 Chapter 1 of The Amateur Immigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson I first encountered my fellow passengers on the Bromelaw in Glasgow. Then we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking as scants on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea were friendly and voluble over their long pipes, but amongst English speakers distance and sufficient rained supreme. The sun was soon overcrowded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening estuary, and with the falling temperature the gloom amongst the passengers increased. Two other women wept. Anyone who had come aboard might have supposed we were all absconding from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged and no common sentiment, but that of cold unites us, until, at length, having touched at Greenwick, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard now announced that our ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in Mid River, at the tail of the bank, her sea signal flying, a wall of bulwark, a street of white deck houses, an aspiring forest of spars larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an incorporated town in the land to which she was to bear us. I was not in truth a steerage passenger, although anxious to see the worst of immigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table at command. The advice was excellent, but to understand the choice and what I gained, some outline of the internal disposition of the ship would first be necessary. In her very nose is steerage number one, down two pairs of stairs. A little above another companion, labelled steerage number two and three, gives admission to three galleries, two running forward towards steerage number one and the third aft toward the engines. The starboard forward gallery is the second cabin. Away above the engines and below the office's cabins to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet a third nest of steerages labelled four and five. The second cabin to return is thus a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin petition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement. There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this strip. He does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds berths and a table completely or somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys a distinct superiority in diet. But this strange to say differs not only on different ships, but on the same ship according as her head is to the east or west. In my own experience the principal difference between our table and that of true steerage passenger was the table itself and the crockery plates from which we ate. But lest I should show myself ungrateful, let me recapitulate every advantage. At breakfast we had a choice between tea and coffee for beverage. A choice not easy to make, the two were so surprisingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof conclusive of some chemical disparity, and even by the palate I could distinguish a smack of snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling and dish-cots in the second. As a matter of fact I have seen passengers after many sips, still doubting which had been supplied to them. In the way of eatables at the same meal we were gloriously favoured. Four, in addition to porridge which was common to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish and sometimes results. The dinner of soup, roast beef, boiled salt, junk and potatoes was I believe exactly common to the steerage in the second cabin. I only overheard it rumoured that our potatoes were of a superior brand and twice a week on pudding days instead of duff we had a settle bag filled with currants under the name of a plum pudding. At tea we were served with some broken meat from the saloon, sometimes in the comparatively elegant form of spare patties or whistles, but as a general thing mere chicken bones and flakes of fish, neither hot or cold. If these were not the scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely, yet we were all too hungry to be proud and fell to these leavings greedily. These, the bread which was excellent and the soup and porridge which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage, so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I might just as well have been in the steerage outright. Had they given me porridge again in the evening I should have been perfectly contented with the fare. As it was with a few biscuits and some whiskey and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my spirits up to the mark. The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of sentiment. In the steerage there are males and females, in the second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a male, but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks I came upon a brass plate and learnt that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it of course, I was lost in the crowd of males and females and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck, who could tell whether I housed on the port or starboard side of steerage, number two and three. And it was only there that my superiority became practical. Everywhere else I was incognito, moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after all and had broken meat to tea. Still I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer at home, and when I felt out of spirits I could go down and refresh myself with a look of that brass plate. For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six guineas is the steerage fare, eight that by the second cabin. And when you remember that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, and in five cases out of ten either brings some dainties with him or privately pays the steward for extra rations, the difference in price becomes almost nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food comparatively varied and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman may thus be had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow passengers in the second cabin had already made the passage by the cheap affair and declared it was an experiment not to be repeated. As they go on to tell about my steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not alone in their opinion. Out of ten with whom I was more or less intimate, I am sure not fewer than five failed if they returned to travel second cabin and all who had left their wives behind assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence until they could afford to bring them by saloon. Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on board. Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good will and character. Yet it had some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed group of Swedes, Danes and Norsemen, one of whom generally known by the name as Johnny in spite of his own protests, greatly diverted us by his clever cross-country efforts to speak English and became on the strength of that a universal favourite. He'd take so little in this world of shipboard to create a popularity. There was besides a Scots mason known from his favourite dish as Irish Dew. Three or four nondescript Scots, a fine young Irishman O'Reilly and a pair of young men who deserve a special word of condemnation. One of them was Scots, the other claimed to be American, admitted after some fencing that he was born in England and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born a nurtured but ashamed to own his country. He had a sister on board whom he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage although she was not only sick but much his senior and had nursed and cared for him in childhood. In appearance he was like an imbecile Henry III of France. The Scotsman though perhaps as big an ass was not so dead of heart and I've only bracketed them together because they were fast friends and disgraced themselves equally by their conduct at the table. Next to turn to topics more agreeable we had a newly married couple devoted to each other a certain story of how they had first seen each other years ago at a preparatory school and that very afternoon he had carried her books home for her. I do not know if this story will be plain to Southern readers but to me it recalls many a school idol with rothful swains of eight and nine confronting each other's striped legs flushed with jealousy for to carry home a young lady's books was both a delicate attention and a privilege. Then there was an old lady or indeed I'm not so sure she was as much old as antiquated and strangely out of place who had left her husband and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself. We had to take her own word that she was married but was sorely contradicted by the testimony of her appearance. Nature soon to have sanctified her for the single state even the colour of her hair was incompatible with matrimony and her husband I thought should be a man of saintly spirit and fantasmal bodily presence. She was ill-porthing, her soul turned from the Vians. The dirty tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety and the whole strength of her endeavour was spent upon keeping her watch true to Classico time till she should reach New York. They had heard reports for her husband and she as some unwarrantable disparity of ours between these two cities and with a spirit commendably scientific had seized on this occasion to put them to the proof. It was a good thing for the old lady for she passed much leisure time in studying the watch. Once when prostrated by sickness she let it run down. It was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands of the watch must never be turned backwards and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment