The bold colonizers who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second trip to the New World faced obstacles impossible to grasp in today’s hyperconnected globe. The seafarers planned to settle in an unknown land far from home, among Native Americans who were often hostile. Today, research suggests that they bore an additional burden: scurvy, which set in during the long sail across the Atlantic.

Historical documents and analysis of skeletons buried at Columbus’ short-lived settlement in what is now the Dominican Republic hint that the colonists suffered from severe scurvy, which is caused by vitamin C deficiency and results in pain, debilitating fatigue and sometimes tooth loss. The study sheds light on what exactly ailed the settlers – something that documents of the day did not fully explain.

Though colonizers were on the mend by the time they died, the disease may have contributed to a wave of deaths and the ultimate failure of the colony, which Columbus intended as Spain’s first permanent settlement in the New World.

“After sustained scurvy, the crewmembers must have felt very, very, very weak,” said study author Vera Tiesler of the Autonomous University of Yucatan in Mexico. “Everybody was ill and suffering.”

Tiesler’s team examined 27 skeletons buried in the cemetery at La Isabela, the ill-fated colony that Columbus founded in 1494 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.

Twenty of 27 skeletons showed bone markings suggestive of scurvy, the team argued in a new paper in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. The team — which includes researchers from Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Italy – said the finding of scurvy is bolstered by contemporary accounts of what the settlers ate during their long passage from Spain to the Americas. Provisions for the 1,000-plus seafarers included bacon, sea biscuit and the like, none of it rich in vitamin C, Tiesler said.

All the same, the voyagers might have avoided scurvy if they’d sailed directly from Spain to La Isabela, a journey of two months or less. It can take up to three months of vitamin C deprivation for scurvy to set in. But when Columbus and his companions reached the Americas, they landed at a Hispaniola outpost where Columbus had left nearly 40 men from his 1492 voyage of discovery. He returned to find all of those men dead, perhaps killed by the local Taino people. So the ships set sail again and spent another month at sea before landing at the site that would become La Isabela.

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