To Panama and back

by Henry T. Byford

CHAPTER III

At Sea

The Weather—Packing the Stomach—A Diatribe on Cooks and Cooking—Uncooked Food as a Diet—Survival of the Fittest—New England Diet—First Impressions and Facts—The Passengers—The Englishman—A Phantom Laugh—The Stewardess—Beef Tea—A Recreation Famine—The Universal Enjoyment—An Old English Table d’Hôte—White Ducks and Rain—Highballs and High Life—Bad Effects of Water—A Temperate Captain and Crew—Scenery and Poetry—How People Get What They Want—The Southern Cross and Others—Advice.

From Diary.

Tuesday, December 20th.—Smooth sea. Weather cool but pleasant. The temperature at New Orleans was about twenty degrees Fahrenheit warmer than at Chicago, and this afternoon is nearly ten degrees warmer than it was at New Orleans yesterday. We are headed almost due south and expect soon to breathe the balmy air of the Caribbean Sea. It is so far a pleasant winter experience to wake up each morning and find the air about ten degrees warmer than on the day before.

What a change from busy Chicago life it is to have nothing to do all day long but read novels and talk small talk, and linger leisurely over one’s meals with strangers gathered together from various parts of Anglo-Saxondom. We lingered over the food to-day until we had eaten enough for two dinners. It was not that we felt the need of a double dinner, but largely out of a subconscious imitation of each other. When among eaters do as eaters do, is the philosophy of it. There is no place where people enjoy and understand the packing and filling up of their adjustable and dilatable stomachs better than on shipboard. When they pack their trunks and bags they do not overload them, for they know that there is danger of straining or bursting them, and they do not wet and soak things down in their trunks in order to make them pack tighter, as they do in their stomachs. They know that the stomach, which was not made by hands, will not burst.

But eating can not unfortunately be made to fill in the whole of our time, even on shipboard and with saltwater appetites. If we had four stomachs, like a cow, and could devote all of our time either to eating, or the chewing of cuds, how simple life would become for many of us. Idle men would be kept from mischief and idle women from worry. Our enjoyment would be simple and continual, sanitary and convivial. However, our mode of living and the economy of our functions are such that we can not utilize much bulky nourishment, as do our bovine models, whose heads and limbs are mere appendages to their stomachs; and our methods of preparing food are such that we do not have to do the work with our teeth. We thus lose much of the benefit as well as harmless pleasure that animals derive from the preparation of their own meals. Our lips are shrinking and our jaws degenerating for want of work.

There is much to be said in favor of doing your cooking in your own mouth. Mouths are often the most unclean of cavities, yet who would not rather trust his own mouth than the methods of the average kitchen blunderer with her germ-laden, all-invading hands, tasting spoons, wandering hairs, dusty dishes, coughs, colds, salt rheums, etc. No one has seen the cook drinking out of the water bottle, tasting the food, and handling the salt, the dough, the waste-pail, the dish cloth, the berries and the bread with fingers that are licked instead of being washed every time she handles these things and her hair, but would wish to possess the jaw and juices of an animal to enable him to save the wages, waste and culinary wantonness of a cook; and avoid the appendicitis, gastric ulcer, fermentation, diabetes, Bright’s disease, entero-colitis and acid fermentation that have developed with the development of the art of eating. Modern cooking is a bold and unscrupulous attempt to create, by means of variously flavored, complicated mixtures, a desire for artificial food, instead of depending upon a natural appetite for a few simple articles, such as exists throughout the animal kingdom where irresponsible cooks have not interfered.

It is an open question whether the human system is not adapted to the consumption of much more uncooked food than is at present allowed, and whether the cooking in many instances does not destroy ferments that aid digestion, and does not thus render the digestion of foods more difficult or imperfect. Fresh raw milk is more nourishing and more easily digested by normal digestive organs than cooked milk, and this is true of eggs, oysters, beef, cheese, tomatoes, butter, etc. Celery, radishes, cucumbers, cresses, parsley, asparagus, onions, honey, fresh and dried fruits, nuts, aromatics, ripe olives, olive oil, smoked and dried meats, besides many other herbs and fruits that are habitually eaten raw in warm and tropical countries, ought to enter more extensively into our diet and be made to greatly reduce the amount of kitchen mixtures that now tempts us toward an overfed anemia, dyspeptic insomnia, toxic obesity and premature death. The above mentioned foods constitute an ample dietary for the average individual. By cooking we aim to facilitate and quicken the digestion of food, and render it more complete, forgetting that a larger amount of undigested debris might maintain a more normal action of the intestines.

