Idle Words

Mission: Burfjord

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0300

On my fourth day in a remote cabin up in Norway my host Ivar asks me if I would like to come along on a day trip to Burfjord, a little town on the mainland about forty minutes away.

I don't have to think twice. Going to the mainland means a chance to charge my camera battery, use a flush toilet, and buy some groceries without having to carry them home on my back. And I know for a fact that Burfjord has TWO grocery stores - I can, if I wish, shop around. Ivar warns me that the weather is worsening and we may end up windbound for many hours in town, but I am not easily deterred. "Well," he says, "I suppose anywhere is interesting the first time. Even Burfjord."

The day is a little breezy, but it's warm enough to be out without a jacket. Still, I put on a pair of special insulating overalls for the boat ride. They feel insufferably hot on land but are a grateful presence after five minutes on the water. They are also buoyant, so that if the boat capsizes we can have the satisfaction of dying of hypothermia rather than drowning.

The sea is already quite choppy as we pass the shelter of the main breakwater. Even in the larger boat, motoring along at twenty knots feels like falling down a flight of stairs while holding a bucket of seawater. The distance between waves is almost equal to the length of our keel, and so every ten seconds or so the boat falls into a resonance and starts leaping higher and higher in the air, forcing us to slow down for a few seconds in order to break the spell.

Some five minutes after leaving port, Ivar swerves the boat very suddenly to avoid hitting a whale that he sees at the last second. "It's too bad we missed," he says, "the meat is excellent". The whales are invisible to me, but every few minutes we get passed by a puffin, crusing low above the water with a dignity completely unbefitting its little clown beak. If you can imagine a cross between a penguin and a toucan, then you have gone a long way towards imagining a puffin. They are numerous over the open water but I never manage to spot one on land.

The only other boats out today are trawlers fishing for prawns. Each trawler is followed by a swirling cloud of gulls, looking for an easy meal. The gulls steal food from fishermen in any way they can, and the fishermen even the score by stealing eggs from the gulls during the spring laying season. Gull eggs are large, bigger than a goose egg, and come in a mottled camouflage pattern. The cooked egg white is translucent and somehow contrives to have less flavor than the white of a chicken egg, but the extremely rich yolk makes the meal worth it. It's legal to pick these eggs without restriction, I learn later, but if you steal too many from a single bird it will finish the season by laying a final miniature, yolkless egg, and you may feel quite guilty indeed.

Seagulls are so tightly linked in my mind to urban garbage dumps and dirty beaches that I have quite a hard time accepting them as regular animals, making their living here amid postcard scenery. It's like seeing pigeons or sewer rats out in the wild. But of course this is the kind of place gulls come from; a landfill is a sumptuous feast rather than a necessity of life.

Those gull eggs that don't make it to a Norwegian table soon hatch into a surprisingly large ball of fluff very adept at hiding among the rocks while its parents are out stealing more prawns. If you get too close to its hiding place, the fluff ball waddles away from you in a panic, then freezes motionless and nearly invisible on the nearest patch of grey stone.

Justifying all the gull chick's anxieties is the elegant and lazy sea eagle, who every day makes his rounds above the island doing his very best never to have to flap his wings. The gulls know what he is up to and harrass him by diving at him and trying to stall his wing. The sea eagle bears this with fortitude, sometimes finding an upcurrent that lets him soar to high altitude, where the gulls (who have to flap as hard as they can to match his speed) don't have the strength to follow. The sea eagle is basically just a bald eagle in different livery, repackaged to meet the demands of the European market. Here his head is the same brown color as his body, though he retains the pretty white tail of his American cousin.

On the water there are many grey geese and eider ducks. Many of the geese trail a flotilla of a half dozen tiny goslings, surprisingly seaworthy. The eider ducks don't look like much, but a duvet cover made from their down sells for as much as a new car. Their tiny bits of fluff, which have amazing thermal properties, have to be painstakingly gathered by hand from cliffside duck nests by fully unionized Scandinavian workers who are required by statute to receive 25 vacation days a year, massive amounts of parental leave, and a living wage in a country that considers $30 to be the right price for a pizza. So the cost of an eiderdown anything is astronomical.

Before synthetic fills were invented, the eider was the Cadillac of sleeping bags, especially for Polar exploration, because of the combination of light weight and unparalleled insulating power. Now it's the material of choice for rich people in all climates. If you can afford the luxury of a cozy eiderdown bedspread, you can likely also afford the cost of air conditioning your house to the low temperature required to sleep under it. Someday someone will figure out how to put this stuff through a civet cat and throw an Apple logo onto it, and then we will have the ultimate luxury.

As we round a cape and turn towards the base of the fjord, the waves calm down a bit and human settlement picks up. Soon there are power lines, phone lines, and then the very backbone of civilization itself, the paved coastal road that runs all the way from Oslo to Kirkenes. A typical farm in northern Norway consists of a main house, a boathouse, and some outbuildings. Everything is new. When the Germans retreated in 1944, they burned this entire province to the ground with legendary Teutonic thoroughness, and the Norwegians have rebuilt with legendary Scandinavian uniformity of design. The result is identical buildings of different colors at a very, very low density, like a scattered Levittown.

Burfjord, population 397, rises out of the mist in the form of an empty pier and a service station. We lash the boat to the pier in anticipation of rough weather and penetrate inland, where Ivar gives me a tour d'horizon. Two grocery stores face off across a small street, each a cube of corrugated sheet metal, containing miracles of transportation like the five-dollar mango. Later on I will stand in one of these stores in front of a pyramid of Coke Zero bottles and consider the fact that a whole infrastructure exists for bringing this substance of no nutritional value from wherever it's bottled in Europe up to a place like this. I happen to love Coke Zero and whatever cyclopyrimidines or butylated phenols give it its weird fake sweetness, but seeing it stacked in quantity after coming off an island where everything has to be carried in by hand gives me pause. I feel like the Burfjord grocery store will someday form part of a sanctimonious diorama about the folly of late-period humanity in someone's well-meaning, sustainably-built museum or alien terrarium, and the thought fills me with irritation in advance. I buy a large bottle of the stuff as my way of shaking a fist at the future.

