Many of the emigrants who crossed the Atlantic aboard packet ships later found work in the shipbuilding trade—often in the yards where the packets were built. There they made an enduring contribution to the lot of their fellow laborers.
During the packet era, the center of shipbuilding lay along Manhattan’s East River, where more than a dozen yards ultimately turned out 160 vessels for the transatlantic routes. Yard owners made their own rules and often kept carpenters, joiners and calk-• ers on the job from sunup until dark (in summer that meant from 4:30 a. m. until 7:30 p. m.). The workers, collectively known—like many 19th Century skilled workers—as mechanics, earned $1.25 a day. That was a living wage, when room and board cost five dollars a month, but hardly overgenerous considering the time put in.
Then came the emigrants, fleeing oppressive working conditions in Europe and emboldened by idealistic notions about American freedom. They fully expected that, in America, workers would set the standards of labor— and their attitude proved contagious. In 1831, mechanics at three adjacent yards banded together and unilaterally cut their workday to 10 hours.
For reasons that are unrecorded, the owners of the yards acceded to the change. They also accepted a device that prevented any boss from cheating on the hours: The workers erected a 25-foot tower topped by an 18-inch brass bell, which was rung six times a day—at 6 a. m. to start work, at the beginning and end of one-hour breakfast and lunch breaks, and at 6 p. m. as the call to go home.
Inevitably, pressure for better working conditions spread, spurred by the bell’s daily reminders of the power of labor solidarity. In 1833, workers all over the waterfront campaigned for shorter hours. The yard owners offered a raise to two dollars a day if workers would keep to the old hours, but the mechanics held to their demand—and gave it sting in the form of sporadic strikes. The owners, fearing the loss of their skilled employees as much as the stoppages, agreed to the shorter day. A little later, they were persuaded to concede the t wo-dollar daily wage too.
In 1834 the workers lifted a new standard above the waterfront—a 36-inch Mechanics’ Bell whose clarion call resounded to distant yards. Over the next 63 years, the bell was moved as the centers of shipbuilding shifted, but its tolling continued to herald the beginning and end of the workday until the industry died out on the East River at the end of the 19th Century.
At last, after 34 days, the vessel reached the Grand Banks, off Newfoundland, in a dense fog on July 3. As she ghosted along the coast, the tolling bells of fishing vessels were heard. To warn them of her presence, the emigrant ship sounded mournful blasts with her foghorn. But to Whyte’s ears a more desolate sound in the enveloping mist was the delirious wailing of 37 typhus victims.
By July 22, the ship had entered the St. Lawrence River. The supply of fresh water was now running so low that the steerage passengers were ordered to use the saline river water for cooking, and several patients who hitherto had seemed to be rallying suffered a relapse. to the ministrations of the captain’s wife—and no little luck—only six of the passengers had died. But when the voyage ended after nearly two months, a dozen passengers remained dangerously sick and had to be separated from their families for hospitalization. At the parting, “the screams pierced my brain,’’ Whyte wrote. “O God! may I never again witness such a scene.”
Since the 1830s, when cholera-ridden ships had begun dumping boatloads of diseased arrivals on the western shore of the Atlantic, the citizens of the New World had tried various means of self-protection. In Ganada, Grosse He, located approximately 350 miles up the St. Lawrence River, had been designated a quarantine station for the examination of ships en route to Quebec and Montreal. Similar facilities existed to the
The Mechanics’ Bell stands guard aver the East River. The bell was melted down during Warid War II to provide metal for weoponry.
South, at Boston, Philadelphia and New York. The quarantine stations were intended as a final barrier against the indiscriminate spread of disease from ship to shore; more often than not, however, the barrier proved to be a sieve.
