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Due to the lack of fresh food, their diet consisted mainly of canned food, and considering that in 1898, vitamin C was not yet known, Dr Cook frighteningly pronounces the sailors' dreaded diagnosis - scurvy considered a disease of the past, which for centuries killed over two million sailors. On the Belgica, there were large quantities of preserved lime juice, which proved completely ineffective in stopping the disease; the juice of the Mediterranean lemon was the only one able to fight this disease.
So, the doctor was forced to improvise again! He remembered the Inuits of Greenland and the fact that they did not have the symptoms of this disease. Their diet consisted almost entirely of fresh meat and fat eaten raw! So, he prescribed the daily consumption of fresh penguin or seal meat, as little cooked as possible, as much as possible, in the blood. The treatment had immediate effects on those who followed it!
Amundsen, who had been feeling unwell at the beginning of July and who valued Dr Cook's opinion very highly, immediately began to eat raw penguins and, within two weeks, had fully recovered! Lecointe, the second in command, initially refused to eat the recommended meat, and his condition worsened considerably. "His case seems to me almost hopeless", wrote Dr Cook, who considered his second in command "the dominant figure in our ranks" and to whom, if anything had happened, the rest of the crew would have fallen prey to despair. Lecointe realised that it was time to listen to the doctor and declared: "I will sit on the stove for a whole month and eat penguins for the rest of my polar life if it does me any good!" Within just 10 days, Lecointe was able to resume all his scientific duties.
Unfortunately, not all the crew members were as understanding as Lecointe when it came to Dr. Cook's advice. One of those who consistently refused to eat penguin and seal meat was Commander de Gerlache himself. Regarding the taste of penguin meat, the staff confessed that: "It is quite difficult to describe its taste and appearance; we have absolutely no meat to compare it with. The penguin, as an animal, seems to be made up of an equal proportion of mammals, fish and birds. If it is possible to imagine a piece of beef, a smelt cod and a cloth-backed duck roasted in a pot, with blood and cod liver oil as a sauce, the illustration will be complete."
This lightly cooked dish was a necessity. The crew, however, did not lack for almost inedible culinary creations. Their chef, the Belgian Louis Michotte, was a special character within the crew. Emil Racoviță left us humorous pages remembering the soups and cakes he prepared: "When it came to soup, the mixing method reached dizzying heights of perfection. Everything that was left over from the morning, lunch and evening meals, everything that Michotte's inquisitive eye discovered through used cans or drawers, everything that was approximately edible on deck, met in the soup bowl. Thus, it was that when the towering Michotte placed the dish containing his work on the table, and the commander lifted the lid, a smell that could not be compared to anything else would disperse in the dining room."
The cake, another creation of master Michotte and described by Raco, as Racoviță's colleagues called him, will amuse us: "Purged by ambition, one day he told us serenely that he was going to make us a puff pastry with jam. ....towards the end of the meal, the door of the room opened, and Michotte appeared with a serious and superior air, carrying something in his outstretched hands on a plate that he respectfully placed on the table. Curious, we all climbed to see what had been brought to the plate: something round, yellowish, resembling a wooden plate on which a mixture of jams had been spread very stingily. Each of us took a spoonful of the sweet mixture, and we confessed that it was not bad, but we wondered what strange idea he had to bring this cake on a wooden bottom. The door opened again, and it was Michotte who, seeing that he was not called upon to be congratulated, decided to receive the expected reward in person. He looked at the plate and frowned. He told us coldly that what was left, that is, the wooden bottom, was the puff pastry and that we had eaten all the garnish. There was such intensity in Michotte's gaze, and his face showed such despair that the state of mind of our comrade moved us deeply. Arming ourselves with knives and other blunt instruments, we broke the pastry into pieces, which we passed into our rebellious stomachs in front of Michotte's peaceful gaze. However, we suffered from our generosity because, from then on, Thursday became the dreaded day of the cake, which remained unchanged. It was the same mixture of all kinds of jams spread with calyx on a blackish plate. Only the consistency of the dough changed: it varied between the hardness of wood and stone.