One night Jones, the young O’Reilly, and myself were walking arm-in-arm
and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a head-wind blew
chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain, and the
fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with its unwelcome
outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense like a mosquito. Even
the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight.
For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran to the
rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was impossible
in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly in the wet
scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. We asked him what
was amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange accent and in a
voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the stomach, that he had
been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice, and had walked the deck
against fatigue till he was overmastered and had fallen where we found
him.
Jones remained by his side, while O’Reilly and I hurried off to seek the
doctor. We knocked in vain at the doctor’s cabin; there came no reply;
nor could we find any one to guide us. It was no time for delicacy; so
we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up a ladder and touching my hat
to the officer of the watch, addressed him as politely as I could—
‘I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in the
lee scuppers; and I can’t find the doctor.’
He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat harshly,
‘Well, _I_ can’t leave the bridge, my man,’ said he.
‘No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,’ I returned.
‘Is it one of the crew?’ he asked.
‘I believe him to be a fireman,’ I replied.
I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly, whether
it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or from something
conciliatory in my address, the officer in question was immediately
relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice much freer from
constraint, advised me to find a steward and despatch him in quest of the
doctor, who would now be in the smoking-room over his pipe.
One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down our
companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room of a night.
Let me call him Blackwood. O’Reilly and I rattled down the companion,
breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and perched across the
carpenters bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood; a neat, bright, dapper,
Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank twang in his
speech. I forget who was with him, but the pair were enjoying a
deliberate talk over their pipes. I dare say he was tired with his day’s
work, and eminently comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I did
not stop to consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath.
‘Steward,’ said I, ‘there’s a man lying bad with cramp, and I can’t find
the doctor.’
He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that is the
prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth—
‘That’s none of my business,’ said he. ‘I don’t care.’
I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat. The thought of
his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with indignation. I glanced
at O’Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked like assault and
battery, every inch of him. But we had a better card than violence.
‘You will have to make it your business,’ said I, ‘for I am sent to you
by the officer on the bridge.’
Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer, but put out his pipe,
gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand strolling. From
that day forward, I should say, he improved to me in courtesy, as though
he had repented his evil speech and were anxious to leave a better
impression.
When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and two
or three late stragglers had gathered round, and were offering
suggestions. One proposed to give the patient water, which was promptly
negatived. Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed to be let lie;
but as it was at least as well to keep him off the streaming decks,
O’Reilly and I supported him between us. It was only by main force that
we did so, and neither an easy nor an agreeable duty; for he fought in
his paroxysms like a frightened child, and moaned miserably when he
resigned himself to our control.
‘O let me lie!’ he pleaded. ‘I’ll no’ get better anyway.’ And then,
with a moan that went to my heart, ‘O why did I come upon this miserable
journey?’
I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in the
close, tossing steerage: ‘O why left I my hame?’
Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the
galley, where we could see a light. There he found a belated cook
scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he sought
to borrow. The scullion was backward. ‘Was it one of the crew?’ he
asked. And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured him that it
was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and came towards us at an
easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger. The light,
as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled
with years; but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from us the
expression and even the design of his face.
So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.
‘_It’s only a passenger_!’ said he; and turning about, made, lantern and
all, for the galley.
‘He’s a man anyway,’ cried Jones in indignation.
‘Nobody said he was a woman,’ said a gruff voice, which I recognised for
that of the bo’s’un.
All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and now the
officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck
rails, if the doctor were not yet come. We told him not.
‘No?’ he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry aft in
person.
Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately enough and
examined our patient with the lantern. He made little of the case, had
the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent him forward to
his bunk. Two of his neighbours in the steerage had now come to our
assistance, expressing loud sorrow that such ‘a fine cheery body’ should
be sick; and these, claiming a sort of possession, took him entirely
under their own care. The drug had probably relieved him, for he
struggled no more, and was led along plaintive and patient, but
protesting. His heart recoiled at the thought of the steerage. ‘O let
me lie down upon the bieldy side,’ he cried; ‘O dinna take me down!’ And
again: ‘O why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?’ And yet once
more, with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the fourth word: ‘I had
no _call_ to come.’ But there he was; and by the doctor’s orders and the
kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the companion of
Steerage No. 1 into the den allotted him.
At the foot of our own companion, just where I found Blackwood, Jones and
the bo’s’un were now engaged in talk. This last was a gruff,
cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a century upon the
seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy blond eyebrows, and an eye
without radiance, but inflexibly steady and hard. I had not forgotten
his rough speech; but I remembered also that he had helped us about the
lantern; and now seeing him in conversation with Jones, and being choked
with indignation, I proceeded to blow off my steam.
‘Well,’ said I, ‘I make you my compliments upon your steward,’ and
furiously narrated what had happened.
‘I’ve nothing to do with him,’ replied the bo’s’un. ‘They’re all alike.
They wouldn’t mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon the top of
another.’
