Debility

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the word debility is defined as the quality or state of being weak, feeble, or infirm (but especially, physical weakness).  The term was frequently used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe the various afflictions that sailors and explorers suffered at the time.  Most of the time, the term referred to the more specific medical diagnosis of scurvy or consumption (tuberculosis), which were very prevalent amongst 18th and 19th century sailors.  As a matter of fact, most naval physicians during that period of time would easily make the diagnosis of scurvy or consumption based solely upon the presence of debility.  That is exactly what happened during the infamous Lost Franklin Expedition, as detailed in a great book by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition.

It's been called the greatest disaster in the history of polar exploration.  The Lost Franklin Expedition was a failed polar (in this case, arctic) expedition led by the British naval captain,  Sir John Franklin, who departed England in 1845 with 129 officers and sailors aboard two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror.  The expedition's goal was to locate and traverse the last unnavigated sections of the famed Northwest Passage, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  The exact details are sketchy, but the two ships became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island.  After being trapped in the ice for more than a year, the two crews abandoned their ships in April, 1848 in an attempt to find their way to safety on foot.  By that point, two dozen men had already died, including Sir John Franklin, had died, presumably from scurvy and consumption.  The remaining survivors were led by Franklin's second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus's captain, James Fitzjames, who all disappeared and presumably perished.  During the decades that followed, what had happened to the Lost Franklin Expedition was one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries.

Pressed by Franklin's wife, Jane, and others, the British Admiralty launched a search for the missing expedition in 1848. During multiple searches in the ensuing decades, several artefacts from the expedition were discovered, including the marked gravesites of three sailors who had died relatively early after the two ships were trapped in the ice.  The book, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition details the how the exhumation and subsequent autopsies performed 138 years later on these three sailors revealed that the probable cause of death was neither scurvy nor consumption, but lead poisoning.  The British Navy had started to use canned meats and vegetables as a better source of nutrition for sailors (notably, the tin can was first patented in England in 1811 and was immediately put to use by the British Navy), but unfortunately the tin cans were soldered shut with lead, which apparently leached into the food (for two relevant scientific publications, see here and here).  Acute lead poisoning can produce a range of clinical signs and symptoms, including loss of appetite, fatigue (debility), weakness, and colic, many of which mimic scurvy; it can also cause neurologic effects, such as confusion, erratic behavior, and paralysis of the limbs. The expedition's medical team at the time was unable to diagnose lead poisoning, and they instead diagnosed all the sailors with debility with scurvy.  The treatment for scurvy was more canned meats and vegetables, which only worsened the acute lead poisoning.

As Beattie and Geiger conclude, "It is sadly ironic that Franklin's expedition, certainly one of the greatest seafaring expeditions ever launched, carrying all the tools that early industry and innovation could offer, should have been mortally wounded by one of them...When Sir John Franklin sailed from the Thames in May 1845, an entire nation believed that the honor of conquering the Northwest Passage was within his grasp.  None could have known that inside the tins stored in the ship's hold there ticked a time bomb that helped not only to deny Franklin his triumph but to steal away 129 brave lives."  They go on to write, "There is often a terrible price to pay in human exploration reliant upon new technology.  That fact was vividly demonstrated again in recent years by the failure of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003."

The British artist, W. Thomas Smith commemorated the Franklin expedition with his haunting painting, "They forged the last links with their lives": Sir John Franklin's Men Dying by Their Boat During the North-West Passage Expedition.

Apparently, the original title of the painting, under which it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895 was  "They forged the last link with their lives: HMS Erebus and Terror, 1849-50".  The dates were the artist's best guess, and the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were the two ships in the lost Franklin Expedition.  The "last links" in the title refers to the claim that Franklin and his men had actually completed the discovery of a formerly uncharted Northwest Passage route through the Arctic archipelago, before Robert McClure did so in 1850 during his expedition to determine the fate of the Franklin expedition from the Pacific side.  Smith's painting is based on McClintock's find of a lifeboat in Erebus Bay containing human remains. Earlier during that same expedition, he had also found documentary evidence that Franklin had actually died in 1847, before Franklin's men had abandoned their ships. 

As an interesting historical aside, several ships were sent to search for the Franklin's lost expedition, including the HMS Resolute.  As happened so frequently in those days, the HMS Resolute became trapped in ice and was abandoned, only later to be recovered by an American whaler George Henry in 1855 and sent back to Queen Victoria.  Timbers from the ship were used to construct three desks, one of which was sent by Queen Victoria as a gift to then President Rutherford B. Hayes.  You will recognize this desk as the famous Resolute Desk, which is a central feature in the White House Oval Office as the President's desk.

Beattie and Geiger finished their book by writing, "The story of how the Royal Navy failed to achieve the Northwest Passage is really that of how the world's greatest navy battled, and was ultimately humbled by, a simple yet gruesome disease - scurvy, allied to a menace of which they could not begin to conceive: lead poisoning.  The source of their defeat was not the ice-choked seas, the deep cold, the winters of absolute night, the labyrinthine geography or soul-destroying isolation.  It was found in their food supply, most notably in their heavy reliance on tinned foods."