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_ 21_st_.--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._
Captain is an Englishman.
An Englishman and his wife traveling for pleasure, probably on their
honeymoon.
American army captain going to some post in the tropics with his wife.
_Facts._
Captain is a Canadian.
Englishman with wife returning to Costa Rica, where he is in business.
Married many years.
Insurance agent and captain of militia going to Costa Rica to look
after mining interests. Is president and organizer of the company.
_First Impression._
Emaciated young man traveling for his health. Either a dyspeptic or
consumptive.
A Spaniard going to his tropical home with his daughter, a dark young
lady.
_Facts._
Relative of insurance agent and secretary of mining company. Starved
from overeating.
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.