Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - South Pole Race: When the Limeys Get Scurvy

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

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?  For a full list of sources go to timharford.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, race the Norwegian adventurer, Rold Amundsen, to the South Pole, and why Scott had lost that race. But there's one mysterious feature 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 you'll forgive the phrase, is served

with a twist of line. February 1912. And bitterly cold. The Antarctic summer was beginning its turn to winter. At Ross Island just off the Antarctic coast, the 65 men of Scots British expedition had established a base for exploring the continent and 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. On the 19th of February, one of Scott's team staggered into the base camp, exhausted, snow blind and dehydrated.

The solitary man, Petty Officer Tom Kreme, reported that Captain Scott had sent the three of them back six weeks ago, before his final push to the pole. The three had almost made it back to the base, and Tom Kreme had marched the last 30 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. Mr Evans is turning black and blue and several other colors as well. Mr Evans is gradually worse.

It's no use closing our eyes to the fact. Mr Evans is no better, but seems to be in great pain, but he keeps quite cheerful. This morning we were forced to put Mr Evans on his ski and strap him on as he could not lift his legs. Mr Evans is in a very bad state. If this is scurvy, I'm sorry for anyone as attacks. 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.

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 the 20th century. Hadn't the British Navy known how to prevent scurvy for more than a century?

They were nicknamed Limey's because they were never far from a serving of lime juice. 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, with a midnight sun sinking low as winter approached. An awful threat hung over him. Teddy Evans had travelled with Robert 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 was happening to the group that had forged on towards the South Pole with Robert Scott? I'm Tim Halford, and you're listening to cautionary tales. Here's a description of scurvy, written 800 years ago. With violent pains in the feet and ankles, their gums become swollen, their teeth, loose and useless, while their hips and shinbones first turn black and putrified. Finally, an easy and peaceful death, like a gentle sleep, put an end to their suffering. Scurvy was most common on long sea voyages. On Vasco de Garmas expedition to India in 1499, he lost two men out of every three to Skurvy. Magellan suffered even heavier losses, four men out of every five as he forged across the Pacific in 1520. In 1620, nearly half the people

on the Mayflower died, most of them from Skurvy. It was merciless. But eventually, a British naval surgeon named James Lind, travelling aboard HMS Salisbury, conducted what is now celebrated as one of the first controlled clinical trials. On the 20th of May, 1747, I took 12 patients in the scurvy on board the Salzburg 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. Lind 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 not going to cure scurvy Two others took 25 guts of elixir vitriol three times a day upon an empty stomach. That's 75 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 fellows given half a pint of sea water. Others got a paste of garlic, mustard, horse radish 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 point, they had made a miraculous recovery, and HMS Salisbury had run out of fruit, which is rather a shame for everyone else. Lind 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, isn't that tidy. Lind certainly didn't understand what we understand today, which is that Skurvy is

an illness caused by a lack of a certain chemical in the body, a score becassid, also known as Vitamin C. It's present in lots of fresh foods, and particularly in oranges and lemons. Vitamin C itself wasn't identified and isolated until the 1930s. In 1939, 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. Dr. Crandon was just fine. But then fatigue started to set in. Week 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 16 seconds. During which time he covered just 50 yards. It was amazing that he could move at all. A scar from an old operation was disintegrating. The 15-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 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 1912, Scott and his small team were nearing the South Pole. were nearing the south pole. Scots, four companions were Henry Birdie Bowers, Lawrence Titus Oats, Dr Edward Wilson,

and another Evans, Edgar Evans. Everyone else who had set out on the journey, helping to pull sledges and establish depots of food, had been sent back to base. Scots group had been dragging their sledges for two months, through sometimes brutal conditions. But with 700 miles completed and 150 miles to the pole, Scots 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 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 wall tent. 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 garard. 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 tries to piece together where it all went wrong. One day, everything's fine, extraordinary smoothness, and police 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.

