520 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES. 
the couritries where these divers live, i. e., in Greece and Turkey, any insurance 
on their lives, or in case of illness due to the diving apparatus. 
The diver is circumscribed by an evil circle from which he can be released 
only by a beneficent law prohibiting this mode of sponge fishing. Greed, 
bravado, and necessity sent the first divers into the scaphander at the instiga- 
tion of the harbor masters and captains. Now, with premature or sudden 
death or chronic disease before him, the ‘‘ machinist” (unyan«es, the sponge 
diver working in the machine, unyavy, is named by the Greek people) sells 
his health and life as dearly as possible. He is paid for a summer season of 
seven to eight months 2,000 to 3,500 francs. This, however, he soon spends, as 
he is tortured by a craving for enjoyment, as a man condemned to death or 
with thoughts of suicide. The high wages of the divers, moreover, are often 
accompanied by rough treatment. They desert,and the harbor masters and 
captains punish them for it as long as they can by the exaction of high per- 
centage, of extraordinary returns in sponges, of inordinately high prices for the 
provisions delivered to their families, or by pitilessly requiring them to dive to 
too great depths, where they meet death or disease as a result. 
The sponge-fishing population of the A‘gean Sea, Greeks and Albanians, 
was a religious one without being fanatic or superstitious. They maintained 
faithfully the ancient simple rites and customs, and their mode of life was hon- 
orable and patriarchic. But what a change has come in all this since the abuse 
of the diving apparatus shook to the depths the moral and material life of these 
brave fishermen! Both those who use and those who do not use the diving 
apparatus have fallen into misery, but the worse fate and the responsibility for 
the evil has befallen the users. A victim of premature death, or of chronic dis- 
eases worse than death, the unfortunate diver seeks in his affliction to forget his 
terrible fate in amusement and profligacy to-day, for to-morrow leaving his aged 
parents or his young wife and small children in misery; or still worse, he is left 
to share this misery with them as a cripple; or, by the height of misfortune, he 
limps through his native place or a foreign land as a beggar, if he is not so crip- 
pled as to have to be carried in a cart. The harbor masters and captains, as 
already stated, bear no responsibility for the frequent accidents, and with no 
provisions of insurance for cases of disease and death, the entire burden of the 
misfortune falls upon the family and the nearest relatives of the victim. The 
sponge trade likewise has for years suffered from the high prices of the sponges, 
a natural consequence of the destruction and scarcity caused by the diving 
apparatus and by the expensive hire of the divers. 
Specialists have for some time been studying and publishing the results of 
their observations on the frequent and varied diseases and the numerous cases 
of death from working in compressed air, and more recently especially among 
