Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 7: Of Cabbages and Kings

During the building of the great wall of China, coolies were fed salted cabbage with their rice to keep them strong and healthy. Salting preserved the cabbage in season and out, and it was the only vegetable they had to supplement their complete, unrefined rice. When the Mongols overran China, knowing a good thing when they tried it, they adopted salted cabbage as a very practical traveling ration. The Mongol armies got as far as Hungary in the thirteenth century, where they introduced salted cabbage to Europe. As sauerkraut, it became one of the principal foods of Germany and Eastern Europe.

Julius Caesar’s legions, the most efficient fighting machine the world had ever known, ranged far from Rome. The sole provisions were sacks of grain — one for each man — Like the Viet Cong, Caesar’s men did not have sugar or kitchens, nor did they have a medical corps, only surgeons for repairing wounds. They ate whole grains plain, on the march, or ground into Roman meal and supplemented with cabbage and any other vegetables they could scrounge. Pliny has said that cabbage kept Rome out of the hands of physicians for many centuries.

It was the European armies traveling in the other direction that ran into trouble. In his history of the invasion of sugar-rich Egypt by the Crusaders of St Louis in 1260, Sire Jean de Joinville described the fungous putrid bleeding gums, the hemorrhagic skin spots, and the swollen legs that plagued Christian armies and led to the ultimate defeat and capture of the holy knights and their commander. I. Stone, The Healing Factory, p. 26.

The Chinese, the Mongols, and the Romans knew that salted cabbage aided scorbitus, as the Romans called it — the Latin word described the skin symptoms. In English it became scurfy, then scurvy. European peasants seemed to know what to do about it; wise women, midwives, and herbalists prescribed all sorts of wild green plants as scurvy grass. Stone, pp. 26-27.

The Christian armies and navies were ravaged by scurvy. While church and state were burning natural healers as witches, sorcerers, poisoners, and dealers in black magic, churchmen and royalty were victims of their own official magic: The notion that scurvy could be cured by the touch of a royal personage, an emperor or king. If one emperor claimed to be able to cure scurvy with his divine touch, what other king could admit to being less divine? Voltaire has recorded an encounter between a Christian saint suffering from scurvy and a sick king who hoped that the saint’s touch could relieve his ailment. Nothing happened. E. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), translated by Peter Gay, Basic Books, New York, 1962.

What is the story of cabbages and kings? From the Arabs in Persia to the Crusaders in Islam to the explorers of the Elizabethan Age, soldiers and sailors were often the first ones on their block to get hooked on sugar. Caliphs, sultans, kings, and queens could issue orders and commands; they had the means and divine right to first claim on things in short supply, but you can be sure that plenty of sugar stuck to the fingers of common soldiers and sailors who freighted the precious stuff across thousands of miles.

One major difference exists between armies and navies. Armies can always live to some extent off the land. The rations of the naval and merchant seamen are established by royal decree; they tend to reflect the greed, corruption, and official prejudice in high places. Armies confiscate* good peasant food. Navies eat at the king’s whim. Peasants on the land with the animals ate whole food and remained whole. Men who lived away from the land in new cities or onboard ships discovering new worlds ate food that was increasingly refined; eventually, they sickened.

During one of Christopher Columbus’ early voyages to the New World, a group of his sailors fell desperately ill. Columbus was about to jettison the sick men to the fish when a green island came in view. When the sick men begged to be left on land to die, Columbus assented. Unloaded in this island paradise and left to expire, the sailors were tempted by unknown fruits and plants. They partook of these strange tropical things. Gradually, to their amazement, all began to recover. When Columbus passed by the island months later on the return journey to Europe, he was amazed when bearded white men hailed the ship. Even more astonishing was the discovery that the sailors were alive and healthy. In honor of the event, the island was named Curaçao — the Portuguese for cure.

Vasco da Gama, searching for passage to the Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope, lost 100 of his 160-man crew to scurvy. Magellan set sail in 1519 on his way round the world with a fleet of five ships. Three years later, having discovered islands like Guam and Curaçao, he returned to Spain with one ship and only eighteen members of his original crew. Stone, p. 27.

In Elizabethan times, British sailors began dying of scurvy by the hundreds. Scorbutical sailors were suspected of malingering; flogging was prescribed as an appropriate remedy. The Royal Navy was often virtually out of commission because half the sailors were ill.

The history of scurvy is classic by now. When it is retold, it is usually suggested that no way existed at that time for carrying fresh vegetables aboard ship on long sea voyages. It is as if there had never been any explorers out there ahead of Queen Bess’ men. How about the Vikings, the Phoenicians, and the sailors of the Far East? How did they escape the scourge of scurvy? Some carried their version of Julius Caesar’s cabbage as sauerkraut, or else they had pressed or pickled vegetables in brine. Others carried beans, lentils, and other seeds which they sprouted to supply what we like to call ascorbic acid or vitamin C. The village druidess might have been able to advise the queen’s Navy had she not been so busy hiding out to avoid being burned at the stake. That, too, was a strenuous time for practitioners of unorthodox medicine. After all, it wasn’t until 1684 that the last sorceress was executed for witchcraft in merry England.

