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Speaker 1: Pushkin. In the first two episodes of our three part

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Speaker 1: series on the Race for the Pole, we heard about

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Speaker 1: how the British Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott raced the

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Speaker 1: Norwegian adventurer Roald Amunson to the South Pole, and why

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Speaker 1: Scott had lost that race. But there's one mysterious feature

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Speaker 1: of that race that we've barely discussed, and one which

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Speaker 1: raises a much broader question. What's it like to learn

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Speaker 1: a vital lesson and then to lose your grip on

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Speaker 1: that lesson? Why does hard one knowledge sometimes melt away

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Speaker 1: in front of us? And so I present a third

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Speaker 1: perspective on the race to the Pole, this one, if

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Speaker 1: you'll forgive the phrase, is served with a twist of lime.

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Speaker 1: February nineteen twelve, and bitterly cold, the Antarctic summer was

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Speaker 1: beginning its turn to winter. At Ross Island, just off

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Speaker 1: the Antarctic coast, the sixty five men of Scott's British

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Speaker 1: expedition had established a base for exploring the continent and

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Speaker 1: conducting scientific experiments, and of course, for a thrust to

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Speaker 1: reach the South Pole itself. It was from this base

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Speaker 1: that Captain Scott's polar party had begun that epic journey

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Speaker 1: three months earlier, at the beginning of the southern summer.

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Speaker 1: Now the men at the base were eagerly awaiting his return.

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Speaker 1: On the nineteenth of February, one of Scott's team staggered

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Speaker 1: into the base camp, exhausted, snow blind, and dehydrated. The

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Speaker 1: solitary man Petty Officer Tom Crean reported that Captain Scott

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Speaker 1: had sent the three of them back six weeks ago

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Speaker 1: before his final push to the pole. The three had

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Speaker 1: almost made it back to the base, and Tom Crean

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Speaker 1: had arched the last thirty miles alone to fetch help.

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Speaker 1: Back Out on the ice were his two companions. One

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Speaker 1: of them, Lieutenant Teddy Evans, was desperately ill. Grimmer and Grimmer.

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Speaker 1: Diary entries from one of the trio tell the story,

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Speaker 1: mister Evans is turning black and blue, and several other

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Speaker 1: colors as well. Mister Evans is gradually worse. It's no

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Speaker 1: use closing our eyes to the fact. Mister Evans is

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Speaker 1: no better, but seems to be in great pain, but

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Speaker 1: he keeps quite cheerful. This morning we were forced to

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Speaker 1: put mister Evans on his ski and strap him on

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Speaker 1: as he could not lift his legs. Mister Evans is

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Speaker 1: in a very bad state. If this is scurvy, I'm

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Speaker 1: sorry for anyone's at tafts. Was it a case of scurvy?

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Speaker 1: Of course, bleeding gums, severe joint pain, bruising new wounds,

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Speaker 1: won't heal, old scars start to reopen. There was no doubt.

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Speaker 1: A mission was soon on its way to fetch the

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Speaker 1: pair out on the ice. Evans and his companion heard

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Speaker 1: the welcome barking of sled dogs coming to the rescue.

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Speaker 1: Evans would live. But how had Teddy Evans contracted a

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Speaker 1: case of scurvy? This was a British naval expedition in

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Speaker 1: the twentieth century. Hadn't the British Navy known how to

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Speaker 1: prevent scurvy for more than a century? They were nicknamed

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Speaker 1: lime Is because they were never far from a serving

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Speaker 1: of lime juice. Had they simply forgotten? British Navy Captain

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Speaker 1: Robert Falcon Scott wasn't available to answer the question. He

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Speaker 1: and his four companions were somewhere in the heart of Antarctica,

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Speaker 1: with a midnight sun sinking low as winter approached. An

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Speaker 1: awful threat hung over him. Teddy Evans had traveled with

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Speaker 1: Rob Scott for hundreds of miles, eating the same food

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Speaker 1: prepared in the same way. If Teddy Evans was barely

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Speaker 1: beginning to recover from a crippling case of scurvy, what

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Speaker 1: was happening to the group that had forged on towards

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Speaker 1: the South Pole with Robert Scott. I'm Tim Harford, and

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Speaker 1: you're listening to cautionary tales. Here's a description of scurvy

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Speaker 1: written eight hundred years ago. With violent pains in the

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Speaker 1: feet and ankles, their gums become swollen, their teeth loose

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Speaker 1: and useless, while their hips and shin bones first turned

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Speaker 1: black and putrefied. Finally, an easy and peaceful death, like

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Speaker 1: a gentle sleep, put an end to their suffering. Scurvy

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Speaker 1: was most common on long sea voyages. On Vasco da

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Speaker 1: Gama's expedition to India in fourteen ninety nine, he lost

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Speaker 1: two men out of every three to scurvy. Magellan suffered

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Speaker 1: even heavier losses four men out of every five as

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Speaker 1: he forged across the Pacific in fifteen twenty. In sixteen twenty,

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Speaker 1: nearly half the people on the Mayflower died, most of

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Speaker 1: them from scurvy. It was merciless, but eventually a British

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Speaker 1: naval surgeon named James Lynde, traveling aboard HMS Salisbury, conducted

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Speaker 1: what is now celebrated as one of the first controlled

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Speaker 1: clinical trials. On the twentieth of May seventeen forty seven.

