alternatehistory.com

I've recently been reading 'Nathaniels Nutmeg' and from it it appears that, among others, James Lancaster used lemon juice as a cure for scurvy in 1601. This was reported to the Admiralty, but nothing came of it, and the curative power of lemon juice was not widely known until 1747 and not adopted by the British navy until 1795. It is estimated that perhaps a million people died of scurvy between these times.

So, what if James Lancaster's report is not lost, but instead scurvy is essentially eliminated some 160 years earlier than in OTL? If nothing else European exploration and explotation of the world is going to be more effective as higher percentages (perhaps much higher percentages) of ships crews will survive, so more ships will return. Knowledge of the world will probably increase faster, and exploitation of far-flung resources, such as spices, occurs more quickly and fully. Perhaps Europe becomes richer, sooner. And this does not take into account the extra descendants of that million people killed by scurvey.

Perhaps all of this leads to a quicker industrial revolution? Or somewhere else? Almost certainly to a world much different to OTL...
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