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╇ i

W H AT ’ S N O R M A L ?
╇ iii

WHAT’S NORMAL?
Reconciling Biology and Culture

Allan V. Horwitz

1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Allan V. Horwitz 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–0–19–060324–3 (hbk.); 978–​0–​19–​060325–​0 (pbk.)

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
v

To the memory of Gerry Grob

╇ vii

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

1. Herodotus and Darwin 1

2. Incest Aversion 24
3. First Names 48
4. Cowardice and Courage 72
5. Obesity 98
6. Fear 123
7. Grief 146
8. Sexual Behavior 168
9. Defects and Differences 194

Notes 215
References 237
Index 259
ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For the past four decades most of my work has focused on issues of mental
health and illness. During this period I observed a steadily increasing trans-
formation of what had been considered problems of living into specific psy-
chiatric diseases that often blurred the lines between normal social stresses
and mental disorders. My book, Creating Mental Illness, critiqued this disease
model that had come to dominate the psychiatric profession. I then collabo-
rated with Jerome Wakefield in focusing on, first, depression in The Loss of
Sadness and, next, on anxiety in All We have to Fear to show the ways that
psychiatry converted normal sadness and natural fears into depressive and
anxiety disorders, respectively. At the same time, I began pursuing the idea
that the complex relationships between normality and abnormality found in
the area of mental illness also applied more broadly to a variety of topics. This
book is the result of my attempt to generalize the various ways that culture
and biology influence what is socially evaluated as normal or abnormal and as
evolutionarily natural or unnatural.
A work of this sort, which crosses so many different lines of inquiry that
are outside of my own areas of expertise, is unusually dependent on the writ-
ings of scholars who specialize in a wide variety of fields. I am especially
indebted to the works of Leda Cosmides, David Kessler, Stanley Lieberson,
William Ian Miller, Andrew Solomon, John Tooby, Jerome Wakefield, and
Arthur Wolf for their many insights on how culture and biology shape the
various topics I examine here.
I am also grateful for the institutional and personal support I received
while writing this work. I began the book in the ideal scholarly environment
of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford
University. I am grateful to Steve Kosslyn and Iris Litt, who served as direc-
tors of the Center during the period of my residence there and to the fel-
lows of the class of 2012-​2013 who provided many invaluable suggestions
for the book. Once again, I am indebted to David Mechanic, the founding
x   
• Acknowledgments

director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research
at Rutgers University, for creating the kind of interdisciplinary environment
that allows non-​traditional scholarship to thrive. Conversations with a num-
ber of friends and colleagues, including Michael Anderson, Deborah Carr,
Peter Conrad, Melissa Lane, Jane Miller, Helene Pott, and Eviatar Zerubavel
have also immensely improved the book. James Cook, my editor at Oxford
University Press, has unfailingly supported the development of this volume.
I especially appreciate his wisdom in selecting two anonymous reviewers who
provided extraordinarily insightful suggestions for revising the draft of the
manuscript that they read. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of
my friend and colleague Gerry Grob, who profoundly influenced my work
but who died shortly before the manuscript was completed.
╇ xi

W H AT ’ S N O R M A L ?
1

1 HERODOTUS AND DARWIN

For if anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from
amongst all the nations of the world the set of beliefs which he thought best,
he would inevitably, after careful consideration of their relative merits, choose
those of his own country.
—​H e r o d o t u s , 1996, Book 3:38

The same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable
uniformity; and this fact is in itself interesting as evidence of the close
similarity in bodily structure and mental disposition of all the races, of
mankind.
—​C h a r l e s D a r w i n , 1877/​1971, pp. 22–​23

Twenty-​five hundred years ago, the Greek historian Herodotus,

often called “the father of history,” traveled widely through the
ancient world, visiting Egypt, Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, and the
Crimea, as well as the entire Greek world. His writings provide
a foundational account of how culture shapes conceptions of
normality:

Everyone without exception believes his own native cus-

toms, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best;
and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman
would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence
that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs
of one’s country. One might recall, for example, an anec-
dote of Darius. When he was king of Persia, he summoned
the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and
asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of
their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any
money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks,
and through an interpreter, so that they could understand
what was said, he asked some Indians of the tribe called
Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what
they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror
2   
•  Wh a t ’ s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture

and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see by this
what custom can do and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he
called it “king of all.”

The Greeks burned dead bodies but were repelled at the notion of eating
them. Yet, the Callatiae ate their dead and were horrified at the thought of
burning the deceased. Other groups had their own idiosyncratic burial cus-
toms: Issedones mixed dead bodies with sheep and then ate them; male
Persians could not be buried until their bodies were torn by birds or dogs;
Egyptian customs forbade dead bodies to be eaten by animals but mandated
that they be embalmed instead; and Babylonians buried their dead in honey.
Herodotus’ descriptions of the widely varying practices about handling the
dead in the ancient world at the same time illustrate the seeming natural-
ness and thoroughgoing arbitrariness of definitions of what is normal or
abnormal.1
Twenty-​four centuries later, Charles Darwin also voyaged around the
world, trekking from South America to the remote Galapagos Islands, fol-
lowed by Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia, and finishing with a trip to
the Cape of Good Hope before returning to his native England. His obser-
vations provide a very different account of responses to death from those
of Herodotus: “The expression of grief due to the contraction of the grief-​
muscles is by no means confined to Europeans, but appears to be common
to all the races of mankind.” Darwin went on to describe the similarities
between grief displays among Australian aborigines and nineteenth-​century
Europeans:

After prolonged suffering the eyes become dull and lack expression,
and are often slightly suffused with tears. The eyebrows not rarely are
rendered oblique, which is due to their inner ends being raised. This
produces peculiarly-​formed wrinkles on the forehead which are very
different from those of a simple frown; though in some cases a frown
alone may be present. The corners of the mouth are drawn downwards,
which is so universally recognized as a sign of being out of spirits, that
it is almost proverbial.

For Darwin, these universally shared facial expressions indicated that an

inherited biological substrate underpins the diverse cultural displays of grief.
Moreover, he posited a mechanism that explained the reasons for this com-
monality: People (and other animals) who communicate emotions that
╇ 3

Herodotus and Darwin ↜渀屮↜渀 • ↜渀屮↜渀 3

convey their need for support after losses are more likely to survive and repro-
duce than those who react in other ways. Herodotus’ and Darwin’s works
exemplify the two major lenses of culture and biology that have shaped views
about normality and abnormality.2

Contesting Normality
The roots of both the natural and cultural approaches are found in debates
among the Classical Greeks during the fourth-╉century bce when Western
philosophy and science emerged. On one side, Socratic philosophers, particu-
larly Plato, derived ethics from common principles that any reasonable person
could agree were good. They strove to uncover the eternal constants that lay
beneath the transitory appearance of customary expressions and that pro-
vided a universal and objective foundation for the distinction between what
is natural and unnatural. The Socratics focused on innate aspects of human
nature that allowed people to deduce which actions were right and which
were wrong. These proponents of the natural tradition stressed how the laws
underlying human behavior were not transient but were impervious to change
over time. The object of philosophical and scientific inquiry should be these
unchanging foundational laws as opposed to fleeting surface manifestations.
Natural or unnatural behaviors were not arbitrary but stemmed from stan-
dards that all rational human beings can recognize are right or wrong. These
rules do not vary from culture to culture but hold in all places and times.
On the other side of this controversy, members of the Sophist school,
including Herodotus, asserted that what was normal or abnormal had little in
common with the universal principles of natural law. The Sophists contrasted
subjective and changeable customs (nomos) with objective and necessary
properties of nature (physis). This school rejected the Socratic conception
that rooted norms in deeper qualities of human nature. Their core conten-
tion was that normality and abnormality were arbitrary social conventions
that lacked any objective basis. Culture—╉“shared blood, shared language,
shared religion, and shared customs”—╉was “king of all.” Normality referred
to whatever taken-╉for-╉granted customs, emotions, and judgments a particular
group valued. Conversely, abnormal behaviors were ones that violated these
standards. Different groups had different ranges of expected behaviors so that
a trait that was normal in one culture might be deviant in another and vice
versa. In contrast to innate Socratic principles, cultural norms shaping how
people ought to act, feel, and behave were not inborn but had to be learned.
Because these norms had no objective grounding, they were always at risk of
4 ╇↜
• ↜ ╇Wh a t ’ s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture

being considered capricious and, therefore, not deserving of respect. Thus,

customs, despite perceptions of their inherent desirability, were not perma-
nent but were capable of rapid transformation.3
Although norms rested on fragile foundations, each group nevertheless
believed that its own ways of life were the best. Customs had a normative
quality that led people to want to behave in certain ways:

For if anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing

from amongst all the nations of the world the set of beliefs which he
thought best, he would inevitably, after careful consideration of their
relative merits, choose those of his own country.

