Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 2004
Captain James Cook sailed the waters around Nome during the summer of 1778. He walked the deck of his ship Resolution that August and exchanged signals with Captain Furneaux on the consort ship Discovery as they measured the watery depths of Norton Sound, ever hopeful to find the way through North America to the Atlantic Ocean. And, after the morning watch, perhaps Cook retired to his cabin, looked over his maps, freshened up, and went to the galley to set a good example for his men with the sauerkraut.
The luncheon the Resolution cooks prepared wouldn’t resemble the kinds of fare served aboard cruise ships anchoring off Nome today. None of those salad bars or all-you-can-eat salmon buffet deals. Captain Cook’s victualization of his ship included strict rations of salted meat, biscuit (I’m guessing it was something like pilot bread), spruce extract beer, marmalades of a variety of vegetables, and pickled concoctions such as sauerkraut. Now Cook knew that he didn’t want to lose any of his sailors to scurvy. But the lads were just not big vegetable eaters. So, how could he get his men to eat vegetables and other antiascorbics? Cook figured that if the lower class seamen saw him and his officers eating sauerkruat, carrot marmalade, and other vegetables high in vitamin C, they might think it a good lead to follow.
Cook was a fair and humane man, a student of what motivates men to do what’s right. How ironic that he should have onboard as his sailing master the nefarious William Bligh who later gained fame not only for the mutiny on his ship the Bounty in 1788 but later his heavyhandedness as the governor in New South Wales, Australia, leading to the Rum Rebellion. Cook luckily didn’t adopt any of Bligh’s particular attitudes and tactics or there might have been a mutiny on the H.M.S. Resolution 226 Augusts ago with sailors fleeing to take up cringing residence on St. Lawrence or Sledge or King Islands instead of on Pitcairn in the South Pacific.
Captain Cook’s higher-class diet bait worked. Even the most reluctant mariner ended up eating the cabbage concoction and found he was not getting scurvy, a bane of all long sea voyages at that time. I just wish my husband and I could be as successful as Captain Cook in getting the young mariners in our apartment to follow our nutritional lead with vegetables. Maybe it’s because our kids aren’t worried about getting scurvy.
Maybe they’d respond more to Mr. Bligh’s methods. I mixed up a bowl of cole slaw yesterday afternoon and sat down on the couch with a bowl of it cradled between my knees as my sons were watching tv. “What’s that?” they asked. “Cole slaw,” I said in my best captain-of-this-vessel-so-doesn’t-that-make-it-something-you’d-like-to-try voice. They weren’t interested. But I’m not giving up. I’m going to spread some carrot marmalade on the swabbies’ pilot bread tomorrow at 12 bells.
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