I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow.
Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance
on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had
already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and voluble over
their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and suspicion
reigned supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened and
grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening estuary; and with the
falling temperature the gloom among the passengers increased. Two of the
women wept. Any one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all
absconding from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged, and no
common sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having
touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard now
announced that our ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in
mid-river, at the Tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of
bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of spars,
larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an incorporated
town in the land to which she was to bear us.
I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although anxious to see the
worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage, and was
advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table
at command. The advice was excellent; but to understand the choice, and
what I gained, some outline of the internal disposition of the ship will
first be necessary. In her very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of
stairs. A little abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and
3, gives admission to three galleries, two running forward towards
Steerage No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines. The starboard
forward gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and below
the officers’ cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet
a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second cabin, to
return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages.
Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being
sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents
in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this
new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in
chastisement.
There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this strip. He
does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds berths and
a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys a distinct
superiority in diet; but this, strange to say, differs not only on
different ships, but on the same ship according as her head is to the
east or west. In my own experience, the principal difference between our
table and that of the true steerage passenger was the table itself, and
the crockery plates from which we ate. But lest I should show myself
ungrateful, let me recapitulate every advantage. At breakfast we had a
choice between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make,
the two were so surprisingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the
coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof conclusive of some
chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could distinguish a smack of
snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling and dish-cloths in the
second. As a matter of fact, I have seen passengers, after many sips,
still doubting which had been supplied them. In the way of eatables at
the same meal we were gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge,
which was common to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and
sometimes rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt
junk, and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and
the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were of
a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding-days, instead of duff, we
had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the name of a plum-pudding.
At tea we were served with some broken meat from the saloon; sometimes in
the comparatively elegant form of spare patties or rissoles; but as a
general thing mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish, neither hot nor
cold. If these were not the scrapings of plates their looks belied them
sorely; yet we were all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these
leavings greedily. These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup
and porridge which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the
voyage; so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table
I might as well have been in the steerage outright. Had they given me
porridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly contented
with the fare. As it was, with a few biscuits and some whisky and water
before turning in, I kept my body going and my spirits up to the mark.
The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably stands
ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of sentiment. In
the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and
gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a
male; but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks, I came on
a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it,
of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously
confined to the same quarter of the deck. Who could tell whether I
housed on the port or starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was
only there that my superiority became practical; everywhere else I was
incognito, moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so much as a
swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after all, and had broken meat
to tea. Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer at
home; and when I felt out of spirits I could go down and refresh myself
with a look of that brass plate.
For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six guineas is the
steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you remember that
the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, and, in five cases
out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or privately pays the
steward for extra rations, the difference in price becomes almost
nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food comparatively varied,
and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman, may thus be
had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-passengers in the second
cabin had already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and declared it
was an experiment not to be repeated. As I go on to tell about my
steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not alone in
their opinion. Out of ten with whom I was more or less intimate, I am
sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to travel second cabin;
and all who had left their wives behind them assured me they would go
without the comfort of their presence until they could afford to bring
them by saloon.
Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on
board. Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will and
character. Yet it had some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed
group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally known by the
name of ‘Johnny,’ in spite of his own protests, greatly diverted us by
his clever, cross-country efforts to speak English, and became on the
strength of that an universal favourite—it takes so little in this world
of shipboard to create a popularity. There was, besides, a Scots mason,
known from his favourite dish as ‘Irish Stew,’ three or four nondescript
Scots, a fine young Irishman, O’Reilly, and a pair of young men who
deserve a special word of condemnation. One of them was Scots; the other
claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he was born in
England; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and nurtured, but
ashamed to own his country. He had a sister on board, whom he faithfully
neglected throughout the voyage, though she was not only sick, but much
his senior, and had nursed and cared for him in childhood. In appearance
he was like an imbecile Henry the Third of France. The Scotsman, though
perhaps as big an ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have only
bracketed them together because they were fast friends, and disgraced
themselves equally by their conduct at the table.
Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married couple,
devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they had first seen
each other years ago at a preparatory school, and that very afternoon he
had carried her books home for her. I do not know if this story will be
plain to southern readers; but to me it recalls many a school idyll, with
wrathful swains of eight and nine confronting each other stride-legs,
flushed with jealousy; for to carry home a young lady’s books was both a
delicate attention and a privilege.
Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as much
old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her husband,
and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself. We had to take her
own word that she was married; for it was sorely contradicted by the
testimony of her appearance. Nature seemed to have sanctified her for
the single state; even the colour of her hair was incompatible with
matrimony, and her husband, I thought, should be a man of saintly spirit
and phantasmal bodily presence. She was ill, poor thing; her soul turned
from the viands; the dirty tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety;
and the whole strength of her endeavour was bent upon keeping her watch
true to Glasgow time till she should reach New York. They had heard
reports, her husband and she, of some unwarrantable disparity of hours
between these two cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific, had
seized on this occasion to put them to the proof. It was a good thing
for the old lady; for she passed much leisure time in studying the watch.
Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let it run down. It was inscribed
on her harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands of a watch must
never be turned backwards; and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the
exact moment ere she started it again. When she imagined this was about
due, she sought out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen, who was
embarked on the same experiment as herself and had hitherto been less
neglectful. She was in quest of two o’clock; and when she learned it was
already seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted up her voice and cried
‘Gravy!’ I had not heard this innocent expletive since I was a young
child; and I suppose it must have been the same with the other Scotsmen
present, for we all laughed our fill.
Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It would be
difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he mine, during the
voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only scooped gravy; but at our
concerts, of which more anon, he was the president who called up
performers to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his errands and
pleaded privately with the over-modest. I knew I liked Mr. Jones from
the moment I saw him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish; nor
could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a _lingua franca_ of many
tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there
is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the sea.
They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a
Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an _h_; a word of a dialect is picked
up from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man’s place of birth. So it
was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea;
and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at
an inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean voyages
having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern. By his own
account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. A few years back,
he had been married and after a fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead
and the money gone. But his was the nature that looks forward, and goes
on from one year to another and through all the extremities of fortune
undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to see
Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting things to
rights. He was always hovering round inventions like a bee over a
flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He had with him a patent
medicine, for instance, the composition of which he had bought years ago
for five dollars from an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a
hundred pounds (I think it was) to an English apothecary. It was called
Golden Oil, cured all maladies without exception; and I am bound to say
that I partook of it myself with good results. It is a character of the
man that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but
wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones
with his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our
neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called
unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you
might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go
to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the day’s
experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a day’s
kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species, and we
angled as often as not in one another’s baskets. Once, in the midst of a
serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself; I own
I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but Jones, with a
better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected laughter, and declared,
what was the truth, that there was a pair of us indeed.