Volume 16 / Part 4 — Atlantic Drift—Gathered In The Steerage.

By An Emigrant.

Concluded.

The generally fortunate voyage of our vessel was varied by two or three days of very rough weather, and the miseries of our first night at sea were intensified by a violent gale. The fast steamer, built with lines calculated for excessive speed, cut through rather than breasted the waves. Tons of clear water washed over the whaleback, knocking over one or two hapless wights, and drenching many others. Her wind-ward side was incessantly swept by blinding showers of heavy spray. To pass from the shelter of the main deck to the entrance of our steerage was a veritable running the gauntlet. You watched till the ship rose, and then ran at full speed for the shelter of the whaleback, happy if you reached it without being rolled by a sudden lurch into the scuppers, or losing your balance and clinging to the nearest rope or stanchion, being soused by the spray from the next wave that struck her.

The storm raged more fiercely as the evening advanced, and from timid lips came stories of the lost City of Boston and the hapless London, while more experienced hands regretted their precipitancy in selecting a vessel of a line in which every other quality was said to have been sacrificed to that of excessive speed, and indulged in uncomfortable surmises as to the consequences of the shaft snapping or the engines breaking down. When the damp and chill of the advancing night drove us to our bunks, we clambered down-stairs, and, staggering away into our respective streets, crawled in. To realize my first impression of the steerage of our vessel at night, when its cavernous space was lit, or rather its grim darkness made visible, by a single lantern, would require the pen of Dickens or the graphic pencil of Gustave Doré. Crouching between those bunks and the roof grotesque forms, dimly seen in the obscure light, threw weird shadows on the cabin sides. Here one busily engaged, under innumerable difficulties, in making up a neat bed of sheets and blankets, into which he afterwards burrows by an ingenious backward movement, like a shore crab hiding himself in the sand left uncovered by the receding tide; while his next neighbor retires to rest by the simple process of kicking off his boots, pulling his battered night-cap over his eyes, and stretching himself on the bare boards, with a muttered string of curses on the ship, the weather, and the world in general, for his evening orisons. At a corner of one of the tables appear a group of players poring over their cards in a chiaro-oscuro that recalls a scene of Teniers or Van Ostade, while at another a group are gathered round a young vocalist who quavers out in a dull monotone a curious medley of sentimental ditties and music-hall vulgarities. Gradually all drop away into their bunks, and everything is still, save the deep breathing of some hundred souls, and the groans of the sufferers from the malady of the sea. Occasionally the heavy plunge of [pg 838] the ship, as she dashes into some mountainous wave, extinguishes the lamp with the shock, and buries the little windows under water, leaving the cabin for a few seconds in profound darkness. In the gale during the first night of our voyage, one tremendous billow struck the ship, burying us in black night, and rolling trunks, tins, and clothes cluttering to leeward with the lurch of the vessel, and awakening all in a moment from their slumbers. A general consternation prevailed, and while some called in angry tones for the lamp to be relighted, others could be heard muttering the unfamiliar words of a half-forgotten prayer. As the great ship shook in her conflict with the raging sea, and we heard overhead the rush of many feet and the swash on deck of a heavy mass of water, I felt nervous enough till she rose again and, creeping to the little window, I could see the cold moon throwing a silvery track across the waste of raging, wind-lashed surges.

I thought of the great ships that had gone down, crowded with hundreds of unprepared and unthinking souls, into the cruel bosom of the great ocean; perhaps their unknown fate was to sink in the darkness of the night, crushed in a moment by an iceberg, or, maimed and helpless, battered to pieces and submerged by the angry waves. What a horrible death-agony must be that of the doomed, who, after the sudden crash of a collision, or battened down in their dark prison in a raging storm, heard the cataract of water roar down the hatchway, greedy to engulf them! For a few moments what fearful struggles would take place in the crowded cabin to mount the bunks and gain the last mouthful of the retiring air, until the flood buried all in the bosom of the deep, in a silence to be broken only by the trumpet of the Judgment Day! Should I, I pondered, in such a dark hour, have the strength of mind or grace of God to lie still on my bed and let the rising water cut short the prayer on my lips, or, hoping against hope, with angrily raging heart die fighting to breathe a few seconds longer the vital air? Of a truth, to die suffocated in the darkness, without a last look at the great vault of heaven, a last breath of the pure air, seemed to me to be to doubly die.

