The generally fortunate voyage of our vessel was varied by two or three days of very rough weather, and the miseries of our first night at sea were intensified by a violent gale. The fast steamer, built with lines calculated for excessive speed, cut through rather than breasted the waves. Tons of clear water washed over the whaleback, knocking over one or two hapless wights, and drenching many others. Her wind-ward side was incessantly swept by blinding showers of heavy spray. To pass from the shelter of the main deck to the entrance of our steerage was a veritable running the gauntlet. You watched till the ship rose, and then ran at full speed for the shelter of the whaleback, happy if you reached it without being rolled by a sudden lurch into the scuppers, or losing your balance and clinging to the nearest rope or stanchion, being soused by the spray from the next wave that struck her.
The storm raged more fiercely as the evening advanced, and from timid lips came stories of the lost City of Boston and the hapless London, while more experienced hands regretted their precipitancy in selecting a vessel of a line in which every other quality was said to have been sacrificed to that of excessive speed, and indulged in uncomfortable surmises as to the consequences of the shaft snapping or the engines breaking down. When the damp and chill of the advancing night drove us to our bunks, we clambered down-stairs, and, staggering away into our respective streets, crawled in. To realize my first impression of the steerage of our vessel at night, when its cavernous space was lit, or rather its grim darkness made visible, by a single lantern, would require the pen of Dickens or the graphic pencil of Gustave Doré. Crouching between those bunks and the roof grotesque forms, dimly seen in the obscure light, threw weird shadows on the cabin sides. Here one busily engaged, under innumerable difficulties, in making up a neat bed of sheets and blankets, into which he afterwards burrows by an ingenious backward movement, like a shore crab hiding himself in the sand left uncovered by the receding tide; while his next neighbor retires to rest by the simple process of kicking off his boots, pulling his battered night-cap over his eyes, and stretching himself on the bare boards, with a muttered string of curses on the ship, the weather, and the world in general, for his evening orisons. At a corner of one of the tables appear a group of players poring over their cards in a chiaro-oscuro that recalls a scene of Teniers or Van Ostade, while at another a group are gathered round a young vocalist who quavers out in a dull monotone a curious medley of sentimental ditties and music-hall vulgarities. Gradually all drop away into their bunks, and everything is still, save the deep breathing of some hundred souls, and the groans of the sufferers from the malady of the sea. Occasionally the heavy plunge of [pg 838] the ship, as she dashes into some mountainous wave, extinguishes the lamp with the shock, and buries the little windows under water, leaving the cabin for a few seconds in profound darkness. In the gale during the first night of our voyage, one tremendous billow struck the ship, burying us in black night, and rolling trunks, tins, and clothes cluttering to leeward with the lurch of the vessel, and awakening all in a moment from their slumbers. A general consternation prevailed, and while some called in angry tones for the lamp to be relighted, others could be heard muttering the unfamiliar words of a half-forgotten prayer. As the great ship shook in her conflict with the raging sea, and we heard overhead the rush of many feet and the swash on deck of a heavy mass of water, I felt nervous enough till she rose again and, creeping to the little window, I could see the cold moon throwing a silvery track across the waste of raging, wind-lashed surges.
I thought of the great ships that had gone down, crowded with hundreds of unprepared and unthinking souls, into the cruel bosom of the great ocean; perhaps their unknown fate was to sink in the darkness of the night, crushed in a moment by an iceberg, or, maimed and helpless, battered to pieces and submerged by the angry waves. What a horrible death-agony must be that of the doomed, who, after the sudden crash of a collision, or battened down in their dark prison in a raging storm, heard the cataract of water roar down the hatchway, greedy to engulf them! For a few moments what fearful struggles would take place in the crowded cabin to mount the bunks and gain the last mouthful of the retiring air, until the flood buried all in the bosom of the deep, in a silence to be broken only by the trumpet of the Judgment Day! Should I, I pondered, in such a dark hour, have the strength of mind or grace of God to lie still on my bed and let the rising water cut short the prayer on my lips, or, hoping against hope, with angrily raging heart die fighting to breathe a few seconds longer the vital air? Of a truth, to die suffocated in the darkness, without a last look at the great vault of heaven, a last breath of the pure air, seemed to me to be to doubly die.
