August 12, 2022 • 33 mins
Polar exploration is dangerous... but trudging hundreds of miles in subzero temperatures isn't made any easier if you're suffering from scurvy. The deadly vitamin deficiency destroys the body and will of even the strongest and most determined adventurer - and it seems that scurvy stuck down the ill-fated expedition of Captain Scott.
But scurvy... in 1912? Hadn't the Royal Navy to which Scott belonged famously cracked the problem of scurvy a century before, with a daily dose of lime juice? How did the 'Limeys' seemingly unlearn that lesson?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In the first two episodes of our three part
series on the Race for the Pole, we heard about
how the British Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott raced the
Norwegian adventurer Roald Amunson to the South Pole, and why
Scott had lost that race. But there's one mysterious feature
(00:39):
of that race that we've barely discussed, and one which
raises a much broader question. What's it like to learn
a vital lesson and then to lose your grip on
that lesson? Why does hard one knowledge sometimes melt away
in front of us? And so I present a third
perspective on the race to the Pole, this one, if
(01:00):
you'll forgive the phrase, is served with a twist of lime.
February nineteen twelve, and bitterly cold, the Antarctic summer was
beginning its turn to winter. At Ross Island, just off
the Antarctic coast, the sixty five men of Scott's British
expedition had established a base for exploring the continent and
(01:24):
conducting scientific experiments, and of course, for a thrust to
reach the South Pole itself. It was from this base
that Captain Scott's polar party had begun that epic journey
three months earlier, at the beginning of the southern summer.
Now the men at the base were eagerly awaiting his return.
(01:45):
On the nineteenth of February, one of Scott's team staggered
into the base camp, exhausted, snow blind, and dehydrated. The
solitary man Petty Officer Tom Crean reported that Captain Scott
had sent the three of them back six weeks ago
before his final push to the pole. The three had
(02:05):
almost made it back to the base, and Tom Crean
had arched the last thirty miles alone to fetch help.
Back Out on the ice were his two companions. One
of them, Lieutenant Teddy Evans, was desperately ill. Grimmer and Grimmer.
Diary entries from one of the trio tell the story,
(02:27):
mister Evans is turning black and blue, and several other
colors as well. Mister Evans is gradually worse. It's no
use closing our eyes to the fact. Mister Evans is
no better, but seems to be in great pain, but
he keeps quite cheerful. This morning we were forced to
put mister Evans on his ski and strap him on
(02:49):
as he could not lift his legs. Mister Evans is
in a very bad state. If this is scurvy, I'm
sorry for anyone's at tafts. Was it a case of scurvy?
Of course, bleeding gums, severe joint pain, bruising new wounds,
won't heal, old scars start to reopen. There was no doubt.
(03:14):
A mission was soon on its way to fetch the
pair out on the ice. Evans and his companion heard
the welcome barking of sled dogs coming to the rescue.
Evans would live. But how had Teddy Evans contracted a
case of scurvy? This was a British naval expedition in
(03:36):
the twentieth century. Hadn't the British Navy known how to
prevent scurvy for more than a century? They were nicknamed
lime Is because they were never far from a serving
of lime juice. Had they simply forgotten? British Navy Captain
Robert Falcon Scott wasn't available to answer the question. He
and his four companions were somewhere in the heart of Antarctica,
(04:00):
with a midnight sun sinking low as winter approached. An
awful threat hung over him. Teddy Evans had traveled with
Rob Scott for hundreds of miles, eating the same food
prepared in the same way. If Teddy Evans was barely
beginning to recover from a crippling case of scurvy, what
(04:21):
was happening to the group that had forged on towards
the South Pole with Robert Scott. I'm Tim Harford, and
you're listening to cautionary tales. Here's a description of scurvy
(04:55):
written eight hundred years ago. With violent pains in the
feet and ankles, their gums become swollen, their teeth loose
and useless, while their hips and shin bones first turned
black and putrefied. Finally, an easy and peaceful death, like
(05:16):
a gentle sleep, put an end to their suffering. Scurvy
was most common on long sea voyages. On Vasco da
Gama's expedition to India in fourteen ninety nine, he lost
two men out of every three to scurvy. Magellan suffered
even heavier losses four men out of every five as
(05:39):
he forged across the Pacific in fifteen twenty. In sixteen twenty,
nearly half the people on the Mayflower died, most of
them from scurvy. It was merciless, but eventually a British
naval surgeon named James Lynde, traveling aboard HMS Salisbury, conducted
(06:00):
what is now celebrated as one of the first controlled
clinical trials. On the twentieth of May seventeen forty seven.
I took twelve patients in the scurvy on board the
Salisbury at sea. Their cases were as similar as I
could have them. They all in general had putrid gums,
the spots, and lassitude, with weakness of their knees. Lynde
(06:24):
divided the men into six pairs and gave them each
the same diet, plus a different treatment for each pair.
Each treatment had been recommended by some esteemed doctor, which
is to say, given the state of medical science, some
highly decorated quack. Two of these were ordered each a
quart of cider a day. Lovely hard cider, but it's
(06:47):
not going to cure scurvy. Two others took twenty five
guts of elixir vitriol three times a day upon an
empty stomach. That's seventy five drops a day of sulfuric acid.
Two others took two spoonfuls of vinegar three times a
day upon an empty stomach. Then there were the poor
(07:08):
fellows give half a pint of sea water. Others got
a paste of garlic, mustard, horseradish, and aromatic plant extracts,
which sounds a little too zesty. None of this was
any help whatsoever. But the final pair got two oranges
and a lemon each day for six days, at which
(07:29):
point they had made a miraculous recovery and m Salisbury
had run out of fruit, which is rather a shame
for everyone else. Lynd is celebrated as a pioneer of
clinical trials. He's also remembered as the man who figured
out how to prevent scurvy. But the story, as we'll see,
(07:51):
isn't that tidy. Lynd certainly didn't understand what we understand today,
which is that scurvy is an illness caused by a
lack of a certain chemical in the body, a scorbic acid,
also known as vitamin C. It's present in lots of
fresh foods, and particularly oranges and lemons. Vitamin C itself
(08:12):
wasn't identified and isolated until the nineteen thirties. In nineteen
thirty nine, John Crandon, a young doctor at Boston City Hospital,
deprived himself of vitamin C just to see what would happen.