Food kept for consumption in the winter time in cold climates, or in arid districts far away from its production, would in part require cooking, but that made of grains could be prepared at laboratories in a dry, unchangeable, sterile form, while some of the animal and fatty foods could be partly predigested and preserved for invalids. In fact, a diet could be planned that would render the kitchen unnecessary except as a place to make ready a hot drink or to warm food already prepared and preserved according to the dictates of science instead of by the art of uneducated, uncultured, unclean, bad-tempered, hap-hazard cooks.

The political crime of 1890 was the putting of sugar on the free list. It was a covert attack upon the women and children of the country by rendering it easier for them to slowly poison themselves i. e., to sweeten themselves to death. A relish for sweets has been given man to lead him to eat fruits and to chew his starchy food until it develops that sweet taste which indicates beginning digestion. It is this relish for sweet that leads herbivorous animals to chew their food so thoroughly. That a taste for sweets is not intended to lead people to eat artificial sweets is evident from the fact that, excepting honey, which is meant for bees, there is no such concentrated sweet as sugar to be found in nature. But man began to extract the sugar from the sugar cane, the beet and the grape and eat it in large quantities in its concentrated, unnatural form, and to put it in food that, without it, would not be relished, and which, therefore, should not be eaten until hunger gave its relish. As a consequence he has become the victim of salt rheums, pimples, hives and other agonies of itching and ugliness.

Sugar is the devil conjured by man to entertain his sweetheart or wife, and keep his children quiet. Sugar is the serpent of a civilized Eden. He corrupts the human body before it is developed, and after. He squanders the pocket money and perverts the appetite of the fairer half of humanity, until it thinks that it would starve without his support, and refuses to nourish itself without his aid. Let him be banished from the public view and be locked up again in the cane and the beet where he can be enjoyed only in harmless attenuations and in digestible quantities. A little of the devil goes a great way. Too much of him breeds disease and doctors to condemn and conduct us to the grave.

But the self-denial of such a return to nature and abandonment of the pleasure of eating a variety of complicated, fancifully flavored and abnormally tempting food mixtures is hardly to be expected of a gastronomically perverted humanity. Humanity knows enough to tempt itself, and it will do so. The rapidly multiplying wealthy class has the means of over-indulging itself, and will make use of them, and the common lot will follow suit. Deterioration, degeneration and individual extinction will be the logical result. Survival of the fittest thus becomes a matter of appetite. To kill oneself by degrees within the three-score-and-ten is becoming the easiest and most agreeable of occupations; much easier and more enjoyable than slowly dieting oneself to death, as Luigi Cornaro did at the age of 103 years. He ate but little here below, but ate that little long.

There are many who believe that what is generally adopted as a custom by the mass of the people must be right, and that since we have been eating as we now do for a long time, and are longer lived than formerly, we should continue doing so. Apropos of this I will quote from the writings of Volney, a Frenchman who traveled in the United States seventy years ago:

“I will venture to say that if a prize were proposed for the scheme of a regimen most calculated to injure the stomach, the teeth and the health in general, no better could be invented than that of Americans. In the morning at breakfast, they deluge their stomach with a quart of hot water, impregnated with tea, or slightly so with coffee, that is mere colored water; and they swallow, almost without chewing, hot bread, half-baked toast soaked in butter, cheese of the fattest kind, slices of salt or hung beef, ham, etc., all of which are nearly insoluble. At dinner, they have boiled pastes under the name of puddings, and the fattest are esteemed the most delicious; all their sauces, even for roasted beef, are melted butter; their turnips and potatoes swim in lard, butter, or fat; under the name of pumpkin pie their pastry is nothing but a greasy paste, never sufficiently baked; to digest these substances they take tea almost instantly after dinner, making it so strong that it is absolutely bitter to the taste, in which state it affects the nerves so powerfully that even the English find it brings on more obstinate restlessness than coffee. Supper again introduces salt meats or oysters. As Chastelux says, the whole day passes in heaping indigestions on one another; and to give tone to the poor, relaxed and wearied stomach, they drink Madeira rum, French brandy, gin or malt spirits, which complete the ruin of the nervous system.”