If I suffered some discomfort and perhaps a little anxiety from the occasional anger of the mighty main, it was far more than compensated for by its aspect in its calmer and more peaceful moods. I cannot understand how in a few days voyagers can learn to complain of the monotony of the sea; to me, its different moods in calm and storm, the snowy crests of the dancing waves, the foaming and often phosphorescent wake of the great steamer, and the ever-changing aspects of the cloud-laden heavens, were objects of untiring interest. If I had the magic pen of the author of the Queen of the Air, I would write a book on the cloud-scenery of the Atlantic. Never, even in the purest Italian sky or the cloudless heavens above the vast expanse of a Western prairie, have I seen Diana so purely fair, Lucifer so bright, or Aurora clad in such varied garments of purple and rose; such a wonderful vault lined with innumerable flakes of spotless wool left by the dying wind; such masses of cumulus, sometimes as solidly white as Alpine summits, sometimes before the rain-storm luridly gray-black with the gathered water, like the massive bulk of Snowdon seen through a driving rain; and, once or twice, the pall of the thunder-storm rising over the leeward heaven and advancing towards us, its ragged [pg 839] edge momentarily lit up with the blazing tongues of the lightning, until it rolled over, deafening with its dread artillery and hiding all around in mist and blinding rain. The grandeur of sunset and of sunrise, when not obscured by the mistiness of a moist atmosphere, was indescribable. Every night, with renewed pleasure, we watched the god of day sink beneath the western horizon. Turner, in his wildest dreams of those gorgeous heaven-pictures that he had not seen on earth but felt that he would love to see, imagined no greater luxury of gold, carmine, purple, crimson, rose, and rose-tinged snow, than was afforded by some of the spectacles of the setting sun. One evening still holds my memory entranced: the heavy curtain of dull gray mist that all day had lain low over the sea rolled eastward before the evening breeze; the emerging sun, low on the horizon, dyed the receding masses of cloud with a thousand shades of livid purple; the peaks and shoulders of the eastern range of mountains of dark vapor caught the light, while between them sank valleys and depths more sombre by the contrast. Westward, below the rosy, almost blood-red sun, ran two long narrow filaments of purple cloud, dark across the glow of the heavens, like bars across a furnace. A few moments, and the shining orb sinks beneath them, fringing their edges with refulgent gold, then falls into a sea of liquid fire. A little longer the crimson hues linger on the eastern curtain of clouds, then grow fainter and fainter, and die away into the gray hues of a moonless night.

Among the five hundred emigrants our good ship carried there were, it is needless to say, many men of different speech, and almost every diversity of occupation and character. Besides the four nations of Great Britain, we had Germans, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians in considerable numbers, a few French, Poles, and Russians, a Levantine Jewess and her children, and a solitary American. With the Teutons my ignorance of their language prevented me holding further converse than to learn their nationality and their destination—generally Illinois, Minnesota, or Wisconsin. Unlike the Irish, with whom New York seemed to fulfil all their notions of America, the Germans and Scandinavians appeared all westward bound, in large parties, organized for agricultural life; and while they were in a considerable minority on the vessel, they formed much the larger proportion of the passengers in the emigrant cars. The amount of their baggage was something prodigious. Nearly all apparently peasants in their native land, they seemed on leaving it to transport everything they possessed except the roof over their heads to their adopted country. What would not break they enclosed in immense bags of ticking and rough canvas, and the residue of their property in arklike chests, the immense weight and sharp iron-bound corners of which moved the sailors to multiform blasphemy. For my part, I had read so much of the contented prosperity of the peasantry in Norway and Sweden that I speculated not a little as to what cause could lead them to make the long and expensive migration from Christiania or Gottenburg to the so far off shores of the Mississippi.

