Captain Cook's dietician skills go on display

Captain James Cook's trailblazing feats as an explorer are well known, but it is his pioneering work in nutrition that is highlighted in a new celebration of science.

Cook's success in using pickled cabbage to save his crew from scurvy is documented in papers being published online to mark the 350th birthday of the Royal Society.

The London-based academy of science for the UK and the Commonwealth, founded in 1660, has created an interactive timeline called Trailblazing, which contains some of the society's most important and influential papers.

An article written by Cook for the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions journal in 1776 explains how his voyage aboard the HMS Resolution from 1772-75 did not lose a single crew member to scurvy.

He discusses the merits of "sour kraut", or sauerkraut, and malt in warding off the disease, caused by a vitamin C deficiency.

"We had on board large quantities of malt, of which was made sweet-wort ... and given from one or two pints in the day to each man," Cook wrote.

Scientists are unsure if it was the malt, which Cook believed to be the best weapon against scurvy, or simply the frequent replenishment of the ship's fresh food that kept the disease at bay.

But Cook's recordings remain one of the earliest triumphs in the study and endorsement of proper nutrition.

Royal Society head of library information services Keith Moore said while methods for preventing scurvy were known, Cook's use of world's best practice was praised.

In a letter to the Royal Society in 1775, lawyer and naturalist Daines Barrington wrote of Cook arriving in South Africa after a 28-month voyage "without having lost a single person by sickness".

Mr Moore said: "Even before he got home, this was big news. Cook had helped his crew to survive the journey and when he returned, the Royal Society asked him to write a paper."

Australian Howard Florey, who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for his role in the extraction of penicillin, also features in Trailblazing. The Royal Society holds a collection of Florey's papers and even a 1944 comic book entitled Penicillin.

"If you have to try to explain to people what the importance of science is, you can point to someone like Florey and just say: 'Look, this man saved millions of lives - millions of lives - and that's no exaggeration'," Mr Moore said.

Trailblazing also includes a gruesome account of an early blood transfusion in 1666.

Scientists and historians have included 60 articles from the 60,000 published since Philosophical Transactions, the world's oldest continuously published scientific journal, began in 1665.

Royal Society president Martin Rees hoped the public access would highlight the importance of science for its own sake and as a means of solving some of the world's problems.

"We've had journals which have published scientific ideas from the 1660s right up to the present," said Lord Rees. "What Trailblazing does is give us an idea for how science has changed over our history."

But, as Captain Cook's voyage to the Pacific Ocean to chart the transit of Venus across the sun in the late 1760s shows, perhaps science hasn't changed so much after all.

- AAP