When the expedition of French explorer Jacques Cartier was ravaged by scurvy in Newfoundland in 1535, the friendly American Indian medicine men prescribed a local green plant — an infusion of spruce needles saved the day. In 1593, Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins protected the crew of the H.M.S. Dainty with oranges and lemons. Each time the scurvy story is recounted, however, one element is rarely mentioned. Something new had been added to the diet of the Elizabethan sailors that the Vikings, the Roman legions, the Phoenicians, and the navigators of the Far East managed without; the same item that began to play havoc with the Crusaders, the treasure they had brought back from their Arab conquests: Raw sugar and rum. In the beginning, soldiers and sailors got hold of rum and sugar anyway they could. Before long, both had become part of the official rations of Britain’s Royal Navy.

One of the earliest recorded medical warnings about a possible relation between scurvy and sugar came from Dr. Thomas Willis. The warning appeared after his death in a book written in Latin and published in Switzerland, Diatriba de Medicamentorum Operationibus in Humano Corpore (Diatribe on the Operation of Medicine in the Human Body).

I do much disapprove things preserved or very much seasoned with sugar, Dr. Willis wrote. I judge the invention of it and its immoderate use to have very much contributed to the vast increase of scurvy in this last age …

No evidence is available to show that anyone else paid much attention to the warning of the eminent Dr. Willis. Certainly not the British admiralty. Scurvy continued to afflict the British Navy and the toll mounted to the thousands. All this while, the British dominated and controlled the sugar trade. In 1740, Commodore Anson left England with six vessels and 1,500 seamen. Four years later, he returned with one ship and 335 men.

In the 1750s, James Lind, a surgeon’s mate on H.M.S. Salisbury, fired by the hardships of the Anson fiasco and the multiple cases of scurvy he had observed on his own ship, undertook one of the earliest recorded controlled experiments in human nutrition. E. V. McCollum, A History of Nutrition, p. 254. At sea on the Salisbury, Lind isolated twelve well-matched scurvy victims, dividing them into six groups of two each. All received the regular Royal Navy ration:

Contrast this with a typical upper-class breakfast in Britain in 1516, before sugar addiction became the fashion:

(In the 1500s, precious little sugar was to be had unless you were invited to court and somebody gave you a pinch — like someone turning you onto cocaine today.)

Each of Lind’s six teams received a different supplementary remedy. Four had liquid additives: cider, vinegar, a dilute sulfuric acid mixture, and ordinary seawater. The fifth received a remedy recommended by a hospital surgeon, a paste of garlic, mustard seed, horseradish, balsam of Peru, and gum myrrh. The last pair were given two oranges and a lemon every day.

These they ate with greediness, Lind noted, with sudden and visible good effects. One member of the citrus-eating team was fit for duty in six days; the other was soon well enough to nurse the other subjects.

Whether or not Lind had ever heard of Dr. Willis of the Royal Society and his warning about sugar, he didn’t follow through. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone except Dr. Willis to experiment by subtracting something from the rations, especially something as new and potent and untried as sugar. Doctors, then and now, elevated themselves by prescribing something new. They often lost face and patients by prescribing something pleasant to the taste. By the sixteenth century, the British population at home had begun to lose their hair and teeth. Until then, only the privileged had been affected. Even the man in the street had become a sugar addict. The connection between sugar and scurvy was deemed practical but unscientific. Vegetables, fruits, berries, and nuts — these natural sources of what we now call vitamin C — had been sweets until concentrated, refined sugar (sucrose) was marketed. Sugar was an unnatural sweet that had been robbed of its vitamin C in the refining process, which was when 90 percent of the natural cane was removed. The replacement of natural sweets by artificial concentrated sweets forms an existential cause of scurvy.

The discovery James Lind had made was duly reported to the British admiralty. Of course, the British diseasestablishment knew better than to admit that scurvy could have been caused by an inadequacy in the Royal Navy rations. Everybody knew that the British empire had the best-fed sailors in all human history and that its Navy was superior to anything afloat. So they continued to flog scorbutical sailors for almost fifty years.

Lind left the Royal Navy a year after making his discovery. After taking his degree at Edinburgh University, he entered private practice and eventually became private physician to George III at Windsor. However, he continued his research and, in 1753, published his treatise on scurvy. Meanwhile, the delay in changing the Royal Navy’s rations took an estimated 100,000 lives in less than fifty years. Lind died in 1794. A year later, when the good doctor was no longer around to say he told them so, the pendulum was finally reversed. What had up till then been declared poppycock was issued as a formal order: Every British seaman would henceforth have a dose of citrus juice with his daily rum allotment. With the arrogance typical of administration in any age, word circulated that this was a secret weapon for maintaining British mastery of the seas. A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, said Max Planck. But, rather, because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

The British called lemons limes at the time; British sailors were known the world around as Limeys. If Lind had taken his sailors off sugar or given them infusions of pine needle tea or bancha tea or fed them cabbage, sprouts, scurvy grass, seaweed, or raw fish — all of which abound in ascorbic acid — the British might have had an entirely different moniker.