The answer after two months was nothing. Doctor Crandon was
just fine, but then fatigue started to set in. Week
(08:37):
by week, Crandon became ever more exhausted, but he was
determined to persist with his experiment. Six months in, Crandon's
skin started to bleed around his follicles. He tested his
endurance by gently jogging on a treadmill set at a
leisurely pace. He lasted just sixteen seconds, during which time
(08:59):
he covered just fifty yards. It was amazing that he
could move at all. A scar from an old operation
was disintegrating. The fifteen year old wound was reopening. Crandon's
remarkable experiment was about to end. To prevent it from
ending in tragedy, Crandon's colleagues staged an intervention for his
(09:23):
own good. They administered intravenous vitamin C and he recovered.
Two months without vitamin C had seemed fine, but after
that Crandon's body had started to slowly fall apart. Out
on the Antarctic ice. In January nineteen twelve, Scott and
(09:48):
his small team were nearing the South Pole. Scott's four
companions were Henry Birdie Bowers Lawrence Titus Oates, doctor Edward Wilson,
and another Evans, Edgar Evans. Everyone else who had set
out on the journey helping to pull sledges and established
depots of food had been sent back to Scott's group
(10:11):
had been dragging their sledges for two months, who sometimes
brutal conditions, but with seven hundred miles completed and one
hundred and fifty miles to the pole, Scott's diary reveals
a fine mood at present. Everything seems to be going
with extraordinary smoothness. We feel the cold very little. The
great comfort of our situation is the excellent drying effect
(10:34):
of the sun. Our food continues to amply satisfy. What
luck to have hit on such an excellent ration. We
really are an excellently found party. We lie so very comfortably,
warmly clothed in our comfortable bags within our double walled tent.
(10:55):
Things could hardly have been going better. Scott and his
men had been away from their base for two months,
and then something happened. That's the writer and polar explorer,
absolutely Cherry Garrard. He wasn't one of the five men
who made that final push towards the south Pole, But
in his book The Worst Journey in the World, he
(11:18):
tries to piece together where it all went wrong. One day,
everything's fine, extraordinary smoothness, amply, satisfying rations, warm and comfortable.
Days later, Scott's diary entries describe an expedition coming apart
of the seams. The weather seems intolerably cold. They can't
bear it. Yet objectively speaking, the weather is not so bad.
(11:43):
The problem is the men. I believe the party was
not as fit at this time as might have been
expected ten days before, and that this was partly the
reason why they felt the cold and found the pulling
so hard. He's talking about mid January, the height of
the brief Antarctic summer. It's just over a week after
Scott's perky diary entry, yet everything is crumbling. A day later,
(12:08):
Scott's tea nears the South Pole and discovers that Amunson
has got their first Scott's group of five tiring men
simply turned and began to plod eight hundred and fifty
miles home again. And unlike doctor John Crandon, they didn't
have someone at the ready with a syringe of vitamin C.
(12:37):
Cautionary tales will return in a moment. So what exactly
did James Lynde discover back in seventeen forty seven, and
(12:58):
why wasn't Scott's expedition able to use that discovery to
prevent scurvy. Lynde had showed that oranges and lemons cured
scurvy in a way that appeals to our modern scent
sabilities a controlled clinical trial, but Lynde himself didn't seem
to appreciate quite what he had done. He wrote a
book about scurvy, which contained an admirably brief and clear
(13:21):
report of his clinical trial, but he surrounded it with
page after page of quack theories about excess perspiration or
the need for ventilation. And a particular problem was that
he recommended boiling the citrus juice into a syrup to
preserve it. Lynde never seems to have tested his own
citrus syrup, and if he had, it wouldn't have worked
(13:43):
because the long boiling process destroyed the vitamin C. The
Navy was not convinced by Lynde's book, but a few
decades later another doctor experimented with fresh lemon juice preserved
under a layer of olive oil and found that it worked.
His name was Gilbert Blaine and he was doctor to
(14:04):
the future King George the Fourth. With a royal doctor
making the case, the British Navy started to grow huge
quantities of lemons on the island of Sicily. By the
early eighteen hundreds, scurvy was eliminated, and yet in nineteen
twelve here was Captain Scott's expedition struck down with scurvy
(14:27):
once again. Our common sense model of discovery, invention and
innovation goes like this. We start at the bottom of
a deep hole of ignorance. Then some brilliant man like
James Lynde finds the rope of discovery and humanity, climbs
out of the hole and stands on firm ground, able
(14:47):
to scam the horizon of knowledge. But unless we understand
why something works, the ground underneath us isn't firm at all.
Lynde had simply assumed that if fresh citrus juice worked,
so too would boiled citrus juice. He was wrong, and
we now know that heat isn't the only thing that
(15:09):
destroys vitamin C, so does copper, which maybe why Navy
ships with big copper cooking pots were so plagued by
scurvy in the first place, so does light, which means
it's not a good idea to store citrus juice in
a glass bottle. None of this was clear to the
British Navy. In eighteen sixty, the Navy switched from juicy
(15:31):
Sicilian lemons to tart West Indian limes. A daily dose
of lime juice became synonymous with the British Navy, hence
the nickname lime Is. Most people assumed that the switch
to limes was just a cosmetic difference. One's yellow and
one's green, but they're basically the same zesty fruit. Today
(15:51):
we know that limes have considerably less vitamin sea than lemons.
