Bounding Main

When the ship goes wop (with a wiggle between) And the steward falls into the souptureen And the trunks begin to slide . . . Why, then you will know (if you haven't guessed) You're Fifty North and Forty West!"--Rudyard Kipling

When the 1,248 passengers of the Gripsholm debarked in Manhattan last week, a day late, after eleven stormy days on the midwinter North Atlantic, it would have been a brave man who greeted them with such a wheeze. It had been a voyage that the Grips holm's burly, sympathetic physician, Dr. Hans Ribbing, would like to forget. During the rough passage, he had dispensed 10,000 seasickness pills; one day had had 500 visitors to the sick bay.*

Dr. Ribbing's pills, a five-months-old Swedish-American Line experiment, helped. But against seasickness of that momentum and mass, nothing is much of a success. Like similar pills concocted by the Canadian Navy and the U.S. Army during the war, they are compounded of drugs (scopolamine and a mild barbiturate) to quiet the nerves. Ribbing has a refinement: an injection of the same preparation for victims too far gone to swallow. But the drugs (which are dangerous and should be taken only by a doctor's prescription) are not much help after a victim gets his larynx between his teeth; they work best as a preventive. Partly psychological in effect, they help queasy travelers face the coming ordeal with mild bravado.

Nobody really knows much about seasickness, except the experts, who wish they didn't. Doctors know little about its cause (they prefer to call it "motion sickness," since car, air, and seasickness are the same thing). They think it may result from nerve impulses touched off by the sloshing about of fluid in the inner ear's semicircular canals. At least four people in ten are susceptible to motion sickness, some so readily that watching a tennis ball in play, spinning on a stool, or even hearing a sea voyage mentioned turns their stomachs. Most people, after a few days or a week at sea, develop a certain tolerance, but a few (about 5%), including some lifelong sailors, never do. Lord Nelson was such a one; the wretched man retched in misery whenever he put to sea. Another delicate traveler: General Douglas MacArthur.

Of the innumerable remedies for seasickness suggested by medicos and inventive travelers (ranging from champagne-drinking to an oxygen mask), perhaps the most picturesque is that of George Bernard Shaw, who, in his traveling days, claimed that he got complete immunity by padding along the deck, knees sagging, with a relaxed, apelike gait.

* The Queen Elizabeth, which also docked in Manhattan last week, 24 hours late, rode out the storm a little better: most of her passengers managed to keep their chins up, dancing and playing squash while the Queen climbed the mountainous waves and slipped majectically into the Atlantic's troughs.

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