Читать книгу The Fair Dominion: A Record of Canadian Impressions онлайн

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Luckily going on board ship has to be a bustling business. My two companions and I, who had been promised a four-berth third-class cabin between us, had to bustle quite a lot—to different gangways from which we were rapidly sent back and into various queues, which turned out, after we had waited in them for some time, to be composed of some other class of passenger. We were extremely heated before we found ourselves in the end about to be passed up a gangway at which the medical inspection of a group of Scandinavians was at the moment going on. Scandinavian seems to be a roomy word which covers all Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Lapps; and no foreigners not coming under this category are carried by the 'Empress' boats.

The theory seems to be in regard to them that they are the only right and proper shipmates for English emigrants going to Canada. They were being pretty carefully examined all the same, men and women alike. The doctors' attention seemed to centre on their heads and eyelids. Hats were pulled off as they came level with them, and tow-coloured hair was grasped and peered into apparently with satisfactory results, for only a couple of elderly people were held back for a few minutes; and they I fancy had not passed the eye test, and were therefore not free from suspicion of having trachoma—a not uncommon North European disease supposed to cause total blindness, which is least of all to be desired in a new country. The two detained Scandinavians were re-examined and passed, after which our turn came. I think we all three felt a little uneasy in the eyelids as we advanced upon the doctor, but we need not have been anxious, for after a swift glance at us he reassured us by grinning and saying, 'There's nothing wrong with you, I should say,'—and so we passed on board. For the next hour or two we were part of a whirl of confused humanity. There is always a tendency among landsmen to become sheepish at sea, and in the steerage there were nine hundred of us, most of whom had never been at sea before. So we rushed together and got jammed down companionways and in passages which even on so big a liner as this could not hold us all abreast, and scrummed to find the numbers of our berths from the steward, and flung ourselves in masses upon our baggage, and pressed pell-mell to the sides of the ship to wave good-bye, and formed a solid tossing square saloonwards when bells rang and we thought they might mean meals.