This blog doesn’t support your claim at all.

This time Scott made sure to provide his men with fresh seal meat, and scurvy was not a problem in the main camp.

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 own 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.

You said they brought ‘tonnes of limes’ and got scurvy despite that.

Yeah, its kinda bleak to see

• I horded my wealth like a dragon and used it to burn down all the neighborhoods in my area, because the money drove me insane

• I wadded up my money into a basketball shaped bundle and just started tossing it anywhere that seemed politically correct and popular

That said, Wozniak did the best with the hand he was dealt. He kicked a bunch of Apple employees in on stock options long before it became company policy. He threw a bunch money into tech museums and art schools and colleges (which California’s state and municipalities have been underfunding in order to subsidize the private tech sector for decades). He invested in environmental R&D and even kicked some money into the effort to prevent Kessler Syndrome - which is, again, shit best served by a collaboration of G20 nations, not just some random rich guy from California. But hey, here we are.

Maybe capitalism wouldn’t be dogshit if we inverted the number of Wozniaks and Zuckerbergs. But also, maybe, billionaires (and heaven help us, trillionaires) were a bad idea to begin with.

in my defense it was primarily supposed to be a fun fact about limes and steam ships.

No, I know, that’s what I’m curious about, haha. I think the expedition is a red herring here.

For all my searching, I can only turn up sources that say limes are less effective than lemons, and lemons are less effective than oranges, and all citrus is less effective than fresh mammal meat, particularly liver. I can find sources that say the vitamin c breaks down when heated, so the navy’s switch from fresh limes to canned lime juice made things worse around the age of the steam ship.

I cannot find sources that say limes don’t work to prevent scurvy, and was wondering if you did.

that’s why i linked the article! the bulk of it is about limes. they did animal testing in the 1920s (before the discovery of vitamin C) and found that

1. lime juice is about 25% as effective as lemon juice at preventing scurvy, when fresh, and
2. its efficacy was reduced by being in contact with a) air and b) copper, which means the open-face copper tanks used to store the stuff at sea was… not well thought out.

basically, as it was used by the british navy it was completely useless.

Right. The problem is not that they used limes, it’s that they did a bunch of stuff to neuter the effectiveness of the limes.

well i mean the fact that they used limes were also part of the problem, since lemon juice could actually handle those conditions. so everything else being equal they would have seen increased rates of scurvy, but the steam age saved them.

Could it handle those conditions? I was under the impression that all vitamin C degrades with exposure to heat, light, and air. I’m not seeing anything that suggests lemon juice is immune.

as i read it it wasn’t immune, it just took longer.

I’m sorry, I probably should have linked what I was looking at earlier!

This suggests that limes and lemons do not degrade at a markedly different rate. Arguably, this is under modern refrigeration, and not the conditions on a 1900s era sailing ship, but I haven’t seen a source for that yet. I think your namesake is a bit cooler than you’re giving it credit for, haha.

Sometimes, the right Steve dies. Eventually. After ruining everything.