Seasickness

“ We all like to see people seasick when we are not, ourselves. Playing whist by the cabin lamps when it is storming outside, is pleasant; walking the quarter-deck in the moonlight is pleasant; smoking in the breezy foretop is pleasant, when one is not afraid to go up there; but these are all feeble and commonplace compared with the joy of seeing people suffering the miseries of seasickness. ”

“ One cannot help thinking the ship has stopped during the night hours and taken on passengers from the main. This is explained by some voyagers keeping to their cabins from the time of sailing.
Seasickness is largely responsible for this perplexing phase of water travel. Women are more affected than men, and the man who will discover a remedy for seasickness will find his name immortalized. Many women will travel for weeks on the water so sick they cannot raise their heads, yet not a complaining 4 word will be uttered by most of them. ”

“ George's Bank, making slow progress on our voyage. During that time I was really seasick, and took little note of passing events, being stretched on the deck, a coil of rope, or a chest, musing on the past or indulging in gloomy reflections in regard to the future. Seasickness never paints ideal objects of a roseate hue. ”

“ And while I heartily wished the masts and yards, which added so much to the beauty of the ship, and of which I was so proud in port, fifty fathoms beneath the keelson, I hastened with my wonted alacrity aloft, and commenced the work of sending down the main-royal yard.
Seasickness is an unwelcome malady at best. It not only deprives a person of all buoyancy of spirit, but plunges him headlong into the gulf of despondency. His only desire is to remain quiet; to stir neither limb nor muscle ”

“ The person who is not actually in the throes of seasickness can have no sympathy with the person who is so afflicted. I used to go up to Mrs. London when she was at the wheel, and ask her if I should not prepare for her dinner a nice piece of fat pork with a string tied to it. The effect was magical. Immediately, she would clap her hands over her mouth and make for the rail. There is something infectious about seasickness. I would have to go join her myself, and sometimes Jack would come with us. ”

“ When you get seasick on an ordinary ocean, you know where to locate the disease, and you know where to go for relief, and when you have got relieved you know that you are alive, but an English channel seasickness is as different from any other as an alcohol jag is different from a champagne drunk. ”

“ The only person who suffers from seasickness is the individual affected. You may run a sliver in your finger and the family will gather around with words of sympathy. You may get a cinder in your eye and your friends will hurry forward to help get it out. But if you are suffering with seasickness, and death would almost be welcome, your friends will only grin and their words of condolence are false and mocking.
A modern steamship is constructed for safety, comfort, and almost luxury. When you get those three qualities there is very little left of the poetry or novelty of ocean traveling. ”

“ Partings over, you enter upon the strange and unforgetable experiences of ten days or more in the necessarily cramped quarters of the steerage—experiences of a kind that do not invite repetition. Homesickness and seasickness form a trying combination, to say nothing of the discomforts of a mixed company and enforced companionship. ”

“ Six or seven hundred human beings in the agony of suspense—often more trying than physical pain itself—were on the upper deck. Some had been suffering the pangs of seasickness for days, many had rushed up from below with no time to slip on warm clothes, others were seeking out husbands, wives or children. ”

“ We have plenty of time and then we may always console ourselves with the thought, “Well, maybe something will happen.” As we swerve into the trough of the sea the Nautilus begins to roll and a groan comes from the Kia Kias on the forward deck. They are experiencing their first case of seasickness 58and seem very wretched indeed. I have been told that seasickness is wholly mental and that babies are never sick at sea because they have no fear of being so, nor any knowledge of how others are affected. ”

“ Although I was not called upon for much actual work, I received no sympathy for my miserable condition; for seasickness, like the toothache, is seldom fatal, notwithstanding it is as distressing a malady as is found in the catalogue of diseases, and one for which no preventive or cure, excepting time, has yet been discovered. ”

“ Psychology seeks the laws of such happenings.
LOCALIZATION OF SOUNDS.
They are the most familiar things which in our science become the strangest. Not to know where you are when seasick, still less where your mind is, is common enough. Our next experiment will trace our power to know where sounds are to the same origin as seasickness.
Seasickness starts in the ear. In its cavity are three small tubes, each bent in a circle, and filled with fluid. ”

“ Many of our passengers were sanguine in their anticipations of our making the shortest passage ever known, and, had our subsequent progress been as great as at first, we should doubtless have accomplished the voyage in thirteen days, but calms and head winds for three days on the Banks have frustrated our expectations.
"There is little that is interesting in the incidents of a voyage. The indescribable listlessness of seasickness, the varied state of feeling which changes with the wind and weather, have often been described. ”

“ He retired to his berth with a dreadful headache; as he described it afterwards, it seemed just as though that great walking beam was smashing up and down right in the midst of his brains. He had never felt so ill before in his life, and was very sure, in his inexperience, that something worse than mere seasickness ailed him.
He told Tom, who was not in the least affected, how he felt; whereupon the runaway blustered round, got the steward and the captain into the cabin, and was very sure that Bobby would die before morning, if we may judge by the fuss he made. ”

“ STRESS. Hard pressure by weather or other causes. Stress of weather often compels a ship to put back to the port whence she sailed.
STRETCH. A word frequently used instead of tack; as, "We shall make a good stretch."—To stretch. To sail by the wind under a crowd of canvas.
STRETCH ALONG A BRACE, To. To lay it along the decks in readiness for the men to lay hold of; called manning it.
STRETCHER. See Sheer-pole.
STRETCHERS. Narrow pieces of wood placed athwart the bottom of a boat, for the rowers to place their feet against, that they may communicate greater effort to their oars. ”

