Mike

“The Admiralty commissioned John Byron to command a ship to do some preliminary exploration in the South Pacific while monitoring the effects of fresh provisions on the incidence of scurvy in his crew. It proved to be a short voyage returning in under two years, in April 1766—and Byron’s conclusions regarding antiscorbutics were sketchy and unreliable. The men had suffered terrible ravages from the disease, but owing to the Admiralty’s instructions for Byron to purchase and outfit the ship with fresh vegetables whenever convenient, there were not a large number of deaths. Byron ordered scurvy grass and coconuts for his men, and while he claimed that the scurvy grass was of “infinite service” it was the coconuts that saved them from certain death. “It is astonishing the effect these nuts alone had on those afflicted … . Many in the most violent pain imaginable … and thought to be in the last stage of that disorder, were in a few days by eating those nuts (tho’ at sea) so far relieved as to do their duty, and even to go aloft as well as they had done before.” For the return voyage, Byron stocked up on more than two thousand coconuts and kept scurvy blessedly at bay. Byron’s unscientific opinion that coconuts were a useful antiscorbutic was of little practical value to the Admiralty, however, as coconuts were not readily available in England. All in all, it was not a very illuminating trial.”
― Stephen R. Bown, Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

“The trick was to pick out what was important, and never, ever to forget that the map was not the territory.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game

“Blair thought, That’s how the empire will end, one-sided and rash, in a botched suicide, leaving India wrecked, Burma blinded.”
― Paul Theroux, Burma Sahib

“History isn’t a narrative. There’s nothing tidy about it. There’s nothing clear about its margins. It’s an infiltrated, interlocking mess, and there are other systers whose brains are much more adapted to dealing with the fact that reality is not a story than humans are. Humans make a lot of terrible mistakes because we rely so heavily on narrative to understand the world. It allows our brains to be hacked by convincing fairy tales, to be hijacked by memes whether they have any objective reality or not. We probably needed rightminding more than most species just to remind us that stories are not the truth, even when they feel like the truth. Even when they suit all our biases and reinforce all our prejudices.”
― Elizabeth Bear, The Folded Sky