Tin can

Taken for granted. The humble tin can.

It was 1917 before the root cause of scurvy had been found although the preventative properties of lime juice had been discovered by James Lind in 1753. It was also later acknowledged that fresh food such as meat and plants would also prevent scurvy but when exploring the polar regions, meat and plants were hard to come across. The process of canning fresh food in the early 19th century to preserve it was hailed as a great advancement although later it was discovered that the canning process actually removed most of the vitamin C and was of little nutritional value.

So in 1845, when Franklin's crews set sail to discover the North West passage in the Terror and Erebus rigged with all of the latest scientific advancements, including a full complement of canned food, hopes must have been high for the expeditions success. On the 12th July, Franklin and some of the officers boarded Prince of Wales, a whaler in Baffin bay while waiting for conditions to improve. By early August, the winds had shifted and and off they sailed. Neither he nor his 128 men were ever seen again.

What happened next has been the subject of much speculation. In 1850, several ships were sent in search of Franklin, one of them captained by John Rae. Graves were discovered of some of the men, complete with carved headstones. John Rae went back in 1854 and spoke to the Inuit who told him that the ships had been lost to ice, that several of the men had died due to starvation and that the surviving men had taken advantage of the new food source. It was discovered that many of the deaths had occurred quite early on in the expedition, before even the ships were lost. A previous expedition had been sent led by James Clerk Ross (nephew of John) but due to unexpectedly poor health and deaths among the crew, that expedition was abandoned. They had found and eaten a large cache of Franklin's tinned food along the way and so knew that starvation due to spoiled food was not the answer.

No-one could adequately explain why the men died and it took till 1980s and a modern day expedition to find the truth. Samples of bodies and cans revealed that very high levels of lead were present. Cans in Franklin's time consisted of sheets of iron, folded round and sealed with a strip of lead based solder. Canned food was heavily relied upon during the expedition and so each man would have been consuming a large daily dose of lead along with his meat and veg. This, combined with the usual scurvy and starvation encountered by polar explorers in those days is what really killed all those men. It was aso found that some of the food had spoiled after all due to faulty soldering. Officers suffered particularly badly, due it is thought to their use of pewter tableware and probable preferential foodstuffs - ie the tinned food. Their over reliance on a new but unproven method of nutrition had caused their downfall.

Captain John Ross on the other hand, while unpopular with his men due to his pompousness and rigid adherence to observing rank and tradition did not suffer the same problems. Ross did not hold with all this new fangled nonsense such as tinned food, and although he used it in his own failed expedition to the NW Passage, his observation of the Inuit and their lack of scurvy led him to insist his crew ate what they did and while they did not enjoy the delights of dining on Caribou stomach and musk ox testicles they only lost one man due to scurvy over a four year expedition 1829-1833. The lessons learned by Ross were not learned by subsequent expeditions and so many decades worth of men were lost.

The tin can was patented in 1810
The tin opener was invented in 1858
It was 1890 before lead solder stopped being used on the inside of food tins
IN 1903-06 the North West passage was eventually discovered by the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, a man who was inspired to become a polar explorer by reading an account written by John Franklin of an overland mapping expedition of North America's arctic coast in 1819.
In 1932 Vitamin C was isolated and connected with scurvy.