The Navy was now relying on precautions against scurvy that
were no use at all, but for decades their lack
of understanding remained hidden for a simple reason. Over the
course of the eighteen hundreds, the Navy gradually switched from
sailing ships to steamships. The steamships traveled faster and needed
(16:16):
to stop for fuel, and when they did, they'd also
take on fresh food. Sailing ship journeys lasted for months.
Sailors on steamships rarely went for more than a few
weeks without eating some fresh food containing bittamin sea. And
remember the young doctor John Crandon, He still felt fine
after two months without vitamin sea. The Navy thought lime
(16:38):
juice was protecting their sailors. The truth was that they
simply weren't at sea for long enough to get scurvy
in the first place. Then, in eighteen seventy five, the
Navy dispatched two ships to find the North Pole. This
expedition was much longer than the average steamship journey. First,
(17:00):
the sledging party sent out over the pack ice was
struck by scurvy. A rescue party reached them an administered
lime juice. It didn't work. Back on the ship men
who took regular swigs of lime juice got scurvy too.
The ships withdrew, and the ignominious failure of the expedition
was a national embarrassment. The return of scurvy was a shock,
(17:26):
So was the failure of lime juice. Hadn't it been
preventing scurvy for years? If anyone had understood that the
long journey was the problem, they might have figured out
the solution, go back to basics with fresh Sicilian lemons.
But they didn't, and by unlucky coincidence, a rival hypothesis emerged.
(17:48):
Just as people were losing confidence in the lime juice cure,
Biologists were beginning to develop the theory of germs and
to understand the role of microbes in causing many diseases. Suddenly,
the idea of scurvy as a disease of deficiency seemed
less modern. An alternative theory rose to eminence, that scurvy
(18:10):
was caused by a toxin produced by bacteria. Here's doctor
Reginald Kurtletz, the senior doctor on Captain Scott's first polar expedition,
which took place a decade before the Race to the
South Pole. Kurtletz is writing in the British Medical journal
want of vegetables and fruit does not predisposed to nor
(18:32):
produce scurvy. Scurvy is chronic ptomaine poisoning. Such ideas were
widely shared by the medical profession. Potomaine described an invisible
toxin that comes from rotting food. Eat fresh food instead,
and the toxic potomain would soon be flushed out of
the system. It all makes perfect sense. The problem is
(18:56):
that potomaine doesn't exist, and trying to protect yourself against
something that doesn't exist can be maddening. Here's Captain Scott
in nineteen o two when an early Antarctic mission was
struck by scurvy. Whence it has come, or why it
has come with all the precautions that have been taken,
(19:17):
is beyond our ability to explain the evil having come.
The great thing now is to banish it. It's a
revealing passage. Scott and his advisers, including doctor Kirtlitz, know
what scurvy is and how dangerous it can be. A
few decades earlier they would also have known how to
(19:37):
cure it lemons, but now they think there might be
some kind of bacteria involved. Where's it coming from? Scott
was reduced to throwing the kitchen sink at the problem,
serving out fresh meat regularly, and by increasing the allowance
of bottled fruits, giving everyone on the mess deck a
change of air. In turn, we've had a thorough clearance
(19:59):
of the holds, disinfected the bilges, whitewashed the sides and
generally made them sweet and clean. As an extep I
tackled the clothes and hammocks. We've had them all thorough.
The aired we've cleared all the deck lights so as
to get more daylight below, and we've scrubbed the decks
and cleaned out all the holes and corners, until everything
is as clean as a new pin. We found very
(20:20):
little dirt, but now we do everything for the safe side,
and from the conviction that one cannot be too careful.
In other words, Scott just didn't know how to protect
his men from scurvy. He hadn't entirely given up on
bottled fruits, but maybe it was fresh meat that would
produce a cure or daylight. All he knew was that
(20:41):
after trying everything, the scurvy went away. Then he ventured
out on a long sledging journey with his colleague and
rival Ernest Shackleton, aiming to scout out a route towards
the South Pole for some future expedition. It was a disaster.
Everyone came down with scurvy, Shackleton worst of all, coughing
(21:03):
up blood. They barely made it back to the base
camp alive. Similar troubles befell other expeditions, British and otherwise,
both in the Arctic and the Antarctic. Scurvy struck again
and again and again and nobody knew why. February nineteen twelve,
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Scott Bowers, Evans, Oates, and Wilson are plodding back towards
their base camp. They're subdued, tired and vulnerable. Wilson had
strained attendon two weeks before. I got a nasty bruise
on the tibialis anacus, which gave me great pain all afternoon.
(21:47):
I gave Birdie Bowers my ski and hobbled alongside the
sledge on foot. It still hasn't healed, and they're all
prone to injury now. Evans is the weakest of them all.
Evans got his nose frost, but not an unusual thing
with him, but we were all getting pretty cold latterly.
Frostbite is no joke. Tissue freezes, the blood supply can't
(22:12):
get through. It's painful, and the frost bitten body parts
can quickly die and start to rot. Here's Scott's diary
from the same day. There is no doubt Evans is
a good deal run down. His fingers are badly blistered
and his nose is rather seriously congested with frequent frostbites.
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He is very much annoyed with himself, which is not
a good sign. Then it was Scott's turn to get
injured on a very slippery surface. I came an often
parler on my shoulder. It is horribly sore to night,
and another sick person added to our tent. Three out
of five inchured. Bowers was looking on the bright side.
(22:56):
Otherwise we are all well but thinning. They're not getting
enough food and in particular they're not getting enough bitten
in C. Of course, in nineteen twelve, nobody knows what
vitamin C is, but there was another recent discovery that
might have saved Captain Scott's expedition. We'll find out what
(23:21):
it was after the break Vitamin C, as we've heard,
wasn't discovered until the nineteen thirties, but the key modern
breakthrough in understanding scurvy was made in nineteen oh seven,
(23:43):
a full three years before Captain Scott left Europe for
his ill fated antarctical expedition. The discovery was made by
two Norwegian scientists, Axel Holst and Theodore Freulich. By chance,
Holston Freulich discovered that guinea pigs could develop scurvy. This
was a surprise. Holston Freulick realized that scurvy wasn't a
(24:07):
disease of humans. It was a disease of humans and
guinea pigs. And from there it was simple to run
experiments by controlling the feeding of guinea pigs and seeing
which ones of them developed scurvy. The results were definitive.
