Golden Dreams and Leaden Realities

by George Payson

Saturday, the 13th of September, 1851, at five o'clock in the evening, we went on board the Carolina, then lying at the wharf, and all ready for sea. She was a propeller of six hundred tons, built as a two-decker, but had afterwards been raised by her present proprietors, who, in their disinterested anxiety to promote the comfort of their passengers, would gladly have gone on adding story to story till she was as high as the Astor House or the Tower of Babel, if they could only have devised a plan for making her as firm as either of those centres of wealth and fashion. She seemed now as crowded as a well filled pincushion; but it is a curious though well authenticated fact, and one of which the various steamboat companies have not failed to take advantage, that five hundred passengers returning from California occupy little more room than half that number from the Atlantic States; either because the disappointment that most of them meet with operates like the prick of a pin on an inflated bladder, or because, and this I apprehend is after all the true reason, the hot and arid temperature of that country so dries up the fluids and juices of the body that it gradually wizzles away till it is reduced to the same condition as a mummy or dried apple.

Be this as it may, on looking round among my fellow passengers I saw many who seemed to feel as if they could easily creep into a rat-hole; and, for my own part, if it had not been for the belt round my waist, I have no doubt I could have squeezed through a crack or into a bottle without the slightest inconvenience. But gaunt, and wizzled, and woe-begone as was the appearance of our company, it was nothing to what was brought about by a few weeks' confinement on shipboard; so that if the voyage had been long enough, a good sized pea-pod would have furnished a craft amply sufficient for our shrunken mortality.

The Carolina went to sea with four hundred passengers, of whom nearly three-fourths were in the steerage. The accommodations provided for this class consisted of a large cabin on the lower deck, and a smaller one directly above it, both furnished with berths similar to those of a river steamboat, with this difference, that though scarcely any wider, they were intended to be occupied by two persons. In cold weather this would have been hardly tolerable, and the reader can imagine the delights of such intimate fellowship in the sultry sluggish air of the tropics. After one or two trials I gave up in despair, and spreading my blankets on deck, slept there every night during the remainder of the voyage. At least half of my companions had the same choice—we made the vast Pacific our bed-chamber, and strewed the lofty deck of our steamer thicker than leaves in Vallambrosa. By eight o'clock every spot was occupied, and it was then almost impossible to cross the deck, especially in rough weather, without tripping over some unlucky nose, or flattening it level with the astonished cheeks. The ship now became silent as the dawn of creation, except the hoarse coffee-mill grinding of the propeller, and the palpable stillness of the passing ripple. We could almost hear the stars twinkling in the sky, and the hum-top spin of the round-faced moon. This was delightful—delicious—enchanting—excessively fine—but several hours later, about the time that the milk-cart rattles o'er the stony street, and the fisherman's horn splits the dull ear of night—when the punctual plodding Phœbus, climbing his eastern ladder, streaks the wide horizon with his floating golden hair—a mimic deluge, commencing at the forecastle, comes drowning out our little world. Onto the hencoops! up into the rigging! down into the steerage! every man for himself, and the long crawling hose, a veritable sea-serpent, take the hindmost! "Oh! preserve us!" cries some heavy dreamer, striking out as if to swim—"oh—ah—whooo! I thought the ship was sinking;" and now wide awake, "Bless us! if I don't wish she would."

This was pleasant weather, but sometimes it rained and blew. Then the labouring ship, making more angles with the horizon than Sir Isaac Newton ever dreamed of, rolled our loose disjointed bodies crunching over the oaken planks—the sullen soddening rain hung every bristle on our blankets with conglobing drops—or a phosphorescent wave drenched us to the skin, filling our eyes, our mouths, our pockets, with its briny flood. If all the resolutions made at such times should be kept, few would ever trust themselves again to the treacherous element.

The first four days of our voyage passed pleasantly enough. The sea was smooth, the sky was fair, a favouring breeze pushed us gently on our way, and we ran in that time nearly nine hundred miles. The thoughts of home with which all were occupied, though they produced a silence and reserve strangely in contrast with the noisy hilarity of the voyage out, at the same time disposed all to bear the hardships and annoyances incident to their situation with patience and good humour. We became by degrees, like a barrel of apples, shaken and jolted into our places until we were able to move about the deck without displacing another at every step. The prospect of a speedy run, and the hope of beating the Panama that was to start two days after us, heightened the general satisfaction.

But this scene was changed with the capricious suddenness of a play. The fifth night I had spread my blankets on a hencoop, and fell asleep with the stars burning undimmed in the firmament. I was awakened about midnight by a dismal uproar for which no place on land is big enough unless it be the desert of Sahara, or one of our western prairies. A sudden squall had sprung up from the south, directly in our teeth. The canvass awnings stretched across the deck twisted and writhed as if in torture. The sailors, at the hoarse cry of "all hands ahoy," came trampling along the deck, knocking down the stupid wakers who sat upright on their blankets like half animated right angles, and rubbed their sleepy eyes. Two hundred piles of bedding at one and the same moment seemed endowed with the power of locomotion, and began to walk, and creep, and tumble towards the steerage.

