Category Archives: disease

by Joel | 10 July 2025 · 4:58 am

Poland-Lithuania’s Golden Age

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 166-169:

That Poland-Lithuania was able to rein in the natural inclination of monarchs to seek absolute power was partly the result of the country’s unique political heritage and traditions and partly the result of a unique period of efflorescence, one reflected not only in the degree to which Renaissance ideas penetrated the polity but also in the economic well-being that accompanied the Golden Age….

This Golden Age was no misnomer. Not that Polish miners had suddenly discovered a rich vein of gold. The market for gold and silver bullion was dominated by Spain, whose recent penetration of the New World had uncovered vast new supplies of these precious ores. Poland-Lithuania turned out to have ample reserves of a resource that was in great demand elsewhere in the world: grain.

The particular world conjuncture of the late fifteenth century suddenly upped the ante for the grain trade. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century (which, incidentally, never made its way to Poland) had a significant effect on the economy of the countries in Western Europe, which upon rebounding shifted from agricultural production to animal husbandry. The population increase in the growing cities of the West, combined with the conscious decision to raise sheep for wool instead of planting seeds for grain meant that food was at a premium—a situation reflected in the so-called price revolution, which suddenly made it exceedingly profitable to engage in the export of staple foods.

It so happened that Poland-Lithuania was perfectly poised to take advantage of this situation. Not only did these lands have ample fields of grain. They now could profit in full from exporting their grain surplus via the Baltic. How? Because Poland-Lithuania now had an outlet to the sea. In earlier centuries, the Teutonic Knights had dominated the Baltic Sea coast and, with it, all sea-bound trade. This changed in the mid-fifteenth century when the population of Royal Prussia—including cities such as Gdańsk and Elbląg—opted for Polish rule. One long (thirteen-year) war and peace treaty later, Royal Prussia became part of Poland-Lithuania. After the mid-fifteenth century, the Teutonic Knights had to content themselves with the less fertile and less developed lands to the east; and even those lands, known after 1525 as Ducal Prussia, became a fief of the Crown of Poland.

In exchange for their allegiance, the inhabitants of Royal Prussia were given several important political and economic privileges. These included the right to their own regional parliament (the Prussian estates), municipal self-government for the cities, the right to trade everywhere in the vast country, and exemption from any additional tolls on the Vistula. The region’s incorporation into Poland-Lithuania, thus, had the potential to bring much benefit to the state. Gdańsk merchants could contract for Polish grain, and those supplying the grain had recourse to the growing world market for their staples, the easiest commodity for a large lowland country to produce. The result was that in the sixteenth century Poland became the main supplier of grain to Europe. Each fall, tons of golden grain—oats and rye, wheat and barley—were shipped to markets far and wide. Whereas in the year 1490, around twenty thousand tons of rye were exported, for example, nearly a century later (in 1587), the figure had risen to around seventy-one thousand tons.

Some of the grain went to destinations within the Baltic region—to places such as Lübeck or Copenhagen, Stockholm or Riga. The other (larger) half sailed through the sound. Some of the grain ended up not only in Amsterdam but also in places such as Setubal or Faro in Portugal, or even all the way to the Mediterranean.

Among the greatest consumers of Polish grain were the Dutch. Those mighty world traders hailing from a tiny waterlogged flatland could no longer feed themselves. Gdańsk itself was responsible for half of Amsterdam’s Baltic trade. But the Dutch were hardly the only foreigners present in the port Gdańsk. Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Englishmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, all traveled to this Baltic entrepôt in search of what Poland-Lithuania could supply. They found a sea of warehouses bursting with rye, wheat, and other grains as well as fibers (flax and hemp), forest goods (wax, honey, potash, lumber), even salted beef.

All this earned the Gdańsk merchants and their Polish suppliers a pretty penny. In the early years of this increased Baltic trade, a foreigner noted what he observed during the annual two-week long fair in Gdańsk, which began on Saint Dominic’s feast day (August 4). He saw over 400 ships arrive in the port. Yet their holds, albeit awaiting the harvest of grain, were hardly empty. They had brought to the shores of Poland-Lithuania all manner of luxury items: French wines; Spanish olive oil, lemons, preserves, and fruits; silks and other fine cloths; Portuguese spices; English cloth and tin. Reportedly the first eight days of the fair were spent loading the boats of the foreigners with Polish-Lithuanian wares, the next eight with selling luxury items (some clearly of global provenance) to the Poles. Business was booming. By mid-century, the historian Marcin Kromer was reproaching his compatriots in the Kingdom of Poland for being obsessed with luxury and splendor, and for adorning themselves in foreign fabrics and exotic leathers, in silks and purples, silver, gold, pearls, and gemstones.

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Filed under Baltics, democracy, disease, economics, food, Germany, migration, Netherlands, Poland

by Joel | 27 May 2025 · 11:10 am

Trench Warfare at Dien Bien Phu

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 655-679:

Meanwhile, the enemy drew ever closer. Two weeks earlier Vo Nguyen Giap had abandoned mass assaults in favor of grignotage, or “nibbling away” of the French positions, in a replay of the trench warfare tactics of the Ypres salient in World War I. Hundreds of sappers were deployed to push assault trenches ever closer to the fortifications, a practice, Giap told associates, that would allow the Viet Minh “completely to intercept reinforcements and supplies.” Lead elements would dig a deep hole at the bottom of the trench and pass the dirt to the rear, where it would be immediately put in sandbags, while other workers brought forward logs and wooden beams to provide the diggers with overhead cover. It was a simple, beautifully efficient system. On most nights the defenders of Eliane could hear the clinking of picks and shovels almost under their feet, sometimes with their naked ears and sometimes using crude geophones made of a combination of wine canteens and medical stethoscopes. This too was reminiscent of Passchendaele forty years earlier, when German troops heard miners from Wales digging beneath them on Messines Ridge, in preparation for blasting them out.

