Potatoes and Onions

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Potatoes and Onions

From Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, 1840.

It was just dinner-time when we filled away, and the steward, taking a few bunches of onions for the cabin, gave the rest to us, with a bottle of vinegar. We carried them forward, stowed them away in a forecastle, refusing to have them cooked, and ate them raw, with our beef and bread. And a glorious treat they were. The freshness and crispness of the raw onion, with the earthy taste, give it a great relish to one who has been a long time on salt provisions. We were ravenous after them. It was like a scent of blood to a hound. We ate them at every meal, by the dozen, and filled our pockets with them, to eat in our watch on deck; and the bunches, rising in the form of a cone, from the largest at the bottom, to the smallest, no larger than a strawberry, at the top, soon disappeared.

The chief use, however, of the fresh provisions, was for the men with scurvy. One of them was able to eat, and he soon brought himself to, but gnawing upon raw potatoes and onions; but the other, by this time, was hardly able to open his mouth, and the cook took the potatoes raw, pounded them in a mortar, and gave him the juice to drink. This he swallowed by the teaspoonful at a time, and rinsed it about his gums and throat.

The strong earthy taste and smell of this extract of the raw potato at first produced a shuddering through his whole frame, and, after drinking it, an acute pain, which ran through all parts of his body; but knowing by this that it was taking a strong hold, he persevered, drinking a spoonful every hour or so, and holding it a long time in his mouth, until, by the effect of this drink, and of his own restored hope (for he had nearly given up in despair), he became so well as to be able to move about, and open his mouth enough to eat the raw potatoes and onions pounded into a soft pulp. This course soon restored his appetite and strength, and in ten days after we spoke to the Solon, so rapid was his recovery that, from lying helpless and almost hopeless in his berth, he was at the mast-head furling a royal.

Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1899), 345-347.

Richard Henry Dana

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