The Sieve

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III AT QUAEANTINE It is at quarantine the port physician boards the foreign ship from the little quarantine boat Vigilant before anybody else is allowed on board, when the ship is steered in by the pilot whom the captain picked up a few miles out at sea, somewhere near Boston Light. The life of the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III AT QUAEANTINE It is at quarantine the port physician boards the foreign ship from the little quarantine boat Vigilant before anybody else is allowed on board, when the ship is steered in by the pilot whom the captain picked up a few miles out at sea, somewhere near Boston Light. The life of the pilots is not as hazardous as it used to be, for they are not competing any longer with one another, and therefore do not go out as far as they used to in frail sailing ships to see who gets the prize, that is, the first chance to bring in a big steamer. It is a trust, this time a good one, yet like all trusts it eliminated competition. Of course, when the pilot is at the helm, the captain's responsibility as navigator ceases to a certain degree, for the pilot is supposed to know all about his home waters, and to guide the good ship safely by rock and riff and sandbank, which so boldly prop out of the water at low tide, and so cowardly and treacherously hide their faces under the water at high tide to destroy the good ship in the safe port after it has braved an ocean in all kinds of wind and weather. I do not wish to sing the song of the pilot to whom so many of us owe our lives, but rather of the grave and serious subject National Quarantine. The average man pays absolutely no heed to this magnificent institution, at least as far as our immigrants are concerned. Till recently the local authorities had control of quarantine matters, and only after they got through with a ship did the Federal Government step in and take a stab at the immigrants. It has been discovered, however, that in case of a great plague abroad, a uniform quarantine system under a central head in Washington was the only proper safeguard for the Nation, and so quarantine has been feder- alized, ...