Tag Archives: Scurvy

MORE ON SCURVY

16 May

Really enjoyable visit to Vervey and the British Residents Association.

Interest was expressed in scurvy, which so bedevilled the Scott expeditions, and it occurs to me that many will be unaware of the history of a disease, which killed thousands and thousands of people; in many years practicing as a doctor I never saw it (and if I had, the treatment would have been straightforward), but in Scott’s time vitamins were unknown and vitamin C (the deficiency of which causes scurvy), was not isolated till the 1930s (and then in the laboratory of the famous scientist, Sit Almoth Wright, who had been emphatic against the connection of the vitamin and the disease).

Scurvy was the dread of all long sea voyages. It was known to the Crusaders, British sailors in the American Revolution, Soldiers in W.W.1. The vitamin is necessary for collagen formation in humans. A lack of the vitamin causes, after about three months, lassitude, fatigue, swelling of the joints and lower limbs, spongy gums, lesions in the limbs that can break down and coalesce so that the victim seems to be rotting to death, also cardiac problems: a most unpleasant death that all were only too keen to avoid.

James Lind, a naval surgeon, cured scurvy in a controlled trial as early as the 1750s when he gave orange and lemons to some sufferers and alternative treatments to other sufferers. He did not think of the disease as a deficiency disease, but rather, a digestive problem. The Navy did introduce citrus fruits for its men, but by the 1900s the citrus fruit cure has lost credibility for the understandable reason (it seems to me), that men were given citrus fruits but still developed scurvy. This was because of the problem of Unintended Consequences. Limes from the Caribbean were utilised by the navy, rather than lemons from the Mediterranean. Limes have less vitamin C than lemons and the juice was transported across the Atlantic in copper containers, which damaged the vitamin’s potency. i.e. the final product was ineffective but the reason for this not understood.

So, by the early 1900s, scurvy was thought to be due to the unpleasant sounding ‘ptomain poisoning’ putrefaction in tins and Wilson’s duty on ‘Discovery’ was to sniff and taste all tins to be eaten each day (virtually everything was in tins) and to throw away any suspicious item. As we know this remedy was ineffective and scurvy broke out when ‘Discovery’ had left England for a year.

Vitamin C is present in citrus fruits and some plants and vegetables. Scurvy can now be quickly cured by oral doses of the vitamin.

I was fascinated to read that James Cook thought that one of his greatest achievements was to have avoided scurvy on his three-year voyage to the Antarctic in the 1700s. He gave his crew sauerkraut also fresh fruit (whenever they landed in a Pacific Island). I understand the Inuit apparently avoided scurvy by eating raw fish and the skin of the Beluga Whale.

We don’t know how lucky we are.

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Professor Sienicki’s assertions about Scott’s ‘suicide’

1 May

I have received correspondence from Professor Sienicki’s team concerning my recent blog on the subject of The Weather and its Role in Captain F. Scott and his Companions’ Deaths. What follows is their letter, followed by my response.

I recently came across your blog post “The Weather and its Role in Captain F. Scott and his Companions’ Deaths, by Professor Krzysztof Sienicki”. I have been helping Prof. Sienicki with a book he has been writing, and thus felt the need to correct several errors in your blog post.

First, you make the mistake of stating Prof. Sienicki made a neural network across the Barrier. This is not correct: what he did was take weather data and ran it through an artificial neural network. You also failed to note the similarity of temperatures at Elaine (at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier) and Schwerdtfeger (near One Ton Depot) AWS stations he noted. These two AWS stations are on Captain Scott’s route. The conclusion is tangible: weather conditions along Captain Scott’s route would have been similar from Elaine onward.

With that in mind, you then fail to note Sienicki’s noting of the First Relief Party’s weather record in support of his thesis. The First Relief Party’s weather record can be found in Simpson’s Vol. III, Table 78, available here: http://archive.org/details/meteorology03simp Compare the Table 78 record with the Scott party’s record, while keeping in mind Sienicki’s observation that Scott’s temperatures were daily mid-day temperatures, and the conclusion is obvious.