If I suffered some discomfort and perhaps a little anxiety from the occasional anger of the mighty main, it was far more than compensated for by its aspect in its calmer and more peaceful moods. I cannot understand how in a few days voyagers can learn to complain of the monotony of the sea; to me, its different moods in calm and storm, the snowy crests of the dancing waves, the foaming and often phosphorescent wake of the great steamer, and the ever-changing aspects of the cloud-laden heavens, were objects of untiring interest. If I had the magic pen of the author of the Queen of the Air, I would write a book on the cloud-scenery of the Atlantic. Never, even in the purest Italian sky or the cloudless heavens above the vast expanse of a Western prairie, have I seen Diana so purely fair, Lucifer so bright, or Aurora clad in such varied garments of purple and rose; such a wonderful vault lined with innumerable flakes of spotless wool left by the dying wind; such masses of cumulus, sometimes as solidly white as Alpine summits, sometimes before the rain-storm luridly gray-black with the gathered water, like the massive bulk of Snowdon seen through a driving rain; and, once or twice, the pall of the thunder-storm rising over the leeward heaven and advancing towards us, its ragged [pg 839] edge momentarily lit up with the blazing tongues of the lightning, until it rolled over, deafening with its dread artillery and hiding all around in mist and blinding rain. The grandeur of sunset and of sunrise, when not obscured by the mistiness of a moist atmosphere, was indescribable. Every night, with renewed pleasure, we watched the god of day sink beneath the western horizon. Turner, in his wildest dreams of those gorgeous heaven-pictures that he had not seen on earth but felt that he would love to see, imagined no greater luxury of gold, carmine, purple, crimson, rose, and rose-tinged snow, than was afforded by some of the spectacles of the setting sun. One evening still holds my memory entranced: the heavy curtain of dull gray mist that all day had lain low over the sea rolled eastward before the evening breeze; the emerging sun, low on the horizon, dyed the receding masses of cloud with a thousand shades of livid purple; the peaks and shoulders of the eastern range of mountains of dark vapor caught the light, while between them sank valleys and depths more sombre by the contrast. Westward, below the rosy, almost blood-red sun, ran two long narrow filaments of purple cloud, dark across the glow of the heavens, like bars across a furnace. A few moments, and the shining orb sinks beneath them, fringing their edges with refulgent gold, then falls into a sea of liquid fire. A little longer the crimson hues linger on the eastern curtain of clouds, then grow fainter and fainter, and die away into the gray hues of a moonless night.
Among the five hundred emigrants our good ship carried there were, it is needless to say, many men of different speech, and almost every diversity of occupation and character. Besides the four nations of Great Britain, we had Germans, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians in considerable numbers, a few French, Poles, and Russians, a Levantine Jewess and her children, and a solitary American. With the Teutons my ignorance of their language prevented me holding further converse than to learn their nationality and their destination—generally Illinois, Minnesota, or Wisconsin. Unlike the Irish, with whom New York seemed to fulfil all their notions of America, the Germans and Scandinavians appeared all westward bound, in large parties, organized for agricultural life; and while they were in a considerable minority on the vessel, they formed much the larger proportion of the passengers in the emigrant cars. The amount of their baggage was something prodigious. Nearly all apparently peasants in their native land, they seemed on leaving it to transport everything they possessed except the roof over their heads to their adopted country. What would not break they enclosed in immense bags of ticking and rough canvas, and the residue of their property in arklike chests, the immense weight and sharp iron-bound corners of which moved the sailors to multiform blasphemy. For my part, I had read so much of the contented prosperity of the peasantry in Norway and Sweden that I speculated not a little as to what cause could lead them to make the long and expensive migration from Christiania or Gottenburg to the so far off shores of the Mississippi.