The experiments on guinea pigs confirmed that scurvy was not
caused by ptomaine poisoning, but by a deficiency of some
(24:31):
sort of nutrient, Just as James Lynde and Gilbert Blaine
had thought all those years ago, Holston Furlick knew they're
discovered something important for polar expeditions, which were being struck
down by scurvy time and time again. They warned the
polar explorer Fritchoff Nansen, who was giving advice to Scott
and his great rival, Rolled Amunson. But Nansen didn't believe
(24:55):
that experiments on guinea pigs could tell him anything. He
hadn't learned the hard way out on the ice. He
wasn't the only skeptic. Holston Furlick's discoveries didn't persuade anyone
until it was too l eight, So Scott and Amunson
both reached the South Pole without understanding scurvy, but like
(25:19):
the steamships of the nineteenth century, Amuson simply outran scurvy.
His entire journey took three months, and for some of
that time he had plenty of access to fresh seal meat,
which contains vitamin C. Scott's group was away from their
base for nearly five months, and after exhausting journeys over
(25:39):
the previous winter, some of them may have been malnourished
before they even set out for the South Pole. It
was a race against time to get back to base
before their bodies failed them. By mid February, Amonson was
sailing from Antarctica to Australia to announce his achievement to
the world. Scott's crew were only halfway back from the
(26:02):
Pole to the base camp. Evans, who cut his knuckles
some days ago at the last depot, has a lot
of puss in it tonight, that's the group's doctor, Edward Wilson.
It's unlikely to be an infection. The Antarctic is one
of the most sterile environments on the planet, too cold
for bacteria. But the wound isn't healing. That's a classic
(26:27):
symptom of scurvy. Wilson again. Titus oates. His big toe
is turning blue black. Evans fingernails all coming off. Titus
nose and cheeks are dead yellow. Here's Scott. Evans has
dislodged two fingernails tonight. His hands are really bad, and
(26:47):
to my surprise, he shows signs of losing heart over it.
He hasn't been cheerful since the accident. He has very
little to be cheerful about. But then, one of the
symptoms of scurvy is a depressed mood. Everyone is worried
about Evans, but they're all eating the same food and
coping with the same brutal conditions. Whatever's happening to Evans
(27:12):
is coming for them too. Here's absolutely Cherry Garrard again,
trying to figure it all out. A decade later, there
was something wrong with this party, more wrong, I mean
than was justified by the tremendous journey they had already experienced,
which had been little worse than they expected. Evans, however,
who was considered by Scott to be the strongest man
(27:32):
of the party, had already collapsed, and it is admitted
that the rest of the party was becoming far from strong.
There seems to be an unknown factor here, somewhere, there
does doesn't there. We'll never know quite how significant scurvy
was among all the afflictions they faced. All we can
do is to look at scurvy's appearance in Polar expedition
(27:56):
after Polar expedition, then to look at the symptoms Scott's
men were suffering, and then draw our own conclusions. Here's
doctor Wilson. On the sixteenth of February, Evans lapsed, sick
and giddy and unable to walk even by the sledge
on ski, so we camped. Wilson must have known that
(28:17):
if Evans really was suffering from scurvy, the rest of
them were next next day, we had gone a good
part of the way when Evans found his ski shoes
coming off. He was allowed to readjust but it happened
again and then again, so he was told to unhitch,
get them right, and follow on and catch us up.
(28:38):
Captain Scott presumably gave that order, and so the four
skied away from Evans, leaving him in the most desolate
place on earth, leaving him to crawl forward alone on
his hands and knees. They must have been so desperate.
When we camped, we had lunch and then went back
(29:00):
for him, as he had not come up. He had
fallen and had his hands frostbitten. He was comatos when
we got him into the tent. He died without recovering
consciousness that night, about ten pm. They staggered on slowly
and unevenly as the winter overtook them. The temperatures were
(29:21):
falling and their strength was failing. The storage depots they'd
laid for their journey home didn't have enough food or
fuel to sustain them at the slow pace they were making.
Oates had an old war wound where a bullet had
shattered his thigh bone. If Oates's scar was dissolving as
he marched on that leg for day after day, it
(29:43):
must have been agony. On March the sixteenth, Captain Oates
fumbled to undo the lacing at the tent entrance and
limped out into a blizzard. He never returned. Scott's diary
recorded his last words as I'm just going outside, and
(30:05):
maybe sometime they all knew that he wasn't coming, and
despair soon came to claim them all. A few days later, Scott, Wilson,
and Bowers gave up. He lay down in an attempt
just eleven miles away from the next depot of food,
(30:26):
the weather had closed in again. They didn't have the
strength to continue. After months without vitamin C, John Crandon
couldn't jog for more than fifty yards. For Scott and
his last two companions, eleven miles in a blizzard must
have seemed an impossible distance. We shall stick it out
(30:46):
to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course,
and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity,
but I do not think I can write more. Their
bodies were found months later by a team that set
out from the British base camp. Bowers and Wilson were
sleeping in their bags. Scott had thrown back the flaps
(31:09):
of his bag at the end. His left hand was
stretched over Wilson, his lifelong friend. There were diaries there
and farewell letters. When the group tried to move Scott's
frozen arm to recover the documents, it broke. We like
(31:35):
to think that knowledge, once gained, is gained forever. But
unless we know why something works, we risk confusing ourselves
back into ignorance. Scott's demise would have astonished the British
navy of a hundred years before him. They'd have known
that it might all have been different with the juice
(31:58):
of a few Sicilian lemons. For a list of all
our sources, see the show notes at Tim Harford dot com.
(32:28):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino
and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is
the work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents
of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright.
