Two Years Before the Mast – a personal narrative of life at sea; 1840
by monkeyfist
Norwalk, Connecticut; Easton Press, 1969, p. 305 (First edition, 1840)
Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834 and published in 1840.
A film adaptation under the same name was released in 1946.
“The scurvy had begun to show itself on board. One man had it so badly as to be disabled and off duty, and the English lad, Ben, was in a dreadful state, and was daily growing worse. His legs swelled and pained him so that he could not walk; his flesh lost its elasticity, so that if pressed in it would not return to its shape; and his gums swelled until he could not open his mouth. His breath, too, became very offensive; he lost all strength and spirit; could eat nothing; grew worse every day; and, in fact, unless something was done for him, would be a dead man in a week, at the rate at which he was sinking.
“The medicines were all, or nearly all, gone, and if we had a chest-full, they would have been of no use, for nothing but fresh provisions and terra firma has any effect upon the scurvy. This disease is not so common now as formerly, and is attributed generally to salt provisions, want of cleanliness, the free use of grease and fat (which is the reason of its prevalence among whalemen), and, last of all, to laziness. It never could have been from the last cause on board our ship; nor from the second, for we were a very cleanly crew. It was probably from having none but salt provisions, and possibly from our having run very rapidly into hot weather, after our having been so long in the extremist cold.”
*more about Two Years Before the Mast on Wiki
This is a really, really good book. It gives you an incredibly vivid picture of life aboard a 19th century sailing ship, and of life in California at the time.
There’s a sailing ship of the same era, the Balclutha, docked near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. There used to be a guy who would give a one-man show aboard the ship, acting as an older Dana and recounting stories from the book. Don’t know if he still does that.