The social center of Burfjord is the small service station with attendant cafe. All the rest of the buildings in Burfjord seem to be owned by the government. There is a school, hospital, nursing home, administrative center, and some kind of cultural meeting hall. Like in a lot of remote outposts of the first world, pretty much everyone in Burfjord is employed in bringing social services to other people in Burfjord. One way to see this is as a hideous waste of taxpayer dollars in support of unsustainably fragmented communities; a different way to see this is as an acknowledgement that the only way to preserve a way of life that makes the region so attractive to visitors is to make it feasible for people to continue to live there without turning it into a tourist theme park.

Norway, as a rich country, has the luxury of pursuing this policy quite directly. There are strict limits on food imports, for example. If by Herculean effort a crop manages to grow in Norway, then by God you will have to pay if you want to buy its non-Norwegian equivalent. If you come down with an exotic disease in Burfjord, then the government will make sure you can videoconference in with a specialist in Oslo, and if you don't speak Norwegian they'll throw a translator in the mix at no charge. The point is to prevent the country from draining into its two or three main urban centers, and losing a distinctive tradition of stoic small farming under ridiculous climactic conditions. Otherwise Norway would just be another Canada, with fjords.

My haven in Burfjord is the local public library, a cheerful little space full of comfortable chairs that seems to share space with the waiting room to a local clinic. One of the first things I see on the magazine rack is a glossy thick booklet, in Polish, called "Welcome! Things to Know About Living in Norway". Norway is extremely popular with Polish workers, who as EU members are allowed to work here with minimal formalities. There are over 120,000 Poles in Norway doing construction, driving trucks, performing seasonal and domestic labor, and working as nurses and caretakers. The appeal to Poles is obvious. Compared to back home, the salaries are princely and you get the full protection of the mighty hammer of Thor that is Norwegian labor law, which it takes half the booklet just to summarize.

By the time Ivar's meeting is over, I have learned all about my rights and obligations as a Norwegian guest worker, the several types of personal identification numbers, and how car ownership would require an expensive series of annual rituals and sacrifices that would give pause to some of the world's major religions.

My ride back to Spildra is the scrappy little commuter ferry that connects the various communities in Kvænangen. Ivar has decided to stay the night in Burfjord and wait for the weather to clear a little bit, so I am condemned to lug my groceries home on foot after all. Compared to the boat, the ferry is a luxuriously smooth ride. It's a small twin-hulled catamaran with room for about fifty people that zips along at something like thirty miles an hour. The boat is clearly designed for rough weather and for the needs of locals who have a lot of stuff to lug. If you have a pallet of furniture and a large ATV you need brought with you, you just tow it to the dock and make sure things are tied down tight. One of the young ferry operators hooks it with the ferry's miniature crane, lowers it into the hold, and reverses the operation when you get to your stop.

Half an hour after we depart the ferry drops me at Dunvik pier to start the walk back to my cabin. Burfjord is now mercifully hidden by a long spit of land to the southwest. Within ten minutes I am out of sight of all the houses and all I see are comic book mountains and open water. But all around me are the invisible tendrils of Scandinavian socialism, just watching and waiting for a single moment of weakness in order to strike, and provide me with skilful medical attention, or rescue me from the sea, or show me that despite my efforts to hide from the world entirely I am standing on a spot with five bars of cell phone coverage.

I can see the sea eagle circling high above me, but a cold voice in my heart whispers that he has already been banded. I have left my illusions in Burfjord.

The Great Legacy.com Swindle

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0300

(See below for an update)

Last month my dear friend committed suicide, and in the middle of many emotions I came into contact with that part of the Internet that specializes in the business of dying.

My friend's parents had bought an online obituary at the New York Times website, something I later found out was run by an outfit called legacy.com. The obituary includes a guest book, where you can send your condolences. There is a little text generator, in case you're out of ideas; you can "light a candle", and there is also a tie-in to an online florist who very generously offers to say with flowers what you might not be able to express through the text generator at such a difficult time. I was mildly surprised not to find a selection of tasteful, black-rimmed emoticons, a bit of kitsch that would have delighted my friend.

I wrote a condolence letter (as I had no other way to contact her parents) and when I submitted it, the site warned me that the "guest book" would expire in a little over a month, but if I liked I could pay to extend its life by one year ($29) or keep up "in perpetuity" ($79), presumably meaning for however long legacy.com stays in business.

Since we have for-profit undertakers, it seemed tacky but not unusual that there should be a business in online guest books for dead people. Knowing a bit about the economics of online services, and what kind of a profit margin that $79 represents, it was perhaps a little galling. But legacy.com pays moderators to check death notices and screen posts, so they can certainly argue they're providing some kind of value.

Things got decidedly sketchier a few weeks later, when legacy.com decided to email me a reminder that the guest book (which I had only posted to, not created) was about to meet a fate very similar to the person it was honoring if I didn't act promptly to renew, which, legacy.com suggested, would be the perfect way to show my support to a grieving family in a difficult time.

When you are mourning someone, any automated reminder about their death from a website that wants your money is going to cause what you might call a negative customer experience. It doesn't matter whether you entitle it "A gentle reminder from legacy.com" or "DEAD FRIEND'S NAME IN ALL CAPS Guest Book" (although guess which one they went with).

I decided to see what the other end of this operation looked like. As an experiment, I visited the obituary section of the New York Times website and followed the steps to submit my own online death notice, stopping only at the final confirmation screen.

I learned the following things:

The death notice section of pretty much every major US newspaper is run by legacy.com, "skinned" to look like the rest of that newspaper's site.
The first step in creating a legacy.com death notice, before anything else, is providing a credit card number.
At no point, including the final confirmation screen, does legacy.com tell you how much you will be charged.
At no point is there a link that you can follow to find out how much you will be charged.
The site requires you to confirm that the transaction you are about to complete is completely non-refundable, even though they never disclose the amount.

Screenshots here: one, two, three, four. You can also try this for yourself, use 4111 1111 1111 1111 as a credit card number.

In other words, the site takes money from bereaved people without disclosing what it's billing them, gambling on the fact that they're probably too preoccupied to care. Whether or not this kind of thing is legal, it is completely unethical. Even an undertaker who has upsold you on everything from coffin to funeral buffet has to show you a number before you sign on the dotted line.

If you Google around long enough, you may find your way to the New York Times rate sheet, where the small print tells you that an online death notice costs "from $79". But you won't find this information from anywhere within the legacy.com payment funnel, nor will you find any more information about that evocative word from.