With the Germans, who came principally from the neighborhood of Mannheim, the case was different. Several of them could speak a little French, nor were they reticent as to the principal cause that led them to desert their fatherland: it was the man tax, levied by the empire of [pg 840] blood and iron on their youth and manhood, that drove them from their farms in the sweet Rhine valley to seek abodes in the new and freer world. Several of them had followed the Bavarian standard under Von Tannen through the hardships and carnage of the Franco-German war; but to the shrewd sense of the peasant the halo of military glory and the pomp of wide empire meant but conscription and taxation, fields untilled, and wife and children starving, while the blood of father and son was poured out to indite a new page in the gory annals of warlike fame.

By the way, one of them assured us that never in the fiercest time of that deadly strife, even when, in long forced marches, driving Bourbaki's broken bands through the snows of Jura, had they fared so badly as he did then, to which I may add the experience of an Englishman—whose sinister countenance and shabby attire gave increased weight to his testimony—who averred that we fared little better than in a workhouse and worse than in a jail.

Amongst us there were many mechanics, principally Irish, who were returning from visits to their friends; nor can I omit to chronicle their uniform and emphatic testimony as to the benefit they had received from their emigration. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago, they were sure of work, could live and dress comfortably, and lay by a large proportion of their earnings, while in England, and still more in Ireland, they were happy when their earnings kept them in lodging, food, and clothing, and saving was neither thought of nor possible. From what I could learn, the position of the unskilled laborer appeared by no means so bright. The different system of hiring in America made the nominally higher wages more precarious than in the old country; and I suspect that everywhere the untaught man, who, ignorant of any distinct branch of industry, brings only his thews and sinews to market, is, and will ever be, but “a hewer of wood and drawer of water”—an ill-paid and little valued drudge.

For one class of the Irish emigrants, of whom we had a certain number on board, their countrymen entertained a profound and not unfounded contempt. Youths from Cork or Dublin shops or offices, whom dissipation or misconduct had thrown out of place, or the desire of novelty or adventure had attracted to the New World—unfit for manual labor, and without any special qualification for commerce—their heads were turned with tales of the giddy whirl of New York life, in their notions of which gallantry, whiskey, politics, calico balls, and rowdy patriotism made a curious medley. Their general ambition was to be bar-tenders, and with some exceptions their usual behavior showed them to be little fitted for any better avocation.

One of the characters that most attracted my attention, though I elicited but little response to my advances from his taciturn nature, was a miner from Montana—a man of short stature but powerful build, with, a determined, weather-beaten face, and a decidedly sinister squint, who had rambled over the greater part of California, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Montana, and apparently returned no richer from his wanderings. Having been a seaman before he took to a mountain life, his gait had acquired an indescribably curious mixture of the out-kneed walk of a man constantly on horseback with the roll of a sailor, while he had, too, a curious habit of involuntarily working the fingers of his right hand as if they held a six-shooter. He usually [pg 841] restricted himself to the bachelor society under the whaleback, and, chary of his words, amused himself with an amateur surveillance of the operations of the men, or occasionally exchanged reminiscences in brief sentences with two or three other returned Californians: how he and his mates had killed a grizzly at the foot of Mount Helena; how he had made £1,200 in eight months from a claim in Siskiyou County, and lost it all in working another in El Dorado County, at which he persevered fruitlessly for three years, while the claims on each side brought heavy piles to their workers; how he had seen twenty-six “road agents” hanged together in Montana; and other tales of far West mining, murder, and debauchery. Once only his hard face relaxed into a laugh at a story he told of two men who quarrelled in a California saloon, and, dodging round the table, while the rest of the company made for the door or skulked behind the beer barrels, emptied their revolvers at each other with no worse effect than one slight scratch. That twelve barrels should go off and no one be killed seemed to be too ridiculous, and his risible faculties overcame him accordingly. Strangely enough, while he spoke with the most hearty enthusiasm as to the pleasures of a mountaineering life, which he declared, with a good horse, a trusty rifle, and staunch mates, was the finest in the world, and to judge from appearances had certainly not made his pile, he never intended to return westward, but was bound for some city of the South. Possibly some episodes in his checkered existence had caused him to bear in mind the shortened career of the twenty-six road agents with a distinctness that determined his preference for this side of the Rocky Mountains.