as she started it again. When she imagined this was about due she sought out one of the young Second Cabin Scotsman who was embarked on the same experiment as herself and had hitherto been less neglectful. She was in quest of two o'clock and when she learnt it was already seven on the shores of Clyde she lifted up her voice and cried, Gravy. I had not heard this innocent expletive since I was a young child and I suppose it must be the same for other Scotsman prisons for we all laughed our fill. Last but not least I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man or he mine during the voyage. Thus at table I carved while he only scooped Gravy and at our concerts of which more or none he was the president who called up the performers to sing and I but his messenger who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest. I knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish nor could his accent deceive me. For as there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the molls and in the faluchus of the Mediterranean so there is a free or common accent amongst English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang in a New England port from a cockney skipper even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an H. A word of dialect is picked up from another hand in the folksal until often the result is undecipherable and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to see in Wales and had been most of his life a blacksmith at an inland forge. A few years in America and half a score of ocean voyages having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern. By his own account he was both strong and skillful in his trade. A few years back he had been married and after a fashion a rich man. Now his wife was dead and the money gone. But his was the nature that looks forward and goes on from one year to another and through all the extremities of fortune undismayed. And if the sky were to fall tomorrow I should look to see Jones the day following perched on the stepladder and getting things to rights. He was always hovering round inventions like a bee over a flower and lived in a dream of patents. He had with him a patent medicine for instance the composition of which he had bought years ago for five dollars from an American peddler and sold the other days for a hundred pounds I think it was, twenty-mish apocrythory. It was called golden oil and cured all maladies without exception and I'm bound to say I took of it myself with good results. It is a character of the man that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with golden oil but whether there was a head aching or a finger cut there would be Jones with his bottle. If he had one taste more strongly than another it was the study character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called unkind. Whenever a quaint or human tray stripped out in conversation you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the day's experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a day's kill but the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species and we angled as often as not in one another's baskets. Once in the midst of a serious talk each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself. I and I paused in embarrassment at this double detection but Jones with a better civility broke into a peel of unaffected laughter and declared what was the truth that there was a pair of us indeed. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of The Amateur Immigrant The Slipper Vox recording is in the public domain. The Amateur Immigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson Early Impressions We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night and early on the Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of immigrants at Loefoil in Ireland and said farewell to Europe. The company was now complete and began to draw together by inscrutable magnetisms upon the decks. There were Scots and Irish in plenty a few English, a few Americans a good handful of Scandinavians a German or two and one Russian all now belonging for ten days to one small iron country on the deep. As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow passengers thus curiously assorted from all Northern Europe I began for the first time to understand the nature of emigration. Day after day through the passage and thence forth across all the states and onto the shores of the Pacific this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emigration from a word of the most cheerful import came to sound most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at home is hopeful and adventurous a young man you fancy scourning restraints and helpers issues forth into life that great battle to fight for his own hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition of difficulties overcome and of ultimate success are but as episodes to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms. It stands to them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the young men enter direct shipload on their heritage of work. Empty continents swarm as at the Boson's whistle with industrious hands and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of man. This is the closet picture and is found on trial to consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow passengers the less I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below 30. They were married and encumbered with families. Not a few were already up in years and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity with bluff or hawk-like features and the stamp of an ego and pushing disposition. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens and men broken by adversity elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life and people who had seen better days. Mildest was the prevailing character mild mirth and mild endurance. In a word I was not taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally such as swept over Mexico or Siberia but found myself like Marmion in the lost battle born down by the flying. Labouring mankind had in the last years and throughout Great Britain sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the time the cellar doors broken and removed for firewood of homeless men loitering at the street corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them of closed factories useless strikes and starving girls but I had never taken them home to me or represented those distresses livingly to my imagination. A turn of the market may be calamity as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment and makes a trifling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle as we please we are not born economists the individual is more affecting than the mass it is by the scenic accident and the appeal to the carnal eye that for the most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now when I found myself involved in the rout that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected the drunken, the incompetent, the weak the prodigal all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land were now fleeing pitifully to another and though one or two might still succeed all had already failed we were a ship full of failures the broken men of England yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene on the contrary was cheerful not a tear was shed on board the vessel all were full of hope for the future and showed an incarnation to innocent gaiety some were heard to sing and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter the children found each other out like dogs and ran about the decks scraping acquaintance after their fashion also what do you call your myth I heard one ask more more was the reply indicating I fancy a shade of difference in the social scale when people pass each other on the hoses of life at so early an age the contact is but slow and the relation more like what we may imagine to be the friendship of flies than that of men it is so quickly joined so easily dissolved so open in its communications and so devoid of your deeper human qualities the children I observed were all in a band and as thick as thieves at a fair while their elders were still ceremoniously maneuvering on the outskirts of acquaintance the sea, the ship and the seaman were soon as familiar as home to these half conscious little ones it was odd to hear them throughout the voyage employ shorewards to designate portions of the vessel go away dune to yon dyke I heard one say probably meaning the bunnock I have often had my heart in my mouth watching them climb into the shrouds or onto the rails while the ship went swinging through the waves and I admired and envied the courage of their mothers who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at these perilous feats you'll maybe be a sailor I heard one remark now's the time to learn I had been on the point of running forward to interfere but stood back at that reproved very few in the more delicate classes have the nerve to look upon the peril of one day to them but the life of poor folk when necessity is so much more immediate braces even a mother to this extreme of endurance and perhaps after all it is better that the land should break his neck than that you should break his spirit and since I am here on the chapter of children I must mention one little fellow whose family belongs to steerage number four and five and who wherever he went was like a strain of music round the ship he was an ugly Mary unbreached child of three his lint white hair in a tangle his face smeared with soot and treacle but he ran to and fro with so natural a step and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and good humour that