Then you miss the point of Sienicki’s pointing out of Leonard Huxley’s falsification of the 1st edition of Scott’s Last Expedition’s temperatures and Jones’ papering over of them. His point is about their actions, not Scott’s. Sienicki pointed out more than an aggregated miscalculation by Solomon; he also pointed out her data dragging by misrepresenting the Scott party’s daily mid-day near surface temperatures after March 10 as daily minimums, and logical fallacies.

Finally, in your citing of Scott’s letter to Sir Bridgeman, you make the mistake of failing to note that the Bridgeman letter has for a long time been partially available in Scott’s Last Expedition, and you incorrectly indicate that the recently released content in the Bridgeman letter includes your quote. The actual recently released content is: “I want you to secure a competence for my widow and boy. I leave them very ill provided for, but feel that the country ought not to neglect them.”

In addition, with regard to your insinuation that the Scott party had neglected the sick, this is certainly in my view true regarding P.O. Evans, but it should be noted that Scott was not entirely consistent in regard to Oates being dead weight. See Scott’s diary entry of March 10 for these quotes: “In point of fact he [Oates] has none. Apart from him, if he went under now, I doubt whether we could get through…At the same time of course poor Titus is the greatest handicap.”

Your assertion that dying was not part of Scott’s plan betrays that you have made an all too common mistake: taking what Scott wrote at face value. Prof. Sienicki and I believe that dying was part of the Scott party’s plan. Evidence that they were stage managing their exit can be found as early as February 7, when Scott manufactured a food shortage, finding the rations short by 1 day and declaring that they hadn’t increased rations. In doing so, Scott deliberately ignored his own diary entry of January 29, where he declared that they would increase rations on “the day after tomorrow,” which would be January 31, and ignored his own diary entry of February 1, where he listed the ration increase as 1/7. 7 times 1/7 equals 1, so if they started the increased ration on January 31, this would place Scott’s party short of rations by 1 day at the beginning of lunch on February 7.

These details and much more will be detailed in Prof. Sienicki’s book, Captain Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition: Slanted Truths-Centennial Account, due to be released this year.

Thanks for considering,

Kristoffer Nelson-Kilger

REPLY

My concern is not on Professor Sieniki’s techniques, but on the interpretation of his findings.

He analysed weather data at various sites over The Barrier for a prolonged period. During this time the pattern of temperature change at different sites followed each other. Scott’s recordings of nearly a century earlier were at variance to Sienicki’s measurements (lower) and furthermore, did not follow the pattern of other explorers in the early 1900s. Professor Sienicki therefore thinks they were falsified.

He concludes that Birdie Bowes and Scott had decided that self destruction was the best way out of their situation and that, by altering the temperature records, they would strengthen Scott’s claims in his messages that the conditions the British team encountered were extraordinarily bad.

He then goes on to involve Huxley in a cover up, stating that where Scott had recorded positive temperatures, Huxley had changed them to negative. He states that Max Jones said the alterations could have been a mistake and that the renowned scientist, Susan Soloman is mistaken in her interpretation of the data.

You say that Sienicki proved that Scott and Bowers falsified evidence. He has done no such thing.  He has shown that the recorded temperatures were dramatically at variance from the norm. But he himself found temperatures approximating to Scott’s low readings in 1985.

The main point of my objection however is that whole tenure of the article is that there was a suicide pact. I think this most unlikely.

If Scott had lived he would not have been held responsible for the deaths of those he had lost, (Scott lost two men on the Discovery Expedition, Amundsen lost men in 1903-6 and 1918-25, Mawson lost his two companions in 1912-13. Shackleton lost men in his Ross Sea party. The last three were honoured). Scott had ‘played the game’ and this would have been respected by the British who honoured Teddy Evans who was sent home with scurvy. He would have been financially secure. He would have been promoted.

