A "Lime-juicer".
The American-built clipper Fatherland, built 1854. Renamed Swiftsure and operated by the British company R & H Green of Blackwall on the London-Melbourne run from 1857 to 1871. 1326 tons. Wrecked at Tripoli in 1888. Hand-coloured lithograph by Thomas Goldsworthy Dutton and William Foster, inward bound off Dover. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Limes, Lime-juicers and Limeys
The origin of the affectionate slang term "limey" for the British is usually told as though it has a long history back to the early 18th century, because limes were used to prevent scurvy in the Navy.
From the 17th century on the British sailors and colonists had been famously associated with limes because of the use of lime juice in the potent alcoholic mixture called punch. Punch appears to have been an invention of the employees of the British East India Company while stationed in India. At the least, it was enthusiastically taken up by them soon after its invention. It was very quickly adopted by sea-farers of all Western European nations. In the East Indies it was made with arrack distilled from palm wine, in the West Indies it was made with rum and in Britain it was made with brandy.
I have separated the section on Punch that I had written here, to keep this as simple as possible. There are many more references to the use of limes in the 17th and early 18th centuries in that piece.
The lime fruit as a deliberate preventative of scurvy only became particularly associated with British sea-faring after 1845 when the British Government started the change from mostly Sicilian lemons to West Indian limes. There had been a crop failure of Sicilian lemons and the Government wanted a secure, British-owned source of citrus fruit. So they encouraged the sowing of lime plantations on Caribbean islands subject to earthquake and hurricanes.
Much more after the break:
