Of scurvy alone it has been suggested that as many as two million sailors died between 1500 and 1850. Typically, scurvy killed about half the crew on any long voyage. Various desperate expedients were tried. Vasco da Gama on a cruise to India and back encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can’t have done much for their spirits either. Sometimes the toll was truly shocking. On a three-year voyage in the 1740s, a British naval expedition under the command of Commodore George Anson lost fourteen hundred men out of two thousand who sailed. Four
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