The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-08-23

| ing of some rolling stock into the bay l The Philadelphia brought along lot of hoisting apparatus with which to re- cover the submerged engines. The l miners are jubilant over the certainty of being able to resume work at once not only for their own interest, but be- | cause they can furnish employment to | several thousand impoverished Cubans. Among the Philadelphia" passengers was MT Kingsbury from the Washing | ton Weather bureau, sent to inaugu- | rate our signal service in Cuba. The manufacturers of Quaker Oats, with their usual enterprise, sent man thus early to pioneer the business in the new | Land of Promise; and a condensed | milk firm had also @ representative on 1 board.
 | Most prominent among the specula- | tors was the son of a well-known | Washington produce dealer, with seve- ral thousand live chickens. in coops, slowed away somewhere below. Hay | ing read that chickens are selling in | Cuba at eight dollars apiece, the young man invested in 'broilers. which bring about twenty-five cents each at home, | expecting to realize an instantaneous profit of several hundred per cent at | the least calculation. It seemed pity to blight the bud of this budding gen. jus of American trade The poor chickens, crowded as closely together as sardnes in box and with almost as little air, the coops being piled in pyr- amids from floor to ceiling of the lower deck, suffering for want of primal ele- ments of the universe, earth. air and water, as well as from ea-sickness, fright and long confinement, died by the l dozens, especially during days and nights of rough weather When the region of tropical sultriness was reached the odors from those coops l bore no comparison to those of Araby | the Blest. The passengers complained, some of them in good English swear words; the captain threatened to make ducks and drakes of the whole invest l ment by dropping 1t into the sea, and | the young speculator's hopes fell &C., cordingly from eight dollars the broiler | to half that sum in the lump. I may as well tell you the rest of the story while | on the subject, though somewhat out of | sequence. When we arrived in Santia- go harbor after six days passage, the remnant of the fowls were so diseased and reduced to bones and feathers that their owner concluded that he would not stand on high profits, but dispose of the lot at three dollars a head.
 When he finally got them ashore, after twenty-four hours delay for lack of lighterage, he could hardly give away the wretched few in which the breath of life yet fingered, though he hawked ;,, +l,1, af
 stores and dry-goods houses, as well as in markets and restaurants for less 1 than their transportation had cost him, to say nothing of his own passage money, one hundred and forty dollars. for the round trip between the harbors l of New York and Santiago. The last | time I saw the young man he told me with tears in his eyes that he had rent ed piece of ground and turned the survivors loose, hoping that some of | them might recuperate and become saleable. but that in any event he was ''out' fully twelve hundred dollars. The trouble was not so much with the chicken business in the island of Cuba as with the speculator's methods If | live fowls are to be transported on a long. tropical voyage, they should be provided with healthfu1 conditions for | pecuniary consideration, if not in the
 interests of humanity Instead of be- l ing too greedy to take advantage of peoples necessities, he should have re- membered that with few exceptions the | impoverished Cubans have absolutely no money for the necessaries of life | and cannot pay fancy prices for import ed chickens. If he had brought dressed | fowls on ice, to be sold at reasonable rates, he might have done better, or if he had established chicken farm," 1 with incubators, anywhere on the is-
 land and waited for better times and
 his plant to grow together, he would doubtless have done very well indeed.
 Our weeks voyage was much like
 others in this direction. It would be
 rare indeed were not some squalls en-
 countered in the 1867 miles that stretch
 between New York and Santiago
 Hardly had the Brooklyn bridge, the
 bronze goddess and other landmarks
 and water-marks of Gotham faded
 from view before the passengers began disappearing one by one. Only some
 how the sight of food suddenly became
 a horror and the desire to recline in se- cluslon was simultaneous and universal. All the omens and portents known to | mariners held true, such as
 Rainbow in the morning,
 Sailors take warning"
 ''If the Bermudas let you pass, | You must beware of Hatteras."
 The first long Sunday was a blank. We knew we were sailing the Sarragos-
 sa sea, amid patches of wonderful sea- | weed, accompanied by those other navi- gators, the nautalus and flying fish, but the inclination for a recumbent attitude
 in private was still so strong that few
 ventured forth. Days followed days on
 the sunlit sea, all so much alike that
 one lost track of time and hardly knew
 whether he had been from home a
 week or a year The skies grow bluer and bluer, and the waves capped
 above the bluest blue eyes ever beheld. Some of the nights were passed in a struggle to hold oneself in bed, so bois- | terous were the long Atlantic swells;
 and anon rocked in the cradle of the
 deep more gently, one gazed through
 the port-hole at disk of star-illumined
 sky and thought of the dear home faces
 till tranquil slumber came.
 A notable circumstance of this jour
 ney was that in the whole thirteen ] ,,,tlor, ,x,o lut tbroc