Quality of Life and Early British Migration by Thomas Jordan

Author:Thomas Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030330774
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The limited pharmacy on a ship probably consisted of alcohol-based remedies. Should a physician or barber-surgeon be sailing to the New World to start a practice in, say, New York or Philadelphia, indentured shipmates would be unusually fortunate. Being a barber-surgeon was a sideline to a business offering other services, in many cases. A wig maker or a pharmacist might set limbs and pull teeth on the side.

A curiosity of the pre-industrial era was the compounding of ointments from smelly, obscure items which resembled Shakespeare’s “fillet of a fenny snake.” In that regard, obtaining a prescription from a Fellow of the Royal College or a barber-surgeon would have been equally ineffective, but far more expensive. In the case of a physician’s prescription, the error would have been compounded by his rationale derived from the doctrine of the humours, or from consulting Nicholas Culpeper’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis. The cover of this work notes him as “Gent.”

Sturdy Vessel. The longest immigrant voyage began on a comparatively small merchant ship designed for trade, one smaller than the increasingly large, complicated men o’war exemplified by H.M.S. Hercules. The Hollanders’ refined their merchant fleet into efficient vessels sailing east to the trading zone known as the Dutch East Indies and controlled, in Holland’s golden age, by the East India Company.

To understand the state of shipping in the United Kingdom (as the nation would be known after the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707) it is helpful to consider the people’s state of mind, their perception of the physical world, what Maruyama (1980) termed their mindscapes. In the pre- industrial years curiosity was not a virtue, and conservatism prevailed in all fields. Only slowly did empiricism bring the microscope, and the images generated by Robert Hooke gain acceptance. As early as the years of James I and VI, a submarine had been demonstrated in the Thames, and a steam engines of sorts presented.

In those two and similar instances, the innovations were seen as amusing, but little more. When William Petty demonstrated his double-bottom boat—a catamaran, Samuel Pepys and Lord William Brouncker, President of the Royal Society and friend of the Stuart brothers, were about the only people of influence who were impressed. Petty built several versions of his double-bottom before his death in 1687. In the eighteenth century ship design began to evolve, extending keels, simplifying rigging and sails, and reducing crews; these innovations improved the economics of building and operating ships, but wind and weather undermined rational innovation in designing ships, vide Petty’s “double-bottom” vessel which was fast and highly steerable.

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