Why did Giap shift tactics? With the French seemingly on the ropes in the second week of April, why did he not seek a swift and conclusive victory, a coup de grâce? Mostly because neither he nor his subordinate commanders could accept the casualty rates the French had been inflicting on them in the first month of the fighting. They needed a respite. Of the total number of dead and wounded that the Viet Minh suffered during the battle for Dien Bien Phu, close to half had been suffered already by April 5. Roughly four thousand of these were fatalities. Many of the losses occurred during intense fighting on strongpoints Dominique, Eliane, and Huguette, but French aerial attacks also could have devastating effect. C-47 transports were equipped with depth-charge racks to allow napalm drums to be unloaded swiftly. These were fused to explode twenty yards above the ground. Larger C-119s swept low, then pulled up abruptly while napalm cans slid out. The actual damage done by these attacks was often marginal, especially when poor weather and antiaircraft fire made accurate targeting impossible, but the mere anticipation that such a weapon could fall from the sky was acutely unnerving to defenders.

By mid-April, various reports indicated growing despondency among Viet Minh troops. Fiery speeches by political commissars about sacrifice, duty, and the need to stamp out Franco-American imperialism were duly given, but these worked best on new recruits anticipating quick success; they rang hollow to weary veterans of the frontal attacks who had witnessed comrades being slaughtered all around them and who themselves might have sustained wounds. French radio intelligence picked up agitated dispatches from lower-unit commanders reporting that some units were refusing orders, and a Viet Minh deserter told the French on April 20 that new recruits were despondent about the difficulties of the struggle. The commissars had to press all the harder, especially at recovery stations where soldiers were convalescing, insisting that the fight must go on as long as necessary, regardless of losses.

Many of the new recruits had walked to Dien Bien Phu, often in groups of about a hundred, usually for long distances through difficult terrain, only to find conditions worse after they arrived. Though the People’s Army had the luxury of rotating units between the trenches and rest areas in the surrounding jungle, this brought only limited relief. Even in the rear areas, men generally slept only on bamboo mats or banana leaves on plastic mats. Few had mosquito nets, and malaria was endemic. Quinine to treat the illness was in short supply, so much so that soldiers would have to pass around a cup of water containing one dissolved tablet, take a sip, and send it on. When the rains started for real about April 25, the conditions deteriorated, and not only for those in the trenches. Sickness increased, and the situation for the wounded, deplorable to begin with, deteriorated further. Gangrene cases proliferated. Ton That Tung remained the only real surgeon on his side, and along with his six assistants he waged a hopeless struggle to treat the wounded, lacking modern drugs and instruments and sometimes forced to operate while standing knee-deep in water. As before, head injuries were a particular problem, and Tung taught the assistants his method of removing foreign bodies by suction and then closing the skull. With no electrocoagulators at their disposal, the team resorted to touching the blood vessels with white-hot platinum wire.

…

THE ASSAULT BEGAN ON MAY 1, AT THE USUAL TIME: LATE AFTERNOON. All day long evidence had accumulated in General de Castries’s command bunker that something was afoot, and by early afternoon the deadly smell of all-out assault hung in the air. Probing attacks down the trench lines were being made in greater strength, and radio intercepts detected the presence of Viet Minh battalions in concentration. The previous three nights had seen more downpours, and on April 29 some parts of the garrison reported three feet of standing water in the trenches. Their boots and clothing perpetually soaked, the men were also hungry, for everyone was now on half rations. April 30 brought a modicum of good news, in the form of an agreement by the American crews from CAT to resume their C-119 flights, in exchange for a promise from the French Air Force to do a better job of suppressing enemy flak (a promise it failed to keep). Supply drops increased dramatically that day and on May 1, and when the assault began, there was again three days of food available, along with desperately needed ammunition.

Just before five o’clock in the afternoon, the artillery barrage commenced. More than one hundred Viet Minh field guns opened up over the whole area of the camp. Bunkers and soggy trenches collapsed under the bombardment, many of their occupants buried alive. After three hours, the firing slackened, whereupon the entire 312th and 316th Divisions stormed up the eastern hill positions of Eliane and Dominique and the 308th targeted Huguette. Dominique 3, defended by a motley mix of Algerians and Tai, fell quickly, and by 2 A.M. Eliane 1 had succumbed as well. In nine hours of fighting, the garrison had lost 331 killed or missing. Was this the beginning of the end? Senior French commanders feared it was. Colonel Langlais wired Hanoi soon after the assault began: “No more reserves left. Fatigue and wear and tear on the units terrible. Supplies and ammunition insufficient. Quite difficult to resist one more such push by Communists, at least without bringing in one brand-new battalion of excellent quality.”