I find it odious and troubling that the New York Times, along with a raft of other major newspapers, partners with this kind of website. It seems like further confirmation that newspapers will now clutch at any revenue stream.

I would very much like to see an online competitor put these vultures out of business. I think a respectable and respectful business model would be to charge a small fee for death notices and make comments read-only after some interval unless the creator paid to extend a default moderation period.

Update

The day after publishing this post, I received an email from the Director of Operations at legacy.com, who tells me the direct link to their order form from the NYT obituary page was a mistake. Legacy.com has changed this link to lead to a page that includes price information.

On Top of the World

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0300

Getting groceries means having to cross the 70th parallel, which fills me with an unjustifiable sense of regret. There's something glorious about being out and about in my shirtsleeves at 70˚N that loses all its savor down at 69˚59'. Never mind that I am still north of all of mainland Canada, north of Alaska (except for a tiny sliver of the North Slope) and very much north of you. We draw arbitrary lines on the globe and then behave in ways that give them a ghostly reality. I didn't come all this way to be walking south!

But my stomach is rumbling, and a three mile walk southeast is the only way to get supplies on this island, population 43, where the room-sized grocery store operates more like an exclusive Parisian boutique, requiring you to ring the doorbell and wait for the yawning proprietor to come downstairs and let you in. Of course, since this is Norway, you then get to shop unmolested while he waits behind the little cash register.

Arriving on the island, my host and I foolishly leave our grocery bags and luggage on the beach for half an hour so we can go off to moor the boat. Birds are not stupid. I lose a package of cheese and some sliced ham; for him the damage is more serious, a tall can of stout punctured well below the beerline by a knowing beak. Dark foam is still oozing into the sand when we come back, and with great care we rush the wounded can into the main house like a fallen comrade. Beer is always precious, but it is so much more precious when replacing it means a ninety minute boat ride.

In their alcoholic frenzy, the birds have unfortunately overlooked a delicious bread of incredible density, bought at a bakery back in Tromsø. Perhaps its armored crust was just too much for them. Though modest in size, the providential loaf will last me for the entire week, and every day reveals some surprise ingredient - raisins, currants, whole apricots! - when I saw off another slice.

The island I am staying on is called Spildra, a little rectangular block of land about four miles long in the Kvænangen fjord in northern Norway. At these latitudes, if you build a farm, you get a dot on the map, and the homestead here is called Skaga. My host is an anthropologist named Ivar, who rents the cabin to strangers like me through an elegant little website. Ivar and his family divide their time between here and a house in Tromsø, about three hours away by boat, a university town of about 60,000. After a week on Spildra, Tromsø begins to feel like a metropolis of unimaginable immensity.

The grocery store is at a dot marked Dunvik. The amenities at Dunvik don't stop with just the shopping. There's electricity, a pier for the ferry, a breakwater, a road, and even a couple of public Dumpsters (which will be very welcome to me at the end of my visit). Both the shop and the little booth that serves as a post office display a handsome wooden sign with 'Store' and 'Post Office' carved out in Russian. This is the work of Ivar's friend Yuri, a prolific woodcarver and frequent visitor to the island. Yuri is one of those preternaturally handy people; the top shelf of the grocery store is lined with elegant little birds made of birch bark, which he sells there on commisison. He also built the very Russian cabin I'll be staying in for a week up at Skaga.

The cabin started out as a banya (Russian sauna), but it ended up looking so nice that Ivar couldn't resist the temptation to turn it into a guest house instead. The building retains the typical banya floor plan (a main room where you are expected to cool off and eat, a small room for steaming) but the hot stones and benches have been replaced by a pair of seriously comfortable beds. The only concession to the Norwegian location is the cabin's curious sod roof, unheard of in Russia but typical for this region. You lay down a layer of sod with the grass side down, and then you cover it with another layer grass side up and let it grow. The result is a warm, shaggy roof that waves in the breeze and occasionally even sprouts flowers. The sheep stare at it with longing.

"I find I sleep about five hours a night in summer," Ivar tells me over dinner my first night on the island. I nod in complete understanding, carry my precious loaf back to the cabin, and wake up twelve hours later. At no point in the week will I sleep fewer than ten hours, and on those days I'll feel groggy and require a fortifying nap. I try to play it cool and pretend like I am not spending half my vacation asleep, but my chimney betrays me. Ivar can see when the smoke starts rising around noon, and my feeble attempts to pretend that I enjoy four or five hours of brisk morning reading before firing up the wood stove fool no one.

Apparently the long hours of daylight and marine air do strange things to visitors. The sun will not set here until late July, and it orbits the sky in a tilted circle, shining high above the southern mountains at midday, and passing just above the northern horizon at midnight. When there are no clouds, it is a spectacular light show. Shadows stretch out into the distance, colors get warmer and warmer, and the nostalgic golden hour that I always associate with late summer afternoons lasts the whole night long.

But clear days are rare on Spildra, as if it were too much beauty for mortals to bear. Much more typical is fog or overcast, sometimes blowing in on a strong wind. On those cloudy days the light at midnight feels like dusk on a winter day, or the peculiar darkness just before a heavy thunderstorm. I can't read without lighting candles, or else holding my book right up against the window pane. There is a subconscious feeling like it is just about to grow dark, but of course it never does.

Life at Skaga is low-tech. The generator in the boathouse stays off unless there is a specific need. I may have found the one place in the world where I am out of range of the World Cup. The bathroom is a handsome A-frame outhouse decorated with official portraits of Norwegian royalty. Deposits collect in a steel drum that gets composted for two years and then goes onto the potato patch. There is running water from a spigot outside the cabin, brought down through a 900 meter long hose running up the cliffs to a nearby lake. The water is an unappetizing brown color from suspended rust, but tastes just fine. When the sun comes out for any length of time it warms the dark hose, and the water comes out at nearly body temperature. On cloudy days, scrubbing dishes chills the hands fast.

The easiest and most pleasant way to get clean is in the banya proper, which sits on a crag overlooking the open water and the little square beach. You feed the voracious stove with amazingly quick-burning little birch logs, and wait. Once the windows have fogged up you can enjoy the rare luxury of feeling excessively warm.

