Of outraged faith! On Peter, “Feed my sheep,
My young lambs feed,” the charge benignant lies,
And we whose vigils cheat the night of sleep,
On Peter, still, calm eyes expectant keep.
Atlantic Drift—Gathered In The Steerage.
By An Emigrant.
To most of the sons and daughters of Columbia the few days they pass in returning from the Old Country represent but a period of wearisome delay—an interval sometimes nauseous and always irksome between the pleasures of travel and those of their own fireside, passed perhaps in recollection of the pleasures of Paris, the classic grandeurs of the Eternal City, or the picturesque beauties of Switzerland and the Rhine; not unfrequently, perhaps, by our belles, whose elegance and social value have received their last gilding in the grand tour of Europe, in anticipation of the effect of their costumes at Newport or Saratoga, or of their adventures and experiences in the great circle of their country friends. All that wealth and skill can do is lavished on the accommodations of ocean steamers, and nothing is spared to make the traveller independent of the caprice or ill-temper of the watery god; and nowadays a passage from the Mersey to our Empire City is to the ordinary passenger almost as comfortable and quite as devoid of unusual interest as a sojourn of so many days at the St. Nicholas or the Fifth Avenue. There is, however, another class of voyagers whose hard-earned savings form the staple of the receipts of the owners of these splendid vessels; they usually belong to a sphere where literature hardly penetrates and whence come few who wield a ready pen; hence perhaps the general ignorance that seems to prevail as to their treatment and accommodation. The cabin passenger sees them only in squalid groups, encumbering the decks of the great ship, beyond the middle enclosure reserved to the saloon; and if he dives into the close and half-lit steerage, a very brief glance round its dim precincts satisfies his curiosity. Believing, however, that many of our adopted countrymen will feel some interest in knowing how the great army of emigrants who flock in hundreds of thousands to our shores fare on their ocean transit, one of us lifts a voice from the steerage to relate some of the realities of life in an emigrant ship. Naught have we extenuated or aught set down in malice, and, such as it is, our little narrative is a true history of personal and actual experience.
To the reader it matters little what ill-fortune cast from his quiet anchorage a London clerk who had already seen three decades, and whose life had hitherto run in the tranquil groove of uniform official duty, sufficiently well remunerated to furnish the comforts of a middle-class English home. Unable to regain a similar position in his native land, he goes to seek his fortune in the West, and, thither wending, finds himself in the steerage of one of our principal ocean steamers. Candor requires this avowal, for those interested in the great liners think they dispose of the numerous complaints as to their treatment of their emigrant passengers, by retorting that they provide for the working-classes, and not for clerks out of place or penniless gentlemen. Hence what is here stated as to their discomfort deals not with [pg 649] the writer's own feelings, but speaks of what he saw endured by others, and he gives voice not merely to his own opinions, but to the sentiments of the mechanics, artisans, and farm laborers who were his fellow-voyagers.
Every emigrant has to provide himself with bedding, plate, basin, drinking and water can, and a knife and fork. Our first experience of emigrant life consisted in the purchase of these articles at a Liverpool slop-shop; some ten shillings covered the entire outlay, except for the blanket, the most indispensable of all; for this purpose, the dealer persuaded us to buy a horse-rug, which he solemnly assured us was worth double the money across the Atlantic: as a copy of the Times would give about as much warmth and shelter as the common covering sold with the bed, we invested in it. An addition to our comfort it certainly has been in the bunk, and in the long nights in the emigrant trains, and it still remains our property; no market have we been able to discover for the article, and we conclude that a certain spice of Americanism had communicated itself to the mercantile mind of the seller. Many of the inmates of our steerage dispensed with all or most of these domestic utensils. One gentleman's luggage, whose world-wide travels we may hereafter refer to, consisted of a limited brown-paper parcel; in his subsequent oceanic career his Irish suavity usually procured him the loan of one of the tins of an acquaintance; that failing, he borrowed any neighboring utensil whose owner was not for the moment at hand; or, driven to his last resource, abjured coffee or soup and ate his portion of meat on a piece of brown paper. Some had but one vessel which served indifferently for a drinking-can, soup-basin, plate, tea-cup, or wash hand-basin, while a few comfort-loving people, more frequently, however, in the after or family steerage than in our bachelor quarters, carried heavy loads of comfortable bedding and neatly-arranged baskets of table-ware.