And now the mighty Pacific seemed bent on showing us what she could do with our cockle-shell of a boat. After the first angry burst, as if sounding the charge, she went to work with a coolness and deliberation well suited to her royalty and power. She tossed us from one hand to another with stunning violence. Her winds blew not wearily, but with that fierce energy as if they had just been let loose from their stalls. The sea went up, and the sky came down, as if, like the man in the iron cage, we were to be crushed between the walls of our dungeon. A sensation of sea-sickness—of stupidity—of utter loathing and yet desire of life—of wet clothes clinging heavily to the shrunken, shivering body—of breathing an atmosphere half air half water—a feeling as if one had fins and scales—a constant holding on to hats, or watching them with strange melancholy as they fly away in the distance—these things, together with a dreamy, ill-defined sublimity over all, make up a storm at sea.

But this was not the end. Our ship, after skilfully dodging for a long time the tremendous blows aimed at her by the furious waves, at length received such a punch in the breast as seemed fairly to knock the breath out of her body. No outward injury was at first discovered, but she bled inwardly and had evidently sprung a dangerous leak. I was sitting like a perpendicular mummy on the deserted quarter-deck, about two o'clock in the morning, watching the dim billows that sent a constant flood of foam over the bows, when St. John came up, and steadying himself by my chair, informed me in a sepulchral whisper that there were ten feet of water in the hold, that the leak was gaining fast, and threatened to put out the fires. Instinctively I put my hand to the leathern belt around my waist, and groaned aloud. Was it for this that I had braved the hardships of a six months' voyage and the sickness and toil of two years in the mines? Was it for this that I had spoilt forever the beauty of my hands and the delicacy of my complexion? Had I stood day after day in those ice-cold rivers, like a man with his feet on the pole and his head under the equator—had I swallowed doses innumerable of oil and laudanum, of blue mass and quinine, only to feed the fishes at last? If I had got nothing, it would have been less matter; but as it was, how I hated the ugly shark who would gulp me at a single mouthful, the richest supper since Cleopatra's pearl. I got up, and unrolling myself from my blankets, walked forward and looked down the hatchway above the furnaces. A red and angry glare from the crevices around the doors showed a mass of water black as pitch rolling and swashing with the motion of the vessel within a foot of the fires. It was Phlegethon shedding its baleful light on the dark and melancholy Styx. A group of passengers stood leaning against the iron railing, watching with strange interest the firemen below standing knee deep in the inky flood, and still plying their task with sullen resolution. As they threw open the clanging doors, we caught glimpses of the fires burning with a fierceness of purpose that seemed to defy the ocean to put it out; but still the insidious element crept on, and we already heard the ominous hiss like the skirmishes before a great battle, as the foremost of the assailants dashed against the bars of the furnace.

If the waters prevailed, as they were sure to do in this unequal contest, our only hope of salvation was gone; for the pump attached to the engine, though sadly out of order, and able to work but about half the time, was still superior in effective service to the united strength of all in the ship. As long as that could be kept in operation there was no danger of the leak gaining upon us, and it was owing simply to its having partially failed, that the state of affairs now looked so threatening. One of the passengers, "a darned bluenose," as he was styled by the ungrateful Yankees whose lives he had volunteered to save at the risk of his own, had ventured out under the bowsprit and nailed some canvass over the principal leak; but there was another he could not reach, and the situation of which was not exactly known. One declared it was under the engine—another, with equal confidence, asserted that it was somewhere about the bows. It was now discovered that the ship was known to be leaky when we sailed; the first mate had said that they had been obliged to keep the pumps going even while she lay at the wharf—the engineer confirmed this story, and added, moreover, that the engine was in an equally unsafe condition. It had in some way broken loose from its fastenings and threatened to knock a hole through the ship's bottom, but by tying it up with ropes they were enabled to maintain a sufficient weight of steam to keep the ship's head to the wind; and in this situation we lay for several days without making a single mile.

Still the services of the engine were indispensible to our safety, and it was necessary under such a pressing emergency to take immediate measures for its relief. Two of the passengers descended into the hold and took their station by the side of the firemen. Others were ranged at convenient intervals on the slender iron ladders that led to the upper decks—a large number of buckets were provided, and the work commenced. The undertaking was greatly impeded by the rolling and pitching of the ship that rendered it at times extremely difficult to maintain a footing upon the ladders, and now and then threw half a bucket of water, that had nearly reached the top, down onto the heads of those below.