Some of the early emigrant ships were certainly of a mean order, and many emigrants suffered cruel hardships before they reached their destination. It was not an uncommon thing for five or six hundred men, women and children to be huddled together indiscriminately in the hold of a vessel of from 250 to 300 tons, doomed to subsist on coarsest food, and liable to be immured beneath hatches for days or weeks at a time, without medical attendance, obliged to cook their own food, and scantily supplied with water; and all this for eight or ten weeks at a stretch!
In one of his autobiographic sketches the late Bishop Strachan says that he sailed from Greenock in the end of August, 1799, “under convoy,” and such was then the wretched state of navigation, he did not reach Kingston, by way of New York and Montreal, till the 31st of December. In a letter before me an aged friend recites the story of his adventurous voyage from Liverpool to Quebec, some fifty years ago. The ship was a superannuated bluff-bowed East Indiaman, but counted good enough in those days to carry five hundred emigrants across the stormy Atlantic. When ten days out they encountered a hurricane which drove the vessel out of her course. Her three masts fell overboard. The cook’s galley and the long boat, the water casks, and everything else on deck, vanished in the gale. The huge hulk rolled like a log in the Bay of Biscay for several days, the passengers meanwhile being confined between decks in horrible confusion. A passing steamer towed them back to Plymouth, where six weeks were spent in refitting the ship, each adult receiving ten shillings and sixpence per week for board and lodging until the repairs were completed. After seven weeks more of great discomfort “and tyrannical treatment on the part of the captain,” they finally reached Quebec in 107 days after first embarking at Liverpool.
My own experience of sailing ships, though fifty-seven years have elapsed, is still fresh in mind and recalls some pleasant memories. My first voyage to New York was from the Clyde in a new American ship, commanded by one Captain Theobald, a typical New Englander, as fine a man as one could desire to meet. The voyage was uneventful in the ordinary sense of the term, but one’s first voyage in a sailing ship is an event never to be forgotten. It was anticipated with peculiar interest, and regarded with far greater importance than attaches to crossing the Atlantic nowadays. So far from being monotonous, there were incessant changes in sea and sky, in the dress of the ship, and the occupations and songs of the sailors. One day the ship might be bowling along beautifully, decked out in her royals and sky-sails, her studding-sails and stay sails; next day, perhaps, she might be scudding under reefed topsails before an easterly gale, pooping seas that washed the quarterdeck and tumbled like a waterfall into the waist of the ship. Occasionally, a “white squall” coming up would make things lively on deck while it lasted. If becalmed in the right place we caught codfish. For the most part, however, the familiar refrain of “tacks and sheets” would be heard many times a day and in the night watches, as we tacked this way and that way against westerly breezes, thankful if the log showed that we had advanced on our course forty or fifty miles in twenty-four hours.
My second voyage westward in a sailing ship was also a memorable one. The Scotch captain of the good ship Perthshire, in which we sailed from the Tail of the Bank, off Greenock, on June 19th, 1844, was very unlike the Yankee skipper of the previous voyage. Captain S—— was kind and attentive to his passengers, but not at all popular with his crew. As I watched him taking the sun, the first day out, he said, “Young man, you are going to be some weeks on board this ship, with nothing to do but to eat and drink and sleep. Suppose you take a few lessons in navigation? Here is a spare quadrant which you can use.” I jumped at the offer, and very soon mastered at least the outlines of the business. Much was learned in these six weeks—how to find the latitude and longitude at sea; to ascertain the precise deviation of the chronometer from Greenwich time, and of the compass from its true bearing; to measure the trend and velocity of ocean currents, and, failing solar observations, how to consult the moon and the stars. This was not only interesting; it was a fascinating pastime. The captain of a twenty-knot steamship has seldom need to “resolve a traverse;” he steers a straight course for his destination, and can usually estimate within a few hours, or even minutes, when he will reach it. It is quite different with the master of a sailing vessel; after contending with contrary winds and being driven out of his course for weeks at a time, he must often wrack his brains before he can locate his exact position on the chart. To be enveloped in dense fog in the near neighbourhood of Sable Island for several days at a time, as happened to us on this voyage, is a very perplexing position to be in.
For a slight offence Captain S—— would send a man aloft to scrape masts in a gale of wind; for a graver misdemeanour he would clap him in irons; had the lash been permitted, he would probably not have hesitated to use it. As might be supposed, things did not go very well in the fo’castle. At length a climax was reached, when the starboard watch came aft one day and lodged a complaint. Getting little or no satisfaction, they retired sullenly, went below, and refused to work for a whole week. The working of the ship then devolved on the first and second mates, the carpenter and the cook, with such of the cabin passengers as could give them assistance. The steerage passengers, siding with the sailors, would not touch a rope, and things even went so far that one of them was placed in confinement for insolence. Some of us were rather glad of the opportunity thus afforded of running up the rigging and creeping through the lubbers’ hole without being “salted.” When orders were given to shorten sail or shake out a reef, we “lay out” on the yard in sailor fashion; but how much good we did on such occasions will never be known.[2] At any rate, we counted it fine fun, and it gave the fiasco a touch of romance that we slept with loaded pistols under our pillows. But the mutiny ended harmlessly when the pilot came on board. One may cross the Atlantic nowadays without any kind of “adventure” like that to adorn a tale, even without so much as once speaking to the captain.
Not every one has the chance of seeing Jack in his citadel. I was deputed by the captain to interview the strikers and endeavour to pacify them. Armed with a copy of the shipping articles which the men had all signed, and another formidable document printed in very large type, I went down into the dingy cabin at the dinner hour. Such a place as it was! I shall never forget it. It corresponded in minute detail to Dana’s description of his fo’castle in “Two Years Before the Mast.” It was devoid of furniture. There was not even a table to place their food on. In the centre of the floor stood a dirty-looking wooden tub containing a junk of boiled salt beef; near it was a pail full of boiled rice and some hard-tack. The men, about a dozen of them, sat each man on his sea-chest, using his jack-knife to cut and carve with. There were no plates. Imagine the rest. The only grievance they would mention to me was that they had been refused molasses with their rice! Their mind was made up to stay under hatches till the pilot came aboard. They would work for him, but not for the captain; and they kept their word. As I was about leaving, the spokesman of the party, pointing to the mess on the middle of the floor, said with a look that constrained pity, “Mister, how would you like that for your own dinner?” He had the best of the argument. It may be added here that this voyage to New York lasted forty-two days, and the last entry in my log is to the effect that we made as good a passage as any ship from England, “beating the Columbus packet-ship by two days!”
“GREAT REPUBLIC.”
Last of the Clipper Passenger Packets, 1854.
The clipper “packet ship” was a vast improvement on the ordinary sailing ship. It had just reached its highest point of development when the ocean steamship first made its appearance. It was to the upper strata of the travelling community, sixty years ago, the counterpart of the express steamer of to-day. The packet-ship was built for fast sailing, with very fine lines, was handsomely fitted up and furnished, was exceedingly well found in eatables and drinkables, and carried a great spread of canvas. To see one of these ships under full sail was a sight to be remembered—a rare sight, inasmuch as all the conditions of wind and water necessary for the display of every stitch of canvas are seldom met with in the North Atlantic. They not unfrequently crossed in fourteen or fifteen days. In winter they might be three months on a single voyage, but their average would be from twenty-five to thirty days.