FIRST your skin bruises as your capillaries start to disintegrate. Then old wounds reopen. Bones are dyed black as blood leaks out of your muscles, and your senses are heightened to the point where smells become intolerable. Everything stinks, but nothing is quite as putrid as you – and then you die.
Scurvy is an exceptionally revolting disease, and it was once commonplace on the high seas. The discovery in the 18th century that a regular supply of citrus fruits could prevent it eventually made seafaring far less treacherous. But it had rather less palatable consequences on the Mediterranean island of Sicily: according to a new historical analysis, the world’s most notorious criminal enterprise sprang up here in parallel with the growing thirst for lemons.
Popular explanations for the rise of the Sicilian Mafia tend to emphasise the weakness of government institutions, which had precious little power to protect property, and the legacy of feudalism. But such theories alone can’t account for the variation in the organisation’s rise in different parts of the island. That is why some researchers have instead looked out to sea.
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Historians estimate that between 1500 and 1800, scurvy caused 2 million deaths at sea, making it the leading occupational hazard of a nautical life. At the heart of the problem was a failure to understand the disease: was it caused by an infection or some sort of dietary deficiency?
It wasn’t until the 1790s, after a series of experimental trials demonstrated the preventative power of citrus fruits, which we now know to be rich in vitamin C, that the British navy issued official guidance that all ships should carry a supply.
A few years later, in 1806, Sicily came under British control. It was the perfect place to grow lemons, and the navy was quick to take advantage. In the 20 years after its new guidelines appeared, the admiralty served up 7.3 million litres of lemon juice, a good portion of which came from Sicily.
The rising demand transformed the island’s economy almost overnight. In the 1850s, Sicily gave over just 80 square kilometres to growing lemons, producing 750,000 cases a year for export. Thirty years later, those numbers had more than tripled. “Probably I would compare it to the discovery in the north of Norway that they had natural gas,” says Alessia Isopi, an economist at the University of Manchester, UK.
Sicily’s lemon boom coincided with turbulent times in Europe. The Napoleonic wars had seen British and French forces occupy the Italian peninsula at various times. With their retreat, citizens across the fractured states there began to dream of a unified Italy, sparking a series of rebellions, revolutions and full-blown wars. “Essentially what happened is the idealistic gentlemen who wanted to make a new Italy enlisted thugs to help,” says the historian John Dickie, author of Cosa Nostra: A history of the Sicilian Mafia.
These gangsters formed secret societies, using their connections to wrest positions of influence in politics and law enforcement. In the south of what is now Italy, where governmental oversight was especially weak, they flourished – and nowhere more so than Sicily. The high profit margins for investing in citrus meant the criminal societies there grew particularly rich.
Italian historian Salvatore Lupo first drew attention to the connection in 1990, and Dickie expanded on the hypothesis in his 2004 book. In many ways, Dickie pointed out, lemons were ideal for the budding Mafiosi. Even with the island’s perfect growing conditions, they were a considerable investment: farmers had to secure access to a water supply and set up an irrigation system, and then they had to wait five years or more for the first fruit. With the lemon trees so delicate and the lemons themselves so easy to steal, says Dickie, “there are a whole series of points where gangsters could apply extortionary pressure”.
But that was just a hypothesis. Only now have Isopi, together with at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and Ola Olsson at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, put it to the test using hard data.
Last year, the trio published an economic analysis based on the Damiani Enquiry, the Sicilian section of a report commissioned by the Italian parliament in the early 1880s to examine the conditions of the new country’s land and people. The report also recorded the location and nature of crimes committed, and this allowed the researchers to make a telling comparison.
“For one observer, lemon blossom started to smell of corpses”
When they analysed the crime figures, which they treated as a proxy for Mafia presence, alongside statistics on the number of lemons produced across Sicily, the researchers found that . “The effect is there,” says Dimico – whereas it is nowhere near as pronounced for any of the island’s other major exports, including olives, grapes and sulphur.
It all seems to stack up. “It’s undoubtedly true that citrus fruit was the business the Mafia grew up around,” says Dickie. “All of the early Mafia bosses of the Palermo area that we know of in the 19th century were lemon traders, owners of lemon groves, guards of lemon groves.” Referring to regular reports of the crimes these men committed, one contemporary government official wrote that “after a certain number of these stories, the scent of orange and lemon blossom starts to smell of corpses”.
Even so, Dickie is wary of putting too much weight on this one explanation. “It sounds a bit like economic determinism to say it’s all to do with lemons,” he says. The forces of history are seldom so cut and dried. Indeed, Dimico agrees that the thirst for lemons was “one of several factors that contributes to the emergence of organised crime”.
The one thing that Sicilian lemons did not do was eradicate scurvy from the British navy, at least not for a while. With the Americans importing an ever larger share of the island’s crop, market forces eventually drove the British towards cheaper Caribbean limes, a preference that earned British sailors the epithet “limeys”.
But limes were less effective, largely because they contain less vitamin C than lemons. That led many seafarers to question the very idea that citrus can prevent scurvy, and to call for mandatory consumption to be abandoned. Even former sailors who mounted long expeditions to the poles were not convinced, which might help to explain why Captain Robert Falcon Scott was beaten to the South Pole in 1911.
It was not until 1932 that vitamin C deficiency was definitively identified as the cause of scurvy. By that point, however, with the Mafia firmly entrenched on both sides of the Atlantic, the demand for Sicily’s lemons had itself borne some bitter fruit.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Blood lemons”
