Every attention was paid to Mr.
Scallon's case by the medical gentlemen, and all our anti-scorbutics
were put in requisition for his recovery: these consisted
principally of preserved vegetable soups, lemon-juice, and sugar,
pickles, preserved currants and gooseberries, and spruce beer. I
began also, about this time, to raise a small quantity of mustard
and cress in my cabin, in small shallow boxes filled with mould,
and placed along the stovepipe; by these means, even in the severity
of winter, we could generally ensure a crop at the end of the sixth
or seventh day after sowing the seed, which, by keeping several
boxes at work, would give to two or three scorbutic patients nearly
an ounce of salad each daily, even though the necessary economy in
our coals did not allow of the fire being kept in at night. The
mustard and cress thus raised were necessarily colourless, from the
privation of light; but, as far as we could judge, they possessed
the same pungent aromatic taste as if grown under ordinary
circumstances. So effectual were these remedies in Mr. Scallon's
case, that, on the ninth evening from the attack, he was able to
walk about on the lower deck for some time, and he assured me that
he could then "run a race.
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