You people are hazardous to my health. And to each another’s. I am not much around people and so am seldom ill. I was ashore for a week and one of my fellow citizens generously gave me a virus. Not a serious one. Not even a real cold. Just a sore throat and congestion. I will survive at least a little longer.
During the age of sail it was well known that once scurvy could be prevented, ships became increasingly healthier as they left ports behind.
Curious about scurvy I did some research. While Vitamin C was not identified until 1932 and the mechanism of the disease not fully understood until then, that fresh food, particularly citrus fruits, prevented the disease had long been known. I was amazed to read that during the The Age of Exploration from 1500-1800 perhaps two million sailors died of scurvy.
Following my own good advice to stay away from people I have not left the Great Cabin today. Not even to step on deck much less the dock. I have stood in the companionway.
I just finished reading a most enjoyable novel, POMPEII by Robert Harris. I have read several of his books, including AN OFFICER AND A SPY about the Dreyfus Affair which has just been released as a film.
POMPEII begins two days before Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD and follows an Aquarius, an engineer responsible for the aqueducts in the Pompeii region, who strives to repair a break in the water system. There is a secondary love story. With so many being killed, I wondered how that would go. Robert Harris handles it very cleverly at the novel’s end.
Here is a quote from the book:
He had long ago resolved that when death came for him he would endeavor to meet it in the spirit of Marcus Sergius, whom he had crowned in his NATURAL HISTORY as the most courageous man who ever lived—wounded twenty-three times in the course of his campaigns, left crippled, twice captured by Hannibal and held in chains every day for twenty months; Sergius had ridden into his final battle with a right hand made of iron, a substitute for the one he had lost. He was not as successful as Scipio or Caesar, but what did that matter? “All other victors truly have conquered men,” Pliny had written, “but Sergius vanquished fortune also.”
“To vanquish fortune’—that was what a man should strive to do.
Seeking photos to illustrate a magazine article, I chanced upon the above one of Carol and post it because I want to enjoy something pleasant. It was taken during the year that Carol sailed with me in 2001 at the ruins of the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Lisbon, Portugal, destroyed in the great earthquake of 1775 and never rebuilt. The cats live a privileged life there. I am privileged to live a life with Carol.