The problem is the men. I believe the party was not as fit at this time as might have been expected 10 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 and tarketic summer. It's just over a week after Scott's perky diary entry, yet everything is crumbling. A day later, Scott's party nears the South Pole, and discovers that Amunson has got their first. Scott's group of five tiring men simply turned and began to applaud 850 miles home again. And unlike Dr. John Crandon,

they didn't have someone at the ready with a swinge of vitamin C. The Wins of Vitamin C. Corsionary tales will return in a moment. So what exactly did James Lynn discover, back in 1747, and why wasn't Scott's expedition able to use that discovery to prevent Skurvy? Lynn had showed that oranges and lemons cured Skurvy in a way that appeals to our modern sensibilities, a controlled clinical trial. But Lynn himself didn't seem to appreciate

quite what had done. He wrote a book about Skurvy, which contained an admirably brief and clear 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. Linn never seems to have tested his own citrus syrup, and if he had, it wouldn't have worked, because the long boiling process destroyed the vitamin C. The Navy was not convinced by Linn'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 the future King George IV. 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 1800s, Skurvy was eliminated. Then yet, in 1912, here was Captain Scott's expedition struck down with Skurvy once again. A 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 Lind finds the rope of discovery and humanity climbs out

of the hole and stands on firm ground, able to scam the horizon of knowledge. But unless we understand why something works, the ground underneath us isn't firm at all. Lind had simply assumed that if fresh citrus juice worked, so too would boil citrus juice. He was wrong, and we now know that heat isn't the only thing that destroys Vitamin C, so does copper, which may be 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 1860, the navy switched from juicy 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, ones yellow and ones green, but they're basically the same zesty fruit. Today, we know that limes have considerably less vitamin C 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 1800s, the navy gradually switched from sailing ships to steamships. The steamships travelled faster and needed to stop for fuel, and when they did, they'd

also take on fresh food. Sailing Shipchern is lasted for months. Sailors on steamships rarely went for more than a few weeks without eating some fresh food containing vitamin C. And remember the young doctor John Crandon? He still felt fine after two months without vitamin C. And remember the young doctor John Crandon, he still felt fine after two months without Vitamin C. The Navy thought lime 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 1875, the Navy dispatched two ships to find the North Pole. This expedition was much longer than the average steamship journey. First, the Sledging Party sent out over the pack ice, was struck by scurvy. A rescue party reached them and 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. 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 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 prominence, that scurvy was caused by a toxin produced by bacteria.

Here's Dr. Reginald Kurtlitz, the senior doctor on Captain Scott's first polar expedition, which took place a decade before the race to the South Pole. Kurtlitz is writing in the British medical journal. One of vegetables and fruit does not predispose to nor produce scurvy. Scurvy is chronic pitomaine 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 pitomaine would soon be flushed out of the system. It all makes perfect sense. The problem is that pitomane doesn't exist.

And trying to protect yourself against something that doesn't exist can be maddening. Here's Captain Scott in 1902 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 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 advisors, including Dr. Curtlet's, know what scurvy is and how dangerous it can be.

A few decades earlier, they would also have known how to cure it. Lemons. But now they think there might be some kind of bacteria involved. Where is it coming from? Scott was reduced to throwing the kitchen sink at the problem. Serving out fresh meat regularly and by increasingly allowance of bottled fruits, giving everyone on the mess deck a change of air in turn. We've had a thorough clearance of the holds, disinfected the

bilges, white washed the sides and generally made them sweet and clean. As a next step, I tackled the clothes and hammocks. We've had them all thoroughly 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 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 him entirely given up on bottled fruit, but maybe it was fresh meat that would produce a cure, or daylight. All he knew was that after trying everything, the scurvy went away. Then he ventured out on a long, sledge-ing journey with his colleague and rival Ernest Chackelton, aiming to scout out a route towards the South Pole for some future expedition. It was a disaster. Everyone came down with Skurvy, Chackelton,

worst of all, coughing 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, Skurvy struck again and again and again, and nobody knew why. February 1912. Scott, Bowers, Evans, Oats and Wilson are plotting back towards their base camp. They're subdued, tired, and vulnerable. Wilson had strained a tendon two weeks before. I got a nasty bruise on the Tibialis antikus,

which gave me great pain all afternoon. 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 frostbitten. Not an unusual thing with him, but we were all getting pretty cold laterally. Frostbite is no joke. The tissue freezes. The blood supply can't get through. It's painful and the frostbitten

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 rundown. His fingers are badly blistered and his nose is rather seriously congested with frequent frostbites. 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 orphaned perler on my shoulder. It is horribly sore tonight, and another sick person added to our tent. Three out of five injured. Bowers was looking on the bright side.

