Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [62]
On ships such as the Batavia where the barbers did survive, the quality of care could occasionally be good. Seventeenth-century surgeons had one inestimable advantage over the physicians and the apothecaries who were their nominal superiors: they were practical men, and learned their trade from experience.*22 Freed from reliance on the false principles of the physicians, surgeons were generally effective in setting broken bones and treating the normal run of shipboard injuries. Some were undeniably conscientious men, who did all they could for the sailors in their care, and a few had passed special “Sea Exams” that qualified them to deal with the full range of shipboard injuries—“fractures, dislocations, shot-wounds, concussions, burns, gangrenes, etc.”
Jan Loxe, a sea surgeon who sailed later in the seventeenth century, left notes that indicate the unpleasant nature and likely extent of Jansz’s work. “First thing in the morning,” he wrote in his journal,
“we must prepare the medicines that have to be taken internally and give each patient his dose. Next, we must scarify, clean and dress the filthy, stinking wounds, and bandage them and the ulcerations. Then we must bandage the stiff and benumbed limbs of the scorbutic patients. At midday we must fetch and dish out the food for sometimes 40, 50, or even 60 people, and the same again in the evening; and what is more, we are kept up half the night as well in attending to patients who suffer a relapse, and so forth.”
Stamina, then, was one requirement for a surgeon. Another was great strength—enough to hold down a conscious, screaming man while amputating a shattered limb without the benefit of anesthetic. But Jansz, and sea surgeons like him, were also required to have a working knowledge of Cornelisz’s art, and it was to the apothecary’s chest, packed by the Gentlemen XVII’s own pharmacist in Amsterdam, that Frans Jansz would have turned in order to treat Pelsaert.
A typical sea surgeon’s apothecary’s chest opened to reveal three drawers, each minutely subdivided into small rectangular compartments and packed with the products of the contemporary pharmacy: approximately 200 different preparations in all. In treating Pelsaert, Jansz may well have turned to theriac, which was often administered to patients suffering from malaria two hours before a paroxysm was anticipated in order to strengthen them for the coming ordeal. Mithridatium—a 2,000-year-old antidote, originally from Persia, which was supposed to neutralize venom and cure almost any disease—was another well-known treatment. Elsewhere in the chest other drawers contained “Egyptian ointment,” a sterilizing balm made from alum, copper, and mercury; the sovereign remedy of mummy; and a variety of oils and syrups fortified with fruits and spices, as well as cinnamon water, camphor, aloes, myrrh, and extract of rhubarb.*23 As a contemporary English book, The Surgeon’s Mate, explained, the provision of so many medicines was hardly excessive, “for although there may seeme many particulars, yet there wanteth at the least forty more.”
For 20 long days, the surgeon dosed and purged the commandeur, trying a variety of treatments in an attempt to cure his illness. And as the Batavia surged onward through the boiling waters of the Roaring Forties at the bottom of the world, the upper-merchant’s fever slowly ebbed away. Whether his recovery was attributable to Jansz’s ministrations or, more likely, to a robust constitution, it is impossible to say. Whatever the reason, three weeks after he had taken to his bunk, and to the consternation of the mutineers, Francisco Pelsaert reappeared