I was recently reading about early exploration of the Arctic and I found myself mulling over a most interesting fact: Scurvy was a massive killer of sailors and others serving overseas in the eighteenth century. It’s believed that between 1756 and 1773, the Royal Navy enlisted 184,899 men (they were all men in those days) and over the same period, 133,708 men died in service, ‘mostly’ of scurvy.