This was enough. A very little humanity went a long way with me after
the experience of the evening. A sympathy grew up at once between the
bo’s’un and myself; and that night, and during the next few days, I
learned to appreciate him better. He was a remarkable type, and not at
all the kind of man you find in books. He had been at Sebastopol under
English colours; and again in a States ship, ‘after the _Alabama_, and
praying God we shouldn’t find her.’ He was a high Tory and a high
Englishman. No manufacturer could have held opinions more hostile to the
working man and his strikes. ‘The workmen,’ he said, ‘think nothing of
their country. They think of nothing but themselves. They’re damned
greedy, selfish fellows.’ He would not hear of the decadence of England.
‘They say they send us beef from America,’ he argued; ‘but who pays for
it? All the money in the world’s in England.’ The Royal Navy was the
best of possible services, according to him. ‘Anyway the officers are
gentlemen,’ said he; ‘and you can’t get hazed to death by a damned
non-commissioned—as you can in the army.’ Among nations, England was the
first; then came France. He respected the French navy and liked the
French people; and if he were forced to make a new choice in life, ‘by
God, he would try Frenchmen!’ For all his looks and rough, cold manners,
I observed that children were never frightened by him; they divined him
at once to be a friend; and one night when he had chalked his hand and
clothes, it was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling
over his boyish monkey trick.
In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man. I was afraid I
should not recognise him, baffling had been the light of the lantern; and
found myself unable to decide if he were Scots, English, or Irish. He
had certainly employed north-country words and elisions; but the accent
and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and incongruous in my ear.
To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an adventure that
required some nerve. The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted
in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid aspect
of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves into
their clothes in twilight of the bunks. You may guess if I was pleased,
not only for him, but for myself also, when I heard that the sick man was
better and had gone on deck.
The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with pink
and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and intermittent; and to
add to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash down the
decks. But for a sick man this was heaven compared to the steerage. I
found him standing on the hot-water pipe, just forward of the saloon deck
house. He was smaller than I had fancied, and plain-looking; but his
face was distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid grey from
a distance, but, when looked into, full of changing colours and grains of
gold. His manners were mild and uncompromisingly plain; and I soon saw
that, when once started, he delighted to talk. His accent and language
had been formed in the most natural way, since he was born in Ireland,
had lived a quarter of a century on the banks of Tyne, and was married to
a Scots wife. A fisherman in the season, he had fished the east coast
from Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over, and the great boats,
which required extra hands, were once drawn up on shore till the next
spring, he worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces, or along the
wharves unloading vessels. In this comparatively humble way of life he
had gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable house, his
hayfield, and his garden. On this ship, where so many accomplished
artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present on a pleasure trip
to visit a brother in New York.
Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the steerage
and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea
and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such counsels. ‘I’m not
afraid,’ he had told his adviser; ‘I’ll get on for ten days. I’ve not
been a fisherman for nothing.’ For it is no light matter, as he reminded
me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist-deep with herrings, day breaking
with a scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken,
iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an anchorage where you
dare not lie, or a harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows.
The life of a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard
work and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak
fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky and
after fifty hours’ unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop will give
him credit for a loaf of bread. Yet the steerage of the emigrant ship
had been too vile for the endurance of a man thus rudely trained. He had
scarce eaten since he came on board, until the day before, when his
appetite was tempted by some excellent pea-soup. We were all much of the
same mind on board, and beginning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup
not wisely but too well; only with him the excess had been punished,
perhaps because he was weakened by former abstinence, and his first meal
had resulted in a cramp. He had determined to live henceforth on
biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return to England, to make
the passage by saloon. The second cabin, after due inquiry, he scouted
as another edition of the steerage.
He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. ‘Ye see, I had no call
to be here,’ said he; ‘and I thought it was by with me last night. I’ve
a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I had no real call to
leave them.’ Speaking of the attentions he had received from his
shipmates generally, ‘they were all so kind,’ he said, ‘that there’s none
to mention.’ And except in so far as I might share in this, he troubled
me with no reference to my services.
But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of this
day-labourer, paying a two months’ pleasure visit to the States, and
preparing to return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered by his
story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the habitual
comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December evening, I
encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging
homeward from the fields. Our roads lay together, and it was natural
that we should fall into talk. He was covered with mud; an inoffensive,
ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic Cable was a secret
contrivance of the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; and I
confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred pounds
in the bank. But this man had travelled over most of the world, and
enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American railroad, with two
dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night; whereas my
fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, and had made all that he
possessed in that same accursed, down-falling England, whence skilled
mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from
the native country of starvation.
Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and hard
times. Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost in his own
pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and held strong
opinions on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters, and, when I
led him on, of the men also. The masters had been selfish and
obstructive, the men selfish, silly, and light-headed. He rehearsed to
me the course of a meeting at which he had been present, and the somewhat
long discourse which he had there pronounced, calling into question the
wisdom and even the good faith of the Union delegates; and although he
had escaped himself through flush times and starvation times with a
handsomely provided purse, he had so little faith in either man or
master, and so profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile
affairs, that he could think of no hope for our country outside of a
sudden and complete political subversion. Down must go Lords and Church
and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must change hands from
worse to better, or England stood condemned. Such principles, he said,
were growing ‘like a seed.’
From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually ominous
and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my workmen
fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell
discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was calm; he had
attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy which had been
pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his panacea,—to rend the
old country from end to end, and from top to bottom, and in clamour and
civil discord remodel it with the hand of violence.