Scurvy aboard the Erasmus

Scurvy aboard the Erasmus is a bodily record of the expedition’s privation: Blackthorne and his crew reach Japan weakened by a long shortage of fresh food, with illness ranging from sore gums and loose teeth to bleeding and flux. Blackthorne’s cautious saving of fruit lessens his own symptoms, but does not spare him pain. The later arrival of fresh vegetables begins to reverse the damage, unevenly and only after the crew has suffered deaths and prolonged sickness.

Voyage and Conditions

The illness belongs to a passage made dangerous by more than weather. The expedition had been forced to winter after the winds changed early and the Captain-General feared Spanish fleets to the north. Four months passed before the fleet could sail; 156 men died from starvation, cold, and flux, and the survivors resorted to eating the calfskin covering the ropes. Storms scattered the ships in the Strait, and the Erasmus alone reached the rendezvous off Chile. After waiting a month as the Spaniards closed in, the ship sailed into unknown waters: the secret rutter ended at Chile. This history of scarcity and uncertainty forms the setting for the crew’s later struggle with scurvy.

Blackthorne’s Illness and Rationing

Blackthorne recognizes that he is luckier than most of the crew, but corrects himself: he has been more careful. He had conserved his fruit while the others consumed theirs despite his warnings, and his scurvy is consequently mild by comparison. His body still hurts, his teeth ache, and his gums are sore and tender. The contrast between his condition and the men’s worsening symptoms is not a matter of immunity; it reflects the practical consequences of preserving a scarce source of fresh food.

In his low-beamed, orderly cabin, Blackthorne unlocks a drawer and unwraps the last apple he has hoarded since Santa Maria Island, off Chile. The fruit is tiny, bruised, and rotting, with maggots inside. He cuts away only a quarter, eats the maggots with the flesh in accordance with an old sea legend about preventing scurvy and tooth loss, then wraps and locks away the remainder. The careful portioning makes the apple both food and a dwindling reserve against further decline.

Symptoms and Uneven Recovery

The crew’s illness is much more severe. Blackthorne sees the others constantly hemorrhaging, suffering diarrhoea, and losing or loosening their teeth; he also knows that most of them hate and fear him, though he regards that hostility as ordinary aboard ship, where the pilot sets the course and runs the vessel. His authority over navigation does not make him able to protect the crew from the privations of the voyage. In the cabin’s dim, creaking interior, his exhaustion registers alongside the physical symptoms, while rats and cockroaches inhabit the ship around him.

After the survivors are ashore in Japan, fresh vegetables begin to banish the scurvy. Eleven of Blackthorne’s men are alive, and all but two are healing rapidly. The two gravely ill men have blood in their bowels and severe flux; Vinck has bled them without helping, and Blackthorne expects them to die by nightfall. The Captain-General, in another room, remains very sick, although the account does not identify his illness as scurvy. The dead have been taken away by the Japanese, so the improvement in the survivors’ condition does not undo the losses of the voyage.

Significance

The crew’s recovery begins not with a dramatic cure but with the return of fresh vegetables, after months in which food scarcity had become a bodily crisis. Blackthorne’s saved apple, consumed in a small piece and guarded for what remains, gives that crisis a precise domestic scale: survival depends on rationing even a damaged fruit. The sharp difference between his milder illness and the men’s bleeding, failing bodies also makes the consequences of his warnings visible, while the arrival of fresh food marks a limited turn toward recovery rather than a clean escape from the voyage’s cost.