he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in motion to meet him, crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup was to meet a little triumph of the human species even when his mother and the rest of the family lay sick and prostrate about him he sat upright in their midst and sang a loud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy throughout the Friday intimacy among us men made but a few advances we discussed the probable duration of the voyage we exchanged pieces of information naming our trains what we hoped to find in the new world or what we were fleeing from in the old and above all we condoled together over the food and the vileness of the steerage one or two had been so near famine that you may say they had run into the ship with the devil at their heels and to these all seemed for the best in the best of all possible steamers but the majority were hugely contented coming as they did from a country in so low a state as Great Britain many of them from Glasgow which commercially speaking was as good as dead and many having long been out of work I was surprised to find them so dainty in their notions I myself lived almost exclusively on bread, porridge and soup precisely as it was supplied to them and found it if not luxurious at least efficient but these working men were loud in their outcries it was not food for human beings it was only fit for pigs it was a disgrace many of them lived almost entirely upon others on their own private supplies and some paid extra for better rations from the ship this marvelously changed my notion of the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan I was prepared to hearing grumble for grumbling is the traveller's pastime but I was not prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to myself words I should have disregarded or taken with a liberal allowance but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no question of the sincerity of his disgust with one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise a single night of the steerage had filled them with horror I had myself suffered even in my decent second cabin berth from the lack of air and as the night promised to be fine and quiet I determined to sleep on deck and advised all who complained of their quarters to follow my example I daresay a dozen of others agreed to do so and I thought we should have been quite a party yet when I bought my rug up about seven bells there was no one to be seen but the watch that comirical terror of good night air which makes men close their windows, list their doors and seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations had sent all those healthy workmen down below one would think we had been bought up in a fever country yet in England the most malaria districts are in the bed chambers I felt saddened at this defection and yet half pleased to have the night so quietly to myself the wind had hurled a little ahead on the starboard bow and was dry but chilly I found a shelter near the firehole and made myself snug for the night the ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle cradling movement the ponderous organic labors of the engine in her bowels occupied the mind and prepared it for slumber from time to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay and recall me to the obscure borders of consciousness all I heard as it were through a veil the clear note of the clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea cry all's well I know nothing whether for poetry or music then can surpass the effect of these two syllables in the darkness of a night at sea the day dawned fairly enough and during the early part we had some pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air but toward nightfall the wind freshened the rain began to fall and the sea rose so high that it was difficult to keep one's footing on the deck I have spoken of our concerts we were indeed a musical ships company and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion and the songs of all nations good, bad or indifferent Scottish, English, Irish, Russian German or Norse the songs were received with generous applause once or twice a recitation very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish accent varied the proceeding and once we sought in vain to dance a quadril eight men of us together to the music of the violin the performers were all numerous frisky fellows who loved to keep capers in private life but as soon as they were arranged for the dance they conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral I have never seen decorum pushed so far and as this was not expected the quadril was soon whistled down and the dancers departed under a cloud eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen from another rank of society would have dared to make some fun for themselves and the spectators but the working man when sober takes an extreme and even melancholy view of personal deportment a fifth form schoolboy is not more careful of dignity he dares not be comical his fun must escape from him unprepared and above all it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration I like his society under most circumstances but let me never again join with him in public gambles but the impulse to sing was strong and triumphed over modesty and even the inclementies of sea and sky on this rough Saturday night we got together by the main deck house in a place sheltered from wind and rain some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane deck with only arms or taking hands we made a ring to support the women in the violent lurching of the ship and when we were thus disposed sang to our hearts content some of the songs were appropriate to the scene others striking the reverse bastard dog will of the musical hall such as around her splendid form I weaved a magic circle sounded bull bleak and pitifully silly we don't want to fight but by jingle if we do was in some measure saved by the vigor and unanimity with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night I observed the plucked Deutsch Mason entirely innocent of English adding heartily to the general effect and perhaps the German Mason is but a fair example of the sincerity with which the song was rendered for nearly all with whom I conversed upon the subject opposed to war and attributed their own misfortunes and frequently their own taste for whiskey to the campaigns in Zulu land in Afghanistan every now and then however some song that touched the pathos of our situation was given forth and you could hear by the voices that took up the burden how the sentiment came home to each the anchor's wade was true for us we were indeed rocked on the bosom deep how many of us could say with the singer I'm lonely tonight, love without you or go someone and tell them from me to write me a letter from home and when was there a more appropriate moment for old Langsine than now when the land the friends and the affections of that mingled but beloved time were fading and fleeing behind us in the vessels wake it pointed forward to the hour the waters should be overpassed to the return voyage and to many a meeting in the sanded inn when those who had parted in the spring of youth should again drink a cup of kindness in their age had not burns contemplated demigration I scarce believe he would have found that note all Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy many were prostrated by sickness only five sat down to tea in the second cabin and two of these departed abruptly at the mill was at an end the Sabbath was observed strictly by the majority of the immigrants I heard an old woman express her surprise that the ship didn't again own as she saw someone pass her with a chess board on the holy day some sang Scottish Psalms many went to service and in true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with their divine I didn't think he was an experienced preacher said one of the girls to me it was a bleak uncomfortable day but at night by six bells or while the wind had not yet moderated the clouds were wrecked and blown away behind the rim of the horizon and the stars came out thickly overhead I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at home upon the summer woods the engine pounded the screw tossed out of the water with a roar and shook the ship from end to end the bails battled with loud reports against the billows and as I stood in the lease cuppers I looked up to where the funnel leaned out over my head vomiting smoke and the black and monstrous top sails blotters as each lurch a different crop of stars it seemed as if all this trouble was a thing of small account and that just above the mast a place unbroken and eternal End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of the Amateur Immigrant This Libervox recording is in the public domain The Amateur Immigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson Steeridge Scenes Our companion Steeridge Number 2 and 3 was a favourite resort Down one flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space the centre occupied by a hatchway which made a convenient seat for about 20 persons while barrels, coils of rope and the carpenter's bench afforded purchase for perhaps as many more The canteen or Steeridge Bar was on one side of the stair on the other a no less attractive spot the cabin of the Indefatigable Interp I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a barrel the very evenings prolonged there to five bells when the lights were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to roost It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard who lay sick and unbelodious in Steeridge Number 1 and on the Monday forenoon as I came down the companion I was saluted by something in