The Pittsburg is about two hundred and eighty feet in length by sixty in breadth. This boat, if placed in a field, would cover nearly half an acre of land.
These boats are high as well as long. Besides the hold, as they call it—a kind of cellar into which they stow away much of their heavy freight—they have two or three other stories or decks for freight and passengers.
The one next above the hold is where they keep their cattle and horses and hogs, if they have any on board; also their common freight. Here, too, in some instances, they have at one end a clumsy kind of cabin called the forecastle, or steerage.
This forecastle is occupied, for the most part, by the poorer passengers, especially emigrants. They have berths or shelves to recline on, but no bed-clothing; and their accommodations are generally very inferior.
On the next floor above are the cabins for the passengers in general. They are usually in two great—rather long—rooms, one at each end. One of them is used at meals as the dining-room. The berths or sleeping places are at their sides. They, too, are mere broad shelves, but they have bed-clothing and curtains.
On the upper deck the cabins are still more ample, as well as better furnished. There, instead of shelves at the sides, there are small rooms connected with the shelves, called state-rooms.
Were it not that the cabins on those upper decks are unusually long in proportion to their breadth, and did you not feel the motion of the boat while occupying them, the traveler would hardly know that he was not in a large and comfortable hotel or dwelling-house.
There is still another deck or promenade above all these, but passengers are not usually allowed to occupy it. The helmsman of the boat is stationed here, and a crowd of people around him might obstruct his view.
I have thus described five stories or rows; but there is a difference in boats in this particular, even in the large ones. Some have only four stories—that is, three besides the hold. In the latter case, the lower or freight deck is at one end of the boat, formed into a cabin which communicates only by means of a stairway with the next deck above it.
The best cabins are carpeted as nicely as our best parlors, and the furniture is often as costly. The state-rooms are also well furnished, and sometimes well ventilated. The beds are narrow. But the beds on board the Pittsburg, though narrow, were quite comfortable. The passenger reclines on a mattress, which rests on coils of elastic wire, like some of our sofas and carriage seats; and the beds are almost as soft as feather beds.