Otherwise, we are all well. But thinning, they're not getting enough food. And in particular, they're not getting enough vitamin C. Of course, in 1912, 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 it was after the break. Vitamin C, as we've heard, wasn't discovered until the 1930s.

But the key modern breakthrough in understanding Skurvy was made in 1907, a full three years before Captain Scott left Europe for his ill-fated Antarctic expedition. The discovery was made by two Norwegian scientists, Axel Holst and Theodore Frullich. By chance, Holst and Frullich discovered that guinea pigs could develop scurvy. This was a surprise. Holst and Frullich realized that scurvy wasn't a 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 petomane poisoning, but by a deficiency of some sort of nutrient, just as James Lind and Gilbert Blaine had thought all those years ago. Holst and Frerlick knew that discovered something important for polar expeditions, which were being struck down by scurvy time and time again. They warned the polar explorer Frichoff Nansen, who was giving advice to Scott and his great rival, role Ammonson. But Nansen

didn't believe 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. Holst and Frurlick's discoveries didn't persuade anyone until it was too late. So, Scott and Ammonson both reached the South Pole without understanding Skurvy. But like the steamships of the 19th century, Amundsen simply outran Skurvy. 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 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, Ammonson was sailing from Antarctica to Australia to announce his achievement to the world. Scott's crew were only half way back from the pole to the base camp. Evans, who cut his knuckles some days ago at the last depot, has a lot of pus 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 back to area. But the wound isn't healing. That's a classic symptom of scurvy. Wilson again. Titus Oats his big toe is turning blue black. Evans fingernails all coming off.

Titus knows and cheeks are dead yellow. His Scott. Evans has dislodged two fingernails tonight. His hands are really bad. And 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 is coming for them too. Here's absolutely cherry garard again, trying to figure it all out to 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 at 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 Skurvy was among all the afflictions they faced. All we can do is to look at Skurv's appearance in polar expedition after polar expedition. Then to look at the symptoms Scotsmen were suffering and then draw our own conclusions. Here's Dr Wilson on the 16th of February. Evans collapsed, Seirkin giddy, and unable to walk even by the sledge on ski, so we camped. Wilson must have known that 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. 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 call forward alone on his hands and knees. There must have been so desperate. When we camped, we had lunch, and then went back for him as he'd not come up. He'd fallen and had his hands frostbitten. He was comatose when we got him into the tent, and he died without recovering consciousness

that night about 10pm. They staggered on, slowly and unevenly as the winter overtook them. The temperatures were falling and their strength was failing. The storage depots, they had laid for their journey home, didn't have enough food or fuel to sustain them at the slow pace they were making. Oats had an old war wound where a bullet had shattered his thigh bone. If Oats' scar was dissolving, as he marched on that leg for day after day, it must have been agony. On March 16th, Captain Oats 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 maybe some time. They all knew that he wasn't coming back. And despair soon came to claim them all. A few days later, Scott, Wilson and Bowers gave up. He lay down in a tent just 11 miles away from the next depot of food. The weather had closed in again, it didn't have the strength to continue. After months without Vitamin C, John Crandon couldn't jog for more than 50 yards. For Scott and his last two companions, 11 miles in a blizzard, must have seemed an impossible distance.

We shall stick it out 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 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 Scots,

frozen an arm to recover the documents, it broke. We like 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 had known that it might all have been different with the juice of a few Sicilian lemons. For a list of all our sources, see the show notes at timhalford.com Corsinary tales is written by me, Tim Haford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss.

It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Haferd and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia Lavalle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarrs, Julia Barton, Carly McGeori, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniel LaCarn, and Maya Canig. Corsary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends, and if you want to hear the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends. And if you want to hear the show ads-free and listen to four exclusive cautionary tales short,

then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm-plus. Thank you. you