Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [52]
Cases of scurvy occurred on almost every voyage to the Indies; a retourschip usually lost 20 or 30 men to the disease, generally between the equator and the Cape. Sometimes the death toll was far worse. On the Eerste Schipvaart of 1595, more than half the men in the fleet were dead of scurvy by the time the ships reached Madagascar. When the handful of survivors finally reached Texel two years later, there were not enough fit men left on board one of the ships to lower her anchors.
Little progress had been made in treating the disease by the time the Batavia sailed three decades later. Scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, which is found in fresh food and particularly in fruit and fruit juice—supplies of which had usually run out by the time a ship reached the equator. But this fact was unknown in 1628, and doctors differed as to what caused the illness and how it should be treated. Foul air below decks was often blamed for the disease, as was a surfeit of salt meat. Wine was a popular, if ineffective, remedy. Perhaps surprisingly, the vitamin-rich juices of lemons and limes—which were to be recognized, late in the next century, as a preventative and cure—were already known to be effective in combating scurvy, although no one fully understood why. They were prescribed as a remedy by a number of naval surgeons, and quantities were carried aboard some ships, particularly those of the rival English East India Company. But this cure was only one among many tried by the VOC, and its unique efficacy was not recognized in the seventeenth century. In consequence the Batavia lost nearly a dozen seamen to scurvy on the passage between Sierra Leone and the Cape.
The dead men were buried at sea. There was not enough wood for coffins, so the deceased were sewn up inside spare pieces of sailcloth and, after a short burial service, tipped into the sea. A dead sailor’s mess-mates would try to make sure that his body was well weighted with sand or lead, in the hope that it would sink too quickly for the sharks that were by now a common sight around the Batavia to tear it apart.
Even in the seventeenth century, sharks enjoyed an evil reputation for ferocity, and Dutch sailors sometimes told stories of fish that had been caught and cut open to reveal the severed legs or arms of recently deceased shipmates in their bellies. Seamen viewed all sharks as man-eaters and would go to considerable trouble to hook them on their lines. Sometimes a captured fish would be killed and put to good use on board—the rough, sandpapery skin was used to sharpen knives, heart and liver became ingredients for the surgeon’s nostrums, and the brains were turned into a special paste that was thought to ease the agony of childbirth. But on other occasions, the men of a retourschip would exact revenge for all the sailors who had died between the jaws of a shark. It was considered fine sport to torture a captured monster by gouging out its eyes and cutting off its fins. Then an empty barrel would be tied to the mutilated animal’s tail and the shark would be returned to the Atlantic. Unable to see or swim or dive, the wounded fish would thrash wildly in gouts of its own blood, endlessly circling and smashing into the sides of the ship until it either died of exhaustion or was