The inspection of passengers aboard the arriving ships was as cursory as the medical examination they had received before departing from Liverpool, for the simple reason that the volume of people to be inspected was overwhelming. During the height of the transatlantic migration, 1,600 ships arrived every year, many of them with 1,000 passengers aboard. And not everyone was inspected. Captains were generally unwilling to face a possible month’s detention if disease was found on their ship—so they would resort to any ruse to avoid the sentence, hiding sick passengers away on the ship or dropping them off somewhere along the coast of New Jersey. And even when inspectors did detain a vessel for 30 days, the emigrants would sometimes jump ship and head into New York in small lighters.
Infection could be spread by objects as well as by people. As a ship came into the harbor, the passengers would throw their bedding and rubbish overboard; this flotsam would eventually wash up on the island with the tide, where it was collected by scavengers. Anything serviceable was later taken into the city and sold, transmitting whatever deadly microorganisms it contained.
In reaction to the ever-growing health problem, the port of New York tightened up its quarantine laws in early 1847; among other things, an emigration commission was empowered to collect a head tax of $1.50 per passenger coming into the port, the money to be put toward maintaining the quarantine station and its hospital. The tax—a stiff one— effectively barred some of the poorest emigrants. But it did little to help other packet ports. When incoming packet ships discovered that they would have difficulty unloading at New York, they changed course and headed for Montreal and Quebec. That year the quarantine station at Grosse He virtually collapsed under the onslaught.
Dr. George Douglas, the island’s medical superintendent, had a staff that consisted of one steward, one orderly and one nurse when he opened the quarantine station on May 4, 1847. The hospital could accommodate 200 patients. Ten days later the first ship of the season, the Syria from Liverpool, arrived with 243 passengers aboard, 52 of whom were ill. Nine other persons had died during the voyage. The Syria’s 10th death occurred at Grosse He the day after she arrived in port. As the days passed, the plague ships kept coming. By the 28th of May, there were 856 cases of typhus and dysentery on the island, with another 470 still aboard ships anchored in the roadsteads. Thirty-six more vessels, containing a total of 13,000 passengers, awaited inspection. The sick and the dying overflowed the hospital and were cared for in hastily erected shanties and tents. Dr. Douglas tried frantically to enlist a staff of physicians, nurses and orderlies, but some refused to come, and of the 26 he did manage to hire by the middle of June, 23 fell ill in less than three weeks. At no time did he have enough healthy people to take care of the sick—or to dig the graves of those who died.
On June 8 the doctor wrote a somber letter to the chief emigration
A cartoon pokes fun at cabin passengers. Acquiring sea legs was an unnerving experience. “Amongst the pea Soup were the passengers roiling an deck messing and sprawling like pigs,” wrote one traveler. “Spoiled all their clothes.”
Mr. Slim in Iiis state-room.—Position Xumbcr Twi
Feels somewhat uneasy, hut, thinkins dinner will do him good, takes his seat at the table.
Feeling a little better, he proceeds on deck. Curious aspeet of things in general.
Odd feeling eonies over him. Thinks he will go baek to his stale-room.
Agent at Quebec. “Out of the 4,000 or 5,000 emigrants that have left this island since Sunday,” he warned, “at least 2,000 will fall sick somewhere before three weeks are over. They ought to have accommodation for 2,000 sick at least at Montreal and Quebec, as all the Cork and Liverpool passengers are half dead from starvation and want before embarking.” For people who had made the ocean crossing in search of a better future, they presented a melancholy sight. “I never saw people so indifferent to life,” Douglas wrote, adding that on the ships, he had been told, “they would continue in the same berth with a dead person until the seamen or captain dragged out the corpse with boathooks.”
By the end of the year, Douglas reported, a total of 8,691 stricken emigrants had been treated in the island’s facilities; 5,424 of them had died. Besides the emigrants, there were another 44 casualties: members of the hospital staff.
The tragedy on the emigrant ships might have been prevented, or at least mitigated, if the various Passenger Vessel Acts in force at the time had been observed—if brokers had not sold tickets to more passengers than a ship was supposed to carry, if the preembarkation medical examinations had been thorough, if captains had refused to allow sick passengers to come aboard their vessels. In 1855 an outraged and frightened citizenry at the receiving end of the transatlantic migration pressured Congress into passing yet more laws, this time with a new twist that threatened the captains and, through them, the shipowners. Captains would be fined a stiff $50 for every passenger they carried in excess of their allotment, and another $10 for the death of every passenger who was more than eight years of age. But this law had no more effect than its predecessors. The authorities turned a blind eye to well-documented violations that could have cost individual captains tens of thousands of dollars.
