“I love the sea as a little boy does his Pa’s pipe: it is all very good till he takes a few puffs, and then he forgets the lovely sensation that the first puff brought him. It will be unnecessary for me to relate all my experience int his regard: suffice it to say that the screaming sea-gulls followed our path, and gorged while I disgorged the good ‘grub’ which I ate at the Liverpool Conference house. Next morning brought different scenery to our view, the sea looked like a great sheet of glass, glistening in the sun, my stomach became settled and retained its ‘hash,’ and the sea-gulls bade us a lamentable farewell.”

I will ask my dad if he has anything in his missionary journal relating to seasickness. He went to New Zealand in the early 1950s and did all of his travel by ship. Spent the majority of his time in the Cook Islands and so a good portion of his mission was spent on a boat either traveling or fishing with the villagers, which missionaries could do back then.

Groberg includes his thoughts on the topic in his memoirs of his journey to Tonga as a young missionary.

I went halibut fishing early one spring in the rough waters of Alaska, and know firsthand that being sicker than a dog while everyone around you seems cheery and unaffected is the pits. Luckily, mine was a day trip and didn’t last a week…

And, if you’d like, I could add some “seasickness” stories that occurred on dry land.

In each of the staterooms there were two stacks of four bunks, made of canvas stretched taut on a steel frame. The frames were hinged so they could be folded up against the wall–there was scarcely room for a soldier to stand between the bunks when they were all folded down, and there certainly wasn’t room for his pack and rifle and other gear.

Each soldier hung his helmet on the corner of his bunk–with the liner removed, it was a useful container for catching the contents of ones stomach–if you managed to hit it. .350 was a good batting average in major league baseball–and apparently it was about what the soldiers hit.

Dad said he discovered early in the voyage that the clearest air was right at the prow of the ship–so he and some buddies tried to get up early every day and claim their spot, upwind of any of the other 10,000 soldiers who might be losing their breakfast along the rails behind them.

He heard from someone that a diet of boiled eggs and boiled potatoes would help. He wasn’t sure that it did–but he says he ate a lot of boiled eggs and boiled potatoes that fortnight.

The heads were another lovely part of the accommodations. There weren’t anywhere near enough, and they didn’t drain well. But, to try to keep the rest of the ship cleaner, the hatches were sandbagged at the bottom–which worked some, by making the heads filthier.

John Maxtone-Graham’s The Only Way to Cross contains several pages chronicling how the various transatlantic steamship lines dealt with seasickness.

I had forgotten Rudger Clawson’s detailed description. Seasickness played a part in the meeting of my great grandparents on the Manhattanin 1869. Charlotte Senior was traveling to Utah with her family, and Frederick King was one of four missionaries on board. He apparently took sick the moment the ship left the dock, and stayed below deck for the first three or four days. His sudden appearance after being at see for several days did not go unnoticed by Charlotte, and they married a year and a half later.