Man seems to be the only animal that doesn’t know how to eat. But as we have apparently eaten without knowing how, and have been dyspeptic for the seventy years since Volney wrote, and probably for seventy years before that, why not eat in this way and remain dyspeptic for the next seventy years? We have been dyspeptic so long that proper food and normal function might prove a disastrous change of environment to our stomachs. Innovations are apt to prove dangerous. Let us be conservative, and do right with caution. This precocious, overgrown, youthful country needs above all to be conservative, and above all wants conserves.

But since the agreeable gustatory occupation of doing the cooking in nature’s individual kitchen is denied us, we passengers are at the mercy of the ship’s cook. I wonder how clean he and his materials are. And as the process of swallowing and washing down his mixtures can not be made to occupy all of our waking hours, we will have to sandwich in a few games of cards, a few cotillions, cigars, siestas and, at appropriate times, a few turns of mal-de-mer.

Wednesday, December 21st.—How different strangers often are from the first impression they make upon us. If we revealed ourselves upon first sight just as we really are in this democratic country, in which the poor are rich and the rich poor, according to the mutations of the markets, and where we can not always distinguish a Brahmin from a blowhard, we would be quickly divided into social castes, and would find new levels. Even in traditional monarchies a large proportion of the nobility are Brahmins by birth only. The fabric of society is woven out of lies, for lies are not words pronounced but impressions produced. In fact, all the world’s a lie, and men and women play their parts therein. The word falsehood is merely the name for a feminine fabric which conceals the hair that nature made to conceal the head. Our customs encourage false hoods, false hair, false teeth and false modesty, for who would marry a person without hood, hair, teeth or modesty? Better dead than without them. Better to have lived and lied than not to have lied at all.

All of the passengers of the S. S. Limón are first-class liars, I mean first-impression liars, like the rest of the world. I have constructed two descriptive columns to show the impression they produced upon me at the first meal and the facts as I have since learned them.

First Impression.	Facts.
Captain is an Englishman.	Captain is a Canadian.
An Englishman and his wife traveling for pleasure, probably on their honeymoon.	Englishman with wife returning to Costa Rica, where he is in business. Married many years.
American army captain going to some post in the tropics with his wife.	Insurance agent and captain of militia going to Costa Rica to look after mining interests. Is president and organizer of the company.
Emaciated young man traveling for his health. Either a dyspeptic or consumptive.	Relative of insurance agent and secretary of mining company. Starved from overeating.
A Spaniard going to his tropical home with his daughter, a dark young lady.	An engineer with a Scotch brogue, superintending a new ice plant just put in the ship. No relation to dark young lady, who is the lady’s maid of the wife of the Englishman.

We also have at the table a young American who is a clerk in the offices of the United Fruit Company at Port Limón, the second mate and the purser. The English couple and the insurance agent have been in the tropics before and have learned not to drink ship water or Central American water, and keep the two waiters busy bringing beer, wine, highballs, Apollinaris water and ginger ale, somewhat to the inconvenience of the rest of us who have to await the return of the waiters with these articles before we can be served with our food.

The Englishman sits in a corner of the smoking-room and smokes a pipe after each meal. While smoking these three pipefuls, which seem to be his daily allowance, he studies American history out of Winston Churchill’s novel, “The Crossing.” He is one of those practical Englishmen who believe that he who laughs last laughs best. He asked me this morning why the United States did not keep Cuba when she first had her; and I could not convince him that it was neither expedient nor honorable to annex the island at that time. In fact, before we got through with our discussion I felt like apologizing to him for our honorable action in the matter, for doing our duty as we saw it. The English believe in our duty as they see it. He considered our dealings with Cuba as a huge American joke, a subject for the pen of a Mark Twain or a W. W. Jacobs, and that a keener sense of humor would have saved us from the mistake.

Thursday, December 22nd.—We have three flesh and blood visible ladies aboard, and a stewardess. A stewardess usually passes for flesh and blood also. This one, however, is a sort of phantom lady who is always heard, but seldom seen. Until this morning she was nothing but a laugh. She had not, to my personal knowledge, been seen on deck. She, however, had frequently made herself known by her laugh which every once in a while would ring out, or rather up, from below like a chime of tiny bells started by the wind, and making melody because they couldn’t help it. When we feel well we are stirred up by the laugh and feel like joining in, but when the waves are swinging our heads around, it sounds unnatural and phantom-like, and strikes an unsympathetic chord in our pneumogastric nerve fibers. I had heard the laugh many times and had enjoyed it until this morning, when I was lying back in my steamer chair practicing Christian Science without any comfort. Every few moments the ship would give a lurch, and so nearly turn over that it seemed as if it could not right up, and the ladies would say o-oh! and the phantom laugh would be heard coming up from below. I took to shutting my dizzy eyes and saying mentally: “Go over, if you wish, old banana box! If only my stomach will keep right side out until we go down and I become unconscious!—Laugh on, young lady! It’s all right for an invisible stewardess who hasn’t any nerves in her stomach (if she has one) and nothing but haw-haws in her brain (if she has one) to laugh, for I can’t help it. But even Solomon said that there was a time to laugh and a time not to laugh.”

