The potatoes were one of our standing grievances; as there were but two stewards to assist some hundred and sixty people, they had to form a course of themselves, or the meat got cold while waiting for them; and instead of being boiled, they were steamed by some hasty process into the taste and consistency of a tallow candle. To the natives of the Emerald Isle, accustomed to consider their potato the pièce de resistance of their humble fare, this misusage of their favorite food was particularly aggravating, and their complaints were loud and endless. Boiled rice was generally served after the potatoes with coarse sugar or treacle; as long as the latter lasted it was palatable, but the sweetening generally bore the same relation to the rice as did Falstaff's bread to his sack, and our ingenuity had to be taxed to procure a double or treble allowance of the sugar by changing places while the serving took place or holding the plate over the shoulders of the steward [pg 655] who carried it. On Sundays plum duff, a heavy pudding pretty liberally supplied with raisins, was dealt out, and to stomachs accustomed to steerage fare seemed something faintly approaching the luxuries of the table appropriate to the day. The tea, which took place at five, may be dismissed in two words: taste it had none, and its smell was beastly; however, it was always boiling hot, and in the cold, damp evenings anything warming was grateful. With it we had biscuits and butter.
Without a detailed notice of that indispensable and omnipresent article the sea-biscuit, any account of our food would be incomplete; a barrel of them always stood at the head of the staircase on the main deck, and any one could help himself as often and as liberally as he thought proper; they formed our sole fare at tea, and our dernier ressort, when the dinner was, as it usually was every other day, altogether uneatable. More fortunate than most of our fellow-passengers, we could combine recreation and humble fare by gnawing at their hard sides. Of wooden consistency they certainly were; to make any impression on their hard edges it was necessary first to break them with a smart blow of the fist, put a piece between two sound molars, shut your eyes, hold fast to one of the stanchions of the bulwarks, and bring your jaws together with a determined and persevering grind! The result, to our taste, was not unsatisfactory; they were perfectly sweet, and when once pulverized not ill tasted; and on several occasions, when we found the other provisions inedible, two or three biscuits, washed down with a bottle of porter, served us for a tolerable meal. Few, however, shared our liking or would touch them, except at the last extremity, and by those whose teeth were not in first-rate order they were unassailable. As a souvenir, we pocketed a couple on leaving the ship, and as we munched them on the following night on the platform of the emigrant car jolting along the side of the broad and mist-clad Hudson, hoped that Dame Fortune would never reduce us in the Far West to more unpalatable fare.
On the whole, it was possible to subsist on the ship's provisions, particularly when the transit was regarded in a purgatorial or penitential sense; and that statement, too, must be qualified by the admission of the necessity of malt liquor: without two or three bottles of beer or porter a day, we could not have survived; they served as a tonic, which made greasy meat digestible, and biscuits possible to swallow; few, however, lived entirely on the steerage fare, nor must it be supposed that the grumblers or discontented were generally those who had, as it is termed, seen better days. Men of that class were slow to complain, because ignorant of what they ought to tolerate or endure in their altered circumstances. It was the well-to-do artisans or workingmen who showed the greatest disgust and were the bitterest in their complaints. Many families were provided with well-filled baskets of good bread, ham, and bottles of preserves, and had their own store of tea and sugar, for which they obtained hot water from the galley; while others bought the whole of their food.
Buying, begging, and stealing food was one of the most interesting and to some the most engrossing of occupations; it required a little money, a deal of diplomacy, and very hardened feelings, and was accomplished in very various ways. At the commencement of the voyage, little cliques were formed of four or five people, who [pg 656] made up a purse of two or three pounds for one of the cabin stewards, who in return sold to or stole for them a regular supply of cabin provisions; we were asked to join a little party of this sort, but declined; nor did we observe much of their subsequent fortune, except that they professed to have plenty of good food, and seemed to spend most of their time in watching for the opportunity when their steward could safely convey it to them; others peeled potatoes or apples and carried water for the galleys, and got fed in return; some reduced it to a system, bought meat from the butchers, and got it cooked in the galley, or, for a consideration, got liberty to go in at an idle time and cooked it themselves; the ordinary way, however, was to buy a bottle of beer at our deck-bar, hand it in to one of the cooks with a tin, and ask him to give you something, the best time being immediately after breakfast, when the hot scouse or Irish stew—far better food than any provided for us—was served out for the sailors' breakfast, or after the saloon dinner; you then slunk about the galley door, cursed for being in their way by all the cooks except the recipient of the beer, until that gentleman saw the head cook or chief steward out of the way, filled the tin with anything at hand—generally scouse in the morning, cold beef and chicken in the evening—shoved it under your coat, and told you to clear out instantly. One's feelings suffered much in this process; but a few days of steerage fare blunt the sensibilities and whet the animal appetite to an extent that requires to be experienced to be appreciated.