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Speaker 1: I took twelve patients in the scurvy on board the

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Speaker 1: Salisbury at sea. Their cases were as similar as I

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Speaker 1: could have them. They all in general had putrid gums,

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Speaker 1: the spots, and lassitude, with weakness of their knees. Lynde

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Speaker 1: divided the men into six pairs and gave them each

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Speaker 1: the same diet, plus a different treatment for each pair.

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Speaker 1: Each treatment had been recommended by some esteemed doctor, which

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Speaker 1: is to say, given the state of medical science, some

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Speaker 1: highly decorated quack. Two of these were ordered each a

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Speaker 1: quart of cider a day. Lovely hard cider, but it's

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Speaker 1: not going to cure scurvy. Two others took twenty five

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Speaker 1: guts of elixir vitriol three times a day upon an

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Speaker 1: empty stomach. That's seventy five drops a day of sulfuric acid.

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Speaker 1: Two others took two spoonfuls of vinegar three times a

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Speaker 1: day upon an empty stomach. Then there were the poor

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Speaker 1: fellows give half a pint of sea water. Others got

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Speaker 1: a paste of garlic, mustard, horseradish, and aromatic plant extracts,

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Speaker 1: which sounds a little too zesty. None of this was

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Speaker 1: any help whatsoever. But the final pair got two oranges

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Speaker 1: and a lemon each day for six days, at which

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Speaker 1: point they had made a miraculous recovery and m Salisbury

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Speaker 1: had run out of fruit, which is rather a shame

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Speaker 1: for everyone else. Lynd is celebrated as a pioneer of

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Speaker 1: clinical trials. He's also remembered as the man who figured

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Speaker 1: out how to prevent scurvy. But the story, as we'll see,

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Speaker 1: isn't that tidy. Lynd certainly didn't understand what we understand today,

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Speaker 1: which is that scurvy is an illness caused by a

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Speaker 1: lack of a certain chemical in the body, a scorbic acid,

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Speaker 1: also known as vitamin C. It's present in lots of

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Speaker 1: fresh foods, and particularly oranges and lemons. Vitamin C itself

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Speaker 1: wasn't identified and isolated until the nineteen thirties. In nineteen

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Speaker 1: thirty nine, John Crandon, a young doctor at Boston City Hospital,

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Speaker 1: deprived himself of vitamin C just to see what would happen.

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Speaker 1: The answer after two months was nothing. Doctor Crandon was

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Speaker 1: just fine, but then fatigue started to set in. Week

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Speaker 1: by week, Crandon became ever more exhausted, but he was

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Speaker 1: determined to persist with his experiment. Six months in, Crandon's

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Speaker 1: skin started to bleed around his follicles. He tested his

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Speaker 1: endurance by gently jogging on a treadmill set at a

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Speaker 1: leisurely pace. He lasted just sixteen seconds, during which time

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Speaker 1: he covered just fifty yards. It was amazing that he

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Speaker 1: could move at all. A scar from an old operation

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Speaker 1: was disintegrating. The fifteen year old wound was reopening. Crandon's

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Speaker 1: remarkable experiment was about to end. To prevent it from

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Speaker 1: ending in tragedy, Crandon's colleagues staged an intervention for his

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Speaker 1: own good. They administered intravenous vitamin C and he recovered.

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Speaker 1: Two months without vitamin C had seemed fine, but after

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Speaker 1: that Crandon's body had started to slowly fall apart. Out

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Speaker 1: on the Antarctic ice. In January nineteen twelve, Scott and

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Speaker 1: his small team were nearing the South Pole. Scott's four

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Speaker 1: companions were Henry Birdie Bowers Lawrence Titus Oates, doctor Edward Wilson,

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Speaker 1: and another Evans, Edgar Evans. Everyone else who had set

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Speaker 1: out on the journey helping to pull sledges and established

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Speaker 1: depots of food had been sent back to Scott's group

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Speaker 1: had been dragging their sledges for two months, who sometimes

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Speaker 1: brutal conditions, but with seven hundred miles completed and one

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Speaker 1: hundred and fifty miles to the pole, Scott's diary reveals

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Speaker 1: a fine mood at present. Everything seems to be going

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Speaker 1: with extraordinary smoothness. We feel the cold very little. The

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Speaker 1: great comfort of our situation is the excellent drying effect

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Speaker 1: of the sun. Our food continues to amply satisfy. What

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Speaker 1: luck to have hit on such an excellent ration. We

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Speaker 1: really are an excellently found party. We lie so very comfortably,

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Speaker 1: warmly clothed in our comfortable bags within our double walled tent.

