"Us hasn't got no money," he fenced, "but there's a very sick man ashore, if so be you'd come and see him."
A little later he led me to a tiny sod-covered hovel, compared with which the Irish cabins were palaces. It had one window of odd fragments of glass. The floor was of pebbles from the beach; the earth walls were damp and chilly. There were half a dozen rude wooden bunks built in tiers around the single room, and a group of some six neglected children, frightened by our arrival, were huddled together in one corner. A very sick man was coughing his soul out in the darkness of a lower bunk, while a pitiably covered woman gave him cold water to sip out of a spoon. There was no furniture except a small stove with an iron pipe leading through a hole in the roof.
My heart sank as I thought of the little I could do for the sufferer in such surroundings. He had pneumonia, a high fever, and was probably tubercular. The thought of our attractive little hospital on board at once rose to my mind; but how could one sail away with this husband and father, probably never to bring him back. Advice, medicine, a few packages of food were only temporizing. The poor mother could never nurse him and tend the family. Furthermore, their earning season, "while the fish were in," was slipping away. To pray for the man, and with the family, was easy, but scarcely satisfying. A hospital and a trained nurse was the only chance for this bread-winner—and neither was available.
I called in a couple of months later as we came South before the approach of winter. Snow was already on the ground. The man was dead and buried; there was no provision whatever for the family, who were destitute, except for the hollow mockery of a widow's grant of twenty dollars a year. This, moreover, had to be taken up in goods at a truck store, less debts if she owed any.
Among the nine hundred patients that still show on the records of that long-ago voyage, some stand out more than others for their peculiar pathos and their utter helplessness. I shall never forget one poor Eskimo. In firing a cannon to salute the arrival of the Moravian Mission ship, the gun exploded prematurely, blowing off both the man's arms below the elbows. He had been lying on his back for a fortnight, the pathetic stumps covered only with far from sterile rags dipped in cold water. We remained some days, and did all we could for his benefit; but he too joined the great host that is forever "going west," for want of what the world fails to give them.
It is not given to every member of our profession to enjoy the knowledge that he alone stands between the helpless and suffering or death, for in civilization modern amenities have almost annihilated space and time, and the sensations of the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur are destroyed by the realization of competitors, "just as good," even if it often does leave one conscious of limitations. The successful removal of a molar which has given torture for weeks in a dentistless country, gains one as much gratitude as the amputation of a limb. One mere boy came to me with necrosis of one side of his lower jaw due to nothing but neglected toothache. It had to be dug out from the new covering of bone which had grown up all around it. The whimsical expression of his lop-sided face still haunts me.
Deformities went untreated. The crippled and blind halted through life, victims of what "the blessed Lord saw best for them." The torture of an ingrowing toe-nail, which could be relieved in a few minutes, had incapacitated one poor father for years. Tuberculosis and rickets carried on their evil work unchecked. Preventable poverty was the efficient handmaid of these two latter diseases.
There was also much social work to be done in connection with the medical. Education in every one of its branches—especially public health—was almost nonexistent—as were many simple social amenities which might have been so easily induced.
At one village a woman with five children asked us if we could marry her to her husband. They had never been together when a parson happened along, and they now lived in a lonely cove three miles away. This seemed a genuine case of distress; and as it happened a parson was taking a passage with us, we sent two of our crew over in a boat to round up the groom. Apparently he was not at all anxious, but being a very small man and she a large woman, he discreetly acquiesced. The wedding was held on board our ship, every one entering into the spirit of the unusual occasion. The main hold was crammed with guests, bells were rung and flags flown, guns fired, and at night distress rockets were sent up. We kept in touch with the happy couple for years, till once more they moved away to try their luck elsewhere.
Obviously the coast offered us work that would not be done unless we did it. Here was real need along any line on which one could labour, in a section of our own Empire, where the people embodied all our best sea traditions. They exhibited many of the attractive characteristics which, even when buried beneath habits and customs the outcome of their environment, always endear men of the sea to the genuine Anglo-Saxon. They were uncomplaining, optimistic, splendidly resourceful, cheerful and generous—and after all in one sense soap and water only makes the outside of the platter clean.