Another want that is keenly felt in consequence of the salt food and dry biscuit is that of something green or succulent. One craves an apple or an orange or lemon; and so well aware were the experienced travellers among us of this want that fresh fruit generally occupied a large space in their well-stuffed baskets. We had only the slender resource of pulling pieces of celery through the grating of the vegetable store, peeling them and eating them as an addendum to the coffee and bread of our breakfast. Unfortunately either the demand for that cool vegetable was unexpectedly great in the saloon, or we emigrants were too successful in extracting it through the bars of the always open store; for before the voyage was half over the supply was exhausted, we then had raw carrots and onions from the same source, but the result was not satisfactory.
Many of the passengers who had no money suffered much from their inability to cope with our daily fate. One young man of about twenty-two or three years of age particularly attracted our attention. Short and slight, of perfectly gentlemanly manners and quiet address, he had little of the typical American about him, though as we afterwards learned from himself he belonged to a Western family engaged in commerce and of considerable means. Some strange star must have presided over his birth, for he had the rarest of all dispositions in the New World, a dislike to traffic and money-making, and an unconquerable yearning for a life of literary labor. He was returning westward after residing in Dresden and Florence, full of enthusiasm for Goethe and Schiller, Tasso and Dante, and proudly conscious of a vocation himself as a dramatic poet. He had shot, he said, in the lakes of Minnesota, hunted in the Adirondacks, become familiar with the most beautiful and intellectual of the European capitals, and now felt that his endowment for his career was enriched by the novel experiences [pg 657] of the steerage of an emigrant ship. Fine conceptions, except perhaps among saints or hermits, do not thrive on an empty stomach.
Our poet looked daily more pallid and spiritless. He listened uninterestedly to everything except prospects of better fare or prophecies of the speedy diminution of the irksome voyage. One night one of the cooks in the emigrant galley gave us a tin crammed to overflowing with fragments of meat and fowl, and, additionally armed with a bottle of porter and a biscuit, we had settled in a quiet leeward corner to make a hearty supper, when we thought of the famishing poet. We found him tending a little singing-bird he was taking out with him, and invited him to share our meal; and the enjoyment with which he ate the broken meat—a biscuit serving for a plate, and a clasp-knife for an instrument—was quite refreshing. We took alternate pulls at the porter, and felt pleased with ourselves and the world. His inner man refreshed, our poet became another person. The charm of his conversation well repaid our little sacrifice, and we talked art and literature, music and the drama, until the loneliness of the deck, the chill night breeze, and the bright moon mounted high in the star-spangled heaven warned us of the approach of midnight. A few hours after we had landed in New York, we met our poet in Broadway, in all the elegance of clean raiment, and happily conscious of a well-lined purse. Though our rough garb assorted ill with his gentility, he insisted on our drinking glasses together to the memory of our meeting. As we drank, he expatiated on the advantages of a varied experience of the many-sided life of our poor humanity. Nevertheless, we opine, to cross the Atlantic in the steerage of an emigrant ship with an empty pocket, is one of those phases of existence which he will never voluntarily again investigate. Another instance of suffering was that of an Englishman—a quiet-visaged, silent man, past middle age, whose velveteen coat and corduroy trowsers bespoke him a ploughman or gamekeeper from some Old World country neighborhood. He had with him his little daughter, a fair-haired, sweet-faced little girl of about twelve, genteelly dressed. Neither he nor his child could eat the ship's food, and the little girl used to sit all day quietly pining by her father's side. They met, however, worse fortune on shore. Bound to some town in Ohio, he was apparently ignorant that a long journey separated it from their landing-place, and landed in Castle Garden penniless. Too shy or too proud to beg, the man and his little girl starved for a day, until some fellow-passenger accidentally found out their condition and supplied them with food.
No account of a sea voyage would be faithful without noticing the dread malady, the sufferings of which form the traveller's introduction to the domain of Neptune; but it is a life over which we must perforce draw a veil. To the voyager who has a comfortable berth, every convenience that wealth can produce, attentive stewards, and the command of each luxury that his fancy or fears can suggest, the horrors of sea-sickness are sufficiently nauseous. What they are in the steerage of an emigrant ship, where your pangs are intensified by the maladies and filth, the groans and curses, of some scores of other victims, can be better imagined than described; it is too disgusting. For the first two or three days, to eye, ear, and nose our steerage was insufferable; there was no remedy [pg 658] but to avoid it as much as possible, and either abandon the meals altogether, or rush down, snatch a hasty portion of whatever came nearest to hand, and beat a hasty retreat to the fresh air of the deck before your rising gorge added you to the ranks of the inconsolable.
But this rough initiation had its practical advantage. Many of the younger passengers of the better class at the commencement of their voyage endeavored to keep up appearances in spite of all difficulties, and to present themselves on deck fresh from a careful toilette and in all the neatness of clean linen and well-arranged dress; but, when they had once succumbed to the qualms of the malady, their vanity went overboard. Languid and weary, they crowded on deck, unwashed and uncombed, muffled in a waterproof, or huddled in twos and threes in a corner in the warm folds of a blanket or horse-rug; and as their spirits revived they thought no more of struggling against adverse circumstances, and were content to “peg along” (pardon, kind reader, the expression) until their feminine instincts revived at the welcome sight of the wished-for land.
To Be Concluded In Our Next Number.