For centuries, sailors around the world died from scurvy. Everyone except the Basques
A 16th-century sailor did not fear shipwrecks—or storms or pirates—as much as he feared a certain silent illness. It wiped out entire crews, it took months to kill you and the medicine of the time couldn’t explain it. The gums softened until they bled and the teeth fell out. Old wounds, already healed, were reopening. The skin would become covered in purple spots and, eventually, the heart would fail. Exactly: we are talking about scurvy, the severe deficiency of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) that caused more deaths than all naval combat and shipwrecks combined. A condition from which the Basque whalers were saved. But to tell it well you have to allow me to take a couple of steps back. Specifically, six centuries ago. How much scurvy killed. The figures are difficult to sustain because they are difficult to believe. When Vasco da Gama completed the first voyage to India in 1498, he said an unknown illness had claimed half of his crew. “The plague of the sea,” they called it, and they believed that it was contagious, that drinking coffee minimized the effects, that eating fireflies provided relief, and, the most amazed, that it was a divine punishment for the sins on board. It is 1740. Commodore George Anson sets sail from Portsmouth at the head of eight Royal Navy ships with almost 2,000 men. The mission: attack Spanish possessions in the Pacific. Four years later, in 1744, he returned to England with 188 survivors, 10%. The rest died of scurvy. The expedition is classified as a victory because they captured a Spanish galleon loaded with silver. And the Basques, where were they? The Basques had been in the North Atlantic for centuries when Anson set sail. The whalers left the Bay of Biscay, each time with better tools. There are records from the 8th and 9th centuries, although its great era begins in the 13th. When the whales disappeared from the Cantabrian Sea, the Basque whalers followed their trail north: Iceland, Greenland. Then Newfoundland. There are historians, among them García Camino and Orella Unzuéthe guardian of the Basque language A. Irigaray or the researcher Robert Loture, who place the arrival of the Basques on the American continent in 1375, more than a century before Columbus. There is no conclusive archaeological evidence of that date, but there is evidence of its consolidated presence in the 15th and 16th centuries. Canadian researcher Selma Barkham spent decades in the archives of Oñati and Tolosa documenting contracts, insurance and crew lists. The curious thing about it all is, why didn’t these die on the high seas? The fact is that towards the middle of the 16th century the Basques controlled the world market for whale oil, the oil of the time, the ingenuity that illuminated the houses of Europe. One hundred ships sailed to Newfoundland each year. Red Bay, in Canadian Labrador—which the Basques called Butus or Buytes—, it was their base of operations. And in that bay, in October 1565a storm sank the ship San Juan, that mythical Basque whaler which several centuries later was rebuilt. The ship carried a thousand barrels of whale oil in the hold. There were no casualties and the crew returned home. The boat? At the bottom of the sea for four centuries. Cider? Did someone say cider? But without pouring. In 1978, Canadian archaeologists from Parcs Canada found the wreck of the San Juan. And it was like a time capsule. Every plank of the hull, the cargo, the crew’s personal belongings, an entire whaling boat, everything was there. Let us keep in mind that the San Juan ship is the best researched 16th century ship in the world. And among the remains, barrels appeared, many barrels. Some of whale oil… and many others of cider and txakoli. The whalers, through insurers, always detailed their contracts well and everything stipulated was recorded due to the very dangerous nature of the matter. And it is known that sailors were entitled to between two and three liters of sagardoa – Basque cider – per day. According to Xabier Agote, president of the Albaola association, up to 50,000 liters of cider could be carried on such an expedition. Because the water on the high seas was corrupted: wine was for the officers and cider, cheaper, was the crew’s drink. Saving lives with grapes and apples. Popular history lies a little. There is more reasons. It has a certain logic: the Basques drank cider, they did not die of scurvy, so cider protected them. The Basque doctor Vicente Lardizabal already suggested in 1720 in his book ‘Political-medical considerations on the health of sailors‘—where detailed diets are dictated—that some vitamin deficiency was the origin of the disease. He didn’t connect it to the cider, but he was on the right track. On May 20, 1747, Scottish physician James Lind divided twelve scurvy-stricken sailors into six groups aboard HMS Salisbury. He administered a different treatment to each couple: vitriolic elixir, vinegar, sea water, a purgative mixture, oranges and lemon and, here is the key, cider. A daily quart of cider for one of the groups. Only the two sailors who took citrus improved visibly. Those who drank cider did not improve. Lind published his results in 1753 in A Treatise of the Scurvythe first controlled clinical trial in the history of medicine. Cider was in the experiment, but it didn’t work. Cider is fruit juice, yes, the problem is chemistry. Basque cider is fermented cider and the fermentation destroys vitamin C. The researcher Daniel Zulaika published the following article in the Bulletin of the Royal Basque Society of Friends of the Country in 2020: Cider did not prevent scurvy on ocean crossings. The nutritional composition tables made it clear that the amount of vitamin C in fermented cider is zero. So why didn’t the Basques die of scurvy? For a more prosaic reason: scurvy takes time to kill and the first symptoms appear after four to six weeks in the … Read more
