THE HEROIC REMEDIES FOR CHANNEL SEA- SICKNESS.
CAPTAIN TYLER has presented to the Board of Trade a very scientific and decidedly amusing Report on the feasible and unfeasible modes of diminishing or removing the miseries of the Channel passage between England and France. It is " an undoubted fact," remarks Captain Tyler, " that the great majority of these passengers suffer (short as is the sea passage) extreme discomfort from sea-sick- ness and want of shelter during bad weather. Not unfre- quently the traveller from India or from America finds the British Channel the most unpleasant part of his journey, and he sometimes looks forward with more anxiety to the state of the Channel than to the heat of the Red Sea, or the passage of the Atlantic, selecting, in the case of America, a French or an English vessel in order to avoid the Channel crossing, according to the country he desires to reach, rather than from any other consideration." The Captain's English is hardly his strongest point, but what he obscurely shadows forth in this last involution of phrases is, that American travellers think so much of the disagreeables of the ordinary pas- sage in our ordinary passage boats between France and England, that if they are going to France, they select a French vessel to avoid the passage of the Straits, and if to England, they select an English vessel for the same purpose, even though they might be able to gain time by taking either country en route to the other. Captain Tyler further assures us, on the testi- mony of Captain Boxer, that out of the 365 days, there are usually 29 days—making up, say, about a month in all of gales and storms, with heavy seas,"—i.e., of passages prostrat- ing and dangerous at once ;-102 days,—making up in all three months and eleven days,—" of good round sea and breezes,"—i.e., of passages in which every passenger on board is fearfully sea-sick, and erroneously believes himself in imminent peril, reproaching himself bitterly in his intervals of anguish with having paid so heavy a price for either gain or pleasure ; —144 days,—making up nearly five months in all,—" of moderate sea and breezes,"—i.e., weather when about half the passengers are ill and the other half puffed up with that very mysterious kind of spiritual pride felt by those who can call ostentatiously for ham and eggs and porter, while even their "own flesh and blood" are thrillingwith an additionalshudder as the steward passes with his trays of bilious-looking food to the insolently hearty and hungry men who have just been shrug- ging shoulders at their brethren's misery ; finally, there are 90 days,—making up just three months in all,—" of calm weather,"—i.e., weather when strong people are quite well,. sensitive people have only headaches, and only the selectest few are really ill with the passage. But think of what this means ;—upwards of four months in all in the year when almost all the passengers are M with the most overwhelm- ing of all miserable sensations, and five months more when half the world succumbs to a still profounder suffering, equally compounded of physical and moral misery,—nausea and humiliation at the arrogant superiority of their brethren.
This is indeed a fearful picture of Captain Boxer's. No wonder that Captain Tyler sets himself to examine the remedy with some of the enthusiasm of a philanthropist, as well as the precision of a man of science.
The remedies proposed may be divided into the heroic and the unheroic,—all of which Captain Tyler details ; though with the sobriety of a practical Englishman he dwells only on the un- heroic, and merely introduces the heroic, with the distant polite- ness of a sort of master of the ceremonies, to the Board of Trade, bowing them off almost as soon as he has mentioned their names and titles. Still, to us the heroic remedies are not without their interest. The first, of course, is that pro- posed Tunnel under the Channel through the grey chalk, dis- cussed by us a few weeks ago, which Captain Tyler treats with a certain limited degree of even scientific respect, though he brings to our notice that the friends of this unholy sugges- tion for undermining our insular society are divided among themselves, Mr. Remington,—who goes in for the tunnel, abjur- ing the grey chalk, which he expects to find rent by dangerous fissures likely to let in the sea from above, and preferring "to work in the Wealden formation," for which purpose he selects the line from Dungeness to Cape G ris Nez. If the friends of the tunnel are divided among themselves, there seems reason to hope that English society will not be riven to its centre by this anarchic suggestion for an insincere evasion of the insular character of our nationality. But as we have referred to the dangers of this wild scheme so recently, and as Captain Tyler entirely ignores its moral aspects, we will go on to the other remedies which may be called heroic.
There are two schemes for bridging the Channel, which are liable, of course, to all the moral objections to the burrowing scheme for turning England into a peninsula, except the latter's evasive and benighted character. A bridge or an aqueduct is at least candid. It openly destroys our insult), tion. It avows to all the world that England is not properly an island. Even the navigators of those Roman ships which, as Mrs. Markham says, sailed round Great Britain, and " so proved it to be an island," would hardly have admitted the inference if at one point of the voyage they had been obliged to steer their vessels under the arches of a bridge or aqueduct. You would never say that two posts connected by a cross-bar are insulated from each other merely because you can duck under the cross bar, and so pass between them. Our moral insularity would vanish with the bridge or aqueduct even more certainly and avowedly than with the tunnel,—still, all would be open and above-board, and there would at least be the advantage that if you could cross safely at all, you would get a breezy journey in the face of day, and not skulk under the sea, with a doubtful ventilation provided by narrow driftways. Still, it is satisfactory to learn that Captain Tyler does not believe in the feasibility either of M. Boutet's bridge of some 50 half-mile arches, or of Mr. Charles Boyd's marine aqueduct, to be supported by iron girders, attached to " 190 towers, 500 feet apart, and 500 feet above the sea." Both these schemes would be attempts to put a hook into the jaws of Leviathan, which the learned and by no means unenterprising Captain Tyler evidently thinks would only end by Leviathan breaking off the hook and .carrying it away in his jaws. When even Waterloo Bridge is said to be failing, the attempt to erect fifty half-mile arches on supports planted in the stormy Straits of Dover, and still more, to erect 190 towers within the same distance, that would stand all the shocks of the tempests, does, no doubt, sound like the veriest rashness of mechanical art. The Tower of Babel was cer- tainly, theoretically, a more ignorant attempt, but the archi- tects of that Tower would probably have thought their scheme modest in comparison with that of M. Boutet or Mr. Charles Boyd. At all events, we have the authority of Captain Tyler for saying that there does not seem to be any feasibility in a bridge scheme. In the next degree to these truly heroic remedies for sea- sickness comes the proposal of Mr. Fowler, which we may call of a mock-heroic character. Without providing any real
terra firma mode of crossing the Channel, it provides one that is to look as much like it as possible. Mr.
