reater in the officers'
bed-places than in those of the men, in consequence of the former
being necessarily placed in close contact with the ship's sides,
and forming an immediate communication, as it were, with the
external atmosphere; whereas in the latter there was a vacant
interval of eighteen inches in width interposed between them. To
prevent as much as possible, therefore, the injurious effects of
this evil upon the health of the officers, I appointed certain
days for the airing of their bedding by the fires, as well as for
that of the ships' companies. 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."

At noon on the 7th, the temperature of the atmosphere had got down
to 49 deg. below zero, being the greatest degree of cold which we had
yet experienced; but the weather being quite calm, we walked on
shore for an hour without inconvenience, the sensation of cold
depending much more on the degree of wind at the time than on the
absolute temperature of the atmosphere as indicated by the
thermometer. In several of the accounts given of those countries
in which an intense degree of natural cold is experienced, some
effects are attributed to it which certainly did not come under
our observation in the course of this winter. The first of these
is the