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Speaker 1: Things could hardly have been going better. Scott and his

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Speaker 1: men had been away from their base for two months,

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Speaker 1: and then something happened. That's the writer and polar explorer,

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Speaker 1: absolutely Cherry Garrard. He wasn't one of the five men

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Speaker 1: who made that final push towards the south Pole, But

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Speaker 1: in his book The Worst Journey in the World, he

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Speaker 1: tries to piece together where it all went wrong. One day,

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Speaker 1: everything's fine, extraordinary smoothness, amply, satisfying rations, warm and comfortable.

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Speaker 1: Days later, Scott's diary entries describe an expedition coming apart

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Speaker 1: of the seams. The weather seems intolerably cold. They can't

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Speaker 1: bear it. Yet objectively speaking, the weather is not so bad.

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Speaker 1: The problem is the men. I believe the party was

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Speaker 1: not as fit at this time as might have been

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Speaker 1: expected ten days before, and that this was partly the

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Speaker 1: reason why they felt the cold and found the pulling

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Speaker 1: so hard. He's talking about mid January, the height of

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Speaker 1: the brief Antarctic summer. It's just over a week after

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Speaker 1: Scott's perky diary entry, yet everything is crumbling. A day later,

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Speaker 1: Scott's tea nears the South Pole and discovers that Amunson

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Speaker 1: has got their first Scott's group of five tiring men

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Speaker 1: simply turned and began to plod eight hundred and fifty

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Speaker 1: miles home again. And unlike doctor John Crandon, they didn't

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Speaker 1: have someone at the ready with a syringe of vitamin C.

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Speaker 1: Cautionary tales will return in a moment. So what exactly

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Speaker 1: did James Lynde discover back in seventeen forty seven, and

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Speaker 1: why wasn't Scott's expedition able to use that discovery to

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Speaker 1: prevent scurvy. Lynde had showed that oranges and lemons cured

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Speaker 1: scurvy in a way that appeals to our modern scent

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Speaker 1: sabilities a controlled clinical trial, but Lynde himself didn't seem

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Speaker 1: to appreciate quite what he had done. He wrote a

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Speaker 1: book about scurvy, which contained an admirably brief and clear

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Speaker 1: report of his clinical trial, but he surrounded it with

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Speaker 1: page after page of quack theories about excess perspiration or

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Speaker 1: the need for ventilation. And a particular problem was that

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Speaker 1: he recommended boiling the citrus juice into a syrup to

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Speaker 1: preserve it. Lynde never seems to have tested his own

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Speaker 1: citrus syrup, and if he had, it wouldn't have worked

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Speaker 1: because the long boiling process destroyed the vitamin C. The

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Speaker 1: Navy was not convinced by Lynde's book, but a few

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Speaker 1: decades later another doctor experimented with fresh lemon juice preserved

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Speaker 1: under a layer of olive oil and found that it worked.

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Speaker 1: His name was Gilbert Blaine and he was doctor to

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Speaker 1: the future King George the Fourth. With a royal doctor

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Speaker 1: making the case, the British Navy started to grow huge

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Speaker 1: quantities of lemons on the island of Sicily. By the

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Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds, scurvy was eliminated, and yet in nineteen

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Speaker 1: twelve here was Captain Scott's expedition struck down with scurvy

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Speaker 1: once again. Our common sense model of discovery, invention and

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Speaker 1: innovation goes like this. We start at the bottom of

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Speaker 1: a deep hole of ignorance. Then some brilliant man like

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Speaker 1: James Lynde finds the rope of discovery and humanity, climbs

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Speaker 1: out of the hole and stands on firm ground, able

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Speaker 1: to scam the horizon of knowledge. But unless we understand

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Speaker 1: why something works, the ground underneath us isn't firm at all.

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Speaker 1: Lynde had simply assumed that if fresh citrus juice worked,

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Speaker 1: so too would boiled citrus juice. He was wrong, and

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Speaker 1: we now know that heat isn't the only thing that

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Speaker 1: destroys vitamin C, so does copper, which maybe why Navy

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Speaker 1: ships with big copper cooking pots were so plagued by

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Speaker 1: scurvy in the first place, so does light, which means

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Speaker 1: it's not a good idea to store citrus juice in

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Speaker 1: a glass bottle. None of this was clear to the

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Speaker 1: British Navy. In eighteen sixty, the Navy switched from juicy

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Speaker 1: Sicilian lemons to tart West Indian limes. A daily dose

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Speaker 1: of lime juice became synonymous with the British Navy, hence

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Speaker 1: the nickname lime Is. Most people assumed that the switch

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Speaker 1: to limes was just a cosmetic difference. One's yellow and

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Speaker 1: one's green, but they're basically the same zesty fruit. Today

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Speaker 1: we know that limes have considerably less vitamin sea than lemons.