stress be time A white-faced orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience of white-faced women such as he could do to play and some of his hearers were scarce able to sit yet they had crawled from their bunks at the first experimental flourish and found better than medicine in the music Some of the heaviest heads began to nod in time and a degree of animation looked from some of the palestars Humanly speaking it is a more important matter to play the fiddle even badly than to write huge works upon what could Mr Darwin have done for these sick women but this fellow scraped away and the world was positively a better place for all who heard him We have yet to understand the economical value of these mere accomplishments I told the fiddler he was a happy man carrying happiness about him in his fiddle case and he seems alive to the fact It is a privilege I said he thought while upon the word turning over in his scots head I then answered with conviction Yes, a privilege That night I was summoned by merrily dance the Quaker's wife into the companion of steerage number four and five This was properly speaking but a strip across a deckhouse knit by a sickly lantern which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship Through the open slide door we had a glimpse of a grey night sea with patches of phosphorus and foam flying swift as birds into the wake and the horizon rising and falling as the vessel rolled in the wind In the centre the companion ladder plunged down sheerly like an open pit Below on the first landing and lighted by another lamp lads and lasses danced not more than three at a time for lack of space in jigs and reels and hornpipes Above on either side there was a recess railed with iron perhaps two feet wide and four feet long which stood for orchestra and seats of honour In the one balcony five slightly Irish lasses sat woven in a comely group In the other was posted Orpheus his body which was convulsively in motion forming an odd contrast to his somnolent imperturbable scots face his brother a dark man with a vehement interested countenance who made a god of the fiddler sat by with open mouth drinking in the general admiration and throwing out remarks to kindle it That's a Bonnie Hornpipe now he would say it's a great favourite with performers they danced the sand dance to it and he expounded the sand dance then suddenly it would be a long flash with uplifted finger and glowing supplicating eyes he's going to play old Robin Gray on one string and throughout this excruciating movement on one string that's on one string he kept crying I would have given something myself that had been on none but the hearers were much awed I called for a tune or two and thus introduced myself to the notice of the brother he directed his talk to me for some little while keeping I need hardly mention true to his topic like the seaman to the star his grandeur that he said confidently his master was a musical man indeed the musical man had left his mark for our fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old heirs Logie of Buckent for instance he knew only as a quick jigging figure in the set of quadrills and had never heard it called by name perhaps after all the brother was the more interesting performer of the two I have spoken with him afterward repeatedly and found him always the same quick fiery bit of a man not without brains but he never showed such advantage as when he was thus squiring the fiddler into public note there was nothing more becoming than a genuine admiration and it shares this with love that it does not become contemptible although misplaced the dancing was but feebly carried on the space was almost impractically small and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of bashfulness about this innocent display with a surprising impudence and roughness of address most often either the fiddler lifted up its voice unheeded or only a couple of lads would be footing it and snapping fingers on the landings and such was the eagerness of the brother to display all the requirements of his idol and such the slippy indifference of the performer that the Turin would as often as not be changed and the hornpipe expire into a ballad before the dancers had cut half a dozen shuffles in the meantime however the audience had been growing more and more numerous every moment there was hardly standing room around the top of the companion and the strange instinct of the race moved some of the newcomers to close both doors so that the atmosphere grew insupportable it was a good place as the saying is to leave the wind hauled ahead with a head sea by ten at night heavy sprays were flying and drumming over the focusle the companion of steerage number one had to be closed and the door of communication through the second cabin thrown open either from the convenience of the opportunity or because we already had a number of acquaintances in that part of the ship Mr Jones and I paid it a late visit steerage number one is shaped like an isosceles triangle the sides opposite the equal angles bulging outward with the contour of the ship it is lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks apiece four bunks below and four above on each side at night the place is lit with two lanterns one to each table as the steamer beat on her way among the rough billows the light passed through violent phases of change and was thrown to and fro and up and down with startling swiftness you were tempted to wonder as you looked how so thin a glimmer could control and disperse such solid blackness when Jones and I entered we found a little company of our acquaintances seated together at the triangular foremost table a more forlorn party and more dismal circumstances it would be hard to imagine the motion here in the ship's nose was very violent the uproar of the sea often overpoweringly loud the yellow flicker of the lantern sprung round and round the shadows in masses the air was hot but it struck a chill from its feet all from all around in the dark bunks the scarcely human voices of the sick joined into a kind of far-meow and chorus in the midst these five friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could in company singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and sensations one piped in feeble tones Hawaii left my home which seemed to be a pertinent question in the circumstances another from the invisible horrors of a pen where he laid dog-sick upon the upper shelf found courage in a blink of his sufferings to give us several verses of the death of Nelson and it was odd and eerie to hear the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts of dark corners and this day has done his duty rise and fall and be taken up again in this dim inferno to an accompaniment of plunging hollow-sounding bows and the rattling spray showers overhead all seemed unfit for conversation a certain dizziness had interrupted the activity of their minds and except to sing they were tongue-tired there was present however one tall powerful fellow of doubtful nationality being neither quite a Scotsman or altogether Irish but a surprising clearness of conviction on the highest problems he had gone nearly beside himself on the Sunday because of a general backwardness to endorse his definition of mind as a living thinking substance which cannot be felt heard or seen nor I presume though he failed to mention it smelt now he came forward in a pause with another contribution to our culture just by way of a change he said I'll ask you a scripture riddle there's profit in them too he added ungrammatically this was the riddle C and P did agree to cut down C but C and P could not agree without the leave of G all the people cried to see the cruelty of C and P hushed the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo we were a long while over the problem shaking our heads and gloomy wondering how a man could be such a fool but lengthy put us out of suspense and devolves the fact that C and P stood for carousel and Pontius Pilate I think it must have been the riddle that settled us but the motion and close air likewise hurried our departure we had not been gone long we heard next morning air two or even three out of the five fell sick we thought it little wonder on the whole for the sea kept contrarial night I now made my bed upon the second cabin floor where although I ran the risk of being stepped on I had a free current of air more or less vitiated to it indeed and running only from steerage to steerage but at least not stagnant and from this couch as well as the usual sounds of a rough night at sea the hateful coughing and retching of the sick and the sobs of children I heard a man run wild with terror besetching his friend for encouragement the ships going down he cried with a thud of agony the ships going down he repeated now in a blank whisper now with his voice rising towards the sob and his friend might reassure him reason with him joke at him always in vain and the old cry came back the ships going down there was something panicky and catching in the emotion of his tones and I saw in a clear face what an involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an immigrant's ship if this whole parish full of people came no more to land into how many houses would the newspaper carry woe and what a great part of the web of our corporate human life would be rent across forever the next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed the wind was fair the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven through great dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam the horizon was dotted all day with companionable sails and the sun shone pleasantly on the long heaving deck we had many fine weather diversions to be gull