In the face of such neglect by shipowners, captains, crews and law-enforcement agents, transatlantic emigration continued without letup. There was no denying that the emigrants were better off in the new country, and they wrote glowing letters to their relatives back home. “We all have plenty of work to do here,” said one, adding: “You know the state we were in when we left you—we had neither meat nor money—but we have plenty of everything that we need at present.” Another wrote: “Urge my brothers to come out if ever they wish to free themselves from bondage; this is the land of independence to the industrious.” And a third: “By adopting this country as the future home of myself and family, I am now a master, where I could never well expect otherwise than to see myself and my family as servants.”
Not was the act of getting to America invariably a traumatic experience. On some ships, steerage passengers dealt with adversity by organizing themselves into mutual-aid societies that cared for the sick and guarded against theft. Emigrants also took steps to protect women from the unwanted attentions of the crew or other voyagers. If a female passenger was not traveling in the company of a father or brother, her family would attempt to enlist some other chaperon beforehand—perhaps a trusted neighbor who was making the trip.
Cabin passengers Jounge around the capstan as a puppy watches/rom an abandoned shuffleboard court. By the 1830s, packet owners routinely provided shipboard games far the well-ta-da passengers who were taking up travel for enlightenment and relaxation.
Chaperonage did not, of course, rule out innocent fun, and many an evening was brightened with the sounds of music. Fiddlers would strike up a tune, dancers would leap into jigs and reels. A passenger who sailed aboard the John Dennison recalled that the quarter-deck would be cleared every evening at 6 o’clock, and the ship’s surgeon would set to on the fiddle. With the ship’s baker performing the role of master of ceremonies, and with a gallon of rum purchased from the ship’s steward, “the dance and merriment were kept up with great spirit until four bells, or 10 p. m. Many more bottles besides the gallon were drunk.’’
Even at their merriest, steerage festivities were but a pale reflection of the amusements afforded the passengers elsewhere on the ship—those who paid 10 times as much as the emigrants to travel cabin-class. Included in their ranks were businessmen, lecturers and actors who earned handsome sums touring America, and all manner of other voyagers who were curious about the New World and had the time and money to indulge their interest. Curiosity operated in both directions, of course. From Boston and New York a new generation of Americans sailed eastward to explore Europe; intercontinental tourism had begun.
Although cabin and steerage passengers were only a deck apart, their lives aboard ship could not have been more different. The cabin passengers usually knew about the grim conditions below only by hearsay, and
Two passengers—one unaccountably dressed in his dinner jacket—lie abed in a packet cabin. Such luxuries as separate bunks and a carpet on the floor made their appearance as early as 1819 but were available to only the richest travelers; of all those who emigrated from Great Britain to the United States between the Revolutionary' War and 1890. scarcely 2 per cent could afford cabin passage.
Y
Even if they had wanted to get at the facts, personal investigation was not always possible. On the Hottinguer in 1845, Mrs. Sarah Mytton Maur>’’ recorded that the ship’s doctor refused to let her go down into the steerage, “holding it not only dangerous and unwholesome, but as being a spectacle wholly unfit for the eyes of a female unaccustomed to behold the strange, and sorry, and demoralizing economy which prevails in those dens of disease and misery.’’ So, while the steerage passenger fought for a place at a cooking grate to prepare his oatmeal or tossed fitfully in his lice-ridden bunk, cabin passengers like Mrs. Maury were often oblivious of the plight of their fellow travelers. They themselves were waited on by skilled stewards, or played quoits on deck to work up an appetite for the next lengthy meal.
