Today the captain became a surgeon with a pocket knife. He opened Jacques’ biggest boil, squeezed out the pus, reamed out the hole with his knife blade and emptied a small bottle of iodine into the wound.

Murder! roared Jacques. Murder!

The captain left the fo’c’sle, paying no attention to the accusation of murder.

The operation was successful and the patient recovered.

Treatments were many. When I was in a similar situation seven years ago, I was cured with the help of a refined trick shown to me by the captain of the barque in which I was serving. He took a small glass, then a piece of paper. He set fire to the paper, popped it into the glass and pressed the rim of the glass tightly against the skin around the boil. When the oxygen inside the glass had been consumed, the resulting vacuum sucked the pus out of the boil. He only had to pour out the glass. Nice work, but I don’t think that Mörn, our skipper, would have accepted it on his ship. A good pocket knife and a drop of iodine will bring relief to many men before we have enough water to wash in.

Eino Koivistoinen