The chemistry of the Portuguese Empire III: Ascorbic Acid

This is the third post inspired by the book “Napoleon’s Buttons – 17 Molecules that Changed History” by Penny Le Couteur & Jay Burreson. While in the first two posts of the series we talked about piperine and eugenol, two molecules that inspired, so to speak, the Age of Discoveries, here we consider ascorbic acid which, or rather the absence of which, almost prevented it.

The functions that ascorbic acid, commonly known as vitamin C, performs in our body are several and important: it is in fact an antioxidant, the precursor of enzymes involved in the immune system and the production of neurotransmitters, and it is essential in the production of collagen and in tissue healing.

Molecule of ascorbic acid

But how is this related to oceanic navigation? Humans, as many other animals, are incapable of synthesizing vitamin C and can only acquire it from dietary sources, mainly from fresh fruits and vegetables. If sailors’ eating habits on land were not ideal, they became terrifying onboard, already after a few weeks of navigation. Preserving food in reasonable conditions was practically impossible and the crew had to rely on salty, dried meat and on hardtacks, biscuits made of water and flour and baked to become rock hard. Considering that voyages used to last for months, sailors very soon after their departure started to show symptoms of scurvy, a disease that is caused by vitamin C deficiency.

Not at all a pretty sight, since early symptoms are malaise and lethargy (that made some people think that lazy sailors got sick) then progressing to shortness of breath, but later symptoms are bleeding gums, loss of teeth, susceptibility to bruising, hemorrhaging from mouth and noise, poor wound healing, foul breath, and diarrhea, to finally evolve into fever, convulsions and eventual death. The scarce hygiene, the co-occurrence of other diseases and the general poor health conditions of the sailors, mainly recruited among the lowest social classes, were confounding factors that prevented a serious study of scurvy for a long time. The search for a cure lead to a series of proposals, including bloodletting, an ‘elixir of vitriol’ (a mixture of sulphuric acid and alcohol), salty water, and a number of other ineffective, when not harmful, alternatives.

Scurvy represented an issue until the 18th century.

Today we know that any citrus juice would be enough to avoid scurvy, but in the Age of Discoveries more people died of scurvy than those who died of war, other diseases and shipwrecks combined. [Silvana Munzi]

Holy Intersections!

Working on a lengthy transcription project, a rather technical, cosmographical document of 16th-century Spain, it is marvellous at every turn how different subjects of research converge on every page. I wanted to show an example that spans widely and into the history of early Christianity.

In this document, Alonso de Chaves’ Quatri Partitu en cosmografía práctica, also called Espejo de navegantes (ca. 1528), we have at the beginning a calendar which at first sight is simply a Catholic calendar, with the saints, feasts and observances of the day. The relation between nautical and calendrical sciences is very intimate, and especially so when it is a question of oceanic navigation, because our solar calendar is directly related to the daily position of the sun through the ecliptic. Moreover, because life on board was liturgically a continuation of life on land, the saints calendar, the santoral, provided a temporal reference for everyone on board.

When we are transcribing these pages we very often need to refer to not just any Catholic calendar, which has a hugely complicated history, but very specifically to the Catholic calendar of the Church of Seville in the early 16th century—and you don’t find this around the corner! Each day has a saint or feast, and saints have attributes, like “bishop” or “martyr” or “virgin”, and sometimes to identify one or other you need to know something about the life of the saint, so you go looking into early medieval collections like the super-popular Legenda aurea. Some lovely paleographic eureka moments happen when you realise that a certain story of a thousand years early in Capadocia is determining the “colour” of the day in early modern Seville.

Then, as you can see in the picture, they still kept in this calendar, as a neo-Classical feature, a column with the Roman calendar dates, complete with their kalends, nones and ides; so you need to know your Roman calendar to make sense of it. On another column, we have the dominical or Sunday letters, useful to determine the day of the week for each particular dates, and crucial for the determination of moveable feasts, like Easter.

And suddenly, when you least expect it, instead of a saint, one cell will contain an astrological/astronomical piece of information, like the ingress of a planet into a sign. So you need to keep on your toes and refresh your astronomical signs as well.

It is these ever-unexpected conjunctions of apparently disparate fields of knowledge which make working with early sources so much fun and always a new challenge, or rather a constant invitation to go beyond. No page is the same when you are reading an early modern manuscript. You literally do not know what to expect before turning the page—Here be marvels! [J. Acevedo]