In cabin class, luxury was ubiquitous. “The ladies’ cabin is distinguished by the extreme elegance of the fittings,’’ effused a journalist who examined the packet Victoria in 1843. “Indeed, no drawing-room or boudoir on terra firma presents a nicer specimen of decorative art or appropriate upholstery. The style of the apartment is that of Louis Quatorze or Quinze, in the most delicate white and gold, the carved framework of the panels being well executed.’’
Eleven years later another reporter described the equally elegant dining saloon on the Marco Polo: “It is ceiled with maple and the pilasters are panelled with richly ornamented and silvered glass,’’ he noted, “coins of various countries being a novel feature of the decorations.” The upholstery was done in embossed crimson velvet.
The food provided for the cabin passengers was no less lavish. As described by a traveler aboard the packet Ontario in the early 1830s, it seemed to pour forth from the ship’s galley in an almost ceaseless stream. Breakfast, served at 9 o’clock, consisted of “black tea, green tea, coffee, biscuit, bread, hot rolls, fish, fowl, ham, cold mutton, eggs,” uTote William Lyon Mackenzie. And sometimes there would be chocolate as well. Lunch featured an impressive spread of cold meats. At four in the afternoon came a dinner that could go on for hours: “soups, fresh mutton, beef, pork and sometimes veal, barn-door fowls, bacon, plum-pudding, preserves, pastry.” A variety of nuts and fruit were offered for dessert. As for libations, “excellent madeira and port, and also claret, are always on the table, and occasionally (say, every other day] champagne, a very fair and genuine sample, is served round after the cloth is removed.”
In between the main meals were other occasions for refreshment. There might be a midmorning glass of port, taken on deck in fair weather. At seven or eight in the evening on some ships, the stewards presented a meal called tea—a repeat of the lunch. And just before retiring, a traveler might partake of sardines and toast.
When they were not at table, the cabin passengers sought and found a variety of amusements to pass the time. Some might spend hours shooting with rifles and pistols at bottles suspended from a spar, or trying to tempt sharks into following the ship by throwing pieces of beef and mutton over the side. On rare occasions, passengers would get an opportunity to shoot at polar bears on drifting icebergs. Sometimes a member of the crew would harpoon a porpoise, and the ship’s cooks would then concoct a feast based on this exotic flesh. Rat hunts—a serious concern in steerage—were pure sport for cabin passengers. When the sea was calm, some adventuresome souls would dive overboard and swim around the ship. “For the want of work,’’ one of them reflected, the men on board “turned boys again, and went to play.”
For travelers with more sedate tastes, a similarly broad range of amusements was available. Some of the more luxurious vessels provided professional orchestras for evening concerts and dances. And on every ship, cabin passengers whiled away the hours at checkers, chess, dominoes, backgammon, whist and poker (a game that reputedly originated in the American hinterland and found its way to England via packet). Passengers also laid bets on the distance covered by the ship each day—a tradition that would be carried on by the ocean liners—and on the time of their ship’s arrival in port.
On the Pacific in 1832 “a society was established for the good demeanor and sociability of the passengers,” wrote the actress Fanny Kemble, and under the direction of its elected officers this group played popular guessing games such as “dumb crambo, and earth, air and water, with
The Irish comic actor Tyrone Power finsetj sailed to New York in 1833 aboard the packet Europe. To Power, the vessel was o floating stage and its passengers a captive audience—and not surprisingly, he enjoyed himself. He exhorted friends to take a packet voyage. “Forgive your enemies, kiss your wife,” he said, “and with a clean heart, backed by forty-eight clean shirts, go and try it.”
The White Diamond Line’s packet Washington Irving carried the American author Ralph Waldo Emerson (inset) to England in 1847 for ivhat he expected ivould be “a change and a tonic.”
The voyage gave the philosopher plenty o/ time to think; he spent it musing darkly about “the dread of the sea” and opined; “The wonder is olways new that any sane man can be a sailor.”
