[Sca-cooks] Lemons in Middle English

[Terry Decker]

According to Mark Anderson, it was an accidental controlled experiment. 
http://www.riparia.org/scurvy_hx.htm

I did a little further checking and found that this was the first voyage of 
the East India company fleet.  Lancaster's logs from the voyage have 
disappeared.  Further information of the voyage can be found in Samuel 
Purchas' Hakluytus post-hummus, or Purchas his Pilgrims, 1625 and Sir 
Clements Markham's
 The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Hakluyt Society, 1877.  The earlier 
voyage of James Lancaster appears in Hakluyt's Voyages, but is not included 
in the abridged edition I have.

Anderson's article is interesting because it covers some of the 
considerations of scurvy and the citrus treatment prior to Lind.

Bear

> So would you say from your reading that Capt. Lancaster knew that he had a 
> scurvy cure with citrus or that he was trying to figure it out?  To my 
> mind, if he didn't yet know what citrus would do, he was possibly 
> endangering the crew on one ship only.
>
> Cordelia Toser
>
> James Prescott <prescotj at telusplanet.net> wrote:
>
>
> Same voyage. Captain Lancaster, though in overall command of the
> four ships, used the juices for his own crew only, which suggests
> that it was not Company policy at the time of his voyage. It is
> suggested that he was experimenting (in the event, at the expense
> of the crews of the other three ships).
>
>
> Thorvald
>
>
> At 20:36 -0600 2005-02-07, Terry Decker wrote:
>> This is coincident with the date and location for James Lancaster
>> (of the East India Company) dosing his crew with citrus juice. My
>> information says that was done just for his crew. This raises the
>> question of whether the cure was generalized for the whole of the
>> East India Company or whether your source generalized and isolated
>> incident.
>>
>> Bear
>>
>>> Scurvy was also mentioned:
>>>
>>> The English East India Company is mentioned as gathering oranges
>>> and lemons from Madagascar in 1601 which they turned into juice
>>> specifically for use against scurvy.
>>>
>>>
>>> Thorvald
>>
>
>
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