the time a single chess board and a single pack of cards sometimes as many as 20 of us would be playing dominoes for love feats of dexterity puzzles for the intelligent some out of medical some of the same order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage were always welcome and the latter I observed more popular as well as more conspicuously well done than the former we had a regular daily competition to guess the vessel's progress and 12 o'clock when the result was published in the wheelhouse came to be a moment of considerable interest but the interest was unmixed not a bet was laid upon our guesses from the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered or taken we had besides romps in plenty puss in the corner which we had re-baptised in a more manly style devil in four corners was my own favourite game but there were many who preferred another the humour of which was the box of persons ears till he found out who had comforted him this Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of weather and in the highest possible spirits we got in a cluster like bees sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck houses stories and laughter went around the children climbed about the shrouds white faces appeared for the first time and began to take on colour from the wind I was kept hard at work making cigarettes for one amateur after another and my less than moderate skill was heartily admired lastly down set the fiddler in our midst and began to discourse his reels and jigs and ballads with now and then a voice of two to take up the air and throw in the interest of human speech through this merry and good hearted scene there came three cabin passengers a gentleman and two young ladies picking their way with little gracious titters of indulgence and a lady bountiful air about nothing which galled me to the quick I have little of the radical in social questions and have always nourished an idea that one person was as good as another and I began to be troubled by this episode it was astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their presence they seemed to throw their clothes in our faces their eyes searched us all over for tatters and incongruities a laugh was ready at their lips but they were too well mannered to indulge it in our hearing wait a bit till we're all back in the saloon and then hear how wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage we were in truth very innocently, cheerfully and sensibly engaged and there were no shadows of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which these damsels passed amongst us all for the stiff and waggish glances of their squire not a word was said only when they were gone Mackay suddenly damned their impudence under his breath but we were all conscious of an icy influence we did break in the course of our enjoyment End of Part 3 Chapter 4 of The Amateur Immigrant This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Amateur Immigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson Steerage Tuck We had a fellow on board an Irish American for all the world like a beggar in The Prince by Callow one eye with great splay right around his sockets and not his squab nose coming down over his moustache a miraculous hat a shirt that had been white ages ago an alpaca coat in its last sleeves and without hyperbole no buttons to his trousers Even in these rags and tatters the man twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of sham jewelry and I have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow passengers with the air of a lord Nothing could overlie such a fellow a kind of base success was written on his brow he was then in his ill days and I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sorter As we moved in the same circle I was bought necessarily into his society I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind or interesting but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour you might call him a half-educated Irish tig how Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his antecedents some said he was a nihilist approaching others set him down for a harmless spend-fifth who had squandered 50,000 rubles and whose father had now dispatched him to America by way of penance either tale might flourish in security there was no contradiction to be feared for the heroes spoke not one word of English I got along with him lumbly enough in broken German and learnt from his own lips that he had been an apocatary he carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book and remarked that it did not do her justice the cut of his head stood out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness the first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado but although the features to our western eyes had a barbaric and unhomely cast the eye both reassured and touched it was large and very dark and soft with an expression of dumb endurance as if it had often looked on desperate circumstances and never looked on them without resolution he cried out when I used to he cried out when I used the word no no he said not resolution the resolution to endure I explained and then he shrugged his shoulders and said ah yeah with gusto like a man who has been flattered in his favourite pretensions indeed he was always hinting at some secret sorrow and his life he said had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety so that the legends of the steerage may have represented at least some shadow of the truth once and once only he sang a song at our concerts standing forth without embarrassment his great statuette somewhat humped his long arms frequently extended his calmock head thrown backward it was a suitable piece of music as deep as a chaos bellow and wild like the white sea he was struck and charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners at home he said no one on a journey would speak to him but those to whom he would not care to speak thus unconsciously involving himself in the condemnation of his countrymen but Russia was soon to be changed the ice of the never was softening under the sun of civilisation the new ideas the aina fina violin was notable among the big empty drum notes of imperial diplomacy and he looked to see a great revival though with a somewhat indistinct and childish hope we had a father and son who made a pair of jack of all trades it was the son who sang the death of nelson under such contrarious circumstances he was by trade a shearer of ship plates but he could touch the organ and lead two choirs in a piccolo and a professional string band his repertory of songs was beside inexhaustible and ranged impartially from the very best to the very worst within his reach nor did he seem to make the least distinction between these extremes but would cheerily follow up tom bowling with around her splendor form the father an old cheery small piece of manhood could do everything connected with tinwork from one end of the process to the other use almost every carpenter's tool and make picture frames to boot I sat down with silver plate every sunday he said and pictures on the wall I have made enough money to be rolling in my carriage but sir looking at me unsteadily with his bright roomy eyes I was troubled with a drunken wife he took a hostile view of me in consequence it's an old saying you remark God made him and the devil he mixed him I think he was justified by his experience it was a dreary story he would bring home three pounds on saturday and on monday all the clothes would be in porn sick of the useless struggle he gave up a paying contract and contested himself with small and ill paid jobs a bad job was as good as a good job for me he said it all went the same way once the wife showed signs of amendment she kept steady for weeks on end it was again worthwhile to labour and to do one's best the husband founds her good situation some distance from home and to make her little upon every hand started the wife in a cook shop the children were here and there busy as mice savings began to grow together in the bank and the golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy family but one week my old acquaintance getting earlier through with his work came home on the friday instead of the saturday and there was his wife to receive him real and drunk he took and gave her a pair of black eyes for which I pardoned him nailed up the cook shop door gave up his situation and resigned himself to a life of poverty with the work house at the end as the children came to their full age they fled the house and established themselves in other countries some did well some not so well but the father remained at home alone with his drunken wife all his sound hearted pluck and varied accomplishments depressed and negated what she did now or after all these years had he broken the chain away from home like a schoolboy I could not discover which but here at least he was out on an adventure and still one of the bravest the most youthful men on board now I suppose I must put my old bones to work again he said but I can do a turn yet and the son to whom he was going I asked was he not able to support him oh yes he replied but I'm never happy without a job on hand and I'm stout I can eat almost anything you see no craze about me this tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a drunken father he was a capable man with a good chance in life but he had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of sherry and involved his sons along with him in ruin now they are on board with us fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood final abstinence like all ascetical conclusions is unfriendly to the most generous, cheerful and human parts of man but it could have induced