Infinite zeal.” The English novelist Charles Dickens, who made a crossing on the George Washington in 1842, was also a member of an impromptu club—‘‘to whose distinguished president modesty forbids me to make any further allusion.” It was, he said, ‘‘a very hilarious and jovial institution.” The clubs took great pleasure in staging mock trials and debates, as well as amateur theatricals.
Meeting another ship at sea was always an occasion. If it was passing in the opposite direction, passengers might hurl weighted messages for home across the water. Overtaking, or being passed by, a rival packet was an even greater cause of excitement. One day during her crossing aboard the United States in 1834, the English social reformer Harriet Martineau directed the captain’s attention to another sail. ‘‘He snatched his glass,” she recorded, ‘‘and the next moment electrified us all by the vehemence of his directions to the helmsman and others of the crew.” The ship turned out to be a rival packet, the Montreal, which had left Portsmouth four days ahead of the United States. ‘‘We were in for a race,” Miss Martineau wrote. The Montreal was faster in a light wind, the United States in a strong wind. As usual on the Atlantic, strong
A packet disembarks passengers onto the New York waterfront, bustling with arrivoisfrom the world over—including some who come on the Keying (bockground), the first Chinese junk to visit America. By 1855, one of four emigrants was Irish, an influx lampooned at right by a trunk labeled “Pat Murfy For Ameriky.”
Npi
Winds prevailed, and the United States beat theMontreal to New York by a margin Miss Martineau neglected to chronicle.
In every way—whether by seamanly panache or his deportment while presiding over meals—the captain set the tone of the ship. Packet captains mingled as equals with even the most prominent voyagers. They showed important guests around the ship, and had to be skilled diplomats who could flatter the vanities of one important traveler without slighting another.
These efforts were often rewarded with imaginative expressions of thanks. Sometimes the tributes took the form of expensive gifts. Napoleon’s brother Joseph, King of Spain from 1808 to 1813, sailed three times with a jaunty Connecticut Yankee named Elisha E. Morgan, who was captain of the Philadelphia. As a token of thanks for the attentions he had received, Joseph presented Morgan with a chessboard that had been used by Napoleon at St. Helena, and a silver tea-and-coffee service and set of gold cutlery that Napoleon had given to his mother.
Other tokens of esteem might be less lavish though no less heady for the captain. The passengers of the Black Ball liner Columbia placed a notice in the New York newspapers attesting to Captain William Lee’s “assiduous attention and gentlemanlike conduct’’ on a voyage they had taken under his command. Doubtless the most novel tribute was paid to Captain David G. Bailey, who brought the Yorkshire from Liverpool to New York in a record-setting 16 days in 1846. Among his passengers were the youthful members of a Viennese ballet troupe. “Those beautiful children were so delighted with him and his ship,’’ reported the New York Herald, “that they danced the splendid Pas de Fleurs on his quarter deck coming up the harbor.’’
Not every cabin passenger rejoiced in sea travel, of course. New England philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was a less-than-enthusiastic sailor. “I waked every morning with the belief that someone was tipping my berth,’’ Emerson wrote, describing an ocean crossing he made in 1847. “Nobody likes to be treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of the house, rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis and stewing oil.’’ The best he could say for sea life was that it was “an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes and olives.’’
Harriet Martineau found the ordeal of a storm intolerable. “All night the noises would have banished sleep if we could have lain quiet,” she wrote. “There was a roar of wind; the waves dashed against the side of the ship as if they were bursting in; water poured into our cabin, though the skylight was fastened down.” With her belongings lying in wet heaps all around. Miss Martineau staggered through the ladies’ cabin in search of a dry place to sleep. The only place that she could find was underneath the table. “So I brought a blanket and pillow, laid down with a firm hold of the leg of the table, and got an hour’s welcome sleep, by which time the storm was enough to have wakened the dead.”
The same Miss Martineau—who was once characterized by a contemporary as “that dyspeptic Radical battle-axe” for her vigorous crusades to pass laws protecting English paupers—looked on the cabin passengers’ sumptuous fare with bluenosed disapproval. “Some of us felt it rather annoying to be so long at table,” she wrote.
World History
