One of Weber's trusted employees has a rare talent: He can guess the country of origin of a baggage's owner from a cursory inspection of their possessions. He has noticed that Scandinavians arrive with more baggage than the others, bringing mattresses, drawers and kitchen chairs, and has concluded that they value objects almost as much as life. The suitcases of the English and French are in a better condition, while Greeks and Arabs lug bundles huge as mountains, having packed tightly and wrapped up hundreds of pounds of things in carpets and scarves.
Ellis Island brings information about the diseases of which America was particularly afraid, including trachoma, which was invariably a reason for deportation. All new arrivals were subject to a medical inspection, whereby a doctor would give the immigrant a quick once-over, focusing on the skin of the head, face, neck, hands, the way they walked and the overall physical and mental condition. Suspicion could be aroused by a collar ('Should be unbuttoned and checked whether it is not hiding a goitre or an ulcer'), a cap over one's eyes ('May hide conjunctivitis or trachoma') or an arm hidden under the overcoat ('May turn out to be deformed, paralysed, without fingers, with a scab'). Whenever an inspecting doctor noticed something and decided that a more thorough check was needed, he chalk-marked the suspect's clothes with a letter for the suggested disease.
A literary investigation
For a long time, Ellis Island knew no case of anybody under suspicion escaping the marking. In 1998, however, the island, now home to a museum, was visited by an eighty-year-old Spaniard Espuga Manuela Careno who had emigrated to America with her mother and brother in 1920. Although she had been only six at the time, she remembered an inspector chalk-mark her little brother's overcoat. The mother took that overcoat off him so fast that it went unnoticed by the staff and the boy was neither removed from the line nor separated from his family.