We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the Friday
forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in
Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was now complete, and
began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon the decks. There
were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a few Americans, a good
handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and one Russian; all now
belonging for ten days to one small iron country on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus
curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time
to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the
passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores of
the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emigration,
from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most dismally in
my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more
pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful
and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and
helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight for his own
hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome,
and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of
self-help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to
them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the personal
act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was adequately rewarded
with a medal. For in emigration the young men enter direct and by the
shipload on their heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the
bo’s’un’s whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new empires are
domesticated to the service of man.
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of
embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the less I was
tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below
thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were
already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my
imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I
thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff
or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition.
Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient
citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed
to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days.
Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance. In
a word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally, such
as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like Marmion, ‘in the
lost battle, borne down by the flying.’
Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain,
sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard
vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted
by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of
homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests
beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls.
But I had never taken them home to me or represented these distresses
livingly to my imagination.
A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French
retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment, and
makes a trifling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle as we
please, we are not born economists. The individual is more affecting
than the mass. It is by the scenic accidents, and the appeal to the
carnal eye, that for the most part we grasp the significance of
tragedies. Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved in the
rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were
a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the
prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the
one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two
might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of
failures, the broken men of England. Yet it must not be supposed that
these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was
cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of
hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some
were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests
and ready laughter.
The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the decks
scraping acquaintance after their fashion also. ‘What do you call your
mither?’ I heard one ask. ‘Mawmaw,’ was the reply, indicating, I fancy,
a shade of difference in the social scale. When people pass each other
on the high seas of life at so early an age, the contact is but slight,
and the relation more like what we may imagine to be the friendship of
flies than that of men; it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so
open in its communications and so devoid of deeper human qualities. The
children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick as thieves at a
fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously manœuvring on the
outskirts of acquaintance. The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon
as familiar as home to these half-conscious little ones. It was odd to
hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore words to designate
portions of the vessel. ‘Go ’way doon to yon dyke,’ I heard one say,
probably meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my mouth, watching
them climb into the shrouds or on the rails, while the ship went swinging
through the waves; and I admired and envied the courage of their mothers,
who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at these perilous
feats. ‘He’ll maybe be a sailor,’ I heard one remark; ‘now’s the time to
learn.’ I had been on the point of running forward to interfere, but
stood back at that, reproved. Very few in the more delicate classes have
the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to them; but the life of
poorer folk, where necessity is so much more immediate and imperious,
braces even a mother to this extreme of endurance. And perhaps, after
all, it is better that the lad should break his neck than that you should
break his spirit.
And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention one
little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who,
wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an
ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in a tangle,
his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and fro with so
natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and
good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in
motion. To meet him, crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment
to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little
triumph of the human species. Even when his mother and the rest of his
family lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy.
Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few advances. We
discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of
information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new world,
or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we condoled
together over the food and the vileness of the steerage. One or two had
been so near famine that you may say they had run into the ship with the
devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the best in the best of
possible steamers. But the majority were hugely contented. Coming as
they did from a country in so low a state as Great Britain, many of them
from Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as dead, and many
having long been out of work, I was surprised to find them so dainty in
their notions. I myself lived almost exclusively on bread, porridge, and
soup, precisely as it was supplied to them, and found it, if not
luxurious, at least sufficient. But these working men were loud in their
outcries. It was not ‘food for human beings,’ it was ‘only fit for
pigs,’ it was ‘a disgrace.’ Many of them lived almost entirely upon
biscuit, others on their own private supplies, and some paid extra for
better rations from the ship. This marvellously changed my notion of the
degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was prepared to hear him
grumble, for grumbling is the traveller’s pastime; but I was not prepared
to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to myself. Words I
should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal allowance; but when a
man prefers dry biscuit there can be no question of the sincerity of his
disgust.
With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise. A single
night of the steerage had filled them with horror. I had myself
suffered, even in my decent-second-cabin berth, from the lack of air; and
as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined to sleep on
deck, and advised all who complained of their quarters to follow my
example. I dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so, and I thought we
should have been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my rug about
seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch. That chimerical
terror of good night-air, which makes men close their windows, list their
doors, and seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had
sent all these healthy workmen down below. One would think we had been
brought up in a fever country; yet in England the most malarious
districts are in the bedchambers.
I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the night
so quietly to myself. The wind had hauled a little ahead on the
starboard bow, and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter near the
fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night.
The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle and cradling movement.
The ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her bowels occupied the
mind, and prepared it for slumber. From time to time a heavier lurch
would disturb me as I lay, and recall me to the obscure borders of
consciousness; or I heard, as it were through a veil, the clear note of
the clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea-cry, ‘All’s well!’ I know
nothing, whether for poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of
these two syllables in the darkness of a night at sea.
The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose so
high that it was difficult to keep ones footing on the deck. I have
spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship’s company, and
cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs
of all nations. Good, bad, or indifferent—Scottish, English, Irish,
Russian, German or Norse,—the songs were received with generous applause.
Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful
Scottish accent, varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to
dance a quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the violin.
The performers were all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers
in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the dance, they
conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral. I have never seen
decorum pushed so far; and as this was not expected, the quadrille was
soon whistled down, and the dancers departed under a cloud. Eight
Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen from another rank of society, would have
dared to make some fun for themselves and the spectators; but the working
man, when sober, takes an extreme and even melancholy view of personal
deportment. A fifth-form schoolboy is not more careful of dignity. He
dares not be comical; his fun must escape from him unprepared, and above
all, it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration. I like his
society under most circumstances, but let me never again join with him in
public gambols.
But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even
the inclemencies of sea and sky. On this rough Saturday night, we got
together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind and
rain. Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane deck, and the
rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to support the women
in the violent lurching of the ship; and when we were thus disposed, sang
to our hearts’ content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the scene;
others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such
as, ‘Around her splendid form, I weaved the magic circle,’ sounded bald,
bleak, and pitifully silly. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if
we do,’ was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with which
the chorus was thrown forth into the night. I observed a Platt-Deutsch
mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to the general
effect. And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example of the
sincerity with which the song was rendered; for nearly all with whom I
conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to war, and attributed
their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for whisky, to the
campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.
Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our
situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices that took up
the burden how the sentiment came home to each, ‘The Anchor’s Weighed’
was true for us. We were indeed ‘Rocked on the bosom of the stormy
deep.’ How many of us could say with the singer, ‘I’m lonely to-night,
love, without you,’ or, ‘Go, some one, and tell them from me, to write me
a letter from home’! And when was there a more appropriate moment for
‘Auld Lang Syne’ than now, when the land, the friends, and the affections
of that mingled but beloved time were fading and fleeing behind us in the
vessel’s wake? It pointed forward to the hour when these labours should
be overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a meeting in the sanded
inn, when those who had parted in the spring of youth should again drink
a cup of kindness in their age. Had not Burns contemplated emigration, I
scarce believe he would have found that note.
All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were prostrated by
sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second cabin, and two of these
departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was observed
strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I heard an old woman express
her surprise that ‘the ship didna gae doon,’ as she saw some one pass her
with a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scottish psalms. Many
went to service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with
their divine. ‘I didna think he was an experienced preacher,’ said one
girl to me.
Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells, although
the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all wrecked and blown
away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly
overhead. I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this
hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at home upon the summer
woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the water with a
roar, and shook the ship from end to end; the bows battled with loud
reports against the billows: and as I stood in the lee-scuppers and
looked up to where the funnel leaned out, over my head, vomiting smoke,
and the black and monstrous top-sails blotted, at each lurch, a different
crop of stars, it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing of small
account, and that just above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.