many instances and arguments for amongst our ships company I was one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman running to fat and perspiration in the physical but with a taste for poetry and a genuine sense of fun I had asked him his hopes in immigrating they were like those of so many others vague and unfounded times were bad at home they were said to have a turn for the better in the States a man could get on anywhere he thought that was precisely the weak point of his position for if he could get on America why could he not do the same in Scotland but I never had the courage to use that argument that was often on the tip of my tongue and instead I agreed with him heartily adding with reckless originality if the man stuck to his work and kept away from the drink ah he said he slowly the drink you see that's just my trouble he spoke with a simplicity that was touching looking at me the same time with something strange and timid in his eye half ashamed half sorry like a good child who knows he should be beaten you would have said he recognized the destiny to which he was born and accepted the consequences mildly like the merchant a Buddha he was at the same time fleeing from his destiny and carrying it along with him the whole at an expense of six guineas as far as I saw drink arduousness and incompetency with the three great causes of emigration and for all of them and drink first and foremost this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest means of cure you cannot run away from a weakness you must sometime fight it out or perish and if that be so why not now and when you stand seal them non-anonym change glen live it for bourbon and it is still whiskey only not so good I see voyage will not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap pleasure emigration has to be done before we climb the vessel a name in life is the only fortune worth the finding and is not to be found in foreign lands but in the heart itself speaking generally there is no vice of this kind more contemptible than another for each is but a result an outward sign of a soul tragically shipwrecked in the majority of cases the pleasure is resorted to by way of anodyne the pleasure seeker sets forth upon life with high and difficult ambitions he meant to be nobly good and nobly happy though it was at little pains as possible to himself and it is because all has failed in his celestial enterprise that you now behold him rolling in the garbage hence the comparative success of the teetotal pledge because to a man who had nothing it sets at least a negative aim in life somewhat as prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider the reform drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating drinks and they live for that negation there is something at least not to be done every day and a cold triumph awaits him every evening we had one on board with us whom I have already referred to under the name Mackay seemed to me not only a good instance of this failure in life of which we have been speaking but a good type of the intelligence which he has surrounded me physically he was a small Scotsman standing a little back to though he were already carrying the elements of a corporation and his look somewhat marred by the smallness of his eyes mentally he was endowed above the average there were but few subjects converse with understanding and a dash of wit delivering himself slowly and with gusto like a man who enjoyed his own centenuousness he was a dry quick pertinent debater speaking with a small voice and swinging on his heels to launch and empathize an argument when he began the discussion he could not bear to leave it off but would pick the subject to the bone without once really increasing a point an engineer by trade Mackay believed in the unlimited perfect ability of all machines except the human machine the latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse gases he had an appetite for disconnected facts which I could only compare to the savage taste for beads what is called information was indeed a passion with the man and he not only delighted to receive it but could pay you back in kind with all these capabilities he was Mackay already no longer young on his way to a new country with no prospects, no money and but little hope he was almost tedious in the cynical discrosures of his despair the ship may go down to for me he would say now or tomorrow I have nothing to lose and nothing to hope and again I am sick of the whole damned performance he was like the kind little man already quoted another so-called victim of the bottle but Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness to the world laid the blame of his failure on corrupt masters and a corrupt state policy and after he had been one night overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups sternly they're not without tact suppressed all reference to his escapade it was a treat to see him manage this the various gestures withered under his gaze and you were forced to recognize in him a certain steely force and a gift of command which might have ruled a senate in truth it was not whiskey that had ruined him he was ruined long before for all good mumin purposes but conversation his eyes were sealed by a cheap school book materialism he could see nothing in the world but money and steam engines he did not know what you meant by the word happiness he had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth he believed in production that useful figment of economy as if it had been real like laughter and production without prejudice to liquor was his garden and a guide one day he took me to task novel cry to me the overpayment of literature literary men he said were more highly paid than artisans yet the artisan made threshing machines and buttered churns and the man of letters except in the way of a few useful handbooks made nothing worth the while he produced a mere fancy article Mackay's notion of a book was Hopus's measure now in my turn I have possessed and even studied that work but if I were to be left tomorrow on one Fernandez Hopus is not the book I should choose for my companion volume I tried to fight the point with Mackay I made him own that he had taken pleasure in reading books otherwise to his view insignificant but he was too weary to advance a step beyond the admission it was in vain for me to argue that he was pleasure ready made and running from the spring whereas his plows and butter churns were but means and mechanisms to give men the necessary food and leisure before they start upon the search for pleasure he jibed and ran away from such conclusions the thing was different he declared and nothing was serviceable but what had to do with food eat eat eat he cried that's the bottom and the top by a not irony of circumstance he grew so much interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by unnoticed and had to go without his tea he had enough sense and humour indeed he had no lack of either to have chuckled over this himself in private and even to me he referred with the shadow of a smile Mackay was a hot bigot he would not hear of religion I have seen him waste hours of time in arguments with all sorts of poor human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves and he had the boishness to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as the riddler's definition of a mind he snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle anything whatever it was that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued passionate production of corn and steam engines he resented like a conspiracy against the people thus when I put in the plea for literature that was only in good books or in the society of the good that man could get help in his conduct he declared that I was in a different world from him damn my conduct said he I have given it up for a bad job my question is can I drive a nail and he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously seeking to reduce people's annual belly full of corn and steam engines it may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of culture that a narrow and pinching way of life not only exaggerates to a man the importance of material conditions but indirectly by denying him the necessary books and leisure keeps his mind ignorant of larger thoughts and that hence brings this overwhelming concern about diet and hence the bald view of existence professed by Mackay had this been an English peasant the conclusion would be tenable but Mackay had most of the elements of a liberal education he had skirted metaphysical and mathematical studies he had a thoughtful hold of what he knew which would be exceptional among bankers he had been brought up in the midst of hot house piety and told within Congress pride the story of his own brother's deathbed ecstasy yet he had somehow failed to fulfill himself and was adrift like a dead thing amongst external circumstances without hope or lively preference or shaping aim and further there seemed a tendency amongst many of his fellows to fall in the same blank and unlovely opinions one thing indeed is not to be learned in Scotland and that is the way to be happy yet that is the whole of culture and perhaps two thirds of morality can it be that the Puritan school is taking a man from nature by thinning out his instincts and setting a stamp of disapproval on a whole series of human activities and interests leads at last directly to material greed nature is a good guide through life and the love of simple pleasures next if not superior to virtue and we had on board an Irishman who based his claim to the widest and most affectionate popularity precisely on these two qualities that he was natural and happy he boasted a fresh colour