Britain’s confusion between lemons and limes played havoc with Sir George Nare’s polar expedition in 1875. West Indian limes instead of Mediterranean lemons were packed for the voyage: Scurvy broke out and the expedition was ruined. An inquest failed to agree on the cause of the debacle. Very soon, Pasteur’s germ theory of disease became the fashion. Dr. Lind’s simple discovery was as out of style as the ancient sorceress with her effective scurvy grass. Eminent physicians proclaimed that scurvy was due to acid intoxication. In 1916, a discovery credited scurvy to a constellation of devil germs. Then constipation got all the credit. Finally, during World War II, two German doctors assigned to care for Russian POW’s came up with the notion that scurvy was transmitted by vermin. The notion that disease is caused by an external devil placates an atavistic need in man. We will fight to the death to avoid accepting responsibility for making ourselves sick.

If it took the Royal Navy forever to accept an idea that any country healer could have told them, their forty-two years of foot-dragging began to look like a speed record compared to the action taken by other arms of the British empire. For instance, the board of trade which controlled the merchant marine resisted the cure for scurvy for over a century. Records show that merchant seamen afflicted with scurvy (which usually proved fatal) had the task of delivering lemons to the ships of the Royal Navy.

Across the seas, in an America racked with civil war, the record is no better. The Union Army — whose soldiers were bingeing on sugared condensed milk — reported 30,000 cases of scurvy. It took the U.S. Army another thirty years to learn what any Indian medicine man could have told them, let alone follow the dietary example of the British.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, after sugared condensed milk had become a national addiction, nursing babies began to go out of style — mothers fed condensed milk to their children. Lo and behold, another variety of scurvy began to appear. The symptoms were called Barlow’s disease, after the doctor who put two and two together.

In the summer of 1933, an intrepid American dentist ventured into the outermost reaches of the Canadian Rockies, Yukon territory. Dr. W. Price found Indian tribes whose health and teeth were uncorrupted by contact with the culture and commerce of the white invaders. Winters in the Yukon go as far as 70° below zero. Obviously, lemons or oranges are not grown there. Most of the Western sources of vitamin C are nonexistent. The Indians were living almost entirely by hunting wild animals. The American traveler wondered why the Indians weren’t plagued with scurvy. He questioned an old Indian through an interpreter:

How do your people escape scurvy?

That is a white man’s disease, was the Indian’s reply.

Isn’t it possible for an Indian to contact scurvy? was the next question.

It is possible, said the Indian. But the Indians know how to prevent scurvy. The white man does not.

Why don’t you tell the white man how to prevent it?

The white man knows too much to ask the Indian anything.

Would you tell me if I asked?

The ancient Indian said he was willing but would first have to consult with the tribal chief. When he returned, he said his chief was willing to share the secret with the visitor because he was a friend of the Indian who had advised them not to eat the flour and sugar sold in the white man’s store.

The Indian then described in detail the way the hunters kill a moose, then open up the carcass at the back, just above the kidneys. Here are found what the Indian described as two small balls of fat. The adrenal glands! These two small balls of fat were cut into as many pieces as there were people in the family. Each would eat his appointed share. The walls of the moose’s second stomach were also eaten. Primitive people, whose scientists had studied wild animals on the loose had learned to eat internal organs of animals; often the muscle meat and filet mignon were thrown to the dogs. Modern civilized man, eating for pleasure and not for survival, does the reverse. The Indians in the Yukon were able to obtain ascorbic acid, vitamin C, from the adrenal glands of the moose and the grizzly bear for centuries. W. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, pp. 73-75.

In 1937, two scientists, Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi of Hungary and the British chemist Sir Walter Haworth were each awarded a Nobel prize — for rediscovering the secret of ascorbic acid, vitamin C. (Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi’s Nobel was in Physiology and Medicine; that of Dr. Haworth — which was shared with Paul Karrer — was in Chemistry.) Szent-Gyorgyi had happened on his first important clue when he isolated a substance in the adrenal glands of an ox which contained very unusual chemical properties. For five centuries the white man had known too much to ask the Indian anything.

In 1855, Chief Sealth of the Duwamish Tribe, which inhabited what is now the state of Washington, wrote to President Franklin Pierce protesting the president’s proposal to buy the tribal lands. The city of Seattle, a corruption of the great chief’s noble name, is now built in the heart of Duwamish land. His letter warned of the white man’s corruptive, destructive habits:

How can you buy or sell the sky — the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s graves, and his children’s birthright is forgotten.

The air is precious to the red man. For all things share the same breath — the beasts, the trees, the man. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench …

The white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brother. I am a savage and I do not understand the other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairies left by the white man who shot them from a passing train.

… What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beast also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.

One thing we know which the white man will one day discover. Our God is the same God. You may think now that you own him as you wish to own our land. But you cannot. He is the Body of man. And his compassion is equal for the red man and the white man. This earth is precious to him. And to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator … Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

We might understand if we knew what it was that the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights, what visions he bums into their minds …

Our warriors have felt shame. And after defeat, they turn their days in idleness and contaminate their bodies with sweet food and strong drink. East-West Journal, Boston, letter from Dale Jones of Seattle.