490 Dr. Trott 
fruit and vegetables, as the physician, 
of the figet might demand! and the 
Victualling Department was’ also di- 
rected to-'restore the ‘fall quantum ‘of 
fresh meat. ‘So little was the Sick and 
Hurt Board used to ‘liberal supplies, 
that the fruit and vegetables came in 
very inadéquate portions. Where 
pounds were sent to us, I asked for 
tons. “ In order to preventthe fleetfrom 
being distressed through these petty 
measures, I visited the garden-grounds 
and markets in the neighbourhood, 
and calculated what they could afford. 
The Iemons and oranges were now 
sent to Portsmouth in light waggons ; 
and several tons of spring sallading 
were daily issued to the sccrbuties of 
the different ships, till the malady 
yielded; and this mode of prevention 
and cure was extended to every vessel 
returning from sea as she arrived. 
The words of Sir R. Curtis to the 
Admiralty, that there could be no 
summer fleet, unless the supplies de- 
manded by the physician were com- 
plied with, were now confirmed, and 
not a ship remained inactive. A squa- 
dron of ships of the line, under Lord 
Bridport, put to sea, and, after a short 
action, captured three sail of seventy- 
fours in the very mouth of a French 
harbour. 
- ft is remarkable that there were 
not ten deaths from scurvy on this me- 
morable occasion; though, including 
all the degrees of its influence, there 
could not be less than 40,000 cases 
before its final extirpation. 
~ Thad been a writer on scurvy, and 
the second edition of my work was the 
means of obtaining for me the high 
station which I had now the honour to 
fill. 'The practice employed had all 
been laid down in my own pages ; but 
it required more than common address 
to secure to the service the permanent 
value of the means employed, as a 
preventive against future horrors. I 
knew that in proportion to the time 
a ship’s crew lived on lemons and 
recent vegetable matter, the attack 
of seurvy would ibe retarded. It 
is difficult to get public Boards to 
attend to medical disquisitions : 1 did 
more; the captains and surgeons 
were enjoined to demand supplies, at 
stated periods, as if the disease re- 
curred with fresh vigour. The busi- 
ness of. prevention and cure went on 
in this manner till these supplies be- 
eame so interwoven with forms of 
scrviee, that permament, sontracts 
T . = 
er on Naval History. 
[July,t, 
were made. for,them as for other nayal 
stores. An immense quantity of land, 
in the neighhourhood of the King’s 
ports, Was at this time converted inta 
garden-ground for the use of the fleet. 
~ Thus at a small expense was scuryy. 
extinguished in the royal nayy of 
Britain, and it forms an era in her 
annals ;. for it had cost more human 
lives than all other diseases put toge- 
ther. But this was not all; it pre- 
pared the seamen for the most vigor- 
ous exertions of bodily strength, whe- 
ther for combating the fury of the 
elements, or, the cnemy in battle, 
And it was justly said by some of the 
most experienced officers, that the 
blockading system of warfare which 
annihilated the naval power of France 
could never have been cartied on, tin- 
less the sca-scurvy had been snbdued; 
and more than a hundred thousand 
British seamen have thus been fed 
to the country, by as many thousand 
pounds. It ought to be remembered, 
that the accomplished Earl Spence 
was at the head of the Admiralty di = 
ring these important transactions, and 
feelingly attended to the condition of 
the fleet. a adeat 
Another incident, fraught withnearly 
equal danger to the health of the fleet, 
happened in 1794, after,the victory on 
the lst of June, by the diffusion of a 
typhoid contagion, spread from the 
French prisoners. Measures equally 
active and successful put an early pe- 
riod to this distemper; and some of 
the ships were cyen cleared before we 
arrived in port. The annals of naval 
warfare exhibit nothing of the kind 
before that evcr threatened a more 
serious mortality. Yet such was the 
nature of the means employed, that 
the country was ignorant of the danger 
till the publication of the first yolume 
of Medicina Nautica, in 1797. Before 
this occasion, I had opposed fumiga- 
tion in every form, as a mass of igno- 
rance and quackery ; and I have lived 
to see it totally neglected and aban- 
doned. It is remarkable, in the pro- 
gress of human opinions, that at the 
very moment that a British House of 
Commons was rewarding Dr. Smyth 
with 5,000/. for the vapour of nitrous 
acid, as a destroyer of contagion, an 
American legislator, Dr. Mitchell, of 
New York, was exhibiting to his fel- 
low citizens the individual substancé 
as being the very matter of. contagion 
itself! “Will posterity believe that, 
at the beginning of the nineteenth 
; eentury, 
