QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (43 page)

Cook never carried fresh limes or lemons on board. The closest he got to a remedy was barrels of sauerkraut and a concentrated fruit-juice mixture called ‘rob’. Both had been boiled to preserve them on the long voyage and so had lost most of their vitamin C.

Cook had been dead for twenty years before the supply of lemon juice to British sailors became standard practice.

Scurvy was a huge problem on long voyages. Magellan lost most of his crew to it crossing the Pacific. Now we know it is a combination of a lack of vitamins C and B, causing the body’s cells to break down, but in the eighteenth century it was treated with more superstition than knowledge. Many sailors believed that the touch of earth would cure it.

The breakthrough came with the publication of Edinburgh physician James Lind’s
Treatise on Scurvy
in 1754, which advocated the use of citrus fruit and fresh vegetables.

The legend is that Cook’s enlightened approach kept his ships free of the disease. The truth seems to be that Cook simply ignored it. The journals of his fellow officers indicate that it was widespread on all three voyages, although there were few deaths.

When, in 1795, the Admiralty finally ordered ships to be supplied with citrus fruit (on Lind’s recommendation), it was lemon, not lime, juice that was supplied. This had a dramatic effect on the disease.

By the 1850s, lemons were being replaced by limes for economic reasons (limes were grown by British businessmen
in the colonies; lemons were grown by Johnny Foreigner in the Mediterranean). Scurvy returned with a vengeance as, ironically, limes contain very little vitamin C.

The first recorded use of the term lime-juicer (later limey) for a Brit was in 1859. Vitamin C wasn’t identified and named until the 1930s. Its chemical name is ascorbic acid. Ascorbic means ‘anti-scurvy’.

You still hear ‘Captain Cook’ trotted out at dinner parties (though very rarely at Australian ones).

Let’s take it from the top: he wasn’t a Captain, for a start, he was Lieutenant Cook on the
Endeavour’s
first voyage (1768–71). And he wasn’t the first European to see the continent – the Dutch beat him by 150 years – or even the first Englishman to land there. That was William Dampier who, in 1697, was also the first to record a ‘large hopping animal’.

Dampier (1652–1715) was a sea captain, navigator, explorer, cartographer, scientific observer, pirate and buccaneer. Alexander Selkirk – the model for
Robinson Crusoe
– was a member of his crew. He circumnavigated the world three times, invented the first wind map and is cited more than
1,000 times in the
OED
, introducing words like avocado, barbecue, breadfruit, cashew, chopsticks, settlement and tortilla into English.

In recent years, there has been a lot of lobbying in favour of the Chinese as the continent’s first foreign visitors. There is some archaeological evidence that the great Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He (1371–1435) landed near Darwin in 1432.

Without having to swallow the whole ‘Zheng He discovered the entire world’ theory cooked up by Gavin Menzies in his best-selling 1421:
The Year the Chinese Discovered America
, there seems to be a good chance that this extraordinary fifteenth-century voyager (he was a Muslim and a eunuch) did reach the northern coast of Australia.

After all, Indonesian fishermen, crazed for the local sea cucumbers (which they traded with the Chinese), had managed it many years before the earliest recorded Europeans.

Some of the Northern Aboriginal peoples, like the c, even learnt to sail and fish from these visitors from overseas, picking up words, tools and the usual bad habits (alcohol and tobacco) along the way.

The real ‘discoverers’ are, of course, the Aboriginal peoples who reached Australia over 50,000 years ago. They have been present on the continent for 2,000 generations, in comparison to just eight generations of Europeans.

That is long enough for them to have witnessed dramatic changes in their environment. The landscape of the Australian interior 30,000 years ago would have been one of green vegetation, brimming lakes and snow-capped mountains.

It doesn’t mean ‘I don’t know’, despite the endless websites and trivia books that tell you otherwise, citing it as a hilarious early example of cultural misunderstanding.

The real story is much more interesting. In eighteenth-century Australia there were at least 700 Aboriginal tribes speaking as many as 250 different languages.

Kangaroo
or
gangaru
comes from the Guugu Ymithirr language of Botany Bay, where it means the large grey or black kangaroo,
Macropus robustus
.

As the English settlers moved into the interior they used this word to refer to any old kangaroo or wallaby.

The Baagandji people lived 2,250 km (1,400 miles) from Botany Bay and didn’t speak Guugu Ymithirr. They heard the English settlers using this unfamiliar word and took it to mean ‘an animal that no one has ever heard of before’.

Since they had never seen them before, they (quite reasonably) used the word to describe the settlers’ horses.