While I was thus moralizing the laugh suddenly appeared on deck in coiffe and corset, smiling and balancing airily while the ship tried to dump it overboard. It was a white-aproned, pink-skinned, flaxen-haired, pleb-featured apparition, as plump and un-phantom-like as flesh and blood with a cockney accent could be. It was searching for sick women, and immediately spied me. It stopped and said:

“’Ave you ’ad any breakfast, sir?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have had breakfast all of my life, thank you.”

“Won’t you ’ave a cup of beef tea, sir? It works like a charm.”

“No, thank you. I don’t want anything that will work. You give us plenty to eat, but you don’t keep it down. Dieting is the best thing for ship food. I was told to diet several years ago, and I wish I’d done it. The opportunity has come now.”

It smiled at me as if I was a spoiled child, and balanced about among the ladies in a way that made my head swim, until finally it disappeared.

In a little while it sent up a cup of beef tea by the shuffling, cross-eyed, colorless, albino-haired, cockney steward. The stuff looked good, however, and I braced up and drank the health of the flower of the English meadows that had blossomed on the beautiful land and now bloomed on the blooming sea, and felt better. The beef tea suffered no harm, and I no longer wished to be thrown overboard. In fact, within two hours afterward I went down to the dining-room and ate leather and doepaste, and drank luke-warm mud-decoction with a favorable termination.

Friday, December 23rd.—We arrive at Port Limón to-morrow morning, and so far no Spanish lessons, no cotillions, no cake-walks, no negro minstrels, no shuffle-board, no music, not even poker or pools on the daily run; nothing doing but the moonlight tête-a-têtes of the United Fruit Company’s clerk from Limón and the lady’s maid from London. He evidently regards her as edible. Watching them with parental interest and sympathetic reminiscence is the only recreation we have had except eating at odd meals when Neptune happened to be napping. Perhaps it is youth rather than opportunity that we lack, for as people grow older they lose the cleverness and skill as well as the illusions necessary for the enjoyment of the recreations of their youth, except in eating. The enjoyment of eating, illusions and all, belongs to all ages and all animals. It constitutes the first evidence of our animal intelligence and the last senile flourish of our physical nature. When all other incentives to enjoyment and hilarity are gone forever, people can laugh and joke over their food like children. Having consumed the spirits of youth they resort to the spirits of wine, and the result is a brilliant flicker.

It is interesting to watch a small party of English people of uncertain age and social station at a Continental table d’hote dinner, as I once had the pleasure of doing:—

At soup a fortified and funereal quiet and, to the young and frivolous table-d’hoters about them, an apparently reproachful demeanor, a social asceticism. Such dignity and decorum as is found only among the English, whose recreations and social functions are formal duties.

Over the fish, occasional premeditated remarks such as courtesy demands, and a solemn sipping of wine at appropriate intervals.

Over the third course, slight relaxation of features and small bits of conversation, interspersed with more frequent and informal sipping of wine.

Over the fourth course, much less modulation of voice and considerable talking, with an occasional easily comprehended joke followed by generous applause. General emptying of bottles and drinking of toasts. A touch of nature makes the whole room grin.

Over dessert, frequent flashing of fire-cracker jokes extinguished in laughter. A leaning over cordiality and unrestrained communicativeness regardless of appearances. An astonishing climax of gayety. The tables are turned. Foreigners grow silent and look on with wonder.

Disappearance of ladies and retirement of the men to the smoking-room or porches for a congenial exchange of confidences and a forgetfulness of cares and responsibilities. Social mellowness slowly hardening back into desiccated conversation.

The elders have had their daily round of recreation, the only kind they still excel at, and are again models of dignity and decorum for the younger generation to respect, but not to emulate.

Such an insular touch of nature I have not, of course, observed on our boat. The above was merely one of those observations of former times that come to my mind during the long hours of sitting and gazing at the tireless sea. Continental table-d’hoters become demonstrative over their wine, but do not taper on and taper off like the English. One expects foreigners to gesticulate and be undignified from first to last.

