Subsequent events proved that "Beef" had no cause to fear the captain.
It was not a nice way for a servant of a transportation line to talk to any patron, immigrant or otherwise, voicing a just protest, and especially not to an unprotected lady traveling alone, subject to the care and courtesy of the transportation company she was traveling with.
Indignant? Oh my! I should say so.
If indignation could sink a ship, we'd never have got across.
As Chairman of the Protest and Indignation Committee, all that indignation was poured into me. I didn't know I could hold so much. And still it came. One woman wanted to sue the company when she got home for a million dollars, and she came and asked my advice about it. I told her I wasn't a lawyer, but being Chairman of the Committee on Protest and Indignation, I told her to state her case. She said she was going down a darkened stairway to the noisome, filthy quarters where they had to sleep; the stairway wasn't lighted and in consequence she fell down stairs and was picked up for dead, jarred, bruised, broken and bleeding profusely. The ship's doctor attended her injuries and charged her two dollars, and she wanted her two dollars back and a million on top of it.
Speaking from underneath the load of other people's woes I had aboard, to say nothing of those of my own, I told her she had, in my opinion, a just claim. To sue the company when she got home—this last advice I threw over my shoulder at her, as another woman was dragging me off to investigate the "awful condition" below deck where they were herded to spend the nights.
And still the indignation grew and grew. Our petition hadn't bettered matters.
We were steerage passengers—just that and nothing more, and if there wasn't some new, fresh, sensational bit of steerage news to tell there was always "Beef" and his insults to discuss.
One evening as curfew rule was being enforced (it seems there is a law that demands that female immigrants en route to the United States shall be ordered below deck at 9 o'clock), as this rule was being applied to our steerage passengers, both Americans and immigrants, and as they were being driven to the filth and stench and vermin below, indignation boiled over again.
One young fellow whose wife was driven from his side, swore like a pirate, but had to submit—we were steerage passengers.