…

What a task they faced! Giap’s attacking force consisted of four infantry divisions, plus thirty artillery battalions and some one hundred guns. In response, the defenders could offer very little except the courage and fortitude borne of desperation. In this respect it was to their advantage that their perimeter had shrunk: It now consisted mostly of portions of Huguette, Claudine, and Eliane, perhaps one thousand yards square, plus the isolated Isabelle three miles to the south. To cover the approach to the hospital, which that morning held more than sixteen hundred wounded, and improvised strongpoint christened Juno had been created between Claudine and Eliane. Total troop strength stood at roughly 4,000, though in terms of infantry in the central sector it was closer to 2,000. There were Foreign Legion and Vietnamese parachutists, Moroccan Rifles, Tai from various dissolved units, French paratroop battalions (half of them Vietnamese), Arab and African gunners, and, down on Isabelle, still some Algerians. The greatest concentration of men, some 750 parachutists, was deployed at the point of maximum import and danger, the top of Eliane.

At four P.M., the Viet Minh artillery bombardment began. Its purpose was mostly to cover the assembly of assault infantry in forward positions, and it featured the unleashing of a wholly new weapon in the 351st Heavy Division’s arsenal: the “Stalin Organs.” Modeled on the twelve-tubed Katyusha rocket launchers that the Red Army had used with devastating effect against the Wehrmacht in World War II, these projectors announced their presence with the terrifying screeching noise of their rockets, which one legionnaire likened to the sound of a passing train. The explosions that followed were louder and often more destructive than those of shells of larger caliber, for the explosive made up a greater proportion of the rocket’s weight. Several of the rockets scored direct hits, destroying munitions stores, pulverizing sodden earthworks, and doing serious damage to the medical supplies depot. That night the garrison’s senior medical officer cabled Hanoi: “Situation of the wounded extremely precarious due to flooding and collapse of several dugouts.… Urgent need of all medical supplies; my stocks are destroyed.”

…

Sometime before eleven (accounts differ on the exact time), a massive explosion shook the earth under Eliane 2. In a tactic reminiscent of the Union at Petersburg in 1864 and the British at the Hawthorn Redoubt in 1916, the Viet Minh had driven a mine shaft under Eliane 2 and loaded it with three thousand pounds of TNT. Veterans recalled a muffled rumbling under their feet, followed after a pause by a giant geyser of earth and stones thrown into the air. The garrison suffered massive casualties, but the key French blockhouse did not fall, and the Viet Minh foolishly paused before advancing. This delay gave the defenders under Captain Jean Pouget precious time to man the lip of the crater and open a murderous fire on the approaching infantry. Three hours later, with Pouget’s men still holding out, he asked for reinforcements. He could hold Eliane 2, he told HQ over the wireless, with just one additional company. None was available, replied the major on the other end. “Not another man, not another shell, my friend. You’re a para. You’re there to get yourself killed.”

Pouget did not die. After acknowledging the major’s message, he announced his intention to sign off and to disable the radio. A Viet Minh operator who had been eavesdropping broke in and told him not to wreck the set just yet—a song was coming on. Through the static Pouget could hear the strains of “Chant des Partisans,” a wartime anthem of the French Resistance. “The swine,” he grumbled, grasping the irony. He put three bullets through the radio and went out to join his men. A few minutes before five o’clock, he and his last handful of soldiers were surrounded and captured.

The end was near. On May 7, the sun went up for the last time on the fortified French camp. Eliane 4 and 10 were still holding out at daybreak, but by midmorning both were gone.

…

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was over. The Viet Minh had won. Vo Nguyen Giap had overturned history, had accomplished the unprecedented, had beaten the West at its own game. For the first time in the annals of colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in fixed battle.

This last paragraph seems to be an astounding claim. Has the author never heard of the 1905 Siege of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War? Or the 1842 Retreat from Kabul and other British defeats during the many Anglo-Indian wars. Did the Russian Empire suffer no defeats as it expanded across Central Asia? Did the Dutch VOC suffer no defeats in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Formosa? The colonial era and its many wars started long before the 20th century.

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by Joel | 27 January 2025 · 6:01 am

Caribbean Slave Traffickers, early 1500s

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 42-45:

Slave traffickers prowled the Caribbean in the 1510s and 1520s, greatly expanding Europeans’ geographic knowledge. Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida—often depicted as a deluded explorer bent on finding the Fountain of Youth—was in fact deeply involved in the early Caribbean slave trade, sponsoring slaving voyages to the Bahamas and opening Florida to the trade. In fact, the royal patent confirming Ponce de León’s discovery of the “island” of Florida allowed him to “wage war and seize disobedient Indians and carry them away for slaves.” Similarly, the Spaniard who first laid claim to the coast of South Carolina, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a man of “great learning and gravity” deferentially addressed as el licenciado, was a prime mover in the slave trade. (The term licenciado refers to someone who holds a university degree, usually a lawyer.) We often think of these men simply as “discoverers,” when in reality considerable overlap existed between discoverers and slavers.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the dispersion of Natives across the Caribbean greatly facilitated the task of capturing and transporting them. Villagers living in small communities on self-contained and exposed islands had little chance to hide from the intruders or to repel unexpected attacks. Slave raiders formed compact groups of around fifty or sixty men. They arrived quietly on their ships; waited until nighttime, “when the Indians were secure in their mats”; and descended on the Natives, setting their thatched huts on fire, killing anyone who resisted, and capturing all others irrespective of age or gender. Once the initial ambush was over, the slavers often had to pursue the Indians who had escaped, unleashing their mastiffs or running the Natives down with their horses. If there were many captives, the slavers took the trouble of building temporary holding pens by the beach, close to where their ships were moored, while horsemen combed the island. The attackers literally carried off entire populations, leaving empty islands in their wake.

The Indians were then loaded on the ships, packed into the space belowdecks. The scene in the hold of a slaving ship was infernal. Lack of air, poor provisioning, and the relentless tropical heat magnified the slaves’ suffering to the highest degree. “The Indians could not move,” wrote a young man from Milan named Girolamo Benzoní, “and there they lay like animals amid their vomits and feces. When the sea was calm and the ship could not move, sometimes there was no water for these poor people. Broken down by the heat, the bad smell, and the discomforts, they died miserably down there.” Unlike the Middle Passage, which required a month of travel, slaving voyages in the Caribbean lasted only a few days. Yet the mortality rates of these short passages surpassed those of transatlantic voyages. Friar Las Casas reported that “it was never the case that a ship carrying three or four hundred people did not have to throw overboard one hundred or one hundred and fifty bodies out of lack of food and water”—making for a mortality rate of twenty-five to fifty percent. Although it is tempting to disregard this claim as another of Las Casas’s exaggerations, sources confirm his mortality estimates. Vázquez de Ayllón’s slaving expeditions were among the most notorious for their poor provisioning and very high mortality rates, which cut deeply into his profits and caused untold human suffering and senseless death.

Spanish slavers did not win every time. In particular, the Natives of the Lesser Antilles were able to fend off raids and occasionally even go on the offensive, surprising lonely ships and Spanish strongholds. In 1513 about one thousand Caribs attacked the Spanish settlements of Puerto Rico, killing many colonists. Ponce de León blundered when he led a retaliatory slaving raid on the island of Guadalupe in 1515, which ended in total disaster: twenty Spaniards were wounded, and five died. The Indians found themselves at a tremendous technological disadvantage. Indian arrowheads made of fish bones could not penetrate the chain mail armor of the Spaniards, and Indian canoes, though they could easily outmaneuver a caravel, had no chance in a long-distance chase. Nevertheless, the Natives were occasionally able to prevail against the Europeans.

In general, however, small crews of European slavers operating from dilapidated ships proved tremendously effective in subduing and capturing Indians across the Caribbean. Slaving licenses issued by crown authorities reveal just how responsive these crews were to market opportunities. The number of licenses grew steadily from 1514 through 1517, the years when the Taínos of Española were no longer available in sufficient numbers to satisfy the Spaniards’ demand for gold. There was a sudden drop in licenses in 1518, followed by an extraordinary spike in 1519. It is not difficult to explain these changes. A smallpox epidemic ravaged the Caribbean archipelago in 1518, curtailing the traffickers’ activities. The following year, slavers worked harder than ever before to replenish the dead or dying Indian workforce of the large Caribbean islands, launching more slaving raids than in all the previous years combined and spreading desolation and death to the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles, and parts of the mainland (see appendix 2). We can only imagine the grim circumstances of the Caribbean islanders who had to endure the alarming epidemic that took the lives of family members and neighbors, causing widespread dislocation and famine and tremendous hardship. And just when the worst seemed to be subsiding, Indian slavers appeared on the horizon, ready to stuff them into the holds of their ships and take them to the goldfields of Española or the pearl banks off the coast of Venezuela. The Bahamas became almost entirely depopulated. Las Casas estimated the number of Lucayos captured at forty thousand, while a slave trafficker put the figure at “only” fifteen thousand. Regardless of the actual number, no Lucayo communities remained in the Bahamas except as bands of refugees. By 1520 armadores like Vázquez de Ayllón were forced to bypass the Bahamian archipelago altogether and venture on to Florida and beyond to find human prey.

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by Joel | 7 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Capt. Cook’s Americans

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle p. 345-347:

WHILE IN MACAU, Captain Gore learned the distressing news that not only was the American Revolution going badly for the English, but both France and Spain had declared war on Britain. Consequently, for the voyage home, facing the danger of seizure or attack, his two ships would remain on a war footing. The Resolution and the Discovery left Macau in January 1780, stopping briefly south of Vietnam and then in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, not far from the seething volcano on Krakatoa. By April, the vessels were anchored in False Bay, near Cape Town. In early August, as the two ships approached England, contrary winds forced them far to the west. Gore had to make a long, awkward circuit around Ireland and over Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The vessels plied down the east coast of Britain, finally arriving in London on October 7, 1780. The Resolution had been gone from England for 1,548 days. At the time, it was believed to be the longest exploratory voyage—in terms of both miles and duration—ever undertaken on the high seas. And yet, despite the odyssey’s historic length, once again, not a single person on either ship had died of scurvy.

…

AFTER RETURNING TO London, the Americans on board the ships had to face the difficult decision whether to cast their loyalties with Britain or find their way back to their native-born colonies and take up the cause against the mother country under whose flag they had been sailing for the past four years. Because he was still a member of the Royal Marines, John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States. In 1786, not done with epic traveling, Ledyard embarked on a trek of more than six thousand miles, mostly on foot, across Europe and Russia in an attempt to reach Alaska, but he was arrested in Siberia under orders from Catherine the Great. Ledyard died in Cairo in 1788, aged thirty-seven, while preparing an expedition to search for the source of the Niger River.