a tight little figure unquenchable gaity and indefacable goodwill his clothes puzzled the diagnostic mind till you were heard that he had once been a private coachman when they became eloquent and seemed a part of his biography his face contained the rest than I fear a prophecy of the future the hawk's nose above accorded so well with the pink baby's mouth below his spirit and pride belonged to the nose while it was from the general shiftlessness expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation to situation and at length on board the emigrant ship Barney ate so to speak nothing from the gully his own tea, butter and eggs supported him throughout the voyage and about meal time you might find him up to the elbows he was the first force heard singing amongst all the passengers he was the first to fill the dancing from lock foils a sandy hook there was not a piece of fun undertaken but there was Barney in the midst you ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our concerts his tight little figure stepping to and fro and his feet shuffling to the air his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement and who enjoyed the bow so nicely calculated between just and earnest between grace and clumsiness with which he bought each song to a conclusion he was not only a great favourite amongst ourselves but his songs attracted the lords of the saloon who often leaned to hear him over the rails of the hurricane deck he was somewhat pleased but not at all abashed by this attention and one night in the midst of his famous performance of Billy Keo I saw him spin half round in a pirouette and throw an audacious wink to an old gentleman above this was the more characteristic as for all his daffy he was a modest and very polite little fellow amongst ourselves he would not have hurt the feelings of a fly nor throughout the passage did he give a shadow of a fence yet he was always by his innocent freedoms and love of fun bought upon that narrow margin where life must be natural to walk without a form he was once seriously angry and that in a grave quiet manner because they supplied no fish on Friday for Barney was a conscientious Catholic he had likewise strict notions of refinement and when late one evening after the women had retired a young Scotsman stuck up an indecent song Barney's dread clothes were immediately missing from the group his taste was for the society of gentlemen of whom with the reader's permission there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin and he avoided the rough and positive with a girl his shrinking Mackay partly from his superior powers of mind which rendered him incomprehensible partly from his extreme opinions was especially distasteful to the Irishman I have seen him sink off with backward looks of terror and offended delicacy while the other in his witty ugly way had been professing hostility to God and an extreme theatrical readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot these utterances hurt the little coachman's modesty like a bad word End of Section 4 Chapter 5 of the Amateur Immigrant This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Amateur Immigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter 5 The Sick Man One night, Jones, the young O'Reilly and myself were walking arm in arm and briskly up and down the deck six bells had rung a headwind blue chill and fitful the fog was closing in with a sprinkler of rain and the fog whistle had been turned on and now divided time with its unwelcome outcries now out like a bull thrilling and intense like a mosquito even the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight for some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the scuppers which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud we ran to the rails an elderly man but whether passenger or seaman it was impossible in the darkness to determine they groveling on his belly in the wet scuppers deeply with his outspread toes we asked him what was amiss and he replied incoherently with a strange accent and in a voice and manned by terror that he had cramp in the stomach that he had been ailing all day had seen the doctor twice and had walked the deck against fatigued until he was over mastered and had fallen where we found him Jones remained by his side while O'Reilly and I hurried off to seek the doctor we knocked in rain at the doctor's cabin there came no reply nor could we find anyone to guide us it was no time for delicacy so we ran once more forward and I whipping up a ladder and touching my hat to the officer on the watch addressed him as politely as I could I beg your pardon sir but there's a man lying with bad cramp in the least scuppers and I can't find the doctor he looked at me peeringly in the darkness and then somewhat harshly well I can't leave the bridge my man said he no sir but you can tell me what to do I returned is it one of the crew who asked I believe him to be a fireman I replied I daresay officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist information from their freight of human creatures but certainly whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew or from something conciliatory in my address the officer in question was immediately relieved and mollified and speaking in a voice much freer from constraint advised me to find a steward and dispatch him in quest of the doctor who would now be in the smoking room over his pipe one of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down our companion's steerage number two and three was his smoking room of a night let me call him Blackwood O'Reilly and I rattled down the companion breathing hurry and in his shirt sleeves and perched across the carpenter's bench upon one thigh found Blackwood a neat bright dapper Glasgow looking man with a bead of an eye and a ranked twang in his speech I forget who was with him but the pair were enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes I dare say he was tired with his day's work and eminently comfortable at that moment and the truth is I did not stop to consider his feelings but told my story in a breath steward said I there's a man lying bad with cramp and I can't find the doctor he turned upon me as pertus asparo but with a black look that is the prerogative of man and taking his pipe out of his mouth that's none of my business I don't care I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat the thought of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with an indignation I glanced at O'Reilly he was pale and quivering and looked like a salt and battery every inch of him but we had a better card than violence you will have to make it your business said I for I was sent to you by the officer on the bridge Blackwood was fairly tripped he made no answer but put out his pipe gave me one murderous look and set off upon his errands strolling from that day forward I should say he improved to me in courtesy as though he had repented his evil speech and were anxious to leave a better impression when we got on deck again Jones was still beside the sick man and two or three late stragglers had gathered round and were offering suggestions one proposed to give the patient water which was promptly negative another badass hold him up he himself prayed to be let lie but as it was at least as well to keep him off the streaming decks O'Reilly and I supported him between us it was only my main force that we did so and neither an easy or an agreeable duty for he fought in his barracks and was like a frightened child and moaned miserably when he resigned himself to our control or let me lie he pleaded oh no get better anyway and then with a moan that went to my heart oh why did I come on this miserable journey I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in the close tossing steerage oh why left I my ham meantime Jones relieved of his immediate charge had gone off to the galley where we could see a light there he found a belated cook scouring the pans by the radiance of two lanterns and one of these he sought to borrow the scullion was backward was it one of the crew he asked and when Jones smitten with my theory had assured him that was a fireman he reluctantly left his scouring and came towards us at an easy pace with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger the light as it reached the spot showed us an elderly man thick-set and grizzled with years but the shifting coarse shadows concealed from us the expression and even the design of his face so soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of a whistle it's only a passenger said he and turning about made lantern and ore for the galley he's a man anyway cried Jones in idling nation nobody said he was a woman set agroth for us which I recognised for that of the boson all this while there was no word of backward or the doctor and now the officer came to our side of the ship and asked over the hurricane deck rails if the doctor were not yet come we told him not no we repeated with a breathing of anger and we saw him hurry after in person ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately enough and examined our patient with the lantern he made little of the case had the man brought after the dispensary dosed him and sent him forward to his bunk two of his neighbours in the steerage had now come to our assistance expressing loud sorrow that such a fine cheery body should be sick and these claiming a sort of possession took him entirely under their own care the drug had probably relieved him for he struggled no more and was let along plenty of impatient but protesting his heart recoiled at the thought of steerage let me lay down upon the building side he cried dinner take me down and again why did I ever come upon this miserable