Yet, Herodotus, in particular, did not condemn the differences among the
institutions and ethos of the various peoples he observed but, rather, embraced
an open and tolerant view of their ways of life and morals. Standards of moral-
ity in one culture were neither inferior nor superior to those in other cultures
but were simply different from them. Each culture should be accepted and
understood on its own terms, not judged by any worldwide system of moral-
ity. The Sophists’ appreciation of the rich diversity of human customs made
them the world’s first multiculturalists.4
The contested issues about the nature of normality and abnormality that
the Classical Greeks raised have echoed throughout the centuries. The two
positions that they developed—╉one concentrating on universal, innate, and
stable aspects and the other on diverse, learned, and changeable qualities—╉
remain the major frameworks for studying what is normal and what is not.
The prominence of the natural and cultural views of normality has waxed and
waned during the course of history.

From Herodotus to Heteronormatively

Herodotus’ works contain the seeds of cultural views that emphasize how
conceptions of normality and abnormality are inherently tied to the practices
and beliefs of specific communities, which vary widely across groups and over
time. Discussions about the culturally relative underpinnings of normality
and abnormality faded in the West during the long Christian era that lasted
roughly from the fourth to the fifteenth century ce, as theologians empha-
sized the universal aspects of religiously based natural laws. The cultural view
did not begin to reawaken until the fifteenth-╉century Era of Exploration when
European voyagers and missionaries returned from expeditions and reported
5

Herodotus and Darwin      •      5

unprecedented levels of human diversity that indicated normal and abnormal

behaviors were far more varied than religious scriptures taught. Subsequently,
prominent thinkers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revived
Herodotus’ notion of comparing and contrasting various groups rather than
regarding them as superior or inferior. Social philosophers such as Baron
Charles-​Louis Montesquieu (1689–​1755) stressed how social organization,
not divine mandates, shaped the norms and customs of each society. Echoing
Herodotus, Montesquieu emphasized how geography and history produced
distinctive patterns of social interaction, beliefs, and laws. Each collectivity
had a general spirit that consisted of particular ways of living, thinking, and
feeling that were different from those of the spirits in other nations. That is,
all human behavior is inseparable from the social context in which it arises.5
The philosophical tradition of empiricism that arose at the time built on
this notion, initiating a long battle in Western thought against the idea that
humans possess intrinsic, hard-​wired proclivities. This view, best exemplified
in the work of English philosopher John Locke (1632–​1704), attacked the
notion of an innate human nature. Instead, empiricists asserted that all of our
knowledge about the world comes from experience. Locke viewed presocial-
ized children as “blank slates” at birth who only became fully human through
processes of social learning:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all
characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence
comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man
has painted on it with an almost endless variety? When has it all the
materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word,
from EXPERIENCE; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from
that it ultimately derives itself.6

In the late eighteenth century, Locke’s work helped pave the way for the trans-
formative French and American Revolutions that constructed new norms
unimpeded by traditional notions of religious dogma and the divine rights
of royalty. Instead, governments, communities, parents, and teachers could
mold human behavior into “an almost endless variety” of forms.
The French Revolution, in particular, overturned previous conceptions
about normality and abnormality. It rejected any divine basis of social life and
morality. The revolutionaries attempted to change such taken-​for-​granted
aspects of the ordinary world as units of time, the 7-​day week, and the cel-
ebration of holidays, which they believed were arbitrary and could easily be
6   
•  Wh a t ’ s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture

changed. One of their major legacies was that political action could transform
capricious and flexible conceptions of what was normal and abnormal.7
Perhaps the major result of the French Revolution was to push individual
choice and welfare to the forefront of value systems. The rights of individuals
to select their own political, religious, and social beliefs contrasted with the
emphasis on traditional social ties and values found in the tightly knit groups
that had persisted through most of human history. Social relationships
increasingly were temporary, serial, and chosen rather than stable, lasting, and
compulsory. Connections to the past, to a particular place, and to one’s family
of origin weakened. Cultural norms in Western individualist societies came to
value autonomy more than authority, uniqueness more than conformity, and
newness more than continuity. Rules limiting personal freedom became less
justifiable. English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–​1873) provided per-
haps the best summary of legitimate restraint over individual behavior: “The
only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of
a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”8
Another by-​product of the French Revolution was the emergence of the
scientific study of normality and abnormality. The revolutionaries’ egalitar-
ian ethos propelled the common person to the forefront of interest. This his-
torically unique exultation of the ordinary individual resulted in a new way
of thinking about what was normal. Most prominently, Belgian statistician
Adolphe Quetelet (1796–​1874) developed a social physics that was based on
statistical indices of the average man (l’homme moyen), who represented the
mean value of numerous observations of some variable within a particular
group. Quetelet’s view was radically democratic because each individual, from
the most noble to the most downtrodden, had equivalent weight to every
other one. Quetelet compiled aggregate statistics on factors such as height,
weight, birth, and death, as well as moral qualities ranging from drunken-
ness and insanity to suicide and crime, to determine how each was related to
characteristics such as age, sex, and marital status. He emphasized how these
associations were not universal but varied across different regions, countries,
and historical eras. In this sense, statistical views of normality were grounded
in cultural conceptions that emphasize how normality and abnormality are
derived from whatever traits are common in particular times and places.9
Quetelet came to view the average man not simply as embodying statisti-
cal frequency but as illustrating a moral quality. “If an individual at any given
epoch of society possessed all the qualities of the average man,” he asserted,
“he would represent all that is great, good, or beautiful.” As Herodotus had
emphasized, what most people did was not just common but positively
7

Herodotus and Darwin      •      7

esteemed: Norms not only described behavior but also actively shaped stan-
dards for moral evaluation in each group.10
The heritage of cultural relativism that sprang from early social scien-
tists, empiricist philosophers such as Locke, and the outcomes of the French
Revolution became foundational for the anthropological view that domi-
nated thinking about the nature of human behavior for most of the twentieth
century. Based on the works of Franz Boas (1858–​1942), a German immi-
grant to the United States, and his students Ruth Benedict (1887–​1948) and
Margaret Mead (1901–​1978), anthropologists insisted that human behavior
was not innate but varied enormously across cultures. History, circumstance,
and environment were the primary forces that shaped lifestyles, human rela-
tions, and moral codes in each culture. These forces were powerful enough
to override whatever inherited traits humans shared with members of other
groups.11
Anthropologists strove to develop a new discipline freed of biological
influences. Benedict’s immensely popular Patterns of Culture (1934/​1959)
posited that learned, culturally specific values defined all forms of human
behavior. She proclaimed, “Not one item of his tribal social organization, of
his language, of his local religion is carried in his germ cell.” Benedict used
examples of Ancient Greek definitions of homosexuality, the catatonic trances
of native healers, and paranoid character traits among the Dobuan Islanders
of New Guinea to assert that virtually all behaviors that our society views
as abnormal other cultures consider as normal. “All our local conventions of
moral behavior are without absolute validity,” Benedict concluded. From the
1940s through the 1960s, Benedict’s younger colleague, Margaret Mead, was
the major spokesperson for the anthropological view. Like Benedict, she was
a thoughgoing cultural determinist who insisted that biology was irrelevant
for explaining human behavior. “We are forced to conclude,” Mead wrote,
“that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately
and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.”12
For decades, anthropologists continued to divorce notions of normal and
abnormal behaviors from any biological grounding. One of the discipline’s
leading midcentury spokespersons, Ashley Montagu (1905–​1999), summa-
rized: “Man has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he
has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the manmade part of the envi-
ronment, from other human beings.” Moreover, unlike genes, cultures could
undergo massive changes in a single generation. “Concepts and terms like
‘heredity,’ ‘biological influences,’ and ‘instinct,’ dropped below the horizon in
social science,” historian Carl Degler observes about this era.13
8   
•  Wh a t ’ s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture

Sociologists, too, following the lead of the discipline’s central founders,

Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, strove to establish a field of study that
was thoroughly divorced from any biological influences. Many embraced
the immensely popular works of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who
insisted that social practices, institutions, and values constitute what groups
conceive as pathological or desirable. Constantly transforming social defini-
tions of who is considered mad, deviant, or defective reflect the dominant
modes of thinking and power structures in different time periods. Distinctions
between normality and abnormality stem from value-​laden constructions
that vary from group to group and lack any objective natural foundation.14
For most of the twentieth century, psychologists also embraced a thor-
oughly environmentalist view of human behavior. Perhaps the most influen-
tial psychologist of the twentieth century, John Watson (1878–​1958), was
intensely concerned with debates about the relative influence of nature and
nurture in human development. He famously declared,

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-​formed, and my own specified

world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random
and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—​doctor,
lawyer, artist, merchant—​chief and, yes, even beggar-​man and thief,
regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and
race of his ancestors.

