What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

We went on board the good ship Corinthian, Captain Chadwick, bound for New York, in the September of 1828. Ship and captain were American.

I confess that my first feeling on entering the place which was to be my habitation during the next few weeks was one of dismay. It was not that the accommodation was rough. I cared little enough about that, and should have cared as little had it been much rougher. But it was the first time in my life that I had had any experience of the truth of the proverb that misfortune makes one acquainted with strange bedfellows! Of course there was in that part of the vessel allotted to the steerage passengers no sort of enclosure for the different berths, some dozen or score of them, in which the steerage passengers had to sleep. No sort of privacy either by day or by night was possible; add to which, the ventilation was very insufficient, and the whole place was, perhaps unavoidably, dirty to a revolting degree. My father almost at once betook himself to his berth, and rarely left it during the entire voyage—indeed he was for the most part incapable of doing so, having been suffering from his usual sick headache more or less during the whole time. If the voyage was a bad time for me, it must have been far worse for him. Indeed I was scarcely ever below, except when attending on him.

Before the first night came, I declared my intention of making no use of the berth assigned to me. Where was I to pass the night then? I said I should pass it on deck. I had a huge great coat, a regular “dreadnought,” so called in those days, and made with innumerable capes; and with that I thought I should do well enough during the September night. My declared intention brought an avalanche of ridicule down on my head, not only from my fellow inhabitants of the steerage, but from the captain and his mates. A night on deck, or at the very most two, would make me glad and thankful enough for the shelter of my berth. I did not know what I was talking of, but should soon find out, &c.

Well, the first night passed! It was a fine moonlight. And I enjoyed it and the novelty of my surroundings keenly. I slept, wrapped in my capacious great coat, two or three hours at a time, and morning found me none the worse. The second night was less delightful! I was weary and began to feel the need of sleep after a fashion to which I was more accustomed. And then came bad weather, wet and cold! I got some shelter in an erection on the deck called the “round house;” but the want of proper rest was beginning to tell upon me, and the fatigue was very severe. I think that, despite my horror of the steerage and the world that inhabited it, I should have succumbed and accepted its shelter, if my determination not to do so had been confined to my own breast; and no necessity had existed for triumphing over the ridicule and the unanimous prophecies of the other passengers and the ship’s officers. As it was, I was safe not to yield!

I did not yield! Our voyage was rather longer than an average one, and during all the thirty-eight days that it lasted, I never passed a night below, or went there at all save for the purpose of changing my clothes, or attending on my father, who lay sick and suffering in his berth during almost the whole time. It was a severer experience than it may seem probably to the imagination of those who never made a similar experiment. When I reached New York, I felt as if it would be heaven to go to sleep for a week.

We had one short spell of very bad weather; and were, as I subsequently learned, in considerable danger for an hour or so. We had been running all day before a fair wind exactly aft, which, continually increasing in violence, assumed at sun-down the force of a gale. Nevertheless Captain Chadwick, against the advice of an old English merchant captain, who was a passenger, could not prevail on himself to lose the advantage of so good a wind, and determined to “carry on.” But as the night advanced the wind continued to increase and the sea to rise, till the danger of being “pooped,” if we continued to run before it, became too great to be neglected. But the danger of putting about, “broaching-to” I believe is the correct term, was also great.

It became necessary however to do this about midnight, and I was the only passenger on deck during the operation. The English merchant captain mentioned above kept running up for a few minutes at a time every now and then. But he had a wife and young children aboard, and would not remain long away from them. The good ship as she came round into the trough of the sea, lay down on her side to such a degree that my body as I clung to the bulwark on the weather-side swung away to the leeward in such sort that I was for a minute hanging from a hold above my head, instead of clinging to one at my side. And I saw and heard—very specially heard—every sail blown away from the yards. I heard, too, the shout of the men on the yards, “We can’t get an inch,” as they strove to reef. Much danger was occasioned to the men by the block at the foot of the mainsail remaining attached to the sail, which was blown about, before it could be secured, with a violence which knocked the cook’s galley to atoms.

And all this I saw to my great delight. For I considered a storm at sea as a part of the experiences of a voyage which it would have been a great pity to have missed, and was altogether unaware that we were in any real danger. Towards daybreak the gale moderated, and before noon it was perfectly calm, and all hands were busy in bending a new suite of sails.

With all this I should have enjoyed the voyage immensely had it not been for the nature of the companionship to which I should have been condemned if I had not escaped from it in the manner I have described. The utter roughness of the accommodation, the scanty and not very delicate food, would all have signified to me in those days absolutely nothing. But I could not tolerate the companionship of the men and women with whom I should have lived. I could have no doubt tolerated it some twenty years later, but it was at that time too new to me. I take it that ill-luck had given us a rather specially bad lot as our destined companions in the steerage. I had seen quite enough of the labourers on the farm at Harrow to know what a man living with his family on a pound a week was like, and I could have managed to live if necessary with such men for a week or two without any insuperable repugnance. But some of the denizens of that steerage bolgia were blackguards of a description quite new to me.

Two figures among them are still, after nearly sixty years, present to my mental vision. One was a large, loosely-made, middle-aged man, who always wore a long grey serge dressing-gown. He was accompanied by nobody belonging to him, and I never had the least idea what grade or department of life he could have belonged to. His language, though horrible, as regards the ideas conveyed by it, was grammatically far superior to that of most of those around him; and he was very clever with his hands, executing various little arrangements for his own comfort with the skill of a carpenter, and almost with that of an upholsterer. His face was thoroughly bad, with loose, baggy, flaccid, pale cheeks, and a great coarse hanging under lip. He always looked exceedingly dirty, but nevertheless was always clean shaved. He was always talking, always haranguing those who would listen to him; always extolling the country for which we were bound, and its institutions, and expressing the most venomous hatred of England and all things English. I used to listen to him during my hours of attendance on my father with an excess of loathing, which I doubt not I failed to conceal from him, and which, acting like a strong brine, has preserved his memory in my mind all these years.