Most of the inhabitants on the island are sheep, who stay busy at their task of turning all of the grass on the island into slippery little piles of sheep shit. The adults have recently been shorn and look a little pitiful. The lambs are still small at this time of year and stay right by their mothers, whose sunken sides and full udders testify to the demands of parenthood. When a lamb wants to nurse it runs up to its ewe and head-butts her hard right in the udder, then kneels down on its front legs to suckle.

The sheep are a useful weather-gage. On dry or sunny days, they surround the main house and cabin, chewing placidly. When they disappear, you know it's about to get a little miserable. You can find them hiding in crags and overhangs further inland, waiting for whatever storm is coming through to blow itself out. When the weather eases a bit, they crowd in the lee of the boathouse, or try to fit under the little elevated hut used for fish-drying.

They have chewed the grass down to stubble length everywhere except the little rectangles of fenced-off land immediately surrounding the main house and cabin, which are still lush and green. The sheep stare at this with unspeakable longing. The smaller lambs have figured out that they can squeeze through the fencing, or sneak under it in places, and every once in a while a lamb will infiltrate the compound and enjoy sheep heaven for a few minutes until I come out yelling and scare it off into the wilderness.

The sheep get their revenge on me at night, when a well-timed 'baa' right outside the window, or a knock or two against the wall, can be quite startling, particularly on the nights when Ivar has gone and I am the only person on my half of the island.

Some of the sheep have grown used to getting a treat and will overcome their fear in order to slowly approach you and stare deep into your eyes with their strange barred pupils. For a moment, you experience a feeling of spiritual communion across the vast gulf that separates man from sheep, a strange feeling of being in communication with an utterly different mind. Then the sheep releases a terrific stream of urine. And, if you want, you can do the same.

An Annotated Letter From Roman Polanski

Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 -0300

Roman Polanski, who is in Switzerland awaiting extradition to the US for the 1977 rape of a thirteen year old girl*, has just released a fascinating open letter, which I have reprinted here with my comments.

Polanski's letter reads:

Throughout my seven months since September 26, 2009, the date of my arrest at Zurich Airport, where I had landed with a view to receiving a lifetime award for my work from the representative of the Swiss Minister of Culture, I have refrained from making any public statements and have requested my lawyers to confine their comments to a bare minimum. I wanted the legal authorities of Switzerland and the United States, as well as my lawyers, to do their work without any polemics on my part.
I have decided to break my silence in order to address myself directly to you without any intermediaries and in my own words.
I have had my share of dramas and joys, as we all have, and I am not going to try to ask you to pity my lot in life. I ask only to be treated fairly like anyone else.
It is true: 33 years ago I pleaded guilty, and I served time at the prison for common law crimes at Chino, not in a VIP prison. That period was to have covered the totality of my sentence. By the time I left prison, the judge had changed his mind and claimed that the time served at Chino did not fulfil the entire sentence, and it is this reversal that justified my leaving the United States.

Polanski refers here to 42 days he spent in Chino under 'psychiatric evaluation' prior to sentencing. The sentence was never pronounced, because Polanski ran away. Polanski made a plea bargain that allowed him to plead guilty to a lesser charge (statutory rape) with the understanding that he would then be sentenced to time served. Given that he raped a child, it was a pretty terrific plea bargain. But right before sentencing, Polanski got cold feet, believing the judge would renege on the plea agreement.

In the California legal system, if you think a judge has been unfair to you, or reneged on a binding plea agreement, there is a process you can follow. Unfortunately, that process is not "flee the country". So Polanski is not even complaining that an injustice was done to him - he's claiming that an injustice was about to be done to him.

This affair was roused from its slumbers of over three decades by a documentary film-maker who gathered evidence from persons involved at the time. I took no part in that project, either directly or indirectly. The resulting documentary not only highlighted the fact that I left the United States because I had been treated unjustly; it also drew the ire of the Los Angeles authorities, who felt that they had been attacked and decided to request my extradition from Switzerland, a country I have been visiting regularly for over 30 years without let or hindrance.

The affair has slumbered for thirty years because Polanski has carefully been slipping it quaaludes. Since his exile, he has taken exquisite pains to avoid being extradited. But last year, he finally got sloppy, and gave the US authorities enough advance warning to get the cumbersome extradition paperwork filed in time for a well-publicized appearance in Switzerland.

I can now remain silent no longer! I can remain silent no longer because the American authorities have just decided, in defiance of all the arguments and depositions submitted by third parties, not to agree to sentence me in absentia even though the same Court of Appeal recommended the contrary.

In the American legal system, if you plead guilty to a crime, you show up to hear sentence pronounced on yourself. The only possible reason Polanski has to demand sentencing in absentia is so he can decide whether the sentence is something he'd like to come back to serve. Given his record, what sane court would agree to this?

I can remain silent no longer because the California court has dismissed the victim’s numerous requests that proceedings against me be dropped, once and for all, to spare her from further harassment every time this affair is raised once more.

This remarkable statement reveals the extent of Polanski's moral transformation. Thirty years ago, when he was raping a thirteen year old girl, giving her alcohol and quaaludes, and sodomizing her, he showed minimal concern for his victim's numerous requests that he stop, that he not take her clothes off, that he let her leave. But the passage of time has sharpened Polanski's moral sensitivity to such a point that it causes him pain even to see her harassed and badgered by the indelicate people who would keep bringing up the painful matter of his crime.

Despite this laudable, if belated, concern for the rights of his victim, this is not how our legal system works. We pass laws against child rape because we don't want to live in a society where people can go around raping children with impunity, regardless of whether those victims later forgive the rapist and want the matter put behind them.

Second, the extradition isn't even about the rape case, but the rule of law. Polanski pled and fled, and he wants to get away with it. The California D.A. argues that it is a bad idea to let felons go free after pleading guilty if they don't feel they'll like the sentence. There's not a lot of gray area here.

Polanski wants to focus all attention on his original crime, apparently unaware that social mores have changed drastically when it comes to child rape since the 1970's. But it is the duty of the LA prosecutor, whatever he thinks of Polanski's offense, to bring him to justice for jumping bail.

I can remain silent no longer because there has just been a new development of immense significance. On February 26 last, Roger Gunson, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case in 1977, now retired, testified under oath before Judge Mary Lou Villar in the presence of David Walgren, the present deputy district attorney in charge of the case, who was at liberty to contradict and question him, that on September 16, 1977, Judge Rittenband stated to all the parties concerned that my term of imprisonment in Chino constituted the totality of the sentence I would have to serve.