Although Watson initially granted that a small number of emotional states,

limited to fear, rage, and love, were innate, he later denied the influence of
even those instincts, focusing instead on the conditioned nature of all human
behavior. People displayed the behaviors that their environments reinforced;
when reinforcement ceased, so did the reinforced behaviors. Abnormal behav-
iors, too, did not require distinct explanations but arose from external rein-
forcements, not innate drives or preferences. Watson’s disciple, B. F. Skinner
(1904–​1990), took this view to its logical extreme, believing that behaviorists
had the power to fundamentally change all human behavior by deliberately
and rationally modifying environments.15
More recently, the arbitrary aspect of social norms has become a rally-
ing cry for social movements that promote the rights of disabled persons.
Advocates for groups spanning from the autistic to the deaf to the obese
and the mentally ill contend that social definitions, not biology, account for
their disadvantages. They value difference and reject conformity. “I am dif-
ferent,” proclaims iconic activist for people with autism, Temple Grandin,
╇ 9

Herodotus and Darwin ↜渀屮↜渀 • ↜渀屮↜渀 9

“not less.” For example, mental illnesses are not disorders but illustrate
“neurodiversity.” Or, deafness is a valued difference to be celebrated rather
than an impairment to be corrected. Sexual identification, too, stems from
“heteronormativity” that gives unwarranted hegemony to binary categories
of male and female. People without disabilities are merely “neurotypical,”
not normal. “You are never to use the word normal,” Andrew Solomon
notes in regard to these groups, “and you are certainly never to use the word
abnormal.”16
Like Herodotus, empiricist philosophers, behavioral psychologists,
anthropologists, sociologists, and disability advocates assert that the possi-
ble varieties of human behavior and moral codes are virtually unlimited and
unconstrained by biology. Nurture, not nature, shapes what we regard as nor-
mal or abnormal.

From Plato to Biology

There is a fairly straightforward continuity between Herodotus’ focus on
cultural diversity and the moral relativity that emerged in seventeenth-╉and
eighteenth-╉century Europe and later became a dominant theme among
anthropologists, sociologists, behavioral psychologists, and disability advo-
cates. In contrast, the Platonic natural law tradition that used innate reason
as the basis for distinguishing natural from unnatural behaviors was radically
transformed during the nineteenth century.
In the mid-╉1800s, Charles Darwin (1809–╉1882) produced a new biological
view of what is natural or unnatural, which came to dominate social thought
through the remainder of that century. Whereas Socratics divorced the func-
tions of the mind from the physiology of the body, Darwin grounded men-
tal phenomena in organic processes. Despite the vast divergences in Socratic
and Darwinian views, however, both sought a universal, innate, and constant
basis for judging what traits are appropriate or pathological. Darwin argued
that every form of life evolved according to the principle of natural selection.
All organisms confront basic challenges of obtaining nutrition, defending
themselves against predators, and transmitting their genes to future genera-
tions. These processes lead different traits to have different survival values in
given environments; forms of life that can best adjust to their circumstances
are more likely to survive and spread their genes than those that make less
adaptive responses.17
When Darwin developed his pathbreaking theory, humans were not
viewed as subject to the laws of evolution. Religious opposition to evolution
1 0   
•  Wh a t ’ s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture

stemmed from beliefs that each species arose from separate acts of divine
creation. Prevalent scientific views also exempted humans from natural selec-
tion, primarily because language created an insurmountable barrier between
people and other animals. In stark contrast, perhaps Darwin’s most radical
insight was that human beings were as much a part of nature as any other
form of life. He emphasized a basic continuity across species: “There is no
fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their men-
tal faculties.” Both mental and physical traits among humans derived from
evolutionary descendants and differed in degree, not in kind, from other
animals:

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and
faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason
etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even some-
times in a well-​developed condition, in the lower animals.18

Darwin especially focused on similarities between humans and other pri-

mates, noting “that there is a much wider interval in mental power between
one of the lowest fishes … and one of the higher apes, than between an ape
and man.” Even faculties such as language, reasoning, morality, and religion,
which seem to be uniquely human, are found in rudimentary forms among
other animals. All forms of evidence “point in the plainest manner to the
conclusion that man is the co-​descendant with other mammals of a common
progenitor,” Darwin concluded.19
Darwin emphasized not just the link of humans with other species but
also the link of humans with each other. He rejected prevailing beliefs that
focused on the distinctiveness of various cultures. All peoples were joined by
a core set of characteristics with deep physiological roots. He used evidence
taken from an array of sources, including observations from other animals,
infants, blind people, and informants from different cultures, to show that
human emotions such as grief, fear, joy, anger, disgust, shame, and pride are
inherited through a common ancestry. “It follows,” he asserted, “that the
same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uni-
formity; and this fact is in itself interesting as evidence of the close similar-
ity in bodily structure and mental disposition of all the races, of mankind.”
Because they were “the same throughout the world,” they provide “a new
argument in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent-​
stock.” Darwin’s own observations confirmed his theory about the resem-
blances among various cultures:
11

Herodotus and Darwin      •      11

The American aborigines, Negroes, and Europeans are as different

from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet
I was incessantly struck, while living with the Fuegians on board the
“Beagle,” with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar
their minds were to ours.20

Darwin’s encounter with a native of Tierra del Fuego exemplified his com-
plicated thoughts about how overt cultural differences reflect more universal
themes:

The term “disgust,” in its simplest sense, means something offensive to

the taste. It is curious how readily this feeling is excited by anything
unusual in the appearance, odour, or nature of our food. In Tierra
del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat
which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at
its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a
naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.

Darwin’s description contains echoes of Herodotus’ account of the Greeks and

the Callatiae. He is disgusted when a “naked savage” touches his food but gives
equal weight to the “utter disgust” the native felt when he handled Darwin’s
meat. Universal predispositions to be disgusted when humans confront “any-
thing unusual in the appearance, odour, or nature of our food” underlie the
culturally variable expressions of food preferences, among many others.21
To Darwin, the many points of similarity across species and human races
indicated that emotional expressions are inherited rather than acquired
through experience. Despite the fact that he was unaware of the genetic
mechanisms that transmit inherited traits, he emphasized how human behav-
iors are not learned through experience but are inborn responses that had
been adaptive in earlier stages of evolution:

That the chief expressive actions, exhibited by man and by the lower
animals, are now innate or inherited—​that is, have not been learnt by
the individual—​is admitted by every one. So little has learning or imi-
tation to do with several of them that they are from the earliest days
and throughout life quite beyond our control.

Races as diverse as Australian aborigines and modern Europeans present

their feelings in similar ways. Even the congenitally blind who could not have
1 2   
•  Wh a t ’ s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture

observed other people’s emotional displays show their feelings through the
same expressions as the sighted. Perhaps most remarkably, human emotional
presentations show distinct resemblances to those found among other spe-
cies. Human behaviors, feelings, and emotions are inborn, genetically pro-
grammed, and universally shared.22
Finally, Darwin highlighted the fundamental constancy of human func-
tioning across time. He emphasized how a relatively fixed underlying psychol-
ogy designed to optimally respond to ancient circumstances still profoundly
influences human behavior, even though it is often ill-​suited for modern life:

The chief part of the organization of every living creature is due to

inheritance; and consequently, though each being assuredly is well fit-
ted for its place in nature, many structures have now no very close and
direct relations to present habits of life.