(32:48):
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton,
Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Mrano,
Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
(33:11):
to share, rate and review, tell a friend, tell two friends,
and if you want to hear the show, adds free
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Podcasts or at pushkin dot FM, Slash Plus,
Pushkin. In the first two episodes of our three part
series on the Race for the Pole, we heard about
how the British Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott raced the
Norwegian adventurer Roald Amunson to the South Pole, and why
Scott had lost that race. But there's one mysterious feature
(00:39):
of that race that we've barely discussed, and one which
raises a much broader question. What's it like to learn
a vital lesson and then to lose your grip on
that lesson? Why does hard one knowledge sometimes melt away
in front of us? And so I present a third
perspective on the race to the Pole, this one, if
(01:00):
you'll forgive the phrase, is served with a twist of lime.
February nineteen twelve, and bitterly cold, the Antarctic summer was
beginning its turn to winter. At Ross Island, just off
the Antarctic coast, the sixty five men of Scott's British
expedition had established a base for exploring the continent and
(01:24):
conducting scientific experiments, and of course, for a thrust to
reach the South Pole itself. It was from this base
that Captain Scott's polar party had begun that epic journey
three months earlier, at the beginning of the southern summer.
Now the men at the base were eagerly awaiting his return.
(01:45):
On the nineteenth of February, one of Scott's team staggered
into the base camp, exhausted, snow blind, and dehydrated. The
solitary man Petty Officer Tom Crean reported that Captain Scott
had sent the three of them back six weeks ago
before his final push to the pole. The three had
(02:05):
almost made it back to the base, and Tom Crean
had arched the last thirty miles alone to fetch help.
Back Out on the ice were his two companions. One
of them, Lieutenant Teddy Evans, was desperately ill. Grimmer and Grimmer.
Diary entries from one of the trio tell the story,
(02:27):
mister Evans is turning black and blue, and several other
colors as well. Mister Evans is gradually worse. It's no
use closing our eyes to the fact. Mister Evans is
no better, but seems to be in great pain, but
he keeps quite cheerful. This morning we were forced to
put mister Evans on his ski and strap him on
(02:49):
as he could not lift his legs. Mister Evans is
in a very bad state. If this is scurvy, I'm
sorry for anyone's at tafts. Was it a case of scurvy?
Of course, bleeding gums, severe joint pain, bruising new wounds,
won't heal, old scars start to reopen. There was no doubt.
(03:14):
A mission was soon on its way to fetch the
pair out on the ice. Evans and his companion heard
the welcome barking of sled dogs coming to the rescue.
Evans would live. But how had Teddy Evans contracted a
case of scurvy? This was a British naval expedition in
(03:36):
the twentieth century. Hadn't the British Navy known how to
prevent scurvy for more than a century? They were nicknamed
lime Is because they were never far from a serving
of lime juice. Had they simply forgotten? British Navy Captain
Robert Falcon Scott wasn't available to answer the question. He
and his four companions were somewhere in the heart of Antarctica,
(04:00):
with a midnight sun sinking low as winter approached. An
awful threat hung over him. Teddy Evans had traveled with
Rob Scott for hundreds of miles, eating the same food
prepared in the same way. If Teddy Evans was barely
beginning to recover from a crippling case of scurvy, what
(04:21):
was happening to the group that had forged on towards
the South Pole with Robert Scott. I'm Tim Harford, and
you're listening to cautionary tales. Here's a description of scurvy
(04:55):
written eight hundred years ago. With violent pains in the
feet and ankles, their gums become swollen, their teeth loose
and useless, while their hips and shin bones first turned
black and putrefied. Finally, an easy and peaceful death, like
(05:16):
a gentle sleep, put an end to their suffering. Scurvy
was most common on long sea voyages. On Vasco da
Gama's expedition to India in fourteen ninety nine, he lost
two men out of every three to scurvy. Magellan suffered
even heavier losses four men out of every five as
(05:39):
he forged across the Pacific in fifteen twenty. In sixteen twenty,
nearly half the people on the Mayflower died, most of
them from scurvy. It was merciless, but eventually a British
naval surgeon named James Lynde, traveling aboard HMS Salisbury, conducted
(06:00):
what is now celebrated as one of the first controlled
clinical trials. On the twentieth of May seventeen forty seven.
I took twelve patients in the scurvy on board the
Salisbury at sea. Their cases were as similar as I
could have them. They all in general had putrid gums,
the spots, and lassitude, with weakness of their knees. Lynde
(06:24):
divided the men into six pairs and gave them each
the same diet, plus a different treatment for each pair.
Each treatment had been recommended by some esteemed doctor, which
is to say, given the state of medical science, some
highly decorated quack. Two of these were ordered each a
quart of cider a day. Lovely hard cider, but it's
(06:47):
not going to cure scurvy. Two others took twenty five
guts of elixir vitriol three times a day upon an
empty stomach. That's seventy five drops a day of sulfuric acid.
Two others took two spoonfuls of vinegar three times a
day upon an empty stomach. Then there were the poor
(07:08):
fellows give half a pint of sea water. Others got
a paste of garlic, mustard, horseradish, and aromatic plant extracts,
which sounds a little too zesty. None of this was
any help whatsoever. But the final pair got two oranges
and a lemon each day for six days, at which
(07:29):
point they had made a miraculous recovery and m Salisbury
had run out of fruit, which is rather a shame
for everyone else. Lynd is celebrated as a pioneer of
clinical trials. He's also remembered as the man who figured
out how to prevent scurvy. But the story, as we'll see,
(07:51):
isn't that tidy. Lynd certainly didn't understand what we understand today,
which is that scurvy is an illness caused by a
lack of a certain chemical in the body, a scorbic acid,
also known as vitamin C. It's present in lots of
fresh foods, and particularly oranges and lemons. Vitamin C itself
(08:12):
wasn't identified and isolated until the nineteen thirties. In nineteen
thirty nine, John Crandon, a young doctor at Boston City Hospital,
deprived himself of vitamin C just to see what would happen.