“ What is man's experience on board a ship in a rough sea? He becomes dizzy, nervous and sick, and when he steps upon the land he walks like a drunken man. The infant's first rock in the cradle has a similar effect. Its little muscles are strained to prevent falling. Its brain is dashed about until it becomes dizzy, but which it soon learns to enjoy because of the peculiar sensation.
Your little babe sees some bright object and reaches out its little hands to take it. ”

“ When a ship is close-hauled, and the head-sails are in perfect equilibrio with those abaft, the resistance of the water from A to B. fig. 5. plate V. is equal to the impulse of the sails, whether it is impressed upon the centre of gravity H of the ship, or any other point of her length before or abaft it. In this situation, the ship will as readily bear away as come nearer to the wind, with regard to the resistance of the water upon her bottom on one side, and the impulsion of the wind upon the sails on the other. ”

“ As for instance, a little agitation of the air will turn a windmill, or sail a great ship; and it is demonstrable in mechanicks, that a hair of a man’s head, or a puff of his breath, by the help of proper springs, wheels, and pulleys, may have force enough to move a body as big and heavy as the world. ”

“ When the ship casts loose from the dock, or lifts her anchor and gets under way, you should think of anything and everything except sea-sickness, and if any one starts the topic in your hearing leave him and walk away, or ask him to change the subject. If you cannot be thus abrupt, change it for him by starting a political discussion or other agreeable wrangle; do anything rather than allow a continuation of his remarks. Many a man and many a woman has been talked into being sea-sick, or has meditated and wondered on the possibility of it till the malady has put in an appearance. ”

“ You learned yesterday, that a body at rest offers a resistance to any force that would put it in motion, and that, when in motion, it equally opposes a state of rest; now let us apply this law for the explanation of the accident that has just befallen you. The butt was full of water; when you attempted to wheel it forward, the water resisted the motion thus communicated to the vessel, and from its vis inertiæ, or effort to remain at rest, rose up in a direction contrary to that in which the vessel moved, and consequently poured over ”

“ The catenary and other curves of tension which a sail assumes under the united influence of the wind, its own weight, and the particular tensions of the various ropes by which it is attached, or against which it presses, show at any moment complexities of arrangement to which fidelity, except after the study of a lifetime, is impossible. ”

“ Why such gradual motions should cause sea-sickness, while much more violent ones, such as horseback-riding, do not, can only be explained by saying that in the more violent ones the individual has a stimulus to adapt his positions to the motion, which he has not in the often unnoticed pitching of a ship. At any rate, this theory explains why lying down should afford relief, as the otoliths then rest at the back and less sensitive part of the canals ”

“ But the motion of a vessel becalmed amid a heavy swell is one of the most uncomfortable of all sea-experiences. Let the merest relic of nausea linger in the human breast, and this movement shall make a full-blown anguish of it. ”

“ I have been lying in my berth in a state of quiescence, since Wednesday eve, and here it is Friday night-quiescence did I say?─far from it-no-I am not ashamed to acknowledge that I am subject to like frailties with my fellow mortals, I was sea sick. It is impossible to describe the feeling of sea sickness, so I will not attempt it. Every one knows that the malady is a subject of ridicule, and not of commiseration. ”

“ A difficulty, however, immediately presents itself: we require motion of a particular kind; but wind will not blow, nor water fall as we please, nor as suits our peculiar wants, but according to the fixed laws of nature. We want an upward motion ”

“ In the first place, the rolling or heaving of the vessel disturbs that feeling of the relation of the body to surrounding objects upon which the sense of security rests. V The nervous system being thus subjected to a succession of shocks fails to effect the necessary adjustments for equilibrium. ”

“ Just as in a ship that springs a leak, you can always stop the first or the second fissure, but when many holes begin to open and let in water, the gaping hull cannot be saved; similarly, in an old man's body, there is a certain limit up to which you can sustain and prop its weakness. ”

“ The sensation in trying to move cannot be unlike that which would be felt in an exhausted receiver. If the weight of the atmosphere on the human body, fifteen pounds to the square inch, instead of being equally diffused could be concentrated on the feet, the sensation probably would not be unlike that which one feels in trying291 to get across a ship’s deck when she is thrown over to the side opposite to that whither you are going. ”

“ When the surface tension of a drop of fluid is lowered by bringing into contact with it some other substance that possesses this power, the surface rushes away at great speed in all directions from the point where the tension is lowered, because usually the tension is reduced very considerably. In this surface movement it is found that new surface is made where the tension is lowered and old surface is destroyed, that is, pulled into the interior over a large part of the surface opposite to where the tension is lowered. ”

“ Are you stranded? Oh, dear no, that sort of thing often happens. Promptly the syce produces from somewhere concealed about his body the little bit of string, and all is well again. The harness may break once again or even twice upon the homeward way, but that little bit of string gets you home at last. ”

“ I was not aware before that there was such entire antagonism in the peculiar, short, broken, and half-finished motions of the brute; causing one to feel at the end of a day’s journey very much as it might be supposed he would, if subjected in rapid succession for the same length of time, to a constant simultaneous jerk of the shoulders, twist of the hips, rap on the ankles, and thump in the back; while the head has been kept incessantly bobbing up and down in involuntary motion, like that of a Chinese image when once set going. ”

“ Fourthly, great regularity of motion is naturally consequent upon the screw being unaffected by the rolling of the ship, and upon its being immersed and not exposed therefore to blows from the sea, and except in the case of its being lifted out of water, the resistance is perfectly uniform and perfectly smooth. ”

“ Let us consider now that whether we move ourselves by means of our legs, or whether we are moved by a vehicle or a boat, at first only a part of our body is directly moved and the rest of it is afterwards set in motion by the first part. We see that pressures, pulls, and tensions are always produced between the parts of the body in this action, which pressures, pulls, and tensions give rise to sensations by which the forward or rotary movements in which we are engaged are made perceptible. ”