Biological qualities of humans that were adaptive when they initially devel-
oped are often poorly suited to cope with new environmental circumstances.
Nevertheless, they persist to the present.23
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Darwin’s theories
became associated with the influential movement of social Darwinism.
Darwin himself, although he shared many common Victorian notions of
Western superiority, generally emphasized the similarities more than the
divergences among human groups. The social Darwinists, however, viewed
normality and abnormality as rooted in biological differences among indi-
viduals, social classes, and races. Applying the concept of natural selection to
human societies, they unabashedly proclaimed the preeminence of White,
Western, especially northern European, cultures and the inferiority of non-​
White, non-​Western groups. Normality and abnormality became ideological
tools to justify, first, Western colonialism and, later, Nazi atrocities. Although
Darwin’s own approach had little similarity with the racist philosophy of
social Darwinism, the cultural view that dominated during most of the twen-
tieth century discredited all biological theories, which largely dropped out of
the intellectual landscape during the first half of the century.24
After a steep decline during the reign of the cultural and behavioral
views, the biological outlook that dominated nineteenth-​century thought
reemerged in the mid-​twentieth century. Originally, studies of nonhuman
animals returned this view to public prominence. Zoologist Konrad Lorentz
won the Noble Prize for his research showing how geese innately bonded
with their mothers. Primatologist Jane Goodall’s studies indicated a natural
13

Herodotus and Darwin      •      13

basis for the social behavior she observed among chimpanzees in the wild.
Bestselling books such as Desmond Morris’ Naked Ape brought the emergent
ethological perspective to a broad lay audience. Cracks in the dominance of
behaviorist psychology emerged as Harry Harlow’s experiments found that
infant monkeys had inborn preferences for nurturing mothers or mother
substitutes. In addition, contradicting Watson’s belief that virtually any rein-
forced behavior could become common, psychologist Martin Seligman’s
work showed that many emotions were biologically pre-​prepared and defied
the principles of learned conditioning.25
Biologists also made tremendous scientific advances during the 1950s and
1960s. In particular, Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA propelled research
on the structures and functions of genes. Psychiatrists uncovered the neuronal
and neurochemical structures and functions of the brain as well as developed
drugs that targeted specific receptor sites. By the 1970s, imaging techniques
such as computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans and magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) allowed neuroscientists previously unthinkable opportunities
to view the operation of living brains. Federal research funding and policymak-
ing turned sharply away from psychosocial to biological approaches.26
From the 1970s onward, evolutionary perspectives also returned to the
consciousness of the general culture. E. O. Wilson’s tome, Sociobiology, was
one landmark in the re-​emergence of the biological view, heralding a new
stage in the debate between the cultural and biological traditions. This influ-
ential volume synthesized scholarship on how genes influenced most animal
behaviors and concluded with a controversial chapter suggesting that human
values also might have universal, natural underpinnings. In later works,
Wilson expanded on this view, attempting to demonstrate how “all tangible
phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are
based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and
tortuous the chains, to the laws of physics.”27
During the 1990s, a new approach to human thought and action, evo-
lutionary psychology, emerged that focused on the aspect of Darwin’s work
that emphasized how the natural qualities of organisms are often mismatched
with the settings in which they must function. Evolutionary psychologists
emphasize how conditions in the Pleistocene Era, which roughly spanned the
period when the human genome developed from 2 million to 10,000 years
ago, set the baseline for natural and unnatural functioning. During this long
period, faster, stronger, and larger predators posed genuine threats to humans,
no adequate protections against harsh climates existed, infant mortality was
common, life spans were short, diseases were impossible to defend against,
1 4   
•  Wh a t ’ s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture

and food supplies were often scarce. Humans lived in hunter–​gatherer societ-
ies in which almost all interactions occurred among a small number of group
members. Rare encounters with strangers usually signaled the presence of
danger. Natural selection favored genes that transmitted those traits that best
promoted survival and reproduction within small tightly linked groups that
confronted unforgiving settings.28
Most activities, relationships, and tempos in the modern developed world
starkly contrast with the environments humans were shaped to deal with.
Nonhuman predators rarely pose dangers, most diseases are preventable and
curable during childbearing years, infant mortality is rare, contraception is
plentiful, and few people consciously desire to have many children. Food sup-
plies are generally abundant, and life spans are long. Heating, air conditioning,
and electric lights protect people from harsh climates. People interact with
far more different and unrelated individuals. The Internet, cell phones, and
other current forms of communication establish worldwide connectivity that
extends far beyond the several hundred contacts people had during prehistory.
Humans now confront social structures and technologies that are often
at odds with their Stone Age mentalities. Yet, human biology makes people
prone to act in many respects as if we live in Pleistocene times. Men still
desire numerous sexual partners, although the widespread use of contracep-
tion does not translate copulation with more women into greater numbers of
offspring. People respond to ancestral cues—​ranging from images of naked
women on computer screens to artificial sweeteners—​that resemble signals
of enhanced fitness in the distant past. “Humans are not fitness-​maximizers,”
evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Lida Cosmides explain, “They are
ancestral environment fitness-​cue maximizers, a profoundly different thing.”
The stability of inherited predispositions is a common source of impairment,
suffering, and distress in a world that bears scant resemblance to the ancient
circumstances in which the human brain developed.29
By the end of the twentieth century, changes in both general and scientific
cultures led biological views to once again gain preeminence in explaining
normality and abnormality. The sequencing of the human genome, the flour-
ishing of neuroscience, the development of new technologies for viewing the
brain, and the growing popularity of evolutionary psychology restored the
credibility of biologically based approaches to human behavior. Psychologists
turned dramatically away from behaviorist views toward neuroscientific
views. Likewise, psychiatry radically transformed itself from a psychosocially
oriented discipline to a field centered on the brain. In contrast to the cultural
view that dominated most of the twentieth century, Darwin’s nature came to
╇ 15

Herodotus and Darwin ↜渀屮↜渀 • ↜渀屮↜渀 15

prevail over Herodotus’ nurture. Turning the cultural view on its head, mod-
ern Darwinians emphasize how human behavior is more innate than learned,
more uniform than variable, and more grounded in laws of nature than in
arbitrary social norms. Even morality itself is an outgrowth of inborn traits as
opposed to acquired human ethics.30

Reconciling Genes and the Environment

For most of the past century, genes and the environment were viewed as
two distinct processes. Although Darwin had been intensely concerned
with the interaction between environments and internal characteristics of
organisms, interest in the relationship between innate traits and social cir-
cumstances waned during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. Subsequent schools emphasized either nature (social Darwinism,
sociobiology, and neuroscience) or nurture (anthropology, sociology, and
behavioral psychology).31 Some signs, however, indicate that the culture
wars of the past few decades are starting to wane.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, recognition began to grow that
one-╉sided views focusing on either biology or society were inherently incom-
plete. For many, the issue became a question not of whether nature or nurture
influences human behavior but of the interplay between heredity and culture.
The notion that nature and nurture, biology and culture, are inseparable forces
shaping normal and abnormal behavior became more widely acknowledged.
As sociologist Ullica Segerstrale observed, “â•›‘Genetics’ and ‘behavior,’ were no
longer seen as incompatible when it came to humans.” Similarly, an editorial
in Nature proclaimed, “It is time for sociologists and biologists to bury the
hatchet.” Although relatively few sociologists study biologically related topics
and many instinctively continue to deny the importance of biological influ-
ences on human behavior, a number of the field’s leaders have called for more
assimilation of social and biological processes.32
One spur to the integration of the environment and genetic effects, which
renewed the importance that Darwin had placed on external circumstances,
has been research showing how genetic influences depend on the social con-
texts in which they are expressed. For example, the genes that make people
prone to depression become manifest only in certain kinds of social environ-
ments. One well-╉known study found that genes regulating serotonin lev-
els have no direct effect on rates of depression. However, people who both
possess the short allele of the 5-╉HTT gene and experience especially high
levels of social stress are more likely to be depressed. Conversely, favorable
1 6   
•  Wh a t ’ s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture

environmental circumstances such as high levels of family support can sup-

press genetic liabilities to alcoholism or delinquency. That is, social and cul-
tural factors can trigger genetic propensities or mitigate genetic defects.33
The rise of the field of epigenetics has been another source for the mutual
study of biological and social influences. Epigenetic studies show how trau-
matic social environments, especially those occurring during the first few
years of life, can impact synaptic structures and neural pathways throughout
a lifetime. Likewise, exposure to environmental toxins—​which vary greatly
according to socially patterned positions—​such as inadequate nutrition or
chemical pollutants can produce changes in genetic material. One study, for
example, showed that individuals with prenatal exposure to famine conditions
during World War II had hypomethylated genes for insulin growth factors six
decades later. Although it is unlikely that these changes are transmitted to
future generations, they indicate that genetic expressions are not invariant but
can change dynamically over an individual’s life course in response to interac-
tional and environmental factors. Brains are highly social organs.34
A third factor reconciling biological and social forces has been the recogni-
tion that biological forces are neither deterministic nor unchangeable. Until
recently, most observers had viewed natural influences as more impermeable
than cultural ones. For example, the influential opponent of sociobiology,
Steven J. Gould, criticized biological views because connecting some phenom-
enon with “human nature” meant that it could not be modified. In fact, tech-
nological developments have made it increasingly impossible to link biology
with determinism. Indeed, improvements in normalization technologies such
as drugs and surgeries as well as new procedures such as in vitro fertilization
mean that in many cases it is far easier to alter biological material than cul-
tural norms. Psychoactive drugs can alleviate the distress of people who inherit
dispositions to become depressed or anxious, surgeries can reduce obesity
or make biological sex conform to gender identity, and same-​sex partners or
infertile parents can have genetically related children. Growing understanding
of the interactions between genes and environments, of epigenetic processes,
and of how to modify biological processes has diminished, but far from erased,
the historical disconnect between cultural and biological approaches.35

