Mike

“Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“It is a peculiarity of English travellers that they do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“The Admiralty commissioned John Byron to command a ship to do some preliminary exploration in the South Pacific while monitoring the effects of fresh provisions on the incidence of scurvy in his crew. It proved to be a short voyage returning in under two years, in April 1766—and Byron’s conclusions regarding antiscorbutics were sketchy and unreliable. The men had suffered terrible ravages from the disease, but owing to the Admiralty’s instructions for Byron to purchase and outfit the ship with fresh vegetables whenever convenient, there were not a large number of deaths. Byron ordered scurvy grass and coconuts for his men, and while he claimed that the scurvy grass was of “infinite service” it was the coconuts that saved them from certain death. “It is astonishing the effect these nuts alone had on those afflicted … . Many in the most violent pain imaginable … and thought to be in the last stage of that disorder, were in a few days by eating those nuts (tho’ at sea) so far relieved as to do their duty, and even to go aloft as well as they had done before.” For the return voyage, Byron stocked up on more than two thousand coconuts and kept scurvy blessedly at bay. Byron’s unscientific opinion that coconuts were a useful antiscorbutic was of little practical value to the Admiralty, however, as coconuts were not readily available in England. All in all, it was not a very illuminating trial.”
― Stephen R. Bown, Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

“was Miss Crane’s first experience of social snobbery abroad, which was never the same as snobbery at home because it was complicated by the demands, sometimes conflicting, of white solidarity and white supremacy.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown