stefansson-wrangel-09-40-004-002

Scurvy 2

There was also some salt which the men used
with the fresh meat, those of them who cared for
it.

On account of their greater portability,
I decided to use the groceries found at
Winter Harbor along with dried meat and fat
in the sledge exploration of the spring 1917.
The dried meat yields to no food in portability
if used with the right amount of tallow, but
at we had to feed some fifty dogs on it as wel
as the men we were short and should have had
to use half-dried or green meat in part had
we not found the cached groceries. I did not
fear scurvy from this use of the groceries as
I expected the men to eat mainly fresh meat
all winter and we would have some seal meat
on the ice in the spring. But I reckoned with out the
fact that some of our men had the belief that
a varied diet is nescessary for health. That
phrase may be all right if properly understood;
but certainly it is not only untrue as commonly
understood by laymen but dangerous when applied
on polar expeditions by the ordinary cook or
even by the surgeons who inherit their views
of scurvy and anti-acorbutics from Captain
Cook’s voyages. On this point witness the
prevalent scurvy of the carefully groomed and
dieted Six Scott expeditions and the absence of
it on the (dietically) apparently haphazard
expeditions of ShaekisierexxKd Bsaxy Peary and
Shackleton.

Of the six five men who went to Winter Harbor
in mid-winter and there lived for several weeks
mainly on the diet given above (the cached stores)
three were afterwards transferred to parties
that lived in considerable part on fresh meat
through February and March; the other three
worked at freighting the groceries to the north
coast of Melville Island and (I later learnt)
ate fresh meat rarely and as one item only of
their meals. They also used salt extensively
both as direct seasoning and in the form of
beef te from Bovril. None of the three who
ate considerable fresh meat nearly or quite
without salt through MM February and March
ever got it scurvy; everyone of the other
three two got it late in March or in April. No
one else of the seventeen in Meoville Island
had any symptom of scurvy.

In March our Melville Island party was
joined by Lorne Knight who had wintered with
the POLAP BEAR in Victoria Island and whose
diet had been mainly groceries of the ordinay
kind with a little fresh meat now and then
cooked in the ordinary white men’s ways.

After Knight joined our party it was
subdivided into two sections travelling one
behind the other on the same trail a few days
apart. In the advance party were Aarnout