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Speaker 1: The Navy was now relying on precautions against scurvy that

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Speaker 1: were no use at all, but for decades their lack

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Speaker 1: of understanding remained hidden for a simple reason. Over the

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Speaker 1: course of the eighteen hundreds, the Navy gradually switched from

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Speaker 1: sailing ships to steamships. The steamships traveled faster and needed

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Speaker 1: to stop for fuel, and when they did, they'd also

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Speaker 1: take on fresh food. Sailing ship journeys lasted for months.

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Speaker 1: Sailors on steamships rarely went for more than a few

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Speaker 1: weeks without eating some fresh food containing bittamin sea. And

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Speaker 1: remember the young doctor John Crandon, He still felt fine

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Speaker 1: after two months without vitamin sea. The Navy thought lime

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Speaker 1: juice was protecting their sailors. The truth was that they

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Speaker 1: simply weren't at sea for long enough to get scurvy

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Speaker 1: in the first place. Then, in eighteen seventy five, the

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Speaker 1: Navy dispatched two ships to find the North Pole. This

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Speaker 1: expedition was much longer than the average steamship journey. First,

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Speaker 1: the sledging party sent out over the pack ice was

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Speaker 1: struck by scurvy. A rescue party reached them an administered

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Speaker 1: lime juice. It didn't work. Back on the ship men

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Speaker 1: who took regular swigs of lime juice got scurvy too.

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Speaker 1: The ships withdrew, and the ignominious failure of the expedition

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Speaker 1: was a national embarrassment. The return of scurvy was a shock,

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Speaker 1: So was the failure of lime juice. Hadn't it been

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Speaker 1: preventing scurvy for years? If anyone had understood that the

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Speaker 1: long journey was the problem, they might have figured out

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Speaker 1: the solution, go back to basics with fresh Sicilian lemons.

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Speaker 1: But they didn't, and by unlucky coincidence, a rival hypothesis emerged.

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Speaker 1: Just as people were losing confidence in the lime juice cure,

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Speaker 1: Biologists were beginning to develop the theory of germs and

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Speaker 1: to understand the role of microbes in causing many diseases. Suddenly,

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Speaker 1: the idea of scurvy as a disease of deficiency seemed

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Speaker 1: less modern. An alternative theory rose to eminence, that scurvy

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Speaker 1: was caused by a toxin produced by bacteria. Here's doctor

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Speaker 1: Reginald Kurtletz, the senior doctor on Captain Scott's first polar expedition,

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Speaker 1: which took place a decade before the Race to the

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Speaker 1: South Pole. Kurtletz is writing in the British Medical journal

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Speaker 1: want of vegetables and fruit does not predisposed to nor

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Speaker 1: produce scurvy. Scurvy is chronic ptomaine poisoning. Such ideas were

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Speaker 1: widely shared by the medical profession. Potomaine described an invisible

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Speaker 1: toxin that comes from rotting food. Eat fresh food instead,

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Speaker 1: and the toxic potomain would soon be flushed out of

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Speaker 1: the system. It all makes perfect sense. The problem is

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Speaker 1: that potomaine doesn't exist, and trying to protect yourself against

253
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Speaker 1: something that doesn't exist can be maddening. Here's Captain Scott

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Speaker 1: in nineteen o two when an early Antarctic mission was

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Speaker 1: struck by scurvy. Whence it has come, or why it

256
00:19:13,610 --> 00:19:16,330
Speaker 1: has come with all the precautions that have been taken,

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Speaker 1: is beyond our ability to explain the evil having come.

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Speaker 1: The great thing now is to banish it. It's a

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Speaker 1: revealing passage. Scott and his advisers, including doctor Kirtlitz, know

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Speaker 1: what scurvy is and how dangerous it can be. A

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00:19:34,370 --> 00:19:37,050
Speaker 1: few decades earlier they would also have known how to

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Speaker 1: cure it lemons, but now they think there might be

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Speaker 1: some kind of bacteria involved. Where's it coming from? Scott

264
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Speaker 1: was reduced to throwing the kitchen sink at the problem,

265
00:19:49,730 --> 00:19:53,250
Speaker 1: serving out fresh meat regularly, and by increasing the allowance

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Speaker 1: of bottled fruits, giving everyone on the mess deck a

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Speaker 1: change of air. In turn, we've had a thorough clearance

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Speaker 1: of the holds, disinfected the bilges, whitewashed the sides and

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Speaker 1: generally made them sweet and clean. As an extep I

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Speaker 1: tackled the clothes and hammocks. We've had them all thorough.

