XVIII. [Wilderness—Planning for Next Year]
AUTHOR'S NOTE
When the S.S. Lake Manitoba carried two thousand all-British Barr Colonists across the Atlantic a quarter of a century ago, she didn't exactly cover herself with glory. Her Board of Trade passenger rating was eight hundred odd.
In one cabin for'ard there were packed three hundred human beings—single men; or what practically amounted to the same thing (as a facetious wag whose wife had run off with the milkman put it)—married men travelling without their wives.
A similar cabin aft enclosed a like number of males. Amidships, but a story or two higher up, the steerage accommodation was crowded with unattached females and married people with their younger children. Recently used as a transport in the South African War, the Lake Manitoba had had her decks and holds painted a snowy white, and divided into compartments with gunny sacking. Into numbers of these elastic cubicles as many as six married couples were squeezed.
Privacy was impossible. No one could undress properly. The drinking water was rotten; the food was worse. The sanitary conveniences would have shamed a monkey cage. The snow-white paint on the woodwork turned out to be merely whitewash, and, when the vessel received a smart smack from a wave, large flakes of it fell off along with the dried undercoat of manure.
Up above, the aristocrats travelled first-class. Theirs was the only passenger accommodation the ship really possessed. Nearly everyone aboard could have afforded to travel cabin, but only those whose applications were received first managed to secure the limited number of berths available. The rest—about sixteen hundred of them—put up with the crudest of steerage fare.
For an interesting view of life aboard an emigrant ship, the single men's cabin for'ard was unique. All sorts and conditions of British middle-class homes were represented, and although it was rather a lot of men to cram into one room, it speaks well for British love of law and order to record that only eleven fights, seven incipient mutinies, three riots, and twenty-two violent interviews with Barr, the party's leader, occurred during the voyage.
This cabin was deep down below the water line. When any of the fellows felt that they needed air, they went up on deck for it. Quite right, too. Why should young single men have things carried down to them?