Notice the key words here, "testified under oath". There is an institution designed especially to settle the kinds of questions Polanski raises about his former judge. But Polanski, despite access to enormous funds to pay for a legal defense, does not have the courage to make his case in open court, even while seizing eagerly on the testimony of others. If his case is so clear, so unassailable that he can no longer remain silent in the face of injustice, why would it not be clear in an LA courtroom?

I can remain silent no longer because the request for my extradition addressed to the Swiss authorities is founded on a lie. In the same statement, retired deputy district attorney Roger Gunson added that it was false to claim, as the present district attorney’s office does in their request for my extradition, that the time I spent in Chino was for the purpose of a diagnostic study. The said request asserts that I fled in order to escape sentencing by the U.S. judicial authorities, but under the plea-bargaining process I had acknowledged the facts and returned to the United States in order to serve my sentence. All that remained was for the court to confirm this agreement, but the judge decided to repudiate it in order to gain himself some publicity at my expense.
I can remain silent no longer because for over 30 years my lawyers have never ceased to insist that I was betrayed by the judge, that the judge perjured himself, and that I served my sentence. Today it is the deputy district attorney who handled the case in the 1970s, a man of irreproachable reputation, who has confirmed all my statements under oath, and this has shed a whole new light on the matter.

Wow, this sure does sound exculpatory! If only there were some kind of institution whose job it was to hear these kind of claims, and settle them.

Polanski seems content to base his defense on the testimony of court officers, laying great weight on the fact that they are testifying under oath, but does not consider it appropriate to appear in court himself. All of the people Polanski claimed wronged him (by considering a sentence longer than forty days for child rape!) have long since died or retired. But even though he can remain silent no longer, he continues to remain silent in the one venue where his words would have any meaning.

I can remain silent no longer because the same causes are now producing the same effects. The new District Attorney, who is handling this case and has requested my extradition, is himself campaigning for election and needs media publicity! I can no longer remain silent because the United States continues to demand my extradition more to serve me on a platter to the media of the world than to pronounce a judgment concerning which an agreement was reached 33 years ago.

At what point does Polanski think it would have been an appropriate time to stop demanding his extradition? He stood before a California court, pleaded guilty and then ran away. Should the police cars have stopped at the county line, Dukes of Hazzard style?

I can remain silent no longer because I have been placed under house arrest in Gstaad and bailed in very large sum of money which I have managed to raise only by mortgaging the apartment that has been my home for over 30 years, and because I am far from my family and unable to work.

You see what happens when you rape children! House arrest in Gstaad! Let this be a lesson to others.

Such are the facts I wished to put before you in the hope that Switzerland will recognize that there are no grounds for extradition, and that I shall be able to find peace, be reunited with my family, and live in freedom in my native land.

Imagine anybody else, someone who is not a celebrity, raping a thirteen year old girl, admitting to lesser charges as part of a guilty plea, and then fleeing before sentencing to live abroad. Now imagine a D.A. with the opportunity to have the criminal brought to face the consequences of his crime, but deciding instead to give the him a pass because he believes the presiding judge made a mess of the case. It would be unheard of, a complete miscarriage of justice, and we would have that D.A. on the pillory.

Polanski asks in this letter to be 'treated fairly, like anybody else'. And in this I wholeheartedly agree with him, and wish him a safe journey back to California.

----

* If you're not familiar with the Polanski case, I urge you to read the pretty wrenching deposition posted on the Smoking Gun, an account that Polanski does not contest. In summary, he pressured a thirteen year old girl into taking off her clothes, gave her alcohol and quaaludes, then vaginally and anally raped her. The judge in the case sent him to prison for psychiatric observation, and he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser crime, statutory rape, in the belief that he would be sentenced to time served. Shortly before sentencing, Polanski fled the country, fearing that the judge would renege on the plea agreement and make him do hard time. France has refused to extradite him (he is a French citizen) but last year the U.S. authorities finally caught up with him in Switzerland.

Scott and Scurvy

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0300

Recently I have been re-reading one of my favorite books, The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 expedition to the South Pole. I can’t do the book justice in a summary, other than recommend that you drop everything and read it, but there is one detail that particularly baffled me the first time through, and that I resolved to understand better once I could stand to put the book down long enough.

Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:

Atkinson inclined to Almroth Wright’s theory that scurvy is due to an acid intoxication of the blood caused by bacteria...
There was little scurvy in Nelson’s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it. We had, at Cape Evans, a salt of sodium to be used to alkalize the blood as an experiment, if necessity arose. Darkness, cold, and hard work are in Atkinson’s opinion important causes of scurvy.

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?

...

By all accounts scurvy is a horrible disease. Scott, who has reason to know, gives a succinct description:

The symptoms of scurvy do not necessarily occur in a regular order, but generally the first sign is an inflamed, swollen condition of the gums. The whitish pink tinge next the teeth is replaced by an angry red; as the disease gains ground the gums become more spongy and turn to a purplish colour, the teeth become loose and the gums sore. Spots appear on the legs, and pain is felt in old wounds and bruises; later, from a slight oedema, the legs, and then the arms, swell to a great size and become blackened behind the joints. After this the patient is soon incapacitated, and the last horrible stages of the disease set in, from which death is a merciful release.

One of the most striking features of the disease is the disproportion between its severity and the simplicity of the cure. Today we know that scurvy is due solely to a deficiency in vitamin C, a compound essential to metabolism that the human body must obtain from food. Scurvy is rapidly and completely cured by restoring vitamin C into the diet.

Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.

It is not easy to find fresh foods that lack vitamin C. Plants and animals tend to be full of it, since the molecule is used in all kinds of biochemical synthesis as an electron donor. But the same reactive qualities that make the vitamin useful also make it easy to destroy. Vitamin C quickly breaks down in the presence of light, heat and air. For this reason it is absent from most preserved foods that have been cooked or dried. Its destruction is also rapidly catalyzed by copper ions, which may be one reason sailors, with their big copper cooking vats, were particularly susceptible.

Because our bodies can't synthesize the vitamin, they have grown very good at conserving it. It takes up to six months for scurvy to develop in healthy people after vitamin C is removed from the diet, and only a tiny daily amount is enough to keep a person healthy.