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Speaker 1: The aired we've cleared all the deck lights so as

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Speaker 1: to get more daylight below, and we've scrubbed the decks

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Speaker 1: and cleaned out all the holes and corners, until everything

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Speaker 1: is as clean as a new pin. We found very

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00:20:20,130 --> 00:20:24,370
Speaker 1: little dirt, but now we do everything for the safe side,

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Speaker 1: and from the conviction that one cannot be too careful.

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Speaker 1: In other words, Scott just didn't know how to protect

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Speaker 1: his men from scurvy. He hadn't entirely given up on

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Speaker 1: bottled fruits, but maybe it was fresh meat that would

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Speaker 1: produce a cure or daylight. All he knew was that

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Speaker 1: after trying everything, the scurvy went away. Then he ventured

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Speaker 1: out on a long sledging journey with his colleague and

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Speaker 1: rival Ernest Shackleton, aiming to scout out a route towards

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Speaker 1: the South Pole for some future expedition. It was a disaster.

285
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Speaker 1: Everyone came down with scurvy, Shackleton worst of all, coughing

286
00:21:03,570 --> 00:21:06,170
Speaker 1: up blood. They barely made it back to the base

287
00:21:06,210 --> 00:21:12,090
Speaker 1: camp alive. Similar troubles befell other expeditions, British and otherwise,

288
00:21:12,450 --> 00:21:16,690
Speaker 1: both in the Arctic and the Antarctic. Scurvy struck again

289
00:21:17,370 --> 00:21:26,370
Speaker 1: and again and again and nobody knew why. February nineteen twelve,

290
00:21:27,450 --> 00:21:32,770
Speaker 1: Scott Bowers, Evans, Oates, and Wilson are plodding back towards

291
00:21:32,770 --> 00:21:39,410
Speaker 1: their base camp. They're subdued, tired and vulnerable. Wilson had

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Speaker 1: strained attendon two weeks before. I got a nasty bruise

293
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Speaker 1: on the tibialis anacus, which gave me great pain all afternoon.

294
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Speaker 1: I gave Birdie Bowers my ski and hobbled alongside the

295
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Speaker 1: sledge on foot. It still hasn't healed, and they're all

296
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Speaker 1: prone to injury now. Evans is the weakest of them all.

297
00:22:00,330 --> 00:22:03,810
Speaker 1: Evans got his nose frost, but not an unusual thing

298
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Speaker 1: with him, but we were all getting pretty cold latterly.

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Speaker 1: Frostbite is no joke. Tissue freezes, the blood supply can't

300
00:22:12,370 --> 00:22:16,210
Speaker 1: get through. It's painful, and the frost bitten body parts

301
00:22:16,250 --> 00:22:21,690
Speaker 1: can quickly die and start to rot. Here's Scott's diary

302
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Speaker 1: from the same day. There is no doubt Evans is

303
00:22:24,890 --> 00:22:28,970
Speaker 1: a good deal run down. His fingers are badly blistered

304
00:22:29,610 --> 00:22:33,490
Speaker 1: and his nose is rather seriously congested with frequent frostbites.

305
00:22:34,130 --> 00:22:36,770
Speaker 1: He is very much annoyed with himself, which is not

306
00:22:36,850 --> 00:22:40,290
Speaker 1: a good sign. Then it was Scott's turn to get

307
00:22:40,290 --> 00:22:44,130
Speaker 1: injured on a very slippery surface. I came an often

308
00:22:44,570 --> 00:22:48,410
Speaker 1: parler on my shoulder. It is horribly sore to night,

309
00:22:48,970 --> 00:22:52,770
Speaker 1: and another sick person added to our tent. Three out

310
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Speaker 1: of five inchured. Bowers was looking on the bright side.

311
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Speaker 1: Otherwise we are all well but thinning. They're not getting

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00:23:01,410 --> 00:23:05,570
Speaker 1: enough food and in particular they're not getting enough bitten

313
00:23:05,650 --> 00:23:10,090
Speaker 1: in C. Of course, in nineteen twelve, nobody knows what

314
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Speaker 1: vitamin C is, but there was another recent discovery that

315
00:23:14,810 --> 00:23:21,170
Speaker 1: might have saved Captain Scott's expedition. We'll find out what

316
00:23:21,250 --> 00:23:34,810
Speaker 1: it was after the break Vitamin C, as we've heard,

317
00:23:35,210 --> 00:23:39,610
Speaker 1: wasn't discovered until the nineteen thirties, but the key modern