Birdie Bowers was a committed Christian and meticulous in his recordings. It would have gone against a lifetimes practice to falsify them.

Wilson, another committed Christian, who longed to return to his wife and family and, in the tent with them day and night as they weakened, does not get a mention. Did this intrigue, which would affect him so fatally, take part in the tent alongside their valued friend, somehow excluding him from their decisions?

The proposed scenario seems most unlikely and I do not think we are going to progress further on this one.

Isobel Williams

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‘A kind of suicide’? Comments on Roland Huntford’s account of the last days of Scott’s polar party

31 Jan

Karen May and George Lewis have produced a forensic analysis of Huntford’s conclusion that, at the end of his life Scott  ‘probably’ had no reason to wish to survive and that he ‘persuaded’ Edward Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers to remain with him in the doomed tent when they could have gone on. (Polar Record, p.1-9 @Cambridge University Press 2013. doi:10.1017/S0032247413000041).

The paper is a ‘must’ for anyone who felt the injustice of Huntford’s negative, subjective assessment of Scott’s expeditions in his work ‘Scott and Amundsen’

The authors challenge Huntford’s statement that Scott’s writings read ‘like a long suicide note’. Scott did not write at the Pole (as is regularly quoted); ‘Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it’. This quotation was posthumously edited. Scott actually wrote ‘Now for the run home and a desperate struggle to get the news through first. I wonder if we can do it’, hardly a suicidal intent. They state that although the party had opium there is no evidence the tablets were taken, Wilson and Bowers were committed Christians, Scott wrote that he would face death naturally.

Huntford remarkably appeared to believe that the possibility of social stigmatisation would have made Wilson and Bowers decide not to live. The authors argue that the two friends, modest and with few social aspiration, could and would have faced the social stigma of surviving Scott who had a severely frostbitten right foot; the reason the two men did not attempt the final journey to One Ton Camp and onwards was not because they were held back by Scott, but that they were simply too weak to make it.

They also question Huntford’s assertion that at the end Scott was ‘almost certainly in the early stages of scurvy. Here I agree with Huntford. By this stage the team had been without significant vitamin C for four months. It is inevitable that they had sub-clinical scurvy as well as other vitamin deficiencies. What the team did not have was overt scurvy (both Wilson and Scott had had the disease before and were not shy about recording its effects). But the vitamin deficiency probably caused a breakdown of Oates’ Boer War injury; his shattered femur and this slowed the return.

May and Lewis dismiss the suggestion that if Scott had lived he would have had to answer for the men he has lost.  Why would he have had to? They list numerous examples of men dying on Antarctic sorties without the expedition leader being called to account– most notably Mawson who last his two companions on his ‘Far Eastern Party’ of 1912/13.  They write compellingly that Scott, having reached the Pole and played the game’ (in contra distinction to Amundsen), would have returned to honour and acclaim.

This is  compulsive

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‘The Blinding Sea’, documentary film by George Tombs

5 Mar

My attention has been drawn to this film, (which is due for release this month), by the Canadian writer and film maker, George Tombs.  The work emphasises how Amundsen was extremely well versed  in dealing with Polar conditions, well before his attempt on the Pole in 1911. He  lived with and learnt from the Inuits. He understood how to manage dog teams, when to kill weaker dogs and importantly how to ward off scurvy by eating meat regularly as well as undigested seaweed from the intestines of slaughtered seals. Amundsen’s recognition  and appreciation of Inuit skills stood him in good stead in the Antarctic. They apparently thought of him as ‘one of their own’.

These were skills that  Scott had no opportunity to learn. Although diligent in acquiring every piece of information and technical advance, his time was completely taken up  between 1904 and 1909 with his naval career (and supporting his mother and sisters). There was no space for exploration. The fact that he did not take dogs onto the glacier and plateau in 1911 contributed significantly to the final tragic outcome.

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