It has been known since antiquity that fresh foods in general, and lemons and oranges in particular, will cure scurvy. Starting with Vasco de Gama’s crew in 1497, sailors have repeatedly discovered the curative power of citrus fruits, and the cure has just as frequently been forgotten or ignored by subsequent explorers.

Lind tends to get the credit for discovering the citrus cure since he performed something approaching a controlled experiment. But it took an additional forty years of experiments, analysis, and political lobbying for his result to become institutionalized in the Royal Navy. In 1799, all Royal Navy ships on foreign service were ordered to serve lemon juice:

The scheduled allowance for the sailors in the Navy was fixed at I oz.lemon juice with I + oz. sugar, served daily after 2 weeks at sea, the lemon juice being often called ‘lime juice’ and our sailors ‘lime juicers’. The consequences of this new regulation were startling and by the beginning of the nineteenth century scurvy may be said to have vanished from the British navy. In 1780, the admissions of scurvy cases to the Naval Hospital at Haslar were 1457; in the years from 1806 to 1810, they were two.

(As we'll see, the confusion between lemons and limes would have serious reprecussions.)

Scurvy had been the leading killer of sailors on long ocean voyages; some ships experienced losses as high as 90% of their men. With the introduction of lemon juice, the British suddenly held a massive strategic advantage over their rivals, one they put to good use in the Napoleonic wars. British ships could now stay out on blockade duty for two years at a time, strangling French ports even as the merchantmen who ferried citrus to the blockading ships continued to die of scurvy, prohibited from touching the curative themselves.

The success of lemon juice was so total that much of Sicily was soon transformed into a lemon orchard for the British fleet. Scurvy continued to be a vexing problem in other navies, who were slow to adopt citrus as a cure, as well as in the Merchant Marine, but for the Royal Navy it had become a disease of the past.

By the middle of the 19th century, however, advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative. Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous.

So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.

In this, the Navy was deceived. Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all.

By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.

It fell to the unfortunate George Nares to discover this fact in 1875, when he led the British Arctic Expedition in an attempt to reach the North Pole via Greenland. Some oceanographic theories of the time posited an open polar sea, and Nares was directed to sail along the Greenland coast, then take a sledging party and see how far north he could get on the pack ice.

The expedition was a fiasco. Two men in the sledging party developed scurvy within days of leaving the ship. Within five weeks, half the men were sick, and despite having laid depots with plentiful supplies for their return journey, they were barely able to make it back. A rescue party sent to intercept them found that lime juice failed to have its usual dramatic effect. Most damning of all, some of the men who stayed on the ship, never failing to take their daily dose, also got scurvy.

The failure of the Nares expedition provoked an uproar in Britain. The Royal Navy believed itself capable of sustaining any crew for two years without signs of scurvy, yet here was an able and adequately supplied crew crippled by the disease within weeks. For the first time since the eighteenth century, the effectiveness of citrus juice as an absolute preventative was in doubt.

More troubling evidence came several years later, during the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to Franz-Josef Land in 1894. Members of this expedition spent three years on a ship frozen into the pack ice. Koettlitz, their chief physician, describes what happened:

The expedition proper ate fresh meat regularly at least once a day in the shape of polar bear. The people on the ship had, however, a prejudice against this food, which certainly was not particularly palatable, and insisted, against all advice, upon eating their preserved and salted meat. This meat I occasionally noticed to be somewhat "high" or "gamey", and afterwards heard that it was often so. The result was that, though I visited the ship every day, and personally saw that each man swallowed his dose of lime juice (which was made compulsory, and was of the best quality), the whole ship’s company were tainted with scurvy, and two died.

This pattern of fresh meat preventing scurvy would be a consistent one in Arctic exploration. It defied the common understanding of scurvy as a deficiency in vegetable matter. Somehow men could live for years on a meat-only diet and remain healthy, provided that the meat was fresh.

This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems.

But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.

Doctors of the era looked at this puzzling evidence and wondered. Other diseases had recently been shown to have their source in bacterial infection. The bacterial model was new, and had already had spectacular success in identifying and treating diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera. What if the cause of scruvy had also been misunderstood? What if instead of a deficiency disease, scurvy was actually a kind of chronic food poisoning from bacterial contamination of meat? Thus was born the ptomaine theory of scurvy, and Koettlitz became its enthusiastic backer:

That the cause of the outbreak of scurvy in so many Polar expeditions has always been that something was radically wrong with the preserved meats, whether tinned or salted, is practically certain; that foods are scurvy-producing by being, if only slightly, tainted is practically certain; that the benefit of the so-called "antiscorbutics" is a delusion, and that some antiscorbutic property has been removed from foods in the process of preservation is also a delusion. An animal food is either scorbutic - in other words, scurvy-producing - or it is not. It is either tainted or it is sound. Putrefactive change, if only slight and tasteless, has taken place or it has not. Bacteria have been able to produce ptomaines in it or they have not; and if they have not, then the food is healthy and not scurvy-producing.

The ’ptomaine’ in the theory was never really defined, other than as a noxious waste product of bacterial action. But the theory had an internal logic. Poorly preserved meats would be contaminated by ptomaine. Under normal conditions, this was not enough cause scurvy. Not only did fresh food consumed in the diet have a kind of antidote effect (whether it worked by neutralizing the poison, or by simply displacing it in the diet, was not clear), but environment also played an important role. Certain factors seemed to predispose people to chronic ptomaine poisoning, including darkness, intense exertion, idleness, close air, prolonged confinement and cold.

On prolonged journeys under harsh conditions, the accumulated ptomaine in badly preserved meats would disrupt health, giving the classic symptoms of scurvy. Once the tainted foods were discontinued, the body would rapidly excrete the accumulated ptomaine and return to healthh.

To the extent that citrus juices were effective in preventing scurvy, it was because their acidity denatured ptomaines, or killed the bacteria that caused them. The real culprit was in the bad meat, and the casks of lime juice mandated by law on every seagoing ship were another example of outdated medical superstition that would now give way to a more sophisticated understanding of illness.

This was the latest in medical thinking on scurvy when Scott prepared for his first expedition to Antarctica, in 1903. It would be the first serious British expedition to the continent in fifty years. Scott took the very same Dr. Koettlitz along as his chief physician.