Most of these are easy to discount because they are acronyms. Folk etymologists seem to be drawn to acronymic explanations, which are almost never right.

Fondness for acronyms is a military habit, dating from the First World War (an early example is AWOL, or ‘Absent Without Leave’, though even this wasn’t consistently pronounced as a word at the time). Acronyms didn’t get into general circulation until the Second World War.

There are almost no examples of words of acronymic origin before 1900. Indeed, the very word ‘acronym’ wasn’t coined until 1943.

In the case of ‘pom’, most reliable authorities agree it is a shortening of ‘pomegranate’.

In his 1923 Australian novel,
Kangaroo
, D. H. Lawrence wrote: ‘ “Pommy”is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood ‘thins down’, by their round and ruddy cheeks. So we are told.’

The term is first recorded in 1916, suggesting that it dates to the latter stages of the nineteenth century, and not to the original convict ships.

Michael Quinion in
Port Out, Starboard Home
(2000) also accepts ‘pomegranate’, citing H. J. Rumsey’s 1920 introduction to a book called
The Pommie or New Chums in Australia
, in which the word is sourced to children’s rhyming slang of the 1870s.

The older term ‘Jimmy Grant’ used for ‘immigrant’ became ‘Pommy Grant’, which was irresistible as the fierce Australian sun turned their ‘new chums’’ skin ‘pomegranate red’.

It’s not Ayers Rock.

Mount Augustus, or
Burringurrah
, in a remote part of Western Australia is the largest single rock in the world, more than two and a half times bigger than
Uluru
or Ayers Rock and one of the natural world’s least known but most spectacular sites.

It rises 858 metres (2,815 feet) out of the surrounding outback, and its ridge is more than 8 km (5 miles) long.

Not only is it bigger and higher than Uluru, its rock is much older. The grey sandstone that is visible is the remains of a sea floor laid down 1,000 million years ago. The bedrock beneath the sandstone is granite dated to 1,650 million years ago. The oldest sandstone at Uluru is only 400 million years old.

The rock is sacred to the Wadjari people, and is named after Burringurrah, a young boy who tried to escape his initiation. He was pursued and speared in the leg, and then beaten to death by women wielding clubs. The shape of the rock reflects his prostate body, lying on its stomach with its leg bent upward towards his chest and a stump of the spear protruding from it.

A final sting in the tail for Ayers Rock snobs: Mount Augustus is a monolith – a single piece of rock. Uluru isn’t. It’s just the tip of a huge underground rock formation that also pokes out at Mount Conner (
Attila
) and Mount Olga (
Kata Tjuta
).

Knocking down kangaroos? Think about it. Boomerangs are designed to come back. They are lightweight and fast. Even large ones are unlikely to give an 80-kg (180-lb) adult male kangaroo much more than a sore head, and if it did knock them down, you wouldn’t need it to return.

In fact, they weren’t clubs at all. They were used to imitate hawks in order to drive game birds into nets strung from trees – a kind of wooden, banana-shaped bird dog.

Nor are they exclusive to the Aboriginal peoples. The oldest returning throwing stick was found in the Olazowa Cave in the Polish Carpathians and is more than 18,000 years old. Researchers tried it out, and it still worked.

This suggests there was already a long tradition of using them – the physical properties have to be so exact to make a successful boomerang that it’s unlikely to be a one-off.

The oldest Aboriginal boomerangs are 14,000 years old.

Various types of throwing woods were used in Ancient Egypt, from 1,340
BC
. In Western Europe a returning throwing stick called a
cateia
was used by the Goths to hunt birds from around
AD
100.

In the seventh century, the Bishop of Seville described the
cateia
: ‘There is a kind of Gallic missile consisting of very flexible material, which does not fly very long when it is thrown, because of its heavy weight, but arrives there nevertheless. It only can be broken with a lot of power. But if it is thrown by a master, it returns to the one who threw it.’

Australian Aboriginals probably became adept with the boomerang because they never developed the bow and arrow. Most Aboriginal peoples used both boomerangs and nonreturning throwing sticks (known as ‘kylies’).

The first recorded use of the word ‘bou-mar-rang’ was in 1822. It comes from the language of the Turuwal people of
the George’s River near Sydney.

The Turuwal had other words for their hunting sticks, but used ‘boomerang’ to refer to a returning throwing stick. The Turuwal belong to part of the Dharuk language group. Many of the Aboriginal words used in English are from Dharuk languages, including wallaby, dingo, kookaburra and koala.