The answer after two months was nothing. Doctor Crandon was
just fine, but then fatigue started to set in. Week
(08:37):
by week, Crandon became ever more exhausted, but he was
determined to persist with his experiment. Six months in, Crandon's
skin started to bleed around his follicles. He tested his
endurance by gently jogging on a treadmill set at a
leisurely pace. He lasted just sixteen seconds, during which time
(08:59):
he covered just fifty yards. It was amazing that he
could move at all. A scar from an old operation
was disintegrating. The fifteen year old wound was reopening. Crandon's
remarkable experiment was about to end. To prevent it from
ending in tragedy, Crandon's colleagues staged an intervention for his
(09:23):
own good. They administered intravenous vitamin C and he recovered.
Two months without vitamin C had seemed fine, but after
that Crandon's body had started to slowly fall apart. Out
on the Antarctic ice. In January nineteen twelve, Scott and
(09:48):
his small team were nearing the South Pole. Scott's four
companions were Henry Birdie Bowers Lawrence Titus Oates, doctor Edward Wilson,
and another Evans, Edgar Evans. Everyone else who had set
out on the journey helping to pull sledges and established
depots of food had been sent back to Scott's group
(10:11):
had been dragging their sledges for two months, who sometimes
brutal conditions, but with seven hundred miles completed and one
hundred and fifty miles to the pole, Scott's diary reveals
a fine mood at present. Everything seems to be going
with extraordinary smoothness. We feel the cold very little. The
great comfort of our situation is the excellent drying effect
(10:34):
of the sun. Our food continues to amply satisfy. What
luck to have hit on such an excellent ration. We
really are an excellently found party. We lie so very comfortably,
warmly clothed in our comfortable bags within our double walled tent.
(10:55):
Things could hardly have been going better. Scott and his
men had been away from their base for two months,
and then something happened. That's the writer and polar explorer,
absolutely Cherry Garrard. He wasn't one of the five men
who made that final push towards the south Pole, But
in his book The Worst Journey in the World, he
(11:18):
tries to piece together where it all went wrong. One day,
everything's fine, extraordinary smoothness, amply, satisfying rations, warm and comfortable.
Days later, Scott's diary entries describe an expedition coming apart
of the seams. The weather seems intolerably cold. They can't
bear it. Yet objectively speaking, the weather is not so bad.
(11:43):
The problem is the men. I believe the party was
not as fit at this time as might have been
expected ten days before, and that this was partly the
reason why they felt the cold and found the pulling
so hard. He's talking about mid January, the height of
the brief Antarctic summer. It's just over a week after
Scott's perky diary entry, yet everything is crumbling. A day later,
(12:08):
Scott's tea nears the South Pole and discovers that Amunson
has got their first Scott's group of five tiring men
simply turned and began to plod eight hundred and fifty
miles home again. And unlike doctor John Crandon, they didn't
have someone at the ready with a syringe of vitamin C.
(12:37):
Cautionary tales will return in a moment. So what exactly
did James Lynde discover back in seventeen forty seven, and
(12:58):
why wasn't Scott's expedition able to use that discovery to
prevent scurvy. Lynde had showed that oranges and lemons cured
scurvy in a way that appeals to our modern scent
sabilities a controlled clinical trial, but Lynde himself didn't seem
to appreciate quite what he had done. He wrote a
book about scurvy, which contained an admirably brief and clear
(13:21):
report of his clinical trial, but he surrounded it with
page after page of quack theories about excess perspiration or
the need for ventilation. And a particular problem was that
he recommended boiling the citrus juice into a syrup to
preserve it. Lynde never seems to have tested his own
citrus syrup, and if he had, it wouldn't have worked
(13:43):
because the long boiling process destroyed the vitamin C. The
Navy was not convinced by Lynde's book, but a few
decades later another doctor experimented with fresh lemon juice preserved
under a layer of olive oil and found that it worked.
His name was Gilbert Blaine and he was doctor to
(14:04):
the future King George the Fourth. With a royal doctor
making the case, the British Navy started to grow huge
quantities of lemons on the island of Sicily. By the
early eighteen hundreds, scurvy was eliminated, and yet in nineteen
twelve here was Captain Scott's expedition struck down with scurvy
(14:27):
once again. Our common sense model of discovery, invention and
innovation goes like this. We start at the bottom of
a deep hole of ignorance. Then some brilliant man like
James Lynde finds the rope of discovery and humanity, climbs
out of the hole and stands on firm ground, able
(14:47):
to scam the horizon of knowledge. But unless we understand
why something works, the ground underneath us isn't firm at all.
Lynde had simply assumed that if fresh citrus juice worked,
so too would boiled citrus juice. He was wrong, and
we now know that heat isn't the only thing that
(15:09):
destroys vitamin C, so does copper, which maybe why Navy
ships with big copper cooking pots were so plagued by
scurvy in the first place, so does light, which means
it's not a good idea to store citrus juice in
a glass bottle. None of this was clear to the
British Navy. In eighteen sixty, the Navy switched from juicy
(15:31):
Sicilian lemons to tart West Indian limes. A daily dose
of lime juice became synonymous with the British Navy, hence
the nickname lime Is. Most people assumed that the switch
to limes was just a cosmetic difference. One's yellow and
one's green, but they're basically the same zesty fruit. Today
(15:51):
we know that limes have considerably less vitamin sea than lemons.
The Navy was now relying on precautions against scurvy that
were no use at all, but for decades their lack
of understanding remained hidden for a simple reason. Over the
course of the eighteen hundreds, the Navy gradually switched from
sailing ships to steamships. The steamships traveled faster and needed
(16:16):
to stop for fuel, and when they did, they'd also
take on fresh food. Sailing ship journeys lasted for months.