Connecting Herodotus with Darwin: Harmful

Dysfunctions
Despite the traditionally sharp distinctions between the biological and
cultural views, new interpretations incorporate the idea that concepts of
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 CHAPTER XV

What next?
I had thought that our experiences so far had sufficiently numbed
my nerves to enable me to stand anything further with comparative
calm, but I had underestimated the ice pack.
During the night after our going afloat nothing happened as we
drifted, but by early morning of the next day, November 25, we were
once more in action, fighting the pack for our existence.
At six a.m., as a preliminary, drifting ice pressed us against the
edge of the pack and piled high up against our side, nipping our port
bow. An hour or so later, this developed into a heavy squeeze which
started more of our bulwark planking, and listed us sharply to port. At
this, coming while we were at breakfast, things commenced to look
bad and we began to shuffle nervously in our chairs, all hands
eyeing the exit to the poop, but Danenhower tried to ease the mental
strain for us when, bending down to retrieve his spoon which for the
third time had rolled off the sloping table to the deck, he remarked,
“Well, mates, if you’ve been itching for the good old days, now’s
your chance to cheer. With this heel, the Jeannette’s beginning to
feel to me like the old home again!”
But nobody laughed, and when after an hour of that ticklish heel,
the pressure slacked and we leveled off, no one regretted the
missing list, unnatural as its absence now felt to us.
Coming up on deck after a hasty breakfast, we found ourselves
adrift again near one end of a narrow lead of water perhaps a couple
of miles long, at the far end of which appeared a sizeable open bay.
De Long debated earnestly with both Chipp and Dunbar, whether he
ought to attempt to run out an ice-anchor and make fast to a floe,
though the question was largely academic for never did a large
enough floe come near us.
 In the late afternoon with still no decision, the question was settled
for us when a strong current springing up for some unknown reason,
the rudderless ship began to drift stern first down that canal in the
pack. At the same time the broken ice behind us also got underway
and started to follow, bearing down ominously for our bows.
We moved along with increasing speed, to our deep relief steadily
gaining on the broken floes pursuing us, till unfortunately at a bend in
the canal, our stern took the bank and stopped us dead. At this, with
our rudder post anchored in the floes, it seemed as if we were
caught, when De Long sang out happily,
“Look! Her bow is paying round as prettily as if she were casting
under jibs!” and to our surprise, it was so. Our stem swung through a
complete arc of 180°, our stern drifted clear of the ice, and there we
were, wholly without effort on our part, properly headed downstream
with the current!
But even that slight delay while coming about promptly put us in
difficulties. As our stern drifted free of the bank, the oncoming ice
struck us and we were jammed through that canal to an
accompaniment of tumbling and shrieking masses of ice awful to
contemplate. Huge hummocks, tons in weight, overhung our
bulwarks, threatening to break off and crash down on our decks;
floebergs large as churches bobbed up and down alongside like
whales, seemingly about to come aboard and overwhelm us, time
after time leaving us breathless as huddled inboard round the
mainmast we watched, not daring to go near the rail, even more
afraid to seek shelter below. Helpless, the Jeannette was pushed,
rammed, squeezed, and hammered along amidst the screeching of
the floes. Just as helpless, we stood in the Arctic night thankful
nevertheless for the bright moonlight which at mid-afternoon was
flooding the scene, for had we without that moon been in darkness
forced to stand by and listen to that shrieking ice without being able
to see, God alone knows what effect terror would have had on us!
This hair-raising passage lasted half an hour. Then as suddenly as
our ordeal had started, it ended in the midst of an eruption of ice
cakes by our being spewed from a final jam blocking the canal into a
large open bay where the current, with room to spread at last,
quickly lost speed, and the terrifying floebergs, no longer constricted,
fell slowly away from our sides!
With fervent sighs of relief at our deliverance we saw the battered
Jeannette lose headway, float gently toward the wide floe forming
the southerly bank of the bay, and quietly ram her blunt nose into the
young ice there, bringing up without a tremor and holding fast. So
ended our day.
It was getting along toward the end of November. For three days
after that, we lay against the edge of the bay while the young ice
thickened about us and a heavy southeast gale kicked up. Our
useless masts and spars whipped and rattled in the squalls, our
rigging, swollen to two or three times natural size by coatings of
frost, sang in the wind in a deep bass pitch wholly new to us, and the
ship shook in the gusts as if her sticks were going to be torn clean
out of her. But to us as sailors none of this was wholly novel; our only
anxiety was what effect this gale, the worst we had yet seen in the
Arctic, would have on the pack. We chopped a hole in the young ice
alongside, got a lead line down, and soon observed that the whole
pack was drifting to leeward with the wind, moving to the northwest
apparently into a large water space temporarily existing unseen by
us somewhere there in the Arctic Sea. These drift observations gave
us cause for sober thought. What would happen if, with the gale still
blowing to urge the ice northwest, something across its path brought
the pack to a stand?
We soon found out. On the third day of the storm, in the dim light
of a moon just rising in the morning, we saw the leeward ice
commence to move past the ship, paradoxically going to windward.
Whatever it was, something had brought the drifting pack to a
sudden halt, but the gale still howled on, driving to the northwest,
and unfortunately for us as we lay broadside to it, driving the ice to
windward fairly onto our port beam, dead against our framing. We
were in for another squeezing by the pack.
Before long the Jeannette, with the pressure squarely on her ribs,
caught now between opposing floes extending her entire length, was
quivering and snapping worse I think than ever in our experience.
Our spar deck arched up under the strain, pitch and oakum were
squeezed out of the seams, and a bucket full of water standing on a
hatch on the poop was half emptied of its contents by the constant
agitation.
To leeward of us, where the ice appeared weaker, one sheet rode
up over another and against this double thickness of ice our
starboard side jammed, while the port floe (which for some reason
seemed stronger than the ice to leeward) pressed fiercely against us
there. The Jeannette thus gripped, shivered and groaned dismally
and her decks bulged upwards till the heavy athwartship trusses in
her hull below came into play and took the squeeze directly. When
the ship was able to give no further, the noise ceased, and for half an
hour perhaps with only the trembling of the decks to indicate the
struggle, the pack pressed and the Jeannette resisted while we as
helpless spectators waited the outcome.
Suddenly the port floe humped and crumbled, relieving the thrust.
Our sprung decks flattened out to normal; we gasped in relief. But
our thankfulness was premature as it turned out, for piling its broken
edges higher against our side, the port floe, driven in by the wind,
pushed up for another nip and the whole performance was
immediately repeated with the Jeannette in a few minutes as badly
squeezed as before.
For eight solid hours the Jeannette fought the pack, over a dozen
times seemingly compressed to the point of collapse, only to have
the floe ice crumple up first and let her spring back into shape each
time. There was nothing we could do to aid her—as De Long put it, it
was simply a question of the ice going through her or of her being
strong enough to stand it. She was strong enough, which was all we
could say, and when at last in the late afternoon the gale died down,
the pressure ceased and she was still intact, we said it fervently. A
good ship, the Arctic Steamer Jeannette.
 CHAPTER XVI

