PEMMICAN IN LIFEBOATS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 April 1942, Page 4

PEMMICAN IN LIFEBOATS

ESKIMOS’ RATION SAVES SAILORS.

Eskimos and trappers of the Frozen North who ate their dried strips of caribou meat or pemmican, have passed on the idea of this highly concentrated form of food to save shipwrecked sailors -from starvation. All lifeboats in Britain’s Merchant Navy are now equipped with nourishing compact foods, among them this concentrated mixture of beef extracts of high calorific value. It is of course a much more scientific product than the pemmican of Fenimore Cooper, being a beef extract with a high fat content.

Each man is supplied with 14 ounces of it, enough for a fortnight. One third of an ounce, taken with other concentrated foods now forming part of the equipment in ships’ lifeboats, will make a meal for one man, and special measuring spoons are supplied with which the extract is spread on the new type of ship’s biscuit. Great explorers of the past have carried this highly concentrated food on their expeditions. Supplies of it went north with Nansen and south with Shackleton and Scott; it was used by the Mount Everest climbers and the British airmen who made the first attempt to fly round the world, as well as in the 1938 Greenland Expedition, the Washburn Alaskan Expedition in 1939, the British Canadian Arctic Expedition, the British Graham Land Expedition and the British Expedition to Greenland.

The new pemmican is also being widely used by Britain’s Allies, and the makers are busily coping with a very large war time demand.