Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (60 page)

Hungry sailors were at the mercy of almost everyone: penny-pinching shipowners whose main concern was to feed them as cheaply as possible, dishonest ship’s pursers who supplied bad food or shortrationed the shipowner (and then sold the stolen goods), and unskilled cooks who couldn’t have done much with the available supplies even if they’d been great chefs. It’s no wonder that sailors looked forward to their daily portion of rum.

Drunkenness was a major problem among seamen. Until 1687, sailors in England’s Royal Navy received an evening ration of one pint of brandy and got drunk on it; after 1687 and the conquest of Jamaica, they switched from a pint of brandy to a pint of rum—and got drunk on that. In an attempt to control the drunkenness in his fleet, British Admiral Edward Vernon ordered that the rum be diluted with water and distributed twice a day, at noon and at 6:00 p.m. The mixture was quickly dubbed
grog
, in honor of Vernon’s nickname, “Old Grog,” a reference to the kind of fabric his cloak was made of—
grogram
. The grog dilution was always done in the presence of an officer to make sure that sailors got their full allotment and weren’t cheated by pursers who added too much water and then sold the extra rum.

Ship’s biscuit, also called
hardtack
or
pilot’s bread
, was a crucial part of a sailor’s diet. Biscuit was round, oval, or square crackers made of a dough heavy on flour and light on water (without shortening or yeast, and usually without salt), baked until it was so hard and indestructible that it was reputed to be able to last half a century. It was always infested with weevils, and though the sailors hated the bugs, they were still a sort of asset: the weevils ate tunnels into the biscuit, which made the rock-hard crackers easier to break up
and eat. Seamen were very dependent on biscuit for filling their stomachs, but eating it plain wasn’t a great menu option, so it was often soaked in water or coffee or crumbled and fried with salt pork or bacon grease.

Salt beef and salt pork were the other staples of a sailor’s diet in the Age of Sail. Cheap cuts of meat were preserved in brine, or
pickle
, in casks, where they’d last throughout a voyage.
Salt horse
and
salt junk
were seamen’s slang for salted beef, “horse” alluding to the toughness of the beef and “junk” referring to the general belief that provisioners threw all the worst parts of several different animals into the casks of brine. Cheap salted fish and dried fish sometimes replaced salt beef and pork; sailors called it “Poor John.”

Ship’s cooks and sailors had so little to work with that they could combine their limited ingredients in only a few different ways.

•
Lobscouse
was a boiled-up stew of salt meat cut in small pieces, broken biscuit, potatoes, and onions.

•
Salmagundi
consisted of salt fish boiled with onions.

•
Skillygalee
was a watery oatmeal gruel.

•
Burgoo
was a thicker oatmeal gruel or porridge seasoned with salt and sugar. It was so easy to prepare (especially in rough weather) that on some ships the cook made it for every evening meal; some shipowners were too cheap to provide anything
but
the ingredients for burgoo.

•
Bully beef
was salt beef from which the cook had boiled away all the fat (and added it to his grease pot—one of the perks of his job), leaving something so tasteless and hard that the sailors often carved it into trinkets instead of eating it.

You can’t talk about seafaring food without talking about scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency. It was rampant on ships for most of the Age of Sail because of the lack of fruit, vegetables, and other foods that contain vitamin C. What’s worse, ships generally set sail in the spring, when most people were still run-down from a winter diet of preserved foods and nothing fresh. That
means they
began
the trip in poor health, and after six weeks of hardtack and salt pork, many were very sick, even dying.

The first signs of scurvy were swollen gums, loss of teeth, skin blotches, and lethargy. The gum problems made it hard to eat the tough biscuit and salt meat, so men with scurvy ate less and less and began to starve. Medical science was primitive, so no one even knew exactly what caused the illness. Scientists deduced that food might have something to do with it, but greed and ignorance prevented the shipowners and naval authorities from acting even on what little they knew. They refused to provision the ships with citrus fruits, green vegetables, or even the ginger that the Chinese took aboard ship as early as the 5th century. Some officials thought that less salt would fix the problem, others that more pickles, cider, or sauerkraut would do the trick.

In 1753 Dr. James Lind published his
Treatise of the Scurvy
, in which he proved by a controlled experiment (one of the first in the diet world) that lemons and oranges were an effective cure—without actually understanding the existence of vitamin C (it wasn’t discovered until 1912). By the end of the 18th century, when more seamen were dying of scurvy than in warfare, the British Navy finally accepted Lind’s thesis and made lemon juice a compulsory daily issue to all sailors. The lemon juice was mixed into the grog ration and, like magic, scurvy disappeared from the navy.