December, 1879, our fourth month in the pack, came in with crisp
cold weather; and as the days passed with the ice about us
thickening and the pack showing signs of some stability, we began
again to breathe without the subconscious dread that each minute
was to be our last. After a few days thus, we even settled into the
winter routine of the ship, released our dogs, and commenced to
take some interest in the wonders of the Arctic night.
For a month, under the shadow of death, personalities had been
forgotten, personal idiosyncrasies submerged. Now with the easing
of that strain, our likes and dislikes, our personal vanities, and the
ordinary problems of existence in the Arctic, popped up once more.
De Long began to worry over scurvy. No Arctic expedition
previously of which we had knowledge had been free of it; in many of
them, scurvy, even more than ice, had been responsible for their
tales of horrible suffering, death, and disaster. Overmuch salt was
apparently the cause of scurvy; proper diet, proper water, and proper
exercise were the antidotes prescribed by Dr. Ambler, and De Long
plunged vigorously into a program designed to protect us from that
loathsome disease.
Exercise to fortify our bodies, the easiest of the requisites to
provide, received immediate attention. On December 2, after the first
night in weeks during which the captain felt secure enough to take
off his clothes when turning in, came a new order.
We were lounging round the messroom, hungrily waiting for
breakfast while Tong Sing padded about between pantry and table,
setting out the oatmeal, the coffee, and the thick slices of bread
when the door from the captain’s stateroom swung back, and with a
grave,
“Good morning, gentlemen,” in came De Long, holding a paper in
his hand.
 “Good morning, captain,” we replied in a ragged chorus, and
hardly waiting till the skipper had seated himself, slid into our chairs.
As usual, I lifted the cover of the oatmeal dish and started to serve.
“Wait a minute with that, Melville; I want to read this order.” The
captain adjusted his glasses, stroked his mustaches a moment while
scanning what he had written, then in his scholarly manner read,
“Until the return of spring, and on each day without
exception when the temperature is above thirty degrees
below zero, the ship will be cleared regularly by all hands
from eleven a.m. till one p.m. During this period every
officer and man will leave the ship for exercise on the ice,
which should be as vigorous as possible. No one except
the officer entering the noon observations in the log will for
any purpose during this period return to the ship.
(Signed) George Washington De Long,
Commanding.”
De Long as he finished, passed the paper to the executive officer
on his right, and ordered crisply,
“Chipp, have all the officers initial this now, and then publish it to
the crew at quarters.” In a more conversational tone, he added to us,
“I suppose, gentlemen, the order’s obvious enough. We’ve got to go
and get some exercise or we’ll all stagnate in this darkness and
make it easier for scurvy to get us. I’ve chosen the time when at
least there’s a little twilight, even though the sun’s gone. Does
anybody have any suggestions regarding exercises?”
The paper (together with Chipp’s pencil) passed back and forth
across the table as one after another, starting with Chipp, we initialed
the order, but no one had any comments to make. Once more I
started to dish out the oatmeal. Danenhower, at the foot of the table,
signing last, tossed the sheet of paper to Tong Sing, who shuffling
across the wardroom, with an Oriental bow laid it down before the
captain.
“Here, Chipp, take this to read to the crew,” said the skipper,
starting to push it toward the exec, then on second thought, holding it
an instant while his eyes glanced perfunctorily down the column of
initials below his signature. A deep flush came over his cheeks as he
read and he stiffened a little in his chair, but without looking up, he
announced sternly,
“Mr. Collins, I see you failed to sign this. What’s the matter?”
There was an instant of tension, then,
“Collins isn’t here yet, captain,” put in Chipp swiftly. “He’s often late
for breakfast. Thinks that having to take the observations on the
midwatch is such a strain, he’s got to sleep in every morning to
recuperate, I guess. I’d tell him later.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot that Mr. Collins is not usually with us for
breakfast.” The skipper’s flush faded, he finished pushing the order
to Chipp. “Very well, have him sign when he shows up. Now with
respect to the exercise for the crew, Chipp, serve out a couple of
footballs. They may want to play. And tell them that anyone who
wishes can get permission to take a rifle and go hunting.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Chipp folded the order, shoved it into his jacket.
“But I’m not so keen on that hunting business, captain. Skulking
around through all these broken hummocks, the men’ll be shooting
each other or the dogs, thinking that they’re bears or seals or
something. It always happens.”
“I won’t shed any tears over the dogs, anyway,” growled Dunbar. “I
think shooting a couple of dozen of ’em ‘by mistake’ would be a good
thing!”
“Belay that, Dunbar, you wouldn’t be so heartless,” piped up
Danenhower. “Don’t destroy my last boyhood illusion. What would
life in the Arctic be without our dogs, anyway?”
“Still hell, Dan, if you ask me, either with or without ’em,” replied
the ice-pilot grimly, passing his plate to me for oatmeal. “But getting
back to the question of exercise, cap’n, I think letting the men hunt’s
a fine idea. Surprising how far a man goes thinking that at the next
waterhole he’ll surely get a seal!”
The surgeon laughed softly.
 “He’ll be surprised all right if he goes with you, Dunbar,” drawled
Ambler. “I’ve done it and I know. Every time you say a thing’s a mile
away across this ice, the only reason it isn’t two miles off is because
it’s three. The men’ll be surprised all right if you take them hunting.”
Virginian and Yankee, the doctor and the ice-pilot were off again
on their favorite argument, Dunbar’s gross underestimation of the
distances he covered on his many scouting trips over the ice. But I
had another problem on my mind, and as soon as I had washed
down my oatmeal with the hot coffee (which by now Danenhower
had managed to get Ah Sam to turn out as a strong black
concoction) I went on deck to struggle with my distilling apparatus.
Historically, there is no doubt that scurvy, the seaman’s curse
since the days of Noah’s voyage in the Ark, has always resulted on
long cruises from the absence of fresh vegetables, the over-
abundance of salt beef, and the impure water (contaminated from
the bilges) which marked the sailor’s diet. And no one who has ever
seen the swollen joints, the rotting teeth, the hemorrhages under the
skin, and the bloated faces of the victims, but strains to fight shy of
scurvy as a shipmate.
Fresh vegetables, the first defense against this scourge, we could
only carry in limited degree when we left San Francisco, and they
had long since been exhausted. Of canned vegetables, especially
tomatoes, we had a considerable supply and on these we leaned
heavily as an antidote. Then of course we had three barrels of lime-
juice, the specific remedy introduced in 1795 by Sir Gilbert Blake
with such good results in the British Navy that ever since then the
British tars, forced to drink the stuff regularly, have been called in
derision “limeys” by their Yankee cousins. But in spite of all this we
did not feel safe. Other Arctic expeditions within the last fifty years,
as strongly fortified as we with lime-juice and in some cases as well
supplied with canned vegetables, had before the end of a winter in
the ice found scurvy decimating them in spite of their precautions.
We were fitted out with copies of every printed record of polar
exploration that either in the United States or in Europe, Bennett or
his satellites on the New York Herald could lay hands on. And De
Long, a good student if the Navy ever produced one, spent hours in
his cabin poring over the accounts of his contemporaries and his
predecessors in the ice puzzling out that riddle. Why in spite of lime-
juice and canned vegetables, in spite of pure fresh water daily
replenished from melting ice, had even our immediate rivals in the
race to the Pole still fallen prey to scurvy?
Their books gave no answer, but our experiences in getting water
by melting ice from the floebergs round us soon gave us a clue. We
had been led to believe that when sea water froze under very low
temperatures, the salt in it crystallized out, rose to the freezing
surface as an efflorescence, and was washed or blown away,
leaving the ice free of salt and fit to be melted into good drinking
water. Indeed Dr. Kane, whose words at that time were accepted as
gospel truth on all matters Arctic, had written,
“Ice formed at a temperature of -30° Fahrenheit will yield a
perfectly pure and potable element.”
And confirming this, Lieutenant Weyprecht, of the Austrian
expedition which in latitude 81° N. had discovered Franz Josef Land
only a few years ago, said that they found that ice over “a certain
thickness” yielded a pure water.
We were confident therefore when we entered the pack that we
needed only to send out a party with pick-axes to obtain from the
nearest convenient spot on the floe an abundant supply of fresh
water for drinking, cooking, and washing purposes. But we were
unpleasantly surprised to discover that we could find not a particle of
ice anywhere, whether cut from the top, the bottom, or the middle of
the floe, whether taken from old floes fifteen feet thick or young ice a
foot thick, that did not contain from twenty to thirty times as much
salt per gallon as even the poorest water Dr. Ambler felt he could
safely allow our men to drink continuously.
During our initial few weeks in the pack we regarded this situation
with incredulity, the same incredulity I have no doubt that the
medieval alchemist displayed when his dabbling revealed a fact
failing to conform to the principles of matter set forth by the master,
Aristotle—it simply could not be so! We concluded at first that
perhaps the ice immediately around us had not been formed at low
enough temperatures, or that it had not yet had time to reach that
“certain thickness.” But having nevertheless to get drinking water the
while we waited for temperature and time to form round us the pure
ice for our permanent supply, we were reduced to scouting far and
wide over the floes, scraping together from drifts here and there
enough snow to melt up for our minimum needs.
But as 1879 faded into 1880, we drifted to the northward, and the
Arctic winter struck us in all its cold fury, we were given a choice
opportunity to try to our hearts’ content ice of every thickness,
formed under every temperature from barely freezing down to -60°
F., and we could no longer blink the facts. On this matter, the
masters from Dr. Kane to Lieutenant Weyprecht were about as
reliable as a lot of gabbling old witches—what they said simply was
not so!
In the absence of any startling geographical discoveries or of any
marked progress toward the Pole, that we had exploded a third
Arctic fallacy (those respecting the Kuro-Si-Wo Current and Wrangel
Land being the first two) gave to Captain De Long and Dr. Ambler a
sense of having accomplished something at last. For Dr. Ambler
deduced from the observed fact that all floe ice retained some salt,
the mystery of the scurvy problem in previous expeditions. These,
using floe ice more or less mixed either with pure snow or ice formed
from melting snow, had obtained water passably potable but actually
(though their fixed misconceptions kept them ignorant of it)
containing so much salt that in spite of lime-juice rations and what-
have-you in the way of canned vegetables, the scurvy had struck
them down.
That deduction made it simple for us. All we had to do was to
avoid the use of tainted floe ice and we would be the first Arctic
expedition in history to dodge the scurvy. And in case the Jeannette
Expedition discovered nothing else, to bring that discovery back
home would at least salve in some measure our pride as explorers.
But if we were not to use the floes, where then was our water to
come from? The obvious answer seemed to be from carefully
selected snowdrifts, but as we floated north with the pack, we
learned the futility of that. The drifts we relied on for the first weeks
after we entered the pack were soon used up and Nature never
replenished them. Apparently off the north coast of Siberia in the
early fall it snowed, but as we drifted to the north of Wrangel Land
and the temperature, falling far below zero, stayed there, to our
dismayed astonishment we learned that in the ordinary sense it
never snowed where we were! Apparently the intense cold froze all
the vapor out of the atmosphere, leaving such a trifling percentage in
the dry air that regardless of other favorable conditions for a fine
snowfall, there just wasn’t enough moisture to provide the makings.