Scott was a meticulous planner, and mindful of the ptomaine theory, paid special attention to the quality of his provisions. While the cold and cramped conditions of the journey could not be helped, he knew he could avoid any risk of scurvy by using only completely unspoiled canned goods. For his part, Koettlitz predicted that as long as there was fresh seal meat available, "we can take it as certain that no scurvy will be heard of in connexion with the expedition, however long it may remain in the High South".

Scott did not have time to supervise the actual canning of his provisions for the Discovery journey, but he made sure that before being served, all tins were opened in the presence of his medical staff, including Dr. Koettlitz, and carefully examined for signs of spoilage. Any doubtful cans were consigned to the trash heap.

So it came as a bitter surprise to Scott when one of the Discovery’s early sledging parties trudged into camp with unmistakable symptoms of scurvy after only a three week absence. Subsequent examination showed that many of the men on the ship were also in the early stages of the disease. The preventative measures had failed, and Scott was greatly distressed:

The evil having come, the great thing now is to banish it. In my absence, Armitage, in consultation with the doctors, has already taken steps to remedy matters by serving out fresh meat regularly and by increasing the allowance of bottled fruits, and he has done an even greater service by taking the cook in hand. I don’t know whether he threatened to hang him at the yardarm or used more persuasive measures, but, whatever it was, there is a marked improvement in the cooking.
...
With the idea of giving everyone on the mess-deck a change of air in turn, we have built up a space in the main hut by packing cases around the stove. In this space each mess are to live for a week; they have breakfast and dinner on board, but are allowed to cook their supper in the hut. The present occupants enjoy this sort of picnic-life immensely.

We have had a thorough clearance of the holds, disinfected the bilges, whitewashed the sides, and generally made them sweet and clean.

As a next step I tackled the clothes and hammocks. One knows how easily garments collect, and especially under such conditions as ours; however, they have all been cleared out now, except those actually in use. The hammocks and bedding I found quite dry and comfortable, but we have had them all thoroughly aired. We have cleared all the deck-lights so as to get more daylight below, and we have scrubbed the decks and cleaned out all the holes and corners until everything is as clean as a new pin. I am bound to confess there was no very radical change in all this; we found very little dirt, and our outbreak cannot possibly have come from insanitary conditions of living; our men are far too much alive to their own comfort for that. But now we do everything for the safe side, and from the conviction that one cannot be too careful.

Scott sent a seal-killing party to collect as much fresh meat as possible (his crew could eat their way through a seal in two and a half days). They gathered enough to eliminate the need for preserved meat entirely. The butchered seals were stored, like logs, frozen on the ice. Meanwhile, Koetlittz had managed to sprout and grow a modest crop of watercress under a skylight, the Antarctic soil proving surprisingly fertile. His confidence in the ptomaine theory did not blind him to the practical advantages of a proven remedy (watercress sprouts contain a ridiculous amount of vitamin C). Enough cress grew to supplement one meal for all the men, and in combination with the fresh seal meat, it was enough to banish all signs of scurvy.

Scott was relieved, but he knew that something had escaped his understanding. Despite scrupulous care, the disease had slipped through, and he was not sure why his precautions had failed. Evidently it was not enough to inspect meat by taste and smell - even minute quanities of ptomaine might be enough to cause scurvy.

His solution was to move the expedition off of canned meat altogether, relying entirely on seal meat and penguin. This would be fine while the men remained on the Discovery, but it left the problem of what to do about the upcoming sledge journeys. The planned sledging ration was pemmican (a mixture of dried meat and fat) and biscuit, but since Scott had lost all confidence in the safety of preserved meat, he had to find a way to replace the pemmican with seal.

Fresh seal meat would be far too heavy a replacement, so Scott had it repeatedly boiled to remove as much moisture as possible (in the process destroying all its vitamin C). This concentrated seal meat was still almost twice as heavy as the equivalent pemmican, but it was the best he could do.

In November of 1902, Scott, Wilson and Shackleton set out on the expedition’s main journey. Their goal was to take a dog team as far south as possible along the Ross ice shelf, and see if they could find a useful route for an eventual attempt at the Pole.

Things did not go well. Scott inadvertently starved his dogs, making them impossible to control and nearly useless for hauling. Very quickly, his men had to start relaying the sledges, which meant walking three miles for every one mile of southward progress. They began killing the weakest dogs and feeding them to the remainder (the dogs were so hungry they did not hesitate to rip their fallen comrades apart). The men themselves could think of nothing else but food, their rations inadequate for the work of hauling the sledge.

Wilson, a doctor, checked the men’s gums and legs each Sunday for signs of scurvy. Shackleton was the first to show symptoms, though he was not told about this for several weeks. Soon Scott and Wilson were showing symptoms as well. Before long Shackleton was weak, had begun to cough up blood at night, and was in real danger of physical collapse.

The party barely made it home. For much of the return trip, Shackleton was unable to pull, staggering alongside the sledges. On their return to the Discovery, the men were bedridden and in a state of complete physical collapse, getting up only long enough to eat prodigious meals. Scott remarked in his journal on the extraordinary lassitude and lack of energy the disease provoked in him.

Eight years after the Discovery expedition, Scott returned to Antarctica to make an attempt at the Pole. Mindful of what had happened on his first journey, he took pains to seek the latest expert advice about scurvy, both from doctors and from Arctic explorers.

The advice he got was unchanged - scurvy was an acidic condition of the blood caused by ptomaines in tainted meat. The legendary explorer Fridtjof Nansen had some particularly curious advice - if he found himself in extremis, Nansen said, it was better to choose cans of meat that were completely rotten over cans that were only slightly spoilt, since the ptomaines were more likely to have broken down in the former.

This time Scott made sure to provide his men with fresh seal meat, and scurvy was not a problem in the main camp. In the austral winter of 1911, Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard went on a phantasmagoric five week journey to try and collect the eggs of the empreror penguin. This journey, which gave Cherry-Garrard’s book its title, took place in complete darkness and temperatures that dropped below -77˙ Fahrenheit. The men, forced to relay and searching for their footprints by candlelight, sometimes made as little as a mile of progress a day. When Cherry-Garrard’s clothes were weighed on his return, they contained twenty four-pounds of ice. That the men survived defies belief - there has never been another journey in the Polar night, even with modern equipment - but they did return, and to Scott's great relief showed no symptoms of scurvy.