318
00:23:39,650 --> 00:23:43,210
Speaker 1: breakthrough in understanding scurvy was made in nineteen oh seven,

319
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Speaker 1: a full three years before Captain Scott left Europe for

320
00:23:46,770 --> 00:23:50,930
Speaker 1: his ill fated antarctical expedition. The discovery was made by

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00:23:50,970 --> 00:23:57,210
Speaker 1: two Norwegian scientists, Axel Holst and Theodore Freulich. By chance,

322
00:23:57,730 --> 00:24:02,450
Speaker 1: Holston Freulich discovered that guinea pigs could develop scurvy. This

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00:24:02,650 --> 00:24:07,010
Speaker 1: was a surprise. Holston Freulick realized that scurvy wasn't a

324
00:24:07,050 --> 00:24:10,690
Speaker 1: disease of humans. It was a disease of humans and

325
00:24:11,090 --> 00:24:14,450
Speaker 1: guinea pigs. And from there it was simple to run

326
00:24:14,490 --> 00:24:18,330
Speaker 1: experiments by controlling the feeding of guinea pigs and seeing

327
00:24:18,370 --> 00:24:23,010
Speaker 1: which ones of them developed scurvy. The results were definitive.

328
00:24:23,610 --> 00:24:26,810
Speaker 1: The experiments on guinea pigs confirmed that scurvy was not

329
00:24:27,050 --> 00:24:31,170
Speaker 1: caused by ptomaine poisoning, but by a deficiency of some

330
00:24:31,250 --> 00:24:34,810
Speaker 1: sort of nutrient, Just as James Lynde and Gilbert Blaine

331
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Speaker 1: had thought all those years ago, Holston Furlick knew they're

332
00:24:39,290 --> 00:24:43,370
Speaker 1: discovered something important for polar expeditions, which were being struck

333
00:24:43,410 --> 00:24:47,290
Speaker 1: down by scurvy time and time again. They warned the

334
00:24:47,370 --> 00:24:51,170
Speaker 1: polar explorer Fritchoff Nansen, who was giving advice to Scott

335
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Speaker 1: and his great rival, Rolled Amunson. But Nansen didn't believe

336
00:24:55,850 --> 00:24:59,090
Speaker 1: that experiments on guinea pigs could tell him anything. He

337
00:24:59,210 --> 00:25:02,490
Speaker 1: hadn't learned the hard way out on the ice. He

338
00:25:02,570 --> 00:25:07,570
Speaker 1: wasn't the only skeptic. Holston Furlick's discoveries didn't persuade anyone

339
00:25:08,250 --> 00:25:13,810
Speaker 1: until it was too l eight, So Scott and Amunson

340
00:25:14,130 --> 00:25:19,130
Speaker 1: both reached the South Pole without understanding scurvy, but like

341
00:25:19,290 --> 00:25:23,930
Speaker 1: the steamships of the nineteenth century, Amuson simply outran scurvy.

342
00:25:24,370 --> 00:25:27,130
Speaker 1: His entire journey took three months, and for some of

343
00:25:27,170 --> 00:25:30,530
Speaker 1: that time he had plenty of access to fresh seal meat,

344
00:25:30,850 --> 00:25:35,410
Speaker 1: which contains vitamin C. Scott's group was away from their

345
00:25:35,450 --> 00:25:39,810
Speaker 1: base for nearly five months, and after exhausting journeys over

346
00:25:39,850 --> 00:25:42,890
Speaker 1: the previous winter, some of them may have been malnourished

347
00:25:42,890 --> 00:25:45,610
Speaker 1: before they even set out for the South Pole. It

348
00:25:45,650 --> 00:25:48,250
Speaker 1: was a race against time to get back to base

349
00:25:48,530 --> 00:25:54,690
Speaker 1: before their bodies failed them. By mid February, Amonson was

350
00:25:54,770 --> 00:25:58,610
Speaker 1: sailing from Antarctica to Australia to announce his achievement to

351
00:25:58,650 --> 00:26:02,850
Speaker 1: the world. Scott's crew were only halfway back from the

352
00:26:02,890 --> 00:26:06,890
Speaker 1: Pole to the base camp. Evans, who cut his knuckles

353
00:26:07,010 --> 00:26:09,570
Speaker 1: some days ago at the last depot, has a lot

354
00:26:09,570 --> 00:26:13,450
Speaker 1: of puss in it tonight, that's the group's doctor, Edward Wilson.