Ledyard’s fellow countryman John Gore, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the land of his birth. The Admiralty appointed him as one of the captains of the Greenwich Hospital, the same position Cook had vacated when he embarked on his final voyage. Gore served ten years at Greenwich. He was a popular figure among the old salts and died there in 1790.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, disease, migration, military, nationalism, publishing, Russia, travel, U.S., war

by Joel | 6 September 2024 · 1:43 pm

Capt. Cook’s Family

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 347-348:

ELIZABETH COOK NEVER remarried and remained a widow for fifty-six years. Sadly, she outlived all of her children, none of whom had children of their own. In October of 1780, the same month the Resolution and the Discovery returned to England, Nathaniel Cook, a midshipman serving on the HMS Thunderer, went down with more than six hundred other souls in a massive hurricane off Jamaica. He was only sixteen. Thirteen years later, in 1793, Hugh Cook perished from scarlet fever while at Cambridge, where he was studying to be an Anglican minister. Only a month after that, the eldest of the Cook boys, James, drowned near the Isle of Wight. The shock of losing her last two sons in such rapid succession proved too much for Elizabeth—it was said she spent almost three years confined to her bed.

At least, thanks to Lord Sandwich, she received a pension of £200 each year from the Admiralty, which, together with her husband’s share of the royalties from the publication of his voyage accounts, saw her into old age. “She kept her faculties to the end,” wrote Elizabeth’s cousin Canon Bennett, describing her as “a handsome and venerable lady, her white hair rolled back in ancient fashion, always dressed in black satin. She wore a ring with her husband’s hair in it, and she entertained the highest respect for his memory, measuring everything by his standard of honor and morality. Her keenest expression of disapprobation was that ‘Mr. Cook’—to her he was always Mr. Cook, not Captain—‘would never have done so.’ Like many widows of sailors, she could never sleep in high wind for thinking of the men at sea.”

Elizabeth Cook died in 1835, aged ninety-three.

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by Joel | 25 August 2024 · 4:24 am

Capt. Cook’s Shipboard Hygiene

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 15-17:

DURING HIS TWO voyages, Cook had shown himself to be a benevolent though strict leader of his own men—sparing with the lash and solicitous of his crew’s happiness, comfort, and health. These should be attributes for any good naval officer, but so many ship captains of the era could be unimaginably brutal in their punishments, tyrannical in their command style, and indifferent to conditions belowdecks. The Royal Navy, it was famously said, was “manned by violence and maintained by cruelty.”

Cook, however, was a different sort of captain. He constantly experimented with schemes for shipboard hygiene and diet. He knew that prolonged dampness and darkness were eternal enemies that worked in concert and must be mercilessly fought. Many diseases killed sailors on long voyages, but most of them, Cook found, could be prevented by maintaining strict cleanliness, especially in the galley.

Germ theory was only a nascent and controversial concept among medical scientists at the time, but Cook intuitively seemed to grasp its essence. Ever at war against grime, he kept his men scrubbing the decks with soap and vinegar, and often ordered smoking fires, set in pots, to be lit deep within the ship. His perpetual campaign against cockroaches, rats, weevils, and other vermin was resourceful, almost scientific, in its approach. “To cleanliness, as well in the ship as amongst the people, enough attention cannot be paid,” Cook insisted. “The least neglect occasions a putrid and disagreeable smell below.”

Then there was the most dreaded maritime disease of all: scurvy, a ghastly disorder that was considered an almost inevitable occupational hazard of long ocean voyages. During the Age of Sail, it was generally assumed that scurvy would kill off half the crew members on any lengthy expedition. The malady’s progression was all too well known: spongy gums, fetid breath, protuberant eyes, scaly skin, a breakdown in the tissues and cells of the body, convulsions, and, eventually, death.

But amazingly, during his two odysseys, it seemed that Cook had beaten scurvy. On his second voyage, the Resolution was at sea for three years, but not a single one of his men died of the disease—or even, it seems, developed advanced symptoms. This was a historic breakthrough. He didn’t understand scurvy’s true cause, its etiology; that it resulted from a deficiency of vitamin C would not be determined until the 1930s, when scientists deduced the compound’s chemical structure.

But Cook, following his own hunches while building on a host of older theories, had put in place an astoundingly efficacious system of prevention. A Scottish surgeon named James Lind had demonstrated as far back as the 1750s that scurvy could be treated by consuming citrus fruit, but it took decades before his ideas were aggressively adopted. Building on Lind’s findings, Cook insisted that whenever possible, his sailors—accustomed to a diet of salted meat and stale biscuits—consume fresh fruits, vegetables, and greens. On the Resolution he kept some strange-sounding supplementary items on the menu as well, such as carrot marmalade, wort of malt, rob of orange, inspissated lemon juice, and a concoction known as saloop, which was steeped from the root of a common meadow plant, Orchis mascula.