The most lively time of the day was the evening after the five o'clock tea; the sailors during the dog-watches—from four to eight—do not turn in, but remain on deck, and they amused or persecuted the female passengers with a coarse gallantry that generally made the more modest women remain below; the cooks, engineers, and firemen stood at their doors in the deck-house and greeted with horse-banter the passers-by; while on the open space before the wheel-house a few couples danced to the music of an accordion, or tried to tire each other out to the whistled tune of an Irish jig. A pair of professional singers, husband and wife, to whose retinue I usually attached myself, used to sit at the door of the saloon and favor us with selections from their repertory, often with a success that brought metallic appreciation from the gentlemen in the neighboring smoking-room; till after sunset—generally interpreted with extreme liberality—one of the stewards of the after-steerage literally hunted the women down-stairs; and then often on fine nights the sailors would cluster round the open hatchway and sing for or banter with their favorites below.

The behavior of the sailors towards the women was the subject of constant complaint by the more respectable of the passengers throughout the voyage; in the evening, no woman without her husband was safe from their persecution, and not always with him at her side; as they stood by each other, and always had the sheath-knife at their side, the men were not very ready to commence a quarrel with them; if their advances were resented, they were apt to change from coarse good-humor to the most revolting and obscene abuse. Hence, as I have mentioned, many of the women would not return to the deck after the evening meal. In [pg 842] short, if other steamers are like the one in which we made the passage, no young woman could cross in the steerage without her modesty being daily shocked, and, if she was unprotected, running great risk of actual insult. I have mentioned that the deck bar was at the head of our staircase and consequently near the sailors' cabin; one night it was broken open and cleared of its contents; whether the culprits were either sought for or detected, I never heard; but certainly the seamen next day were in a state of extreme conviviality: and, under the emboldening influence of liquor, one lively young mariner put his arm round the waist of a very handsome young Englishwoman, whose ladylike dress and appearance had so far prevented her from being molested in this way. A fight between her husband and the delinquent was with difficulty prevented by the bystanders, and the former went to complain to the chief officer; he mustered the watch and read them a lecture on their not interfering with the female passengers, and told the culprit he would hand him over to the authorities at Castle Garden on his arrival at New York, who would certainly send him for six months to prison. The latter did not seem much discomposed at the intimation, and the day I landed in the Empire City he appeared at our boardinghouse on Washington Street in a state of great hilarity and beer, and informed us with much blasphemy that he had cut his connection with the ship.

The emigrant passengers on board our ship suffered much annoyance and discomfort; but I do not hesitate to say that most of our troubles arose from the crew and attendants rather than the arrangements of the ship itself. Much of the accommodation provided—for instance, in the case of the wash-houses and fresh-water pumps—was made useless by the negligence or surliness of the men by whom they were controlled; the victuals seemed generally to be of good quality, and, except in the case of the fresh bread and sugar, were provided with lavish if not wasteful abundance, but they were usually carelessly cooked, if not actually uneatable, and served in the roughest and most heedless manner. The crew were a most disorderly set—quarrels were of constant occurrence. I saw two fights—one between the interpreter attached to the after-steerage and one of the stewards; and another, which took place between the head-cook and the butcher in the saloon galley; and I heard of several others. The cooks and bakers in the steerage galley were changed once or twice during the voyage, but no change for the better resulted. I attribute this want of anything like discipline or attentiveness to their duties to the constant change of the men on board these steamers; they only sign articles for the run out and home, rarely remaining more than one or two voyages in the ship, and many go the westward voyage merely to get to New York and desert the ship the moment they arrive there. I was told the chief officer called the milors together and promised them, as the ship was short-handed (she had seven less than her complement of 28 seamen), they should receive £5 10s. per month instead of the £4 10s. for which they had shipped; but in spite of this, nearly half of them would desert when the ship came to her moorings. The cooks, bakers, and stewards are engaged in the same way, and the consequence is, before they can all be got to understand their positions and work well together, they are paid off and a new [pg 843] set come on board. If the companies could form a permanent staff for their vessels, and go to the same care and expense over their organization as they give to the material equipment of their splendid vessels, an immense change for the better would be effected in the comfort and convenience of the emigrant. As to the distribution of provisions, the passengers might be arranged in messes of ten or twenty, some of whose number would fetch their food from the galley for allotment among themselves, and thus give them an opportunity of eating their meals at table in a more Christianlike and less piggish manner than the majority are at present compelled to do. Nor do I see any great difficulty or additional expense in a different arrangement of the bunks, by which, at the sacrifice of the wide space in the middle of the steerage, they could be grouped on each side of a central table, so that each twenty or thereabouts would form a partially separated room, with its own table and its own mess.