One of Scott's goals for the winter journey had been to determine the proper ration for sledging up on the Polar plateau, where the men would have to hike for several weeks at altitudes above 10,000 feet. After some tinkering with proportions, the men on the Winter Journey had settled on a satisfying ration, and Scott decided to adopt it unchanged for his on trip later that year:

Scott's Polar ration: 450g biscuit, 340 grams pemmican, 85g sugar, 57g butter, 24g tea, 16g cocoa. This ration contains about 4500 calories (sledging requires 6500) and no vitamin C.

Scott left camp with 16 men on November 1, 1911. His plan was to lay depots along the route, and send groups of men back at intervals until he was left with three companions on the great plateau south of the Beardmore Glacier. The expedition used men, dogs, ponies (slaughtered and fed to the dogs at the foot of the glacier), and a pair of experimental motorized sledges that broke down after just a few miles on the ice.

Scott sent back his men in stages; each group had a progressively harder time making it back to camp. The last group, sent back from the top of the Beardmore, was led by Edward Evans, who quickly developed a severe case of scurvy. After bravely walking most of the distance, he became incapacitated and had to be left on the ice in the care of a companion while the third man in the group force-marched the thirty remaining miles to camp to summon a rescue team.

Scott, oblivious to this ominous development, pressed onwards. The rest of his story is well known. Norwegian tents at the Pole, an increasingly desperate return, two in his group sickening and dying, then a terrible blizzard eleven miles short of his last depot; the three men freezing to death in their tent.

The evidence that the Polar Party suffered from scurvy on their return trip is strong but circumstantial. The wounds that would not heal, the sudden death of Seaman Evans during the descent down the Beardmore, their great weakness are all consistent with the disease. Both Scott and Wilson would have easily recognized the symptoms, but it is possible that they would have chosen not to record them. There was a certain stigma with scurvy, especially in their case, having taken such pains to forestall the disease. Scott had nearly left any mention of scurvy out of his 1903 report, before deciding to do so for the cause of science, and it’s possible he felt a similar reticence now.

Entire academic careers have been devoted to second-guessing Scott's final journey. It would probably be easier to list the few things that didn’t contribute to his death, than to try and rank the relative contributions of cold, exhaustion, malnutrition, bad weather, bad luck, poor planning, and rash decisions. But with regard to scurvy, at least, the Polar explorers were in an impossible position.

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

It was pure luck that led to the actual discovery of vitamin C. Axel Holst and Theodor Frolich had been studying beriberi (another deficiency disease) in pigeons, and when they decided to switch to a mammal model, they serendipitously chose guinea pigs, the one animal besides human beings and monkeys that requires vitamin C in its diet. Fed a diet of pure grain, the animals showed no signs of beriberi, but quickly sickened and died of something that closely resembled human scurvy.

No one had seen scurvy in animals before. With a simple animal model for the disease in hand, it became a matter of running the correct experiments, and it was quickly established that scurvy was a deficiency disease after all. Very quickly the compound that prevents the disease was identified as a small molecule present in cabbage, lemon juice, and many other foods, and in 1932 Szent-Györgyi definitively isolated ascorbic acid.

---

There are several aspects of this 'second coming’ of scurvy in the late 19th century that I find particularly striking:

First, the fact that from the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease. The sickness could be fitted to so many theories of disease - imbalance in vital humors, bad air, acidification of the blood, bacterial infection - that despite the existence of an unambigous cure, there was always a raft of alternative, ineffective treatments. At no point did physicians express doubt about their theories, however ineffective.

Second, how difficult it was to correctly interpret the evidence without the concept of "vitamin". Now that we understand scurvy as a deficiency disease, we can explain away the anomalous results that seem to contradict that theory (the failure of lime juice on polar expeditions, for example). But the evidence on its own did not point clearly at any solution. It was not clear which results were the anomalous ones that needed explaining away. The ptomaine theory made correct predictions (fresh meat will prevent scurvy) even though it was completely wrong.

Third, how technological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions. I mentioned how the advent of steam travel made it possible to accidentaly replace an effective antiscorbutic with an ineffective one. An even starker example was the rash of cases of infantile scurvy that afflicted upper class families in the late 19th century. This outbreak was the direct result of another technological development, the pasteurization of cow's milk. The procedure made milk vastly safer for infants to drink, but also destroyed vitamin C. For poorer children, who tended to be breast-fed and quickly weaned onto adult foods, this was not an issue, but the wealthy infants fed a special diet of cooked cereals and milk were at grave risk. It took several years for infant scurvy, at first called "Barlow's disease", to be properly identified. At that point, doctors were caught between two fires. They could recommend that parents not boil their milk, and expose the children to bacterial infection, or they could insist on pasteurization at the risk of scurvy. The prevaling theory of scurvy as bacterial poisoning clouded the issue further, so that it took time to arrive at the right solution - supplementing the diet with onion juice or cooked potato.

Fourth, how small a foundation of evidence was necessary to build a soaring edifice of theory. Lind’s famous experiment, for example, had two sailors eating oranges for six days. Lind went on to propound a completely ineffective method of preserving lemon juice (by boiling it down), which he never thought to test. One of the experiments that ’confirmed’ the ptomaine theory involved feeding a handful of monkeys canned and fresh meat. The fructivorous monkeys died within days; the ones who died last, and with the least blood in their stool, were assumed to be the ones without scurvy. And even these flawed experiments were a rarity compared to the number of flat assertions by medical authorities without any testing or basis in fact.

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

In the course of writing this essay, I was tempted many times to pick a villain. Maybe the perfectly named Almroth Wright, who threw his considerable medical reputation behind the ptomaine theory and so delayed the proper re-understanding of scurvy for many years. Or the nameless Admiralty flunkie who helped his career by championing the switch to West Indian limes. Or even poor Scott himself, sermonizing about the virtues of scientific progress while never conducting a proper experiment, taking dreadful risks, and showing a most unscientific reliance on pure grit to get his men out of any difficulty.

But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.

tl;dr: scurvy bad, science hard.

I'll try to footnote this essay properly in the next few days; in the meantime, if you'd like to geek out with me I invite you to check out a list of collected links.