In the mid-19th century, steam power began to replace wind power. A sail-powered Atlantic crossing could take from one to three months; on a steamship it might take as little as seven days. With shorter voyages, food didn’t have to last as long, so the sailors’ diet of ship’s biscuit and salt meat could be more varied. Shorter trips also meant putting into port more often, so dwindling provisions could be replenished with fresh food. Today, even pleasure sailboats have refrigerators, cruise ships are floating feasts, and the United States Navy takes its menus so seriously that it recruits “mess management specialists” and presents annual awards for food service excellence.

Dr. Henry Heimlich stole the show in 1974 with his famous “abdominal thrust” lifesaving technique, but that’s not the only “maneuver” out there. Here are a few you may not have heard of
.

T
HE SELLICK MANEUVER
This is used daily by doctors all over the world, primarily during
intubation
—the insertion of a breathing tube down the throat. It involves applying the correct amount of pressure to the outside of the throat at the
cricoid cartilage
, a ring-shaped piece of cartilage that circles the trachea. Done properly (only by trained professionals), it closes off the esophagus but doesn’t close off the airway, allowing a tube—whether for oxygen, for anesthesia, or for other purposes—to be safely inserted. The tube also prevents the patient from, to put it plainly, choking on their own vomit. The insertion technique is named after British anesthesiologist Dr. Brian Sellick, who described it in 1961, although it was actually first written about in 1774 by celebrated Scottish anatomist and doctor Alexander Monro, who recommended it for helping resuscitate drowning victims. When Sellick died in 1996, his obituary said the maneuver “has probably saved more lives and reduced pulmonary morbidity worldwide more than any other advance in anaesthetic management.”

You’ve probably done this one yourself. Hold your nose and close your mouth, and then try to forcefully exhale. Hear your ears pop? That’s the
Valsalva maneuver
. It’s used to equalize the air pressure in the enclosed middle ears with air pressure outside in the atmosphere. Here’s how it works: The
eustachian tubes
are slender tubes that run from the middle ears to the back of the throat, where they are normally closed. When pressure outside your ears decreases, as when you’re in a rising airplane, the higher pressure inside the ears causes the ear drum to bulge out. When air pressure outside
increases
, as when diving in water, the opposite occurs, pushing the ear drums inward. Both can damage the ear drums. The Valsalva maneuver forces the openings to the eustachian tubes in
the throat to open, allowing air to escape or pass into the middle ears, equalizing the pressure with the outside. (The same thing often happens when you yawn or chew gum.) The maneuver is named for Italian physician Antonio Maria Valsalva, who first described it in 1704. It had been used by humans long before that, but Valsalva was the first to explain it medically. (Valsalva is also known as the person who named the eustachian tubes, after 16th century Italian doctor Bartolommeo Eustachio.)

This is used by obstetricians and midwives when a rare but very serious birthing event known as
shoulder dystocia
occurs. That’s when a baby’s head makes it out—but the shoulders don’t. A bit of birthing background: In a normal birth the baby’s head and body are “born” individually, each during its own contraction. The head comes out first (face down about 90% of the time), with the shoulders lying horizontally or in line with the pelvis. Between contractions, the baby rotates 90° to a vertical, or side-facing, position, now with one shoulder behind the pubic bone and one behind the coccyx (tailbone). In shoulder dystocia, the top (or
anterior
) shoulder gets stuck behind the mother’s pubic bone. It can be dangerous for the mother and
very
dangerous for the baby, and it must therefore be dealt with quickly. A common first technique is the “McRoberts leg-lift maneuver,” in which the mother, on her back, simply lifts her knees to her chest. If that doesn’t free the shoulder then the
Gaskin maneuver
is often tried. In this “all-fours” maneuver, the mother rolls over, gets on her hands and knees, and arches her back, allowing gravity to help the baby’s shoulder pass. Simple as it sounds, it has proven to be very effective. It was named after American midwife Ina May Gaskin, and is described as “the first obstetrical maneuver to be named after a midwife.” Gaskin learned the technique in the 1970s from a Guatemalan midwife, who had learned it from Mayan women, who have apparently been using it for centuries. It has gained popularity since Gaskin started teaching it in 1976, and is now used increasingly by midwives and obstetricians in clinics around the world.

“Let him who would move the world first move himself.”—
Socrates

Great art or a waste of time? There are as many opinions as there are channels
.

“Television is the first truly democratic culture, available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.”

—
Clive Barnes

“I consider the television set as the American fireplace, around which the whole family will gather.”

—
Red Skelton

“There was a point where I felt like, ‘Golly, you work so hard, try so hard and the people say they want meaningful television and then Jerry Springer ends up beating you.’”

—
Oprah Winfrey

“Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn’t have in your home.”

—
David Frost

“Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the air-waves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.”

—
Dave Barry

“Television is teaching you whether you want it to or not.”

—
Jim Henson

“Anyone who’s afraid of what TV does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

—
Clive James

“Television is America’s jester. It has assumed the guise of an idiot while actually accruing power and authority behind the smoke screen of its self-degradation.”

—
Lawrence Mintz