Abstrakt: In premodern and early modern times life aboard seagoing ships was always characterized by formidable challenges. The ever-extending sailing times in the Age of Sail opened an entirely new and often disastrous chapter of deprivation, disease and death at sea. Lack of hygienic principles and balanced diets caused high mortality rates due to epidemics as well as nutrition-related diseases, among which the vitamin C deficiency disease scurvy was one of the most gruesome. In retrospect, avoiding scurvy could only have been possible by maintaining regular consumption of vegetables or fruit products during the voyages, but basic European shipboard diets usually did not include such a component. Nevertheless, the staggering onslaught of scurvy forced seafaring authorities to start experimenting with vegetable-inclusive diets for sailors. Contrary to Western seafaring practices, Chinese ships never covered the huge distances of the exploratory voyages that decisively changed the course of global history; hence, scurvy is virtually unknown in Asian seas. Furthermore, Chinese shipboard provisions reflected much closer land-based diets common in China. This lecture will provide a cross-cultural, comparative picture of shipboard diets in East and West by introducing a variety of sources such as passages from Qu Dajun’s 屈大均 Guangdong xinyu 廣東新語. Thereby I will aim to shed more light on the character of the dissimilarities between both maritime traditions and divergences in dietary adaptation to life at sea.
Dr. Mathieu Torck (Ph.D, 2006) is post-doctoral researcher in the framework of the ERC project AdG TRANSPACIFIC (“The Structure and Impact of Trans-Pacific Trade, 16th to 18th Centuries: The Manila Galleon Trade Beyond Silver and Silks”) led by Angela Schottenhammer – Early Modern History Unit, KU Leuven (Belgium), in which he currently investigates Spanish shipboard diets and disease incidence in a longue durée perspective. Generally, Torck deals with historical anthropological questions in maritime, military, medical, nutritional and food history from Song through Qing times. He has written an extensive cross-cultural study on the history of scurvy in East Asia (Avoiding the Dire Straits). He is particularly interested in dietary issues, particularly the anthropology of shipboard diets and spread of disease as well as in the cross-cultural transfer of technical and scientific knowledge in East Asian, Eurasian and global contexts. Mathieu Torck is also lecturer and project assistant in the Department of Languages and Cultures (Chinese Studies) at Ghent University (Belgium). Together with Ann Heirman, he wrote a book on material culture in Buddhist monasteries of India and China (A Pure Mind in a Clean Body) and he is also co-author of A Belgian Passage to China, a popular-scientific work introducing hitherto unpublished sources on the technology transfer between China and Belgium around the turn of the twentieth century.