Sailors on steamships rarely went for more than a few
weeks without eating some fresh food containing bittamin sea. And
remember the young doctor John Crandon, He still felt fine
after two months without vitamin sea. The Navy thought lime
(16:38):
juice was protecting their sailors. The truth was that they
simply weren't at sea for long enough to get scurvy
in the first place. Then, in eighteen seventy five, the
Navy dispatched two ships to find the North Pole. This
expedition was much longer than the average steamship journey. First,
(17:00):
the sledging party sent out over the pack ice was
struck by scurvy. A rescue party reached them an administered
lime juice. It didn't work. Back on the ship men
who took regular swigs of lime juice got scurvy too.
The ships withdrew, and the ignominious failure of the expedition
was a national embarrassment. The return of scurvy was a shock,
(17:26):
So was the failure of lime juice. Hadn't it been
preventing scurvy for years? If anyone had understood that the
long journey was the problem, they might have figured out
the solution, go back to basics with fresh Sicilian lemons.
But they didn't, and by unlucky coincidence, a rival hypothesis emerged.
(17:48):
Just as people were losing confidence in the lime juice cure,
Biologists were beginning to develop the theory of germs and
to understand the role of microbes in causing many diseases. Suddenly,
the idea of scurvy as a disease of deficiency seemed
less modern. An alternative theory rose to eminence, that scurvy
(18:10):
was caused by a toxin produced by bacteria. Here's doctor
Reginald Kurtletz, the senior doctor on Captain Scott's first polar expedition,
which took place a decade before the Race to the
South Pole. Kurtletz is writing in the British Medical journal
want of vegetables and fruit does not predisposed to nor
(18:32):
produce scurvy. Scurvy is chronic ptomaine poisoning. Such ideas were
widely shared by the medical profession. Potomaine described an invisible
toxin that comes from rotting food. Eat fresh food instead,
and the toxic potomain would soon be flushed out of
the system. It all makes perfect sense. The problem is
(18:56):
that potomaine doesn't exist, and trying to protect yourself against
something that doesn't exist can be maddening. Here's Captain Scott
in nineteen o two when an early Antarctic mission was
struck by scurvy. Whence it has come, or why it
has come with all the precautions that have been taken,
(19:17):
is beyond our ability to explain the evil having come.
The great thing now is to banish it. It's a
revealing passage. Scott and his advisers, including doctor Kirtlitz, know
what scurvy is and how dangerous it can be. A
few decades earlier they would also have known how to
(19:37):
cure it lemons, but now they think there might be
some kind of bacteria involved. Where's it coming from? Scott
was reduced to throwing the kitchen sink at the problem,
serving out fresh meat regularly, and by increasing the allowance
of bottled fruits, giving everyone on the mess deck a
change of air. In turn, we've had a thorough clearance
(19:59):
of the holds, disinfected the bilges, whitewashed the sides and
generally made them sweet and clean. As an extep I
tackled the clothes and hammocks. We've had them all thorough.
The aired we've cleared all the deck lights so as
to get more daylight below, and we've scrubbed the decks
and cleaned out all the holes and corners, until everything
is as clean as a new pin. We found very
(20:20):
little dirt, but now we do everything for the safe side,
and from the conviction that one cannot be too careful.
In other words, Scott just didn't know how to protect
his men from scurvy. He hadn't entirely given up on
bottled fruits, but maybe it was fresh meat that would
produce a cure or daylight. All he knew was that
(20:41):
after trying everything, the scurvy went away. Then he ventured
out on a long sledging journey with his colleague and
rival Ernest Shackleton, aiming to scout out a route towards
the South Pole for some future expedition. It was a disaster.
Everyone came down with scurvy, Shackleton worst of all, coughing
(21:03):
up blood. They barely made it back to the base
camp alive. Similar troubles befell other expeditions, British and otherwise,
both in the Arctic and the Antarctic. Scurvy struck again
and again and again and nobody knew why. February nineteen twelve,
(21:27):
Scott Bowers, Evans, Oates, and Wilson are plodding back towards
their base camp. They're subdued, tired and vulnerable. Wilson had
strained attendon two weeks before. I got a nasty bruise
on the tibialis anacus, which gave me great pain all afternoon.
(21:47):
I gave Birdie Bowers my ski and hobbled alongside the
sledge on foot. It still hasn't healed, and they're all
prone to injury now. Evans is the weakest of them all.
Evans got his nose frost, but not an unusual thing
with him, but we were all getting pretty cold latterly.
Frostbite is no joke. Tissue freezes, the blood supply can't
(22:12):
get through. It's painful, and the frost bitten body parts
can quickly die and start to rot. Here's Scott's diary
from the same day. There is no doubt Evans is
a good deal run down. His fingers are badly blistered
and his nose is rather seriously congested with frequent frostbites.
(22:34):
He is very much annoyed with himself, which is not
a good sign. Then it was Scott's turn to get
injured on a very slippery surface. I came an often
parler on my shoulder. It is horribly sore to night,
and another sick person added to our tent. Three out
of five inchured. Bowers was looking on the bright side.
(22:56):
Otherwise we are all well but thinning. They're not getting
enough food and in particular they're not getting enough bitten
in C. Of course, in nineteen twelve, nobody knows what
vitamin C is, but there was another recent discovery that
might have saved Captain Scott's expedition. We'll find out what
(23:21):
it was after the break Vitamin C, as we've heard,
wasn't discovered until the nineteen thirties, but the key modern
breakthrough in understanding scurvy was made in nineteen oh seven,
(23:43):
a full three years before Captain Scott left Europe for
his ill fated antarctical expedition. The discovery was made by
two Norwegian scientists, Axel Holst and Theodore Freulich. By chance,
Holston Freulich discovered that guinea pigs could develop scurvy. This
was a surprise. Holston Freulick realized that scurvy wasn't a
(24:07):
disease of humans. It was a disease of humans and
guinea pigs. And from there it was simple to run
experiments by controlling the feeding of guinea pigs and seeing
which ones of them developed scurvy. The results were definitive.
