Even though they suffered terribly from scurvy, sailors were still expected to work. If they failed to appear on deck, the boatswain whipped them with the end of a rope and then dragged them up on deck, where the sunlight pitilessly revealed their deteriorated condition. Their skin seemed to be falling from their bones, and old scars and sores, long healed, reopened. Their bodies were literally falling apart.
As scurvy claimed one life after another, burials at sea became commonplace. Sailors, many of them suffering from the early stages of scurvy themselves and seeing their own deaths foretold, wrapped the body in a remnant of an old, tattered sail, secured it with rope, and tied cannonballs to the feet. A priest, and on occasion the captain, uttered a brief prayer; two sailors lifted the corpse onto a plank, tilted it, and committed their crewmate’s mortal remains to the hungry sea.
Pigafetta put the grim tally of those who died from scurvy at twenty-nine, in addition to the sole remaining Indian passenger they had captured. Many others suffered grievously. “Besides those who died, twenty-five or thirty fell sick of divers maladies, whether of the arms or of the legs or other parts of the body, so there remained very few healthy men.”
In Magellan’s day, scurvy was a disease new to Europe, a terrible by-product of the Age of Discovery. In 1498, Vasco da Gama’s crew, exploring the African coast for Portugal, suffered the first widely noted outbreak. Da Gama observed that his men developed the telltale swelling of hands, feet, and gums. He also wrote of Arab traders offering oranges to the afflicted sailors, and the men making a miraculous recovery thereafter; the clear implication is that the Arabs, more accustomed to long ocean voyages than their European counterparts, knew the affliction and its cure. During a three-month-long passage across the Indian Ocean, Vasco da Gama’s crew again fell victim to scurvy, and this time thirty men died. “In another two weeks there would have been no men at all to navigate the ships,” da Gama wrote. Deliverance came when they reached land and again feasted on life-giving oranges. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Vasco da Gama and other early European explorers believed that unhealthy air—not dietary deficiencies—caused scurvy.
The intense suffering experienced by da Gama’s men, and later by Magellan’s, could have been prevented by a daily dose of one spoonful of lemon juice, for that is the amount of vitamin C necessary to prevent scurvy. In the body, vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, helps to manufacture the enzyme prolyl hydroxylase, which in turn synthesizes a protein collagen used for connective tissues such as skin, ligaments, tendons, and bones, all of which give our bodies tensile strength. A vitamin C deficiency leads to the melting of the collagen fibers and a breakdown in the connective tissues, especially in bones and in dentin, the building block of teeth. Collagen acts as a glue binding connective tissues together, and when it disintegrates, the tissues separate and capillaries hemorrhage, creating black-and-blue patches on the skin. (Curiously, Magellan’s men’s desperate hope that eating rats would avert scurvy had a basis in fact; unlike humans, rats synthesize and store vitamin C.)
Scurvy continued to afflict explorers for more than two hundred years. Often, the difficulty of obtaining oranges during voyages was to blame, but even the most dedicated investigators remained befuddled, while thousands died at sea. Finally, in 1746, James Lind, a Scottish naval surgeon, turned his attention to the problem of scurvy, then afflicting sailors in the Royal Navy. To determine the cause, he conducted the first modern clinical trials on record. He isolated a dozen sailors suffering from scurvy and fed them the same diet. Then he subjected each to different treatments, administered daily. Some received seawater, some nutmeg and other spices, some vinegar, and others two oranges and one lemon. “The consequence was that the most sudden and visible good effects were perceived from the use of the oranges and lemons,” Lind observed, “one of those who had taken them being at the end of six days fit for duty.”
Despite the overwhelming evidence, Lind’s findings were not widely accepted. He persisted. After leaving the navy, Lind was elected a Fellow of Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicians and subsequently published an exhaustive study entitled A Treatise of the Scurvy Containing an Inquiry into the Nature, Causes and Cure of That Disease. In the four-hundred-page treatise, Lind offered his own bizarre theory of the origins of scurvy; he claimed that a cold and wet climate clogged the pores and set the stage for the disease. This was nothing more than an updating of theories prevalent in Magellan’s era.
Not until 1795 did the British Royal Navy finally insist that sailors receive a daily ration of the juice of lemons or limes to combat scurvy, a practice leading to the term “limeys” to refer to British sailors. (At the time, a “lime” meant both lemons and limes.) This was an act of faith more than science because it was still not known why lemons, limes, oranges, and other fruits and vegetables prevented scurvy. Finally, in 1932, three medical researchers, W. A. Waugh, C. G. King, and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, managed to isolate and synthesize ascorbic acid; they offered a scientific explanation of vitamin C’s effect on the body, and showed how a vitamin C deficiency leads to scurvy.
While their men suffered and died around them, Magellan, Pigafetta, and several other officers remained mysteriously healthy. “By the grace of our Lord I had no illness,” Pigafetta marveled. Neither he nor anyone else knew why, but there was an outstanding reason why they had escaped scurvy. Throughout the ordeal, the officers regularly dipped into their supply of preserved quince, an applelike fruit, without realizing it was actually a potent antiscorbutic. Saved by this fluke, the good fortune seemingly conferred on Magellan by Saint Elmo appeared to hold, at least for the present.
Nothing in Pigafetta’s diary suggests that the officers conspired to keep their supply of quince to themselves at the cost of their men’s lives. Magellan and the others remained oblivious to its life-sustaining properties, and they continued to believe that their men suffered from a variety of afflictions, most of them caused by “bad air.” Since Magellan was known for personally ministering to his men when they became ill, he would likely have insisted they take daily rations of quince had he known of its benefits.
During these three months and twenty days,” wrote Pigafetta, “we made a good four thousand leagues across the Pacific Sea, which was rightly so named. For during this time we had no storm, and we saw no land except two small uninhabited islands, where we found only birds and trees.” Their first landfall occurred on January 24, and very disappointing it proved to be: a simple atoll rising enigmatically from the ocean. Magellan named it San Pablo because the sighting occurred on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. (This tiny atoll was also the explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s first sighting of land during his transpacific crossing in 1947 aboard the balsa raft Kon Tiki.) The atoll proved useless to Magellan’s vessels; he saw neither evidence of human habitation nor a safe place to drop anchor. After sailing completely around the island, he signaled the fleet to proceed on its course. San Pablo could not come to their aid.
Eleven days later, on February 4, 1521, Magellan spotted another islet—most likely Caroline Island, in Micronesia. The fleet approached, and once more tried to find an anchorage, but did not succeed. The water, complained Pigafetta, was so deep that “there is no place for anchoring because no bottom can be found.” De Mafra, writing long after the event, recalled an impenetrable reef that repelled the ships: “It seemed as if Nature had armed it against the sea.” And Albo’s log notes: “In this latitude we found an uninhabited island, where we caught many sharks, and therefore we gave it the name of Isla de los Tiburones”—Shark Island. Stunned from monotony and debilitated by illness, the crew watched the large, menacing creatures circle, apparitions in a scene of despair. Even Magellan, normally possessed of superhuman determination and indifference to hardship, became depressed and unstable as the transpacific crossing wore on. In a rage, he flung his useless maps overboard, crying, “With the pardon of the cartographers, the Moluccas are not to be found in their appointed place!”