The result was that in a gale when a temperature change brought
snow, all that fell was a fine powdery deposit, ice mainly, which
driven by the wind cut into our faces like needles. What was worse
for us however (for in most cases we could stay inboard during a
blow) was that the gale drove these particles over the pack with such
force that they acted like a sand blast on the surface of the floes,
with the net result that when the wind died, such drifts as we could
find were so complete a mixture of powdered floe and driven snow
as to be heavily salted and wholly unfit for human needs.
Now, while we could find no newly formed safe drifts, it had not
been wholly impossible for us to get sufficient good snow from the
old ones by going further and further afield in the pack until the last
gale in November. This after making us “shoot the rapids” so to
speak in that canal, had left us stranded miles from our original
refuge in a pack of what was mostly relatively young ice. Naturally
there were no old drifts in that vicinity and the captain, at first fearful
of being torn away at any minute, was reluctant to permit anyone to
get out of sight of the ship in searching for snow. Willy-nilly,
therefore, we got our water by scraping the tops of nearby drifts
formed in the last storm. This was so salty, however, that within two
days Dr. Ambler had several of the officers and most of the crew
under treatment for diarrhoea. Aside from the ordinary effects of this
disorder in reducing the vitality of those afflicted, to us it was
especially disastrous, for since the “heads” on the ship were for
obvious reasons shut up, we had for months been using portable
“heads” made of tenting, set up on the ice some little distance from
the ship. It needs little imagination therefore to understand what
diarrhoea meant to a man under the frequent necessity of hastily
rushing off through the Arctic night to a flimsy canvas tent to sit there
in the bitter cold of a temperature some thirty degrees or more below
zero.
Given a few weeks of such excessive salinity in our water and it
was obvious that scurvy would get us, but that at least would take
several weeks. De Long was faced with the imperative necessity of
rectifying the situation within a few days or of risking the loss of his
crew as a result of the unavoidable physical exposure which
diarrhoea entailed under our peculiar circumstances.
De Long, Ambler, Chipp, and I held an ambulant council of war.
Muffled in our parkas, we first searched the pack around us for
suitable snowdrifts in the forlorn hope that perhaps the men had
missed a good one. We found a few that to the taste seemed
passable, but in each case the hope faded when the surgeon
squeezed a drop of silver nitrate into a melted sample, and inevitably
the milky white reaction showed excessive salt.
Not very hopefully we scanned the “head” situation. No chance of
improvement there. Since the ship was immovably frozen into the
ice, we dared neither to reopen the “heads” on the ship nor bring the
ones on the floe any closer to the gangway without risking an
outbreak of contagion.
So there being no safe water available from the pack ice, no hope
of getting any from snowfalls, and the absolute need of providing
some quickly lest the next movement of the ice find us with a
helpless crew unable even to abandon ship, it was the conclusion of
the council that, regardless of cost, we must make our own from sea
water. Naturally enough since I was engineer officer, De Long turned
that problem over to me.
Ordinarily it would not have been much of a problem technically.
On the ship steaming normally, and feeding her boilers from the sea,
I might have bled some steam off the auxiliary line, put it through a
distilling coil or worm we had fitted in our engine room, and collected
the resulting fresh water. But we were not only not steaming
normally, we were not steaming at all, because for the reasons I
have given previously our fires were out, our firerooms were cold,
and our boilers were emptied.
Aside from that, there was another angle to it that griped the
captain. To take sea water and distill it over into fresh water you’ve
got to boil it. That takes heat, and heat takes coal, and coal was of
all things we had aboard the most precious, more so even than food,
for in a pinch with our food exhausted we might go out on the pack
with rifles and knock down bears, seals, and walruses enough to
exist on, but where in those icy wastes could we go to knock down
even one ton of coal to feed our boilers when our bunkers were
emptied? For we had left only ninety tons, which (save for the scanty
supply I doled out to Ah Sam daily for cooking, and to Bosun Cole for
stoking the two stoves forward and aft to keep men and officers from
freezing to death) under the captain’s orders I was religiously
husbanding, so that if ever we were released by the pack, we might
be able again to fire up our boilers and do some of that exploring for
which we had come north.
Up to now, to live at all, we had had to burn coal enough to run the
galley and our heating stoves; from now on, if we were to live without
scurvy, we would have in addition to burn coal enough to run some
kind of an evaporator. What kind it might be, to give us safe water
and still consume the least possible quantity of “black diamonds,” the
captain left to me.
The problem started not with “How much water do we need?” but
with “How little water can we get by on?” I canvassed this question
with the doctor, the captain, the exec, Ah Sam and finally Jack Cole
—all of whom had something to contribute on what was the least
possible quantity needed for drinking, for cooking, for tea, and for
washing—and I came out with the answer that 40 gallons of water a
day, about a gallon and a quarter for each one of our thirty-three
men, was the irreducible minimum.
Naturally for this quantity, which was more or less in line with the
daily capacity of any really ambitious Kentucky moonshiner’s still, it
was foolishness to think of firing up so large a kettle as one of our
main boilers. Thinking over what else we had, my recollection lighted
on a small Baxter boiler which we had brought along to furnish
steam for driving an Edison electro-magnetic generator and
illuminating the ship with his newfangled carbon lamps. Edison’s
generator having proved a flat failure (probably because it got
soaked in salt water on our stormy crossing of Behring Sea) the
captain had ordered the whole works dismantled and struck below
into the hold. Without further delay, I had Lee and Bartlett resurrect
the Baxter boiler (leaving the rest of the outfit below) and this little
boiler with the help of my machinist and fireman, I soon had rigged
up inside the deckhouse, with its steam outlet hooked to a small coil
set outside in the open air on top of the deckhouse, where the cold
air would act as a very effective condenser on the vapor passing
through the worm.
Meanwhile, not waiting for this contraption to get into action, at the
surgeon’s suggestion the skipper ordered Cole to break out from the
hold a couple of barrels of lime-juice, which on December 2 for the
first time on the cruise, he started to issue. In our mess, a pitcher of
this stuff was placed on the table at dinner, where under the watchful
eye of the surgeon, each one of us, sweetening it to taste, had to
drink an ounce. For the crew, Alfred Sweetman, carpenter, was given
the responsibility of seeing that the men took theirs, and as each
watch laid below for dinner, under Sweetman’s observation, each
man was handed a tin cup with his ration of lime-juice and an ounce
of sugar to sweeten the unsavory mess, and compelled to drink it
before he could draw his food ration. Months of storage in casks had
not improved its flavor any, so in spite of Ambler’s gaze and
Sweetman’s vigilance, had it not been for the sugar generously
served out to sweeten the dose, I have little doubt that, scurvy or no
scurvy, all sorts of ingenious dodges would shortly have been
developed to avoid swallowing that tart medicine.
When the last pipe joint was tightened up, Bartlett fired the Baxter
boiler and we commenced distilling. Our first few days at it were to
my surprise pretty much a failure, for the distilled water which we
collected up on deck in a barrel set underneath the outlet of the
condensing worm, while better than the melted snow, still tested far
too high in salt for safe use, and our diarrhoea continued unabated.
This puzzled me (not to mention severely disappointing the captain)
and it took some hours of sleuthing about to discover the trouble. I
then found that we were feeding the boiler from a tank atop the
deckhouse. This tank was filled by the seaman on watch who hauled
water to the topside in a bucket from a hole chopped in the floe
alongside. Unless the man was careful (and a sailor working outside
in a temperature of 30° below zero is interested only in speed and
not in care) he would slop the sea water over both coil and
deckhouse, from which places enough trickled down into the fresh
water barrel to ruin completely our day’s output. Having discovered
this, I promptly rigged a pan over the barrel to catch the drip and
looked hopefully for better water. But my hopes were dashed once
again when, watching Surgeon Ambler test a sample from our next
barrel of water (the result of a whole day’s distilling), I saw to my
disgust the sample turn as milky as ever immediately he dropped a
little silver nitrate into it.
By now, we had been suffering four days from diarrhoea and the
situation was serious. I dropped everything else to devote my whole
time to watching the operation of our evaporator, endeavoring by an
analysis of what I could see done and what theoretically must be
going on inside the apparatus from firebox to receiving barrel, to
locate the reason or reasons why from our sea water feed, we failed
to get over and condense a pure steam, leaving all the salt behind as
a brine in the boiler. Thinking at first we might be boiling off the water
too fast, I had Bartlett damp his fire somewhat to make less steam,
but I soon found that that solved nothing. For with too little steam
going up through our condensing coil in the frigid atmosphere
outside, the condenser promptly froze up and burst a pipe, putting a
stop to distilling altogether till Lee thawed out the coil and repaired
the leak.
But hardly had we resumed operation again when what I saw gave
me the answer. Bartlett started up his little feed pump, and began
vigorously to pump cold water into the hot boiler to bring up the level
in the glass. Promptly, as shown by the needle on the gauge, the
pressure in the boiler tumbled and the water in the sight glass
started to bubble vigorously. And that had been our difficulty. The
sudden injection of cold feed water evidently created a vacuum in
the steam space. Under the reduced pressure the hot water in the
boiler had boiled off so violently that it carried salt spray up with the
steam and over into the distiller, where it ruined our make.
Now I had it.
“Enough, brother!” I sang out to Bartlett. “Stop that pump, haul
fires and secure everything!”
And from then on, alternating between sweating over that hot
boiler and freezing on our enforced trips to the “head,” Bartlett, Lee,
and I struggled all through the night. We shifted the location of the
feed water line inside the little boiler to a point as far away from the
steam space as we could get it, and inserted a constriction in the
steam line to the feed pump so that no one could, even by accident,
start the pump suddenly or make it stroke at anything more than
dead slow speed.
In the early morning, we finished, refilled the boiler, fired up, and
again started distilling. When we had to feed the boiler, we fed slowly
(which was the only way the pump would now run), and I felt sure
from the slight fluctuation of the pressure gauge that I had at last
ensured operation steady enough to eliminate priming. And when at
noon with the barrel half full of distilled water, Bartlett, Lee, and I, in
the front row of a cluster of fellow sufferers, gathered wearily round
the surgeon as he poised his silver nitrate solution over the test cup,
I felt there was some warrant for the hearty cheer which echoed
down the deck when Ambler announced,
“Very pure, chief!”
So ended our struggle to get fresh water. And in a few days our
intestinal troubles ended too, a result for which all hands were
devoutly thankful. But when I reported our success to the captain,
while he was even more laudatory in congratulating me than anyone
else had been, still for him there was a fly in the ointment which
completely took the edge off his enthusiasm.
“How much coal does that distiller use up, Melville?” he queried.
 “About two pounds of coal per gallon of water made, sir,” I
answered.
He figured mentally a moment, blinked sadly at me through his
glasses, then muttered,
“Two pounds per gallon, chief? Why, it’s nearly a hundred pounds
of coal a day just for distilling! That expenditure will ruin us if we
have to keep it up. Snow, snow! That’s what we need!”
 CHAPTER XVII

