financial cramp.
They seem woefully behind the times in this public sanatorium and hospital, with the doctors appearing to know no more than I do about treating tuberculosis. The young nurses don’t like being told they couldn’t cure a kipper, never mind a patient, and yet the old saying goes that all the nice girls love a sailor! There is no modern apparatus, no X-rays, artificial sunrays, or any other rays for that matter. They do have an excellent stock of fresh air, a bottle of cough mixture, and a flask of cascara sagrada, but that just about sums up their stock in trade. Instead of giving oxygen to a man on his last gasp, they should give him Sanatogeniii much earlier and then the deaths might be fewer. You hear far too much of this ‘fresh air’ business; no one could get much more of it than I have by sailing across the North Sea for a couple of years, but it hasn’t done me any good.
I am now able to sit on a deckchair on the lawn and keep a lookout on the high fence that shuts us off very completely from the outside world. I can walk up and down the narrow strip of grass as if it were an imaginary ship’s bridge and even talk to an imaginary helmsman, but I am tired of these occupations. I’ve read every book in the place, even The Constant Nymphiv which shows just how desperate one can become. I have found scientific books about atoms and electrons to be all very wonderful, but they’re only for the improvement of trade or machine and not for us humans. The nearest approach to a cure for this complaint is all about money and being able to take advantage of what it will buy rather than science. I recently paid nine pence for a book entitled How to Cure Tuberculosis, but to no real benefit other than to the bookseller’s pocket.
I’ve also had better food for 14 shillings a week in a coasting steamer than I’ve had in this place. I am sure you have seen those Indian fakir fellows, or photographs of them. We all appear exactly the same, just skin and bones. My legs look like an optical illusion with my thighs no thicker than an ordinary man’s forearm, and as for my calves! For most of the patients, however, these sanatoriums are a godsend and they are infinitely better off in hospital than they would be in their own homes. It just needs someone in high authority to run around with a flannel hammer and to tap the brains of those in charge to wake them up before they get into a groove.
There is no amusement provided for the patients unless the parson’s weekly visits should count, but I’m sure they’re not intended as such! He is quite a nice man the parson, but another sufferer. He suffers from the truly ghastly complaint of speaking with a very parsonical voice, even in ordinary conversation: ‘My poor fellow, you are not looking yourself today.’ That cheers me up no end until I reach for the mirror. And then he continues, ‘I will now read to you from the Scriptyahs,’ which reminds me of George, a steward aboard a little coasting boat in which I was sailing as chief mate. George also had a parsonical voice; he would come creeping into my cabin the morning after the night before with the greeting ‘blessed are the weak for they shall be comforted’, before sharing the glass of whisky or bottle of beer he had brought with him as a means of providing the further comfort we both sought.
As I’ve said before, there is nothing to do in the hospital to keep one amused. Needlework on cushion covers doesn’t appeal to me, and I lose my wool mending my socks. I’ll have to fall back on my old logbook and live in the past. A rolling stone may not collect much moss, but it can collect an awful lot of memories. After months of monotony one feels one simply must break out somehow, so I am going to break out by writing my recollections, even if they should be as rambling as I have been these past few months. The only really sensible thing I can remember doing is getting married,v although I suppose you will say the next sensible thing will be my getting buried. I can give no details about that for the moment; medical opinion suggests it won’t be too long.
Recalling my life will not be easy, but there will be one or two good features in the book at least!
This beautiful art plate of the author comes free with the book.
Yours truly,
The unsuccessful seaman
What the Admiralty Sailing Directions say about the West Coast of Africa.
From ten o’clock in the morning till five in the evening a white man is seldom seen abroad; at the latter hour, the race-course and the premenade on the battery are frequented by equestrians and pedestrians; and, perhaps, no circumstance that strikes the attention of a stranger, makes so strong an impression on his mind as the general expression he observes of languor and debility in the looks of every individual he meets of European birth (with perhaps two or three exceptions) in the colony. The young and old, the acclimated even as they are deemed, who have had their seasoning, either in one fever, or the periodical return of that malady, and have survived these attacks, show plainly enough the baneful influence of the climate, which leaves the future without vivacity, and frame without vigour, and the whole constitution apparently deficient in vitality.
“The English oil-traders never live on shore. Vast hulks of East Indiamen, once floating palaces or stores, are the houses of the agents; while trading vessels sometimes remain three years in a river, their decks covered with a thatched roof. These ship-villages are governed by a council of captains, who punish thieves and mutineers, and act as a Court of Arbitration, there being a power of appeal to the Consul of Fernando Po, who visits the rivers from time to time in a man-of-war. Half a century ago the delta was merely a slave-exporting land; and the palm oil traffic is quite of recent date. In 1808 our imports of the oil did not exceed 200 tons a year; at present they amount to about 50,000 tons. In this Delta of the Niger, the refuge of reckless and despairing men, Death, as if sure of its victims, throws off the mask. Once enter that gloomy land, and the impression can never be effaced. The rivers filthy as sewers; the slimy mud stinking in the sun; the loathsome crocodiles lying prone upon it, and showing their white bellies as they sullenly plunge into the stream; the foaming, shark-haunted bars; the hideous aspect of the people, whose bodies are usually covered with sores; the traders with their corpse-like faces – all this can be remembered, but cannot be described. The tribes which occupy the lower regions of these rivers monopolise the inland trade, and their chiefs acquire considerable wealth.”
“Here a European must look after himself; for the inhabitants are so subtilly mischievous, that you will be betrayed before you are aware; and they are so barbarously cruel, that the parents sell their children, and the husband his wife, one brother and sister the other; and, in decency and order, are scarecely a degree above the beasts.”
This description was written in the seventeenth century, and we do not find the inhabitants have improved since that time. (1890)
Among the predisposing causes of sickness, one of the most frequent is the dread and prostration of spirits that pervades almost every class of people on their first visit to this unhealthy coast. The unremitting fatality of the diseases, united with the depressing influences of climate, have certainly gained for this part of the globe, an unenviable notoriety, which time can never dissipate. Notwithstanding the array of fearful drawbacks, individuals may reside in the majority of these regions, unimpaired in health and constitution, for a considerable number of years, by proper care and attention to hygiene considerations, by cheerfulness and confidence relative to future results, regularity and a tropical adaptation of diet, by a determination to resist hypochondriacal forebodings, or despondent impressions, by the appropriate employment of time in judicious mental and physical labour or recreations.
