“But there is no peace in a steamer, it is nothin’ but a large calaboose,1 chock full of prisoners. As soon as you have found your place in the book, and taken a fresh departure, the bonnet man sais, ‘Please, Sir, a seat for a lady,’ and you have to get up and give it to his wife’s lady’s-maid. His wife ain’t a lady, but having a lady’s-maid shows she intends to set up for one when she gets to home. To be a lady, she must lay in a lot of airs, and to brush her own hair and garter her own stockins is vulgar; if it was known in First Avenue, Spruce Street, in Bonnetville, it would ruin her as a woman of fashion for ever.
1 Calaboose is a Southern name for jail.
“Now bonnet man wouldn’t ask you to get up and give your place to his wife’s hired help, only he knows you are a Yankee, and we Yankees, I must say, are regularly fooled with women and preachers; just as much as that walking advertisement of a milliner is with her lady’s-maid. All over America in rail carriages, stage coaches, river steamers, and public places, of all sorts, every critter that wears a white choker, and looks like a minister, has the best seat given him. He expects it, as a matter of course, and as every female is a lady, every woman has a right to ask you to quit, without notice, for her accommodation. Now it’s all very well and very proper to be respectful to preachers; and to be polite and courteous to women, and more especially those that are unprotected; but there is a limit, tother side of which lies absurdity.
“Now if you had seen as much of the world as I have, and many other travelled Yankees, when bonnet man asked you to give up your seat to the maid, you would have pretended not to understand English, and not to know what he wanted, but would have answered him in French and offered him the book, and said certainly you would give it to him with pleasure, and when he said he didn’t speak French, but what he desired was your place for the lady, you would have addressed her in German, and offered her the book, and when they looked at each other, and laughed at their blunder, in thus taking you for a Yankee, perhaps the man next to you would have offered his seat, and then when old bonnet man walked off to look at the Chinese Junk, you would have entered into conversation with the lady’s-maid, and told her it was a rise you took out of the old fellow to get her along-side of you, and she would enjoy the joke, and you would have found her a thousand times more handsome and more conversational and agreeable than her mistress.
“But this wouldn’t last long, for the sick gall would be carried up on deck agin, woman like, though ill, very restless, and chock full of curiosity to see the Chinese Junk also; so you are caught by your own bam, and have to move again once more. The bell comes in aid, and summons you to dinner. Ah, the scene in the Tower of Babel is rehearsed; what a confusion of tongues! what a clatter of knives and forks and dishes! the waiter that goes and won’t come back; and he who sees, pities but can’t help you; and he who is so near sighted, he can’t hear; and he who is intercepted, and made prisoner on his way.
“What a profusion of viands—but how little to eat! this is cold; that under-done; this is tough; that you never eat; while all smell oily; oh, the only dish you did fancy, you can’t touch, for that horrid German has put his hand into it. But it is all told in one short sentence; two hundred and fifty passengers supply two hundred and fifty reasons themselves, why I should prefer a sailing vessel with a small party to a crowded steamer. If you want to see them in perfection go where I have been it on board the California boats, and Mississippi river crafts. The French, Austrian, and Italian boats are as bad. The two great Ocean lines, American and English, are as good as anything bad can be, but the others are all abominable. They are small worlds over-crowded, and while these small worlds exist, the evil will remain; for alas, their passengers go backward and forward, they don’t emigrate—they migrate; they go for the winter and return for the spring, or go in the spring and return in the fall.
“Come, Commodore, there is old Sorrow ringing his merry bell for us to go to dinner. I have an idea we shall have ample room; a good appetite, and time enough to eat and enjoy it: come, Sir, let us, like true Americans, never refuse to go where duty calls us.”
After dinner, Cutler reverted to the conversation we had had before we went below, though I don’t know that I should call it conversation, either; for I believe I did, as usual, most of the talking myself.
“I agree with you,” said he, “in your comparative estimate of a sailing vessel and a steamer, I like the former the best myself. It is more agreeable for the reasons you have stated to a passenger, but it is still more agreeable to the officer in command of her on another account. In a sailing vessel, all your work is on deck, everything is before you, and everybody under your command. One glance of a seaman’s eye is sufficient to detect if anything is amiss, and no one man is indispensable to you. In a steamer the work is all below, the machinery is out of your sight, complicated, and one part dependent on another. If it gets out of order you are brought up with a round turn, all standing, and often in a critical situation too. You can’t repair damage easily; sometimes, can’t repair at all.
“Whereas carrying away a sail, a spar, a topmast, or anything of that kind, impedes but don’t stop you, and if it is anything very serious there are a thousand ways of making a temporary rig that will answer till you make a port. But what I like best is, when my ship is in the daldrums, I am equal to the emergency; there is no engineer to bother you by saying this can’t be done, or that won’t do, and to stand jawing and arguing instead of obeying and doing. Clippers of the right lines, size, and build, well found, manned, and commanded, will make nearly as good work, in ordinary times, as steamers. Perhaps it is prejudice though, for I believe we sailors are proverbial for that. But, Slick, recollect it ain’t all fair weather sailing like this at sea. There are times when death stares you wildly in the face.”