We are in the Caribbean Sea “alright,” with trade winds to tame us, choppy seas to chafe us, and sudden showers to shift us. The officers and the militia captain are parading in dazzling white duck suits, in which they are obliged to run under cover every little while from the rain. A mist appears over the horizon and in a few minutes overtakes us in the form of a drenching rain, causing the officers on duty to put on their raincoats, and those off duty to come in and be treated to highballs. This is their high life, and makes them accept with thankfulness and thanks whatever and whichever comes. Water is man’s greatest enemy as well as friend in the Caribbean. It drives through the canvas awnings, steals into the staterooms, rusts steel buttons and umbrella frames, ruins clothing, spoils cigars and gives men a taste for liquor.

The captain, however, is temperate and has none of the sailors’ vices, as no man who lives with the bottom of the sea constantly under his feet should have. This nautical peculiarity of the captain has a good effect upon the crew, and is a recommendation to the United Fruit Company. It enables him to drink with impunity when alone with the passengers. He believes that only temperance men should be allowed to drink. He believes that, being temperate, drink does him no harm, and that he who thinks like a gentleman will drink like a gentleman. The “besht” engineer is also temperate, for the captain sees to it that drink does not harm him either. The poor fellow has had nothing alcoholic since we left New Orleans. But he will get his bottle of beer with his Christmas dinner to remind him of the cause of all the happiness he has ever had. Our captain is so opposed to intemperance that he will not keep a man in the crew who is addicted to drink. The fate of the best engineer is therefore settled, and he is taking his last voyage on the S. S. Limón. But he has not had his last good time off the S. S. Limón by any means.

We have beautiful sunsets and sunrises, although they are not very different from those in Illinois except that the colors are more crude and garish. The softened, hazy, fumigated, terra cotta hues of the Chicago sunsets are unknown here. It is necessary to go to Chicago to see them. On bright and clear days the Caribbean sky and water have an intense blue color that we seldom see in Northern latitudes, but when the wind blows and the sky is overcast, the water is of a bright, seasick green color, known to poets although not to poetry.

We have moonlight nights that are worth taking a five-day boat ride to see. At times the sky and sea are bathed in silver sheens and shimmers that equal those in some of the paintings and poems, and which are worthy the pen of a Scott or Shelley. At other times the firmament is caverned with jasper clouds, and the water mottled with mysterious isles of shadow. As Shelley says:

The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut

By darkest barriers of enormous cloud,

Like mountain over mountain huddled—but

Growing and moving upward in a crowd,

And over it a space of watery blue

Which the keen evening star is shining through.

How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh

Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening’s ear

Were discord to the speaking quietude

That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven’s ebon vault

Studded with stars unutterably bright,

Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls,

Seems like a canopy that love has spread

To curtain her sleeping world.

This is about as I would have written except that I should also have put the Fruit Company’s clerk and the English lady’s maid in the scene to emphasize the moonlight and add that human interest which the lines do not express. The difference between Shelley’s lines and mine would have been that Shelley’s contain more poetry than truth, while mine would have contained more truth than poetry. Truth is better than poetry.

I have given Shelley’s description because people are seldom satisfied with the naked truth. They prefer something in costume, and labeled with a name. For instance, when they ask for medicine they get something with a name; when they want Christian Science they get nothing, with a name; when they want lies they get the real thing. Those who can no longer be deceived are ready for another world, but not for a better one.

Every one who visits the torrid zone takes a look at the Southern Cross. So did I. On the Caribbean it arises very late at night, and comes out about the time civilized banqueters are going home. I had to get up after midnight to obtain a view of it. There were several crosses visible and I looked at them all, and thus saw the Southern one. But I was unable to say which one was the one, for I had no compass. However, that did not matter, since I could say I had seen it. The one that travelers see and talk about is a crooked one. It does not stand straight in the heavens, and has its beams warped. I would not advise any one to travel down here in a banana boat, that becomes inebriated and intolerable every time a zephyr blows, in order to stay awake to see a little, crooked, imperfect cross that wouldn’t be looked at in Chicago. One can stay at home and hunt up a better and bigger one before midnight, not to mention our glorious Orion, our beautiful Milky Way and many other interesting and historic constellations. In fact, how many Northern people who know of and have seen, and have acted silly about, the Southern Cross, know of all and have seen all and have acted silly about all of our Northern constellations? We should know something about our own heaven before we devote our attention to that of others.