Scurvy Day, 1903

Tinned meat, lime juice – and perhaps a drop of claret

A shorter piece this week while I have a brief end-of-summer break. Hopefully without a ‘Scurvy Day’ of the kind described by this week’s diarist.

He is Edward Adrian Wilson (1872–1912), doctor, artist, devout Christian, ornithologist… and polar explorer. Wilson grew up in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire in a well-heeled family, his father a physician and his mother a poultry breeder. He showed early prowess in natural history and studied natural sciences at Cambridge. And in 1901, he became a member of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery expedition – Ernest Shackleton was the third officer, and Wilson was zoologist and junior doctor, noted for his calm demeanour (often in the face of Scott’s impatience).

The voyage made important scientific discoveries and was successful in defeating the danger of scurvy, despite ongoing medical ignorance about it (and despite the pioneering work of James Lind a century earlier). Scott wrote the official account in 1905, but Wilson had kept a careful diary, which was only published in 1966.¹ I’m not going to go into all the details of polar exploration here, but his extensive diary (“written primarily for my wife”) is notable for its keen eye of a man both artist and scientist and for his light-hearted tone and warm nature – just like the man himself, who seems to have been universally liked, described by Scott as “the life and soul of the party, the organizer of all amusements, the always good-tempered and cheerful one, the ingenious person who could get round all difficulties”. Here is Edward, then, writing on 1st September 1903, describing the diet of the Discovery crew…

One of Wilson’s own watercolours which accompanied his diaries, here showing their base at Hut Point – it is still there today.

We have finished all our mutton, having had it every Sunday all through the winter. As it was all tainted, I think it’s a good thing there was no more. The beef also is decidedly tainted, and a large percentage of the condensed milk is quite bad.

Every Tuesday for dinner we have skua, half a bird to a man, enough for a meal and very good indeed. One day in the week we have stuffed seal’s heart, another seal steak and kidney pie, another seal steak and onions, and so on. For breakfast we have the best dish of all – seal’s liver, twice a week, other days stewed seal meat or curried. Thursday is known to everyone as “Scurvy Day”, being the only day in the week on which we have tinned meat. No one likes it so much as the seal, but it gives a day off to the cooks, who otherwise never get a holiday. On the whole we live very wholesomely – plenty of porridge, and good butter and good bread and jams, plenty of seal meat, fresh, palatable and well cooked. Skua gull, and cheese. Tea, coffee and cocoa. Lime juice every day and claret once or twice a week. Only our vegetables are a hopeless failure. The potatoes are eatable, but none of the others are.

Today I spent the morning drawing and the afternoon went [on] a ski run, and painting ice crystals for Ferrar.²

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In 1910, six years after the Discovery returned, Wilson again joined Scott southward, this time on the Terra Nova as chief scientist, on the ill-fated quest for the South Pole that has gone into legend. Wilson was one of the five men led by Scott to the pole itself in January 1912, only to find Roald Amundsen had got there first. And Wilson died at the end of March, out in the brutal blizzards, alongside Scott. Wilson kept a diary of that expedition, too, and poignantly his last letters to his wife Oriana also survive. In the penultimate one of 27th February, he wrote:

Our effort today is rather a forlorn hope but I hope this  will reach you… I look forward to meeting you after this life is over.  I shall simply fall and go to sleep in the snow and I have your little books with me in my breast pocket.

1. It is available online here.

2. Hartley Ferrar was the expedition’s geologist.