voyage and yet once more with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the forth word I had no call to come but there he was and by the doctor's orders and the kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the companion of steerage number one into the den allotted him at the foot of our own companion just where I found Blackwood Jones and the Boson were now engaged in talk the last was a gruff cruel looking seaman who must have passed near half a century upon the seas square headed goat bearded with heavy blind eyebrows and an eye without radiance but inflexibly steady and hard I had not forgotten his rough speech but I remembered also that he had helped us about the lantern and now seeing him in conversation with Jones and being choked with indignation I proceeded to blow off my steam well said I I make you my compliments upon your steward and furiously narrated what had happened I've nothing to do with him replied the Boson they're all alike they wouldn't mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon the top of another this was enough a very little humanity went a long way with me after the experience of the evening a sympathy grew up at once between the Boson and myself and that night and during the next few days I learnt to appreciate him better he was a remarkable type and not at all the kind of man you find in books he had been at surpass the pole under English colours and again in the stateship after the Alabama and praying God we shouldn't find them he was a high Tory and a high Englishman no manufacturer would have held opinions more hostile to the working man and his strikes the workmen he said think nothing of their country they think of nothing but themselves they're damned greedy selfish fellows he would not hear of the decadence of England I say they send us beef from America he argued but who pays for it all the money in the worlds in England the Royal Navy was the best of possible services according to him anyway the officers are gentlemen said he and you can't get haste to death by a damned non-commissioned as you came in the army among nations England was the first then came France he respected the French Navy and liked the French people and if he were forced to make a new choice in life by God he would try Frenchmen for all his looks and rough cold manners I observed that children were never frightened by him they divine you but once to be a friend and one night when he had chalked his hand and clothes it was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling over his boyish monkey trick in the morning my first thought was of the sick man I was afraid I should not recognize him baffling had been the light of the lantern I found myself unable to decide if he were Scots, English or Irish he had certainly employed North Country words and elitions but the accent and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and incongruous in my ear to descend on an empty stomach in the steerage number one was an adventure that required some nerve the stench was atrocious each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese and the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves into their clothes in twilight of the bunks you may guess if I was pleased and not only for him but for myself also when I heard that the sick man was better and had gone on deck the morning was raw and foggy though the sun surfaced the fog with pink and amber the fog horn still blue the mist the torus and intermittent and to add to the discomfort the seaman were just beginning to wash down the decks but for a sick man this was heaven compared to the steerage I found him standing on the hot water pipe just forward of the saloon deckhouse he was smaller than I had fancied and plain looking but his face was distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes limpid grey from a distance and then looked into full of changing colours and grains of gold his manners were mild and uncomprisingly plain and I soon saw that once started he delighted to talk his accent and language had been formed in the most natural way since he was born in Ireland had lived a quarter of a century on the banks of time and was married to a Scots wife a fisherman in the season he had fished the east coast from Fischero to Whitby when the season was over and the great boats which required extra hands were once again drawn up on the shore till the next spring he worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces or along the wharves unloading vessels in this comparatively humble way of life he had gathered a competence and could speak of his comfortable house his hayfield and his garden in this ship when so many accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation he was present on a pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York there he started he informed me he had been warned against the steerage and the steerage fare and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea and a spice loaf but he laughed to score on such councils I'm not afraid he told his advisers I'll get on for ten days I've not been a fisherman for nothing for it is no light matter as he reminded me to be in an open boat perhaps waist deep with herrings day breaking with a scale and for miles on every hand lee shores unbroken iron bound surf beat with only here and there an anchorage where you dare not lie or a harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows the life of a North Sea Fisher is one long chapter of exposure and insufficient fare and even if he makes land at some bleak Fisher port perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky and after 50 hours unsleeping vigilance and toil not a shop will give him a credit for a loaf of bread not a shop will give him credit for a loaf of bread yet the steerage of the immigrant ship had been too far for the endurance of a man thus rudely trained he had scarce eaten since he came on board until the day before when his appetite was tempted by some excellent pea soup we were all much of the same mind on board and beginning with myself had dined upon pea soup not wisely but too well only with him the excess had been punished perhaps because he was weakened by former abstinence and his first meal had resulted in a cramp he had determined to live henceforth on biscuit and when two months later he should return to England to make the passage by saloon the second cabin after due inquiry he scouted as another edition of steerage he spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill you see I had no call to be here said he and I thought it was by with me last night I have a good house at home and I had no real call to leave them speaking of the attentions he had received from his shipmates generally there are also kinds at he that there's none to mention and except in so far as I might share in this he troubled me with no reference to my services but what affected me in the most lively matter was the wealth of this day labour paying a two months pleasure visit to the states and preparing to return in the saloon and the new testimony rendered by his story not so much to the horrors of steerage as to the habitual comfort of the working classes one foggy frosty December evening I encountered on Lipperton Hill near Edinburgh an Irish labour trudging home and from the field arose later together and it was natural that we should fall into talk he was covered with mud and an inoffensive ignorant creature who thought the Atlantic cable was a secret contrivance of the masters the better to oppress laboring mankind and I confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly 300 pounds in the bank but this man had travelled over most of the world and endured wonderful opportunities on some American railroad with two dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night whereas my fellow passenger had never quit a time-side and had made all that he possessed in that same accursed down-falling England when skilled mechanics, engineers, mill rights and carpenters were fleeing us from the native country of starvation fitly enough we sit off on the subject of strikes and wages and hard times being from the time and a man who had gained and lost in his own pocket by these fluctuations he had much to say and held strong opinions on the subject he spoke sharply of the masters and when I let him on of the men also the masters had been selfish and obstructive the men selfish, silly and light-headed he rehearsed to me the course of a meeting in which he had been present and the somewhat long discourse which he had there pronounced calling into question the wisdom and even the good faith of the Union delegates and although he had escaped himself through flush times and starvation times with a handsomely provided purse he had so little faith in either man or master and so profound a terror for the unearing nemesis of mercantile affairs that he could think of no hope for our country outside of a sudden and complete political subversion down must go lords and church and army and capital by some happy direction must change hands from worse to better or England stood condemned such principles he said were growing like a seed from this mild soft domestic man these words sounded unusually ominous and grave I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my workmen fellow passengers but most of it was hot and turgid and fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men this man was calm he had attained prosperity and ease he disapproved the policy which had been pursued by labour in the past and yet this was his panacea to rend the old country from end to end and from top to bottom and in clamour and civil discord remodeled it with the hand of violence End of chapter 5