Fowler proposes only to spend two millions sterling, where the tunnel-men and the bridge-men do not pretend to believe that they can effect anything at all under thirty millions, and probably not much on that. But then what does Mr. Fowler propose to give us for our two millions ? Only the privilege of being sea-sick in a railway carriage, if we prefer it, instead of being sea-sick on a deck. He pro- poses to build a few ferry steamers, 450 feet long, with 57 feet of beam, "propelled by disconnected engines of 1,500- horse power," and to carry the train at Dover (or at Audrecelles, the place on the French coast favoured by Mr. Fowler) bodily on to these steamers by a "hydraulic apparatus," and further to permit the passengers to have their choice between their places in the railway carriages when thus removed on deck, and in the splendid saloons of the big ferry boats themselves. Mr. Fowler suggests that a ferry-boat 450 feet long, with 57 feet of beam, will not rock or pitch much, and apparently thinks that if they do pitch a little, the privilege of the alter- native whether you will be sea-sick in the railway carriage or in the saloons of the ferry-boat, will be consoling. We can- not say we entirely realize the benefits of his evidently generous-minded scheme. We well remember that passengers by the Great Eastern in one of her first voyages were bitterly disappointed by finding that sea-sickness in the storms was almost as universal as if they had been in a Cunard packet. If so, 450 feet by a beam of 57 feet would not be any thing of a security against sea-sickness in the chopping sea of a Channel passage ; and as for the rest of the privileges offered by Mr. Fowler's scheme, we hardly appre- ciate them at all. It is, no doubt, a proud thing to be removed, while sitting quietly in a train, by a hydraulic apparatus, train and all, into a giant ferry-boat ; but the pride and pleasure of putting so many scientific expedients into requisition would soon be exhausted, and we should be very quickly asking ourselves if that very minute walk from the train to the vessel in Dover harbour was, after all, worth the effort to avoid, whether it was not a rather pleasant break in the journey, and desirable opportunity for stretching one's legs, than otherwise. As for the inestimable privilege of selecting between nausea in your railway carriage, when stowed away on the deck of a ferry-boat, and nausea immediately on the said deck itself, or in one of the saloons opening off the said deck, we do not feel that it would be worth buying even at the cheapest rate. Mr. Fowler seems, to ns, to have accumu- lated a great deal of ingenuity on the removal of imaginary grievances, and on the bestowal of still more imaginary privileges.
Finally, comes Captain Tyler's very modest recommendation, —neither heroic nor mock-heroic, but practical,—to make no particular change except for the purpose of insuring the passage of the Channel at all hours, not depending on the tide. He proposes in effect to improve the piers at Boulogne and at Dover, so as to prevent the accumulation of any "bar" about either harbour,—at Dover we do not understand that there is any bar at present, but there is insufficient room in Dover Harbour for all the ships that often want to come into it,—and then to leave things pretty much as they are, sea-sickness and all. It would, no doubt, be a great advantage not to have the constantly shifting "tidal trains," the time- changes in which are so exceedingly inconvenient, and it would be a real boon if we had no fears as to getting into harbour after all, in case the right tide happened to have been missed through delay or bad weather. There is no anguish greater than getting in sight of port in that miserable condition into which nausea throws you, and then hearing the captain say he must "put about" and cruise for another two hours or so till the tide serves to get in. Those hours are amongst the purgatorial trials of life, with the firm cliffs close at hand, but like the fruits which approached the lips of Tantalus, not to be scaled by you, while every other second your head measures, by a sudden swim it gives, the sadden sink of the ship, which, again, changes back, with a terrible yieldingness, into the upward movement. A man who has nerved his will for two hours of that sort of thing, and finds himself suddenly condemned to four or five hours, can only succumb. He has not laid in a sufficient stock of volition to bear such a blow as that. If Captain Tyler will deliver us from these aggravated assaults of fortune, and discountenance,—as, on the whole, he does,—the meditated treason against our insular constitution, he will deserve our warmest thanks. After all, fearful as nausea is, we must remember that England contains 30,000,000 of souls, to all of whom, every day in the year, her insular position is a great inheritance. To sacrifice this for the three hundred thousand, or say even the half-million, of passengers per annum, each of whom feels the inconvenience of the insularity for only about four or six hours (counting the passages both to and fro) in the year, while he reaps the advantage of it for all the other 363 days, and for at least forty-two out of the forty-eight hours of the remaining two days, would be the very insolence of moral wastefulness, which no one, surely, who ponders it properly, will venture to recommend.
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