…

Cook hadn’t really conquered scurvy, though—the particular lessons he’d learned through hard and patient experimentation would be unlearned and then learned again, dismissed and revived in piecemeal fashion, over the next several decades. But for now, the Admiralty viewed Cook’s apparent mastery over the disease as possibly an even more consequential achievement than proving the Southern Continent’s nonexistence. So many sons of England, so many sons of so many countries, had died of this horrible malady. It has been estimated that nearly two million European sailors perished from scurvy between 1600 and 1800. The notion that a thousand-day voyage could be undertaken without the disease’s appearance represented a radical shifting of the possibilities; it meant that His Majesty’s ships could range wider and longer, extending the reach of the Crown to the world’s most distant nooks and corners, to complete the maps of the globe.

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by Joel | 21 August 2024 · 8:40 am

Indentured Servitude vs. Slavery

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 214-215:

As the 17th century drew to a close, English and French colonists were no longer able to justify investments in indentured servitude, even as temporary chattel, on economic grounds. They were, however, able to promote the institution on social and political grounds. The policy decision to pull white women from field gangs because they were better placed to serve the colonial enterprise in the field of reproduction exemplifies the significance of social forces in determining the shape of the labor system. Importantly, it shows that the planters’ efforts to reinvent servitude as slavery received some pushback for social and political purposes. In addition, there was the matter of sustaining militia regiments to assist in the suppression of enslaved Africans. To these ends colonial governments, rather than planters, sought to ramp up the demand for male servants.

Given the harshness of Caribbean work and epidemiological environments, for many servants the plantation experience amounted to lifelong enslavement. The legal requirement of fixed-time servitude and the social reality of lifelong labor were offset by mortality trends and management policy. To suggest, as one scholar does, that it “was, of course, inconceivable that any of the [white] labor pools mentioned (convicts, prisoners of war, or vagrants) could have been converted into chattel slaves” is to ignore what was taking place on the ground in the colonies (Eltis 2000, 70).

The conversion of servitude into slavery was conceived by planters of cotton, tobacco, and sugar. If these planters failed at this conversion, it was not because of weak managerial resolve, but because of the multiple internal and external forces that militated against them, including servants’ unrelenting ambition to participate in colonialism as independent wealth makers.

From the beginning, those Barbadian planters who received large grants of land calculated the benefits of importing African labor to work them. Pre-sugar Barbadian planters, such as James Drax, were directly involved in sponsoring slave voyages to the African coast; the Drax family later became sugar barons in Barbados and Jamaica. Other English merchants with investment interests in Barbados were known slave traders. The Earl of Warwick, who claimed in 1629 that Barbados was granted him by the monarch, and Maurice Thompson, a large landowner, were involved in the supply of enslaved Africans directly to Barbados before the “sugar revolution.”

The contrast with smaller landholders is sharp. Before the [Dutch] Brazilian political crisis of 1645 wrecked that country’s sugar industry, the Dutch West India Company was selling slaves on easy terms to creditable planters in Barbados and Guadeloupe. Strapped for cash and alienated from credit, the “small holders did not take to sugar,” says Blackburn, “because it was a new and unfamiliar crop, and because it could not be harvested for at least eighteen months after the first planting” (Blackburn 1997, 231). They did not attract Dutch or English credit, had no access to core funding for slave purchase, and thus remained in the servant market. In this way they drove the demand for servants despite the potential availability of slaves.

“Slavery and cotton,” then, was as established in Barbados and Guadeloupe in 1640 as would be “sugar and servitude” in 1650 and “sugar and slavery” in 1660. Between 1645 and 1650, the midpoint of the transition, the mixed-labor regime was at its peak. As big investors in cotton production, planters with financial access did two things that prepared them for sugar: they consolidated small plantations into large ones, and they made substantive purchases of enslaved Africans. Economies of scale in cotton production enabled many of these planters to access larger external credit instruments that enabled the expansion of both the servant trade and the slave trade. In addition, the planters sped up the land consolidation process that facilitated the sugar industry.

These investors became industry leaders who championed the charge into sugar production and plantation expansion after 1645. In effect, they were deepening rather than creating the reliance upon enslaved Africans. Capital was scarce and expensive; risks were high. In pursuit of profits, planters fully exploited whatever labor was within their reach. Alongside “sugar and black slavery” there was “sugar and white slavery.” Plantation agriculture before, during, and after the sugar revolution generally meant disciplined, coerced labor—and, as Williams so aptly concluded, “at times that labor has been slave, at other times nominally free; at times black, at other times white or brown or yellow” (Williams 1944, 29).

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by Joel | 17 August 2024 · 4:57 pm

Caribbean Demographic Changes, 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 197-199:

European and African populations in the Caribbean grew quickly, almost exclusively through migration rather than natural increase. If the numbers are often vague, two patterns are clear. First, the white population in the islands was predominantly young and male until the late 17th century. Second, the population came to be dominated by enslaved Africans by the end of the century, first on the English islands and then on the French. The population of the French islands was 19% black by 1650 but 36% by 1660 (Boucher 2008, 115). By 1655 the population of Barbados contained some 20,000 Africans and 23,000 Europeans; 18 years later, the slave population outnumbered the European population, 33,184 to 21,309 (Dunn 1973, 87). Enslaved Africans came from a variety of ethnic groups, as did Europeans—especially on the English and Dutch islands.