355
00:26:13,930 --> 00:26:17,650
Speaker 1: It's unlikely to be an infection. The Antarctic is one

356
00:26:17,650 --> 00:26:21,650
Speaker 1: of the most sterile environments on the planet, too cold

357
00:26:21,690 --> 00:26:26,930
Speaker 1: for bacteria. But the wound isn't healing. That's a classic

358
00:26:27,010 --> 00:26:31,890
Speaker 1: symptom of scurvy. Wilson again. Titus oates. His big toe

359
00:26:32,010 --> 00:26:36,450
Speaker 1: is turning blue black. Evans fingernails all coming off. Titus

360
00:26:36,490 --> 00:26:42,130
Speaker 1: nose and cheeks are dead yellow. Here's Scott. Evans has

361
00:26:42,250 --> 00:26:47,770
Speaker 1: dislodged two fingernails tonight. His hands are really bad, and

362
00:26:47,930 --> 00:26:51,970
Speaker 1: to my surprise, he shows signs of losing heart over it.

363
00:26:52,370 --> 00:26:55,770
Speaker 1: He hasn't been cheerful since the accident. He has very

364
00:26:55,810 --> 00:26:58,690
Speaker 1: little to be cheerful about. But then, one of the

365
00:26:58,730 --> 00:27:03,330
Speaker 1: symptoms of scurvy is a depressed mood. Everyone is worried

366
00:27:03,330 --> 00:27:06,530
Speaker 1: about Evans, but they're all eating the same food and

367
00:27:06,650 --> 00:27:11,250
Speaker 1: coping with the same brutal conditions. Whatever's happening to Evans

368
00:27:12,050 --> 00:27:16,410
Speaker 1: is coming for them too. Here's absolutely Cherry Garrard again,

369
00:27:16,730 --> 00:27:19,650
Speaker 1: trying to figure it all out. A decade later, there

370
00:27:19,730 --> 00:27:22,570
Speaker 1: was something wrong with this party, more wrong, I mean

371
00:27:22,610 --> 00:27:26,170
Speaker 1: than was justified by the tremendous journey they had already experienced,

372
00:27:26,450 --> 00:27:30,090
Speaker 1: which had been little worse than they expected. Evans, however,

373
00:27:30,490 --> 00:27:32,770
Speaker 1: who was considered by Scott to be the strongest man

374
00:27:32,810 --> 00:27:36,450
Speaker 1: of the party, had already collapsed, and it is admitted

375
00:27:36,490 --> 00:27:39,170
Speaker 1: that the rest of the party was becoming far from strong.

376
00:27:40,130 --> 00:27:44,010
Speaker 1: There seems to be an unknown factor here, somewhere, there

377
00:27:44,130 --> 00:27:48,850
Speaker 1: does doesn't there. We'll never know quite how significant scurvy

378
00:27:49,130 --> 00:27:52,690
Speaker 1: was among all the afflictions they faced. All we can

379
00:27:52,730 --> 00:27:56,290
Speaker 1: do is to look at scurvy's appearance in Polar expedition

380
00:27:56,490 --> 00:28:00,250
Speaker 1: after Polar expedition, then to look at the symptoms Scott's

381
00:28:00,290 --> 00:28:05,410
Speaker 1: men were suffering, and then draw our own conclusions. Here's

382
00:28:05,450 --> 00:28:09,970
Speaker 1: doctor Wilson. On the sixteenth of February, Evans lapsed, sick

383
00:28:10,050 --> 00:28:13,330
Speaker 1: and giddy and unable to walk even by the sledge

384
00:28:13,370 --> 00:28:17,410
Speaker 1: on ski, so we camped. Wilson must have known that

385
00:28:17,450 --> 00:28:21,010
Speaker 1: if Evans really was suffering from scurvy, the rest of

386
00:28:21,050 --> 00:28:25,050
Speaker 1: them were next next day, we had gone a good

387
00:28:25,090 --> 00:28:27,930
Speaker 1: part of the way when Evans found his ski shoes

388
00:28:27,970 --> 00:28:31,250
Speaker 1: coming off. He was allowed to readjust but it happened

389
00:28:31,250 --> 00:28:34,650
Speaker 1: again and then again, so he was told to unhitch,

390
00:28:34,930 --> 00:28:37,290
Speaker 1: get them right, and follow on and catch us up.

391
00:28:38,530 --> 00:28:43,690
Speaker 1: Captain Scott presumably gave that order, and so the four

392
00:28:44,010 --> 00:28:48,170
Speaker 1: skied away from Evans, leaving him in the most desolate

393
00:28:48,210 --> 00:28:51,850
Speaker 1: place on earth, leaving him to crawl forward alone on

394
00:28:51,930 --> 00:28:55,770
Speaker 1: his hands and knees. They must have been so desperate.

