Before the epic voyages of Capt. James Cook, the British Admiralty routinely signed on twice the number of sailors needed for a voyage, expecting half to die en route. Those expectations were all too often realized.
Cook helped change that. He pioneered clean decks, drier quarters, warmer clothes and a better diet. His journals give the facts.
They show he forced a radical new diet on his crew. Fresh onions were just the beginning. "We had besides many articles such as malt, sauerkraut, salted cabbage, potable broth, saloup, mustard, marmalade of carrots and inspissated juice of wort and beer," wrote Cook in his log. Lots of vitamins, right? He even took strange grasses and foods to try en route.
The men hated the stuff, longing for the familiar diet of salt beef and hard tack (weevils and all), but Cook told his men, eat this or else ... and the convincer was a lashing. Tough cookie, Cook, but at the end of his first important trip, he was able to write, "For the first time in recorded history of a long sea voyage, not one man was lost from scurvy."
Not only the diet was unusual. Cleanliness was as rare as Godliness on other ships. Decks were customarily painted red, the better not to show blood and dirt, but Cook insisted on constant scouring. The hold on these ships invariably stank. He ordered The Endeavor's hold ventilated or at least dried out somewhat by fire in an iron pot. A bit of gun powder was touched off now and then to vary the stench. Hazardous smoke? Cook felt it purified the air. Who could argue?
Cook, a sharp observer of cause and effect, noticed that the well-dressed officers, who wore warm clothes and worked sensible hours, enjoyed better health than the shivering sailors, who slept and worked four-hour shifts in wet clothes. Life in England in the coal mines, on farms and in the streets was then fairly cheap. A meek acceptance of Providence was more common than a careful scrutiny of the facts. Cook took little for granted. He saw to it that his men had woolen trousers and jackets, enough changes to keep drier, and more reasonable working shifts.