Although most European migrants traveled as indentured laborers, there were some free migrants as well. Some were ambitious men eager to improve their economic condition: Tom Verney hoped in 1639 that his time in Barbados would “be an engagement for mee for my new lead-life,” promising both prosperity and personal redemption for past failures (Games 1999, 80). Some were men of the cloth. The presence of Caribs on French-occupied islands not only hindered French settlement but also inspired the French to send Catholic missionaries to proselytize. Jews found haven in Suriname, Curaçao, Barbados, and Jamaica. English Catholics, forbidden to practice their faith openly at home and banned from holding public office, inhabited all of the English colonies in the Caribbean. French Huguenots made their way to the islands, too, where many governors tolerated their presence. If for many the 17th-century Caribbean was a place of violence, premature death, and avarice, for others the islands offered relative sanctuary—whether prompted by indifference or acceptance from neighbors—from some of the religious and political violence of the era.

European affairs continued to punctuate Caribbean life in the middle of the 17th century, defining mature colonial settlements just as they had facilitated their creation. Other regions of the Atlantic also began to shape the Caribbean. Trading ties thickened connections to the American mainland, Europe, and Africa. One overpopulated Caribbean colony, Barbados, even spawned a supply colony on the American mainland, Carolina. Africans became a larger presence in the region, dominating some islands and posing strategic challenges and opportunities for residents and invaders. Several regional transitions illustrate these new intersections.

The first transition involved sugar, another commodity of growing popularity in Europe. Tobacco may have sparked interest in Caribbean land in the 1620s, but sugar wrought an even greater frenzy. It took hold gradually in the English and especially the French Caribbean, primarily because sugarcane cultivation and processing required a large capital investment in equipment and labor, one well beyond the reach of most European planters, many of whom also lacked expertise in processing cane. In 1654 came a crucial turning point in the Caribbean, sparked by events outside the region: the Dutch, after nine years of struggle with the Portuguese, finally abandoned Brazil, where they had learned the complicated and costly techniques of sugar cultivation and, more important, of transforming sugar into rum and molasses. As Dutch merchants, planters, and investors dispersed into the Caribbean, they brought those techniques with them. While some English settlers had already begun to experiment with sugar on Barbados, the infusion of Dutch capital contributed to the “sugar revolution,” in which sugar monoculture replaced other crops and enslaved Africans replaced European indentured laborers.

Sugar wrought major environmental transformations wherever it took hold, and those changes assisted the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which had crossed the Atlantic from Africa in slaving vessels. As Europeans cleared land for sugarcane, they felled trees, removing bird habitats and facilitating the survival of insects the birds had once consumed. Sugar processing also required clay pots, which stood empty much of the year, collecting rainwater that enabled mosquitoes to flourish. A. aegypti is the vector for yellow fever, and it is no accident that the Caribbean’s first yellow fever epidemic started in Barbados in 1647, in the wake of sugar’s introduction to the island. In that first epidemic, as much as one-third of the island’s population may have died.

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by Joel | 4 July 2024 · 12:24 pm

Pinpointing the SARS Outbreak, 2003

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 45-48, 50-51:

I wanted to go back to People’s Hospital [in Beijing], because I couldn’t stop thinking about the “courtyard problem.” By then, it’d become the site of one of the biggest and most difficult battles against SARS. Starting on April 5, about 222 people had been infected at the hospital, including ninety-three hospital staff across nearly half the departments. The emergency ward north of the outpatient wing was the most severely affected; that was where the courtyard was. On April 22, I had seen patients covered in white cloth being rolled out of there. Two days later, when our van passed by once more, the eighty-five-year-old hospital had just announced a full quarantine. Beyond the yellow quarantine tape, three nurses sat on the empty steps, holding their blue nurse’s caps. Their long wet hair was drying in the sun. As they sat in silence, one would occasionally comb her fingers through the hair hanging in front of her chest. Our van parked in front of the hospital for over ten minutes. Xiao Peng pointed his camcorder at them from a distance.

I felt that there must be a correlation between the twenty-nine patients I’d witnessed being transferred without proper protection and the high rate of infection now sweeping the hospital. I wanted to know more about what had happened. No one asked me to work on the story. I wasn’t even sure if I could make it at all, let alone get it on the air, but my team was willing to work with me….

I ended up getting an interview with Zhu Jihong, the director of the emergency ward. He confessed to me that, at the time of transfer, the twenty-nine patients I’d counted were all in fact infected with SARS. In fact, the emergency ward had already been battling known cases since April 5. But rather than report the cases, the real numbers were hidden from the World Health Organization when they came to inspect the hospital. The patients had been transferred to ambulances that drove around Beijing in circles until the inspectors left.

I’d spent a long time convincing Zhu Jihong to accept the interview. I said, “You don’t need to make any judgments or draw any conclusions, just describe what you saw, heard, and felt, that’s all.”

After a long pause on the phone, he said, “The memory is too painful.”

“Of course,” I said, “but pain can be cathartic, consolation for one’s sacrifices.”

Zhu Jihong led me through the emergency ward corridor. He leaned over, undid the heavy chain lock, and pushed the door open. He reached for the wall with his left hand and after some flickering the lights turned on. In the ashen light, the classroom-sized space was filled with blue IV chairs tagged with white labels that read: April 17, Thursday; April 17, Thursday …

The beds were littered with rumpled blankets, some of which had fallen to the ground. Chairs were upturned, four feet in the air, left there by people fleeing for their lives.