395
00:28:58,050 --> 00:29:00,650
Speaker 1: When we camped, we had lunch and then went back

396
00:29:00,690 --> 00:29:02,890
Speaker 1: for him, as he had not come up. He had

397
00:29:02,930 --> 00:29:07,130
Speaker 1: fallen and had his hands frostbitten. He was comatos when

398
00:29:07,170 --> 00:29:10,770
Speaker 1: we got him into the tent. He died without recovering

399
00:29:10,810 --> 00:29:17,450
Speaker 1: consciousness that night, about ten pm. They staggered on slowly

400
00:29:17,730 --> 00:29:21,730
Speaker 1: and unevenly as the winter overtook them. The temperatures were

401
00:29:21,730 --> 00:29:26,010
Speaker 1: falling and their strength was failing. The storage depots they'd

402
00:29:26,050 --> 00:29:28,730
Speaker 1: laid for their journey home didn't have enough food or

403
00:29:28,810 --> 00:29:31,850
Speaker 1: fuel to sustain them at the slow pace they were making.

404
00:29:32,930 --> 00:29:35,810
Speaker 1: Oates had an old war wound where a bullet had

405
00:29:35,850 --> 00:29:39,970
Speaker 1: shattered his thigh bone. If Oates's scar was dissolving as

406
00:29:40,010 --> 00:29:43,330
Speaker 1: he marched on that leg for day after day, it

407
00:29:43,450 --> 00:29:49,050
Speaker 1: must have been agony. On March the sixteenth, Captain Oates

408
00:29:49,090 --> 00:29:52,490
Speaker 1: fumbled to undo the lacing at the tent entrance and

409
00:29:52,690 --> 00:29:59,450
Speaker 1: limped out into a blizzard. He never returned. Scott's diary

410
00:29:59,530 --> 00:30:04,890
Speaker 1: recorded his last words as I'm just going outside, and

411
00:30:05,010 --> 00:30:10,650
Speaker 1: maybe sometime they all knew that he wasn't coming, and

412
00:30:10,890 --> 00:30:17,650
Speaker 1: despair soon came to claim them all. A few days later, Scott, Wilson,

413
00:30:17,970 --> 00:30:22,290
Speaker 1: and Bowers gave up. He lay down in an attempt

414
00:30:22,450 --> 00:30:25,810
Speaker 1: just eleven miles away from the next depot of food,

415
00:30:26,530 --> 00:30:29,130
Speaker 1: the weather had closed in again. They didn't have the

416
00:30:29,170 --> 00:30:34,490
Speaker 1: strength to continue. After months without vitamin C, John Crandon

417
00:30:34,650 --> 00:30:38,490
Speaker 1: couldn't jog for more than fifty yards. For Scott and

418
00:30:38,570 --> 00:30:43,130
Speaker 1: his last two companions, eleven miles in a blizzard must

419
00:30:43,170 --> 00:30:46,930
Speaker 1: have seemed an impossible distance. We shall stick it out

420
00:30:46,970 --> 00:30:49,810
Speaker 1: to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course,

421
00:30:50,690 --> 00:30:54,770
Speaker 1: and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity,

422
00:30:55,170 --> 00:30:59,010
Speaker 1: but I do not think I can write more. Their

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Speaker 1: bodies were found months later by a team that set

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Speaker 1: out from the British base camp. Bowers and Wilson were

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Speaker 1: sleeping in their bags. Scott had thrown back the flaps

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Speaker 1: of his bag at the end. His left hand was

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Speaker 1: stretched over Wilson, his lifelong friend. There were diaries there

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Speaker 1: and farewell letters. When the group tried to move Scott's

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Speaker 1: frozen arm to recover the documents, it broke. We like

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Speaker 1: to think that knowledge, once gained, is gained forever. But

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Speaker 1: unless we know why something works, we risk confusing ourselves

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Speaker 1: back into ignorance. Scott's demise would have astonished the British

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Speaker 1: navy of a hundred years before him. They'd have known

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Speaker 1: that it might all have been different with the juice

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Speaker 1: of a few Sicilian lemons. For a list of all

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Speaker 1: our sources, see the show notes at Tim Harford dot com.

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Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.

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Speaker 1: It's produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino

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Speaker 1: and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is

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00:32:40,010 --> 00:32:43,610
Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents

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Speaker 1: of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright.

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Speaker 1: The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work

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00:32:51,370 --> 00:32:56,490
Speaker 1: of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton,

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00:32:56,890 --> 00:33:02,130
Speaker 1: Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Mrano,

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Speaker 1: Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production

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Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember

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Speaker 1: to share, rate and review, tell a friend, tell two friends,

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00:33:14,810 --> 00:33:16,730
Speaker 1: and if you want to hear the show, adds free

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00:33:16,890 --> 00:33:21,290
Speaker 1: and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tale shorts. Then sign

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00:33:21,370 --> 00:33:24,090
Speaker 1: up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple

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Speaker 1: Podcasts or at pushkin dot FM, Slash Plus,