We pass out into the open again, bound for the next port of call. If
the weather chances to be "dirty," the sufferers from _mal-de-mer_ lie
about on every available spot, be it floor or bench, and over these
prostrate forms must one jump as one descends to the dining-saloon for
lunch. It may be merely due to the special keenness of my
professional sense, but the apparent proportion of the halt, lame, and
blind who frequent these steamers appears out of all relation to the
total population of the coast. Across the table is a man with an
enormous white rag swathing his thumb. The woman next him looks out on
a blue and altered world from behind a bandaged eye. Beside one sits a
young fisherman, tenderly nursing his left lower jaw, his enjoyment of
the fact that his appetite is unimpaired by the vagaries of the North
Atlantic tempered by an unremitting toothache.
But the cheerful kindliness and capability of the captain, the crew,
and the passengers, on whatever boat you may chance to travel,
pervades the whole ship like an atmosphere, and makes one forget any
slight discomfort in a justifiable pride that as an Anglo-Saxon one
can claim kinship to these "Vikings of to-day."
Life is hard in White Bay. An outsider visiting there in the spring of
the year would come to the conclusion that if nothing further can be
done for these people to make a more generous living, they should be
encouraged to go elsewhere. The number of cases of tubercle, anaemia,
and dyspepsia, of beri-beri and scurvy, all largely attributable to
poverty of diet, is very great; and the relative poverty, even
compared with that of the countries which I have been privileged to
visit, is piteous. The solution of such a problem does not, however,
lie in removing a people from their environment, but in trying to make
the environment more fit for human habitation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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