Sailors, Disease, Injuries and Death

A fabulous read concerning women and how they helped shape history is the book Women Sailors and Sailor's Women: An Untold Maritime History by David Cordingly, former curator of paintings and head of exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. Cordingly's initial interests were on piracy and wrote a definitive account of the age of piracy. In his extensive maritime research, he began to note the many women who played a part in the shaping of colonial maps and exploration via ships - stories that blow holes in the belief that men alone dominated the seas and exploration. And with discovering more and more instances of women playing large but little known roles in the age of sea rovings, he endeavored to share his growing collection with the public.

The following is an excerpt from the book. Although it is not specifically related to women forging history, the excerpt explains the toll the ocean played on sailors and those who waited for them. The romantic view of sailors and pirates sailing the seven seas and gaining riches is very much lacking in this descriptive view of the job hazards they very unromantically faced.

"For sailor's wives who had waited months for news of their husbands, the sailors' return was of critical concern, because all too often the sailors did not return. The great killer of seamen was not enemy action or shipwreck but disease. The figures speak for themselves. During the French Wars from 1793 and 1815, approximately 100,000 British seamen died. of this number, about 12 percent died from enemy action, shipwreck, or similar disasters; 20 percent died from accidents; and no less than 65 percent died from disease. The diseases that most afflicted seamen were scurvy, typhus, and yellow fever. Scurvy was a result of a lack of vitamin C in the diet, and it decimated crews on lengthy voyages until the recommendations of the naval surgeon Dr. James Lind were finally put into practice toward the end fo the eighteenth century. Typhus was often brought aboard ships by press-ganged men who had been confined for weeks in over-crowded and unsanitary conditions. With several hundred men crammed into a ship, it could spread rapidly, and men died horribly within two or three weeks of going down with the disease.

Even more feared by seamen and soldiers alike were the tropical fevers that made a posting to the West Indies or the tropical coast of Africa appear like a sentence of death. In 1726, an expedition to the Caribbean under Admiral Hosier lost more than 4,000 dead out of a squadron of 4,750. This was an unusally high proportion, but malignant yellow fever continued to wreak havoc among the crews of ships stationed in West Indian harbors. In 1806, William Turnbull published The Naval Surgeon, a massive volume based on his practical experience as a surgeon in the navy. He warned that the West Indies was the most unhealthy of all stations and advised captains of ships to anchor as far from land as possible. Of yellow fever, he wrote that "the first symptoms are sudden giddiness and loss of sight, to such a degree as to make the person fall down insensible." During the final stages, "the foam issues from the mouth; the eyes roll dreadfully; and the extremities are convulsed, being thrown out and pulled back in violent and quick alternate succession."

Many of the sailors who survived disease returned home with crippling injuries from shipboard accidents or wounds sustained in action. Nelson, who lost his sight in one eye during the siege of Calvi in 1794, and had his right arm amputated following a disastrous attack on Tenerife, was only the most famous of many. Disabled sailors with begging bowls were a familiar sight on the streets of London, Portsmouth, and other ports, and the naval hospitals were filled with men suffering from appalling injuries.

There is a passage in the memoirs of William Spavens that describes the state of the men in the queue for the Chatham Chest, the pension board for disabled seamen. After long service in the navy and on the East Indiamen, Spavens suffered a major injury to his right leg while handling casks in a longboat alongside his ship and had to have the limb amputated. He was in good company at Chatham. There were men swinging on crutches with a wooden leg below the knee, or above the knee, or with both legs missing. There were men with their noses shot off, or pieces torn from their cheeks, or missing their jawbones or chins. One man had his skull fractured and trepanned and a silver plate substituted for the missing bone. There were many who had lost a hand, an arm, or both arms. Some had their limbs permanently contracted by their injuries, "some with a hand off and an eye out; another with an eye out and his face perforated with grains of battle-powder, which leaves as lasting impression as though they were injected by an Italian artist." These were the shipboard accidents and the naval wars of the Napoleonic period. At the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, for instance, there were 244 men killed and 796 wounded in the British fleet alone. At Trafalgar, 1,700 men were killed and wounded in the British ships, and three times that number among the French and Spanish ships ... " (p. 239-241)