At last, early on the second Sunday morning, the thunderlike roll of the cable paid out over our heads awoke us as the ship came to anchor off Staten Island, and later in the day she moored alongside the company's wharf in New Jersey. In sight of the promised land, the fatigue and annoyance of the voyage were soon forgotten. A liberal meal of fresh and unusually well-cooked beef and plum-duff, eaten undisturbed by the vessel's motion, made the memory of the disgusting messes we had endured or revolted at less poignant. The entire passengers went on shore in the forenoon, but none of the emigrants were allowed to leave, or any one to come on board the ship. Boatfuls of friends of the passengers came alongside, and the word passed along the deck that Mrs. Brady's husband or Mary Cahill's brother was seeking her. Numberless inquiries were shouted as to Mike, or Mary, or the children, until the gray twilight hid the spires and streets of the great city across the river. The chief officer came round early with a lantern, and summarily dismissed all the women below, and all went quietly to rest. Often, I believe, the last night on board the emigrant ship is a scene of wild revelry, if not actual debauchery; but the want of liquor—none was sold after the vessel came to her moorings—and the absence of the fairer sex, effectually quenched any convivial tendencies.

At an early hour next morning the luggage was run out of the hold, and tumbled pell-mell on deck; and the youth of either sex, hitherto contented with the shabbiest and most negligent of attire, watched eagerly for their boxes, dragged them to a convenient corner, and made an elaborate toilette, either for the benefit of their American friends or to give the coup de grâce to the sweethearts they had encountered on the voyage. It was like the transformation scene in a pantomime, and I could hardly recognize my lady acquaintances in their gay bonnets and neat dresses. Much of their finery, however, suffered serious damage before they emerged on the Bowery. In the afternoon, the custom-house officer came on board and took his place near the gangway, alongside of which lay a tender for the passengers and a barge for the luggage. The boxes were scattered all over the deck, and to get them examined one had to drag them to the officer, open them and close them, obtain a Castle Garden check from an official at the head of the gangway, and then they went over the side on to the barge, and the passenger on to the tender. Every [pg 844] one was anxious to be off, and all scrambled at once towards the gangway, dragging boxes and bundles with them. Never did we see such a scene of tumult and confusion. Such a babel of tongues; such despair at boxes that either would not open, or more frequently, being opened, would not shut; such lamentations over their often hopelessly shattered contents—the married women imploring some one to mind their children while they dragged their boxes to the gangway; the single ones begging quondam admirers to help them to move their heavy trunks—appeals to which the latter, sufficiently engrossed with their own struggle to be off, generally turned a deaf and unkind ear. The custom-house officer seemed to discharge his duty with as much good-humor as the necessity of examining some thousand boxes in a limited time would allow. We got off with the first tenderful, and after waiting an hour or two in Castle Garden, where we at once cleared the refreshment stall of what we then thought delicious coffee and pies, we were told to fetch our luggage on the following day, and then passed out into Broadway to seek our various fortunes.

In the boarding-house where I spent the night in New York, I met passengers from most of the other lines. All complained of their accommodations, and affected to believe that they had unfortunately selected the most uncomfortable service. For my own part, I believe that on the whole there is but little to choose between the accommodations and provisions supplied by the different companies, and that the description I have given of the arrangements of one line would generally apply to the rest.