The experiments on guinea pigs confirmed that scurvy was not
caused by ptomaine poisoning, but by a deficiency of some
(24:31):
sort of nutrient, Just as James Lynde and Gilbert Blaine
had thought all those years ago, Holston Furlick knew they're
discovered something important for polar expeditions, which were being struck
down by scurvy time and time again. They warned the
polar explorer Fritchoff Nansen, who was giving advice to Scott
and his great rival, Rolled Amunson. But Nansen didn't believe
(24:55):
that experiments on guinea pigs could tell him anything. He
hadn't learned the hard way out on the ice. He
wasn't the only skeptic. Holston Furlick's discoveries didn't persuade anyone
until it was too l eight, So Scott and Amunson
both reached the South Pole without understanding scurvy, but like
(25:19):
the steamships of the nineteenth century, Amuson simply outran scurvy.
His entire journey took three months, and for some of
that time he had plenty of access to fresh seal meat,
which contains vitamin C. Scott's group was away from their
base for nearly five months, and after exhausting journeys over
(25:39):
the previous winter, some of them may have been malnourished
before they even set out for the South Pole. It
was a race against time to get back to base
before their bodies failed them. By mid February, Amonson was
sailing from Antarctica to Australia to announce his achievement to
the world. Scott's crew were only halfway back from the
(26:02):
Pole to the base camp. Evans, who cut his knuckles
some days ago at the last depot, has a lot
of puss in it tonight, that's the group's doctor, Edward Wilson.
It's unlikely to be an infection. The Antarctic is one
of the most sterile environments on the planet, too cold
for bacteria. But the wound isn't healing. That's a classic
(26:27):
symptom of scurvy. Wilson again. Titus oates. His big toe
is turning blue black. Evans fingernails all coming off. Titus
nose and cheeks are dead yellow. Here's Scott. Evans has
dislodged two fingernails tonight. His hands are really bad, and
(26:47):
to my surprise, he shows signs of losing heart over it.
He hasn't been cheerful since the accident. He has very
little to be cheerful about. But then, one of the
symptoms of scurvy is a depressed mood. Everyone is worried
about Evans, but they're all eating the same food and
coping with the same brutal conditions. Whatever's happening to Evans
(27:12):
is coming for them too. Here's absolutely Cherry Garrard again,
trying to figure it all out. A decade later, there
was something wrong with this party, more wrong, I mean
than was justified by the tremendous journey they had already experienced,
which had been little worse than they expected. Evans, however,
who was considered by Scott to be the strongest man
(27:32):
of the party, had already collapsed, and it is admitted
that the rest of the party was becoming far from strong.
There seems to be an unknown factor here, somewhere, there
does doesn't there. We'll never know quite how significant scurvy
was among all the afflictions they faced. All we can
do is to look at scurvy's appearance in Polar expedition
(27:56):
after Polar expedition, then to look at the symptoms Scott's
men were suffering, and then draw our own conclusions. Here's
doctor Wilson. On the sixteenth of February, Evans lapsed, sick
and giddy and unable to walk even by the sledge
on ski, so we camped. Wilson must have known that
(28:17):
if Evans really was suffering from scurvy, the rest of
them were next next day, we had gone a good
part of the way when Evans found his ski shoes
coming off. He was allowed to readjust but it happened
again and then again, so he was told to unhitch,
get them right, and follow on and catch us up.
(28:38):
Captain Scott presumably gave that order, and so the four
skied away from Evans, leaving him in the most desolate
place on earth, leaving him to crawl forward alone on
his hands and knees. They must have been so desperate.
When we camped, we had lunch and then went back
(29:00):
for him, as he had not come up. He had
fallen and had his hands frostbitten. He was comatos when
we got him into the tent. He died without recovering
consciousness that night, about ten pm. They staggered on slowly
and unevenly as the winter overtook them. The temperatures were
(29:21):
falling and their strength was failing. The storage depots they'd
laid for their journey home didn't have enough food or
fuel to sustain them at the slow pace they were making.
Oates had an old war wound where a bullet had
shattered his thigh bone. If Oates's scar was dissolving as
he marched on that leg for day after day, it
(29:43):
must have been agony. On March the sixteenth, Captain Oates
fumbled to undo the lacing at the tent entrance and
limped out into a blizzard. He never returned. Scott's diary
recorded his last words as I'm just going outside, and
(30:05):
maybe sometime they all knew that he wasn't coming, and
despair soon came to claim them all. A few days later, Scott, Wilson,
and Bowers gave up. He lay down in an attempt
just eleven miles away from the next depot of food,
(30:26):
the weather had closed in again. They didn't have the
strength to continue. After months without vitamin C, John Crandon
couldn't jog for more than fifty yards. For Scott and
his last two companions, eleven miles in a blizzard must
have seemed an impossible distance. We shall stick it out
(30:46):
to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course,
and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity,
but I do not think I can write more. Their
bodies were found months later by a team that set
out from the British base camp. Bowers and Wilson were
sleeping in their bags. Scott had thrown back the flaps
(31:09):
of his bag at the end. His left hand was
stretched over Wilson, his lifelong friend. There were diaries there
and farewell letters. When the group tried to move Scott's
frozen arm to recover the documents, it broke. We like
(31:35):
to think that knowledge, once gained, is gained forever. But
unless we know why something works, we risk confusing ourselves
back into ignorance. Scott's demise would have astonished the British
navy of a hundred years before him. They'd have known
that it might all have been different with the juice
(31:58):
of a few Sicilian lemons. For a list of all
our sources, see the show notes at Tim Harford dot com.
(32:28):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino
and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is
the work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents
of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright.
(32:48):
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton,
Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Mrano,
Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
(33:11):
to share, rate and review, tell a friend, tell two friends,
and if you want to hear the show, adds free
and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tale shorts. Then sign
up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple
Podcasts or at pushkin dot FM, Slash Plus,
Host
Tim Harford
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