This was the courtyard I had been hearing so much about. It was a space wedged between four buildings. With the addition of a roof, it had become an indoor space, sealed off from traffic in the rest of the hospital. They’d used it as the IV room, where all the patients with fevers came to receive their drips. Twenty-seven beds sat shoulder to shoulder with only the space of a fist between them. Every day, almost sixty people had sat tightly together on the beds and among a few chairs. Even during the daytime, the room completely depended on artificial lighting. There was no airflow, no windows, only a ventilation panel connected to the central air conditioning system, which spread the germs across the whole hospital.

The patient files that piled up in a mound on a desk were yellowing with age. I hesitated for a second. Zhu Xuhong said with a dismal smile, “Allow me.” He opened the files, which said pneumonia. He pointed toward a blackboard. Next to the twenty-two names written in white chalk, nineteen read: pneumonia, pneumonia, pneumonia …

“In fact, it was SARS,” he said.

Even the patients had not known. It was like a taboo. No one in the hospital had even called SARS by its name. They’d called it “that thing.” The first patient had come in on April 5. The doctors suspected she was a SARS patient after seeing her chest radiograph. But the government announced that all cases were from outside Beijing. All public hospitals are managed by the government. And according to the standards for diagnosis and treatment in Beijing, the doctors could only diagnose someone who had a history of direct contact with a confirmed infected person.

…

On April 22, Zeng Guang, the chief scientist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention examined this hospital. He said, “When buildings are about to collapse, escaping is the only choice.” Two days later, People’s Hospital quarantined. Zhang Wenkang, the minister of health, was fired, and within one week, the army built the biggest field medical hospital in Beijing. There were 686 SARS cases there, almost one-tenth of all global cases.

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by Joel | 27 June 2024 · 6:22 am

Khmer Rouge Fertilizer Crews

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 201-203:

The piles of ash on the farm are all used up now. The fertilizer unit makes its own ashes to mix with the excrement. Making ashes is not an easy task; we must fell large trees, saw them into pieces, carry them and place them into piles, and then light fires to burn them. Now the fertilizer unit has been divided into three teams: the ash makers, the excrement carriers, and the fertilizer mixers.

I and Bong Sae, my group leader (a former teacher in Kampong Speu province), who both have similar wounds, are placed in the excrement carrying team. This team has four people: Bong Sae, Bong Phon, Bong Him, and me. We stop using bangky baskets to carry the excrement because we find two wooden buckets, each attached to a board. We carry one bucket between two people. It’s very difficult because we can’t breathe without taking in the stench, but our labor is not as rigorous as that of the ash makers.

Each morning we carry the buckets from the fertilizer shed and scoop the excrement out of the latrines from one end of the village to the other and then back again. In the morning, we must carry four buckets, and another four buckets in the evening. At first, we are reluctant out of sheer disgust. Then after doing it every day, our noses get tighter, and we grow accustomed to the stench. After scooping the excrement into the buckets, those who smoke sit and have a smoke to gather their strength. I’m not a smoker, so I walk around and look at the villagers’ huts, observing the lives of each family. Only we, the excrement carriers, have the possibility of becoming so intimately familiar with the real lives of the villagers.

We go from one latrine to the next, from one hut to the next. The shit from this latrine is like the shit from that one, their shit is like my shit. All of it is dark green colored like the leaves of trees, different from animal droppings only in that ours smells worse. Before we had latrines, we relieved ourselves in the fields. When they encountered our excrement now and then, the base people would say, “human tracks, but animal shit.” Only the excrement of the cadres, the chhlops [lit. ‘spies’: monitors and enforcers], the cooperative chief, and the soldiers has a natural color. If any of the people’s latrines has fresh excrement with a color like that of an animal, it is certain that last night they had rice or corn to eat. If they didn’t trade for it, then they must have stolen some corn from someone’s field.

Some latrines have a decent amount of excrement, while others hardly have anything at all to scoop out—even if we only come by once a week. It’s because the owner is down sick and has no leaves to eat, so there’s not much excrement to produce. At each hut we see illness and suffering. Tears, pus, blood, clear fluid from sores, all flowing and mixing together. When I never saw anybody besides myself, I used to think that I suffered the worst. But after seeing others around me, I am surprised. Most of the people in the village are suffering as badly as I am. Some even have it worse than I do: they have no family, but are left to suffer in illness, all alone.

Some days, the excrement carriers postpone scooping excrement for a while to help carry a dead body to be buried. We cut wild bamboo and split it into strips about a meter-eighty in length, then we use dah kun, yeav, or preng vines to weave the strips into a lattice to wrap the corpse in (instead of a coffin) and carry it to be buried. Some corpses have grass mats to be wrapped in, while other corpses have nothing at all but these bamboo lattices. The four of us don’t know any proper religious rites, so we simply bury the corpses straight, like we would any other thing. And we are not afraid of the corpses either, for we have become the village corpse buriers, and we are as accustomed to this work as we are to the smell of excrement.

Those with strength are sent out on mobile assignments away from the village, and those who are ill nearby have no strength to carry the corpses to be buried. So it falls to the excrement carriers. Every two or three days we have a body to carry off and bury.

There is no special place for burying bodies. We usually bury them in the forest behind the houses of the dead, a distance of only about 100 or 150 meters.