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Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia
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illustrative detail
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4. Life for the Crew

Surgical instruments
graphic lineSurgical instruments, 1639		  

Life for crews on board East India Company ships was hard. From London, the fleets brought meat. It was soon rotten. Sailors had to eat it with spices to disguise its putrid flavour. The only other things to eat on most voyages were bread, dried fish, dried vegetables and wheat porridge. If a ship took a long time to get to St Helena (an island in the Atlantic Ocean) the supplies might run out.

Sailors were often ill with diseases like scurvy or flux. If you got scurvy your gums would swell up and get soft and painful so that you could not eat. Your teeth would drop out and your arms and legs would become spotty. Soon you would not be able to move at all. Some of the other diseases like flux (which we now call dysentery), the bloody flux and tertian ague (which we now call malaria) were even worse. By the time James Lancaster reached the Cape of Good Hope, a hundred of his crew were dead.

Many of the ships carried a surgeon to do emergency operations. In the picture you can see some of the tools the surgeons used. You might notice a very big saw in the middle. What do you think it was it used for?

 
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