“The smooth, colorless lumps that the men found on their plates every night were not much like any dish promised on the label of the can. The kjøttboller, the spongy meatballs de Gerlache bought in Norway, was the most disgusting for most people … [the appointed “chef”] The cans were often mixed together into a nondescript soup, which was somehow less than the sum of its parts. “
All they had to look forward to, for six sunny months, was dinner. But even that became difficult to bear.
The first time they cooked a piece of penguin meat, and it is the only game in town (city = huge glaciers of ice and nothing else), “It somehow tastes like fish and birds alike, with great taste”. They decide not to take it again. Until a few weeks pass, and a man’s health begins to decline. Their heartbeat was racing and slowing, some had dangling bags of fluid gathering under their eyes, and lethargy was widespread. The ship’s first companion, Roald Amundsen, was particularly ill.
Cook identifies their symptoms as scurvy, and without fresh fruit, vegetables or meat, they can die of it. He convinces the Belgian boys to try the penguin again, along with the seal meat. (Cook had spent time with the Inuit during a previous horrific trip in the Arctic and noticed that they survived the winter on meat and lard, often raw.) Cook preferred his penguin steaks to be slightly burnt, but he advised everyone to eat them as rare as possible.
“Remarkably, after only a few days of extravagant cutlets, which contained the texture of fatty, uncooked chicken, Amundsen is almost back to normal,” Sancton wrote. They didn’t know after that what we know now, that meat contains vitamin C, which is necessary for collagen formation in the body.
Scurvy is one of a laundry list of nightmares that men faced on this large ship full of mice in the middle of the Antarctic ice. But the rest is beyond the scope of this food post, so you just have to read the book to find out.
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