Continuing his program for dodging scurvy, De Long followed up his

exercise order by another calling for a thorough monthly medical
examination of all hands. In this I believe he had two objects—the
main one, of course, to give the surgeon a chance to catch and deal
with the first symptom of disease and especially scurvy, before it had
any opportunity to get out of bounds; the other, by maintaining a
record at frequent intervals of our physical condition, to study the
effect of the long Arctic night and of Arctic conditions generally on
the human body, and to learn perhaps the best method of combating
these effects.
I read the order absent-mindedly, made a mental note that at ten
next morning I was due for examination, and in the midst of my
engrossment over the urgent problem of how to save some coal,
promptly put the matter out of my thoughts. An hour later, Charley
Tong Sing touched my shoulder and announced in a singsong voice,
“Captain wantee you, chief, in cabin allee samee light away.”
More discussions about coal economy, I presumed.
But that idea was quickly knocked out of my head when stepping
into the cabin I found myself facing not the captain alone but also Mr.
Collins.
A little surprised at this unexpected situation, I looked enquiringly
from one to the other. Both men were on their feet, both were angry,
and evidently trouble was in the offing. Not being invited to take a
seat, naturally I remained standing also, looking quizzically from
Collins to the captain, wondering what was up.
I found out soon enough. De Long, waiting only till he was sure
that the steward was out of the room and the door firmly closed
behind me, with an evident effort to maintain an even tone broke the
silence.
 “Melville, I’ve sent for you as the officer aboard with longest
experience in Service customs to get from you an independent
opinion on the propriety of my medical examination order before I
proceed to enforce it. It seems that Mr. Collins here objects.”
So that was it.
I swore inwardly. Here was Collins heading for trouble again, and
unfortunately for me, here I was dragged into the muddle, evidently
by the captain this time, and from the nature of the case, bound to
offend our meteorologist if I even opened my mouth. What ailed
Collins anyway? I had never seen a man on shipboard with such an
unholy penchant for getting himself into difficulties.
Apparently the wrinkling of my bald brow and the way I fingered
my beard as the situation hit me, gave Collins an inkling of my
feelings, for without giving me a chance to speak, he burst out
heatedly,
“You’re absolutely correct, I do object! And regardless of what
Melville or anybody else you bring in here may say, I’m going to keep
on objecting! I never liked that exercise order you’ve already issued,
even though I’m obeying it. I’m a grown man, and I was before ever I
saw this ship, and I’ve got sense enough to decide for myself how
much exercise I need to keep my health and when I need to take it,
without anybody telling me. I don’t need to be ordered out like a
schoolboy for supervised play, nor have my steps dogged like a poor
man’s cur to see I take it. Nevertheless, I swallowed that. But this is
too much! I’ve got some rights and I’ve got some pride! Even if I am
down on the shipping articles as a seaman, I’m not a damned guinea
pig, to be stripped naked every few weeks for the doctor to
experiment on!”
This time I guess my jaw did drop in open-mouthed astonishment.
That seaman business again. How it must be rankling in Collins’
soul! I looked from Collins’ overwrought face to De Long’s, flushing a
fiery red. Had he been any other skipper I had ever sailed with, I
should have seen Collins immediately clapped into the brig for gross
insubordination. But of the scholarly De Long’s reactions I was not
so certain. Prudently I closed my mouth without uttering a word.
There was nothing I could say anyway that wouldn’t make a bad
situation worse.
De Long’s blue eyes, a startling contrast to his burning cheeks,
blinked queerly through his glasses as he stood there, struggling
inwardly to control himself the while regarding Collins.
“The scholar in him’s going to win out over the sailor,” I thought to
myself. “There’ll be no arrest.”
And so it proved. For what seemed an oppressive length of time
under that strain, the captain, without speaking, glared at Collins and
Collins unflinchingly glared back. Finally in an unbelievably mild
tone, the captain broke the tension.
“Will you please be seated, chief? I should have asked you
before.” I sat down. “And that will do for you, Mr. Collins; you may go
now. I see that Mr. Melville and I will get along much more rapidly
discussing this subject without your presence.”
Like an animal suddenly uncaged Collins, still glaring, turned his
back on us, and broke from the cabin, leaving the door wide open.
The captain closed it, then sank into an armchair facing me,
nervously chewing the twisted ends of his mustaches. Still breathing
heavily from his repressed emotions, he turned to me,
“Melville, it seems that everything I do for the discipline and safety
of my crew, that man takes as a personal affront! And now over this
examination matter, he’s positively insubordinate! I sent for you that
we might all discuss that order in a reasonable manner, and find out
what’s wrong with it, if anything is. But you saw what happened
instead! Nevertheless, chief, I want your frank opinion. Is there
anything wrong with that order?” De Long paused, looked anxiously
at me.
“To tell you the truth, captain,” I said, “I read it only once hurriedly
and then never gave it a second thought. The Navy Regulations
require us all to stand an annual physical examination; what
difference it makes to anyone, except to the doctor who has to do
the work, if it’s monthly, I can’t see. But so long as Dr. Ambler isn’t
complaining, what’s Collins blowing up about it for?”
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