With the Germans, who came principally from the neighborhood of Mannheim, the case was different. Several of them could speak a little French, nor were they reticent as to the principal cause that led them to desert their fatherland: it was the man tax, levied by the empire of [pg 840] blood and iron on their youth and manhood, that drove them from their farms in the sweet Rhine valley to seek abodes in the new and freer world. Several of them had followed the Bavarian standard under Von Tannen through the hardships and carnage of the Franco-German war; but to the shrewd sense of the peasant the halo of military glory and the pomp of wide empire meant but conscription and taxation, fields untilled, and wife and children starving, while the blood of father and son was poured out to indite a new page in the gory annals of warlike fame.
By the way, one of them assured us that never in the fiercest time of that deadly strife, even when, in long forced marches, driving Bourbaki's broken bands through the snows of Jura, had they fared so badly as he did then, to which I may add the experience of an Englishman—whose sinister countenance and shabby attire gave increased weight to his testimony—who averred that we fared little better than in a workhouse and worse than in a jail.
Amongst us there were many mechanics, principally Irish, who were returning from visits to their friends; nor can I omit to chronicle their uniform and emphatic testimony as to the benefit they had received from their emigration. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago, they were sure of work, could live and dress comfortably, and lay by a large proportion of their earnings, while in England, and still more in Ireland, they were happy when their earnings kept them in lodging, food, and clothing, and saving was neither thought of nor possible. From what I could learn, the position of the unskilled laborer appeared by no means so bright. The different system of hiring in America made the nominally higher wages more precarious than in the old country; and I suspect that everywhere the untaught man, who, ignorant of any distinct branch of industry, brings only his thews and sinews to market, is, and will ever be, but “a hewer of wood and drawer of water”—an ill-paid and little valued drudge.
For one class of the Irish emigrants, of whom we had a certain number on board, their countrymen entertained a profound and not unfounded contempt. Youths from Cork or Dublin shops or offices, whom dissipation or misconduct had thrown out of place, or the desire of novelty or adventure had attracted to the New World—unfit for manual labor, and without any special qualification for commerce—their heads were turned with tales of the giddy whirl of New York life, in their notions of which gallantry, whiskey, politics, calico balls, and rowdy patriotism made a curious medley. Their general ambition was to be bar-tenders, and with some exceptions their usual behavior showed them to be little fitted for any better avocation.
One of the characters that most attracted my attention, though I elicited but little response to my advances from his taciturn nature, was a miner from Montana—a man of short stature but powerful build, with, a determined, weather-beaten face, and a decidedly sinister squint, who had rambled over the greater part of California, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Montana, and apparently returned no richer from his wanderings. Having been a seaman before he took to a mountain life, his gait had acquired an indescribably curious mixture of the out-kneed walk of a man constantly on horseback with the roll of a sailor, while he had, too, a curious habit of involuntarily working the fingers of his right hand as if they held a six-shooter. He usually [pg 841] restricted himself to the bachelor society under the whaleback, and, chary of his words, amused himself with an amateur surveillance of the operations of the men, or occasionally exchanged reminiscences in brief sentences with two or three other returned Californians: how he and his mates had killed a grizzly at the foot of Mount Helena; how he had made £1,200 in eight months from a claim in Siskiyou County, and lost it all in working another in El Dorado County, at which he persevered fruitlessly for three years, while the claims on each side brought heavy piles to their workers; how he had seen twenty-six “road agents” hanged together in Montana; and other tales of far West mining, murder, and debauchery. Once only his hard face relaxed into a laugh at a story he told of two men who quarrelled in a California saloon, and, dodging round the table, while the rest of the company made for the door or skulked behind the beer barrels, emptied their revolvers at each other with no worse effect than one slight scratch. That twelve barrels should go off and no one be killed seemed to be too ridiculous, and his risible faculties overcame him accordingly. Strangely enough, while he spoke with the most hearty enthusiasm as to the pleasures of a mountaineering life, which he declared, with a good horse, a trusty rifle, and staunch mates, was the finest in the world, and to judge from appearances had certainly not made his pile, he never intended to return westward, but was bound for some city of the South. Possibly some episodes in his checkered existence had caused him to bear in mind the shortened career of the twenty-six road agents with a distinctness that determined his preference for this side of the Rocky Mountains.