Essays of Travel

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Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

ESSAYS OF TRAVEL

Contents

THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT: FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
THE SECOND CABIN
EARLY IMPRESSION
STEERAGE IMPRESSIONS
STEERAGE TYPES
THE SICK MAN
THE STOWAWAYS
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
NEW YORK
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
COCKERMOUTH
AN EVANGELIST
ANOTHER
LAST OF SMETHURST
AN AUTUMN EFFECT
A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY
FOREST NOTES -
ON THE PLAINS
IN THE SEASON
IDLE HOURS
A PLEASURE-PARTY
THE WOODS IN SPRING
MORALITY
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE
RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO LOCORUM
THE IDEAL HOUSE
DAVOS IN WINTER
HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
ALPINE DIVERSION
THE STUMULATION OF THE ALPS
ROADS
ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES

CHAPTER I--THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT

THE SECOND CABIN

I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in
Glasgow. Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but
looking askance 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 among English
speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme. The sun was soon
overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continued to
descend the widening estuary; and with the falling temperature the
gloom among the passengers increased. Two of the women wept. Any
one 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 united us, until at length, having
touched at Greenock, 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 emigrant 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 will first be necessary. In her
very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs. A little
abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives
admission to three galleries, two running forward towards Steerage
No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines. The starboard
forward gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and
below the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel,
there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The
second cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart
of the steerages. Through the thin partition 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 if 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 the 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-cloths in the second. As a matter of fact, I have
seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting which had been
supplied them. In the way of eatables at the same meal we were
gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was common
to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and sometimes
rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt junk,
and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and
the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes
were of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding-days,
instead of duff, we had a saddle-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 rissoles; but as a general thing mere chicken-
bones and flakes of fish, neither hot nor 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 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
whisky 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 on a brass plate, and learned
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 No. 2 and 3? 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 cheaper fare, and declared it was
an experiment not to be repeated. As I 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 vowed, if they returned, to
travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind them
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 of '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 an universal favourite-
-it takes so little in this world of shipboard to create a
popularity. There was, besides, a Scots mason, known from his
favourite dish as 'Irish Stew,' 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 and
nurtured, but ashamed to own his country. He had a sister on
board, whom he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage, though
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 the Third of France. The Scotsman, though perhaps as big an
ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have 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, with a pleasant 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 idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and
nine confronting each other stride-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 am not sure that 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; for it was sorely
contradicted by the testimony of her appearance. Nature seemed 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 phantasmal bodily presence.
She was ill, poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty
tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety; and the whole strength
of her endeavour was bent upon keeping her watch true to Glasgow
time till she should reach New York. They had heard reports, her
husband and she, of some unwarrantable disparity of hours 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 a watch must never be turned backwards;
and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she
started it again. When she imagined this was about due, she sought
out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen, 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 learned 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 have been the same with the
other Scotsmen present, 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; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the
president who called up 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 undeceive me. For as
there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the
feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent
among 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 a dialect is picked up
from another band in the forecastle; 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 sea; and yet he was from 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
skilful in his trade. A few years back, he had been married and
after a fashion a rich man; now the 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 to-morrow, I should look to
see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder 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 pedlar, and
sold the other day for a hundred pounds (I think it was) to an
English apothecary. It was called Golden Oil, cured all maladies
without exception; and I am bound to say that I partook 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 wherever
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 to 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 trait
slipped 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 own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but
Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected
laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair
of us indeed.

EARLY IMPRESSIONS

We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the
Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough
Foyle, 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 by day
throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States,
and on to 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, scorning 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 and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty
continents swarm, as at the bo's'un'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 thirty; many 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 eager and pushing disposition. Now those around me
were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family
men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place
themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. Mildness
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, borne 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 Tyne, 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 these distresses livingly to my imagination.

A turn of the market may be a 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
accidents, 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 shipful 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 inclination 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 mither?' I heard one ask. 'Mawmaw,' was the reply,
indicating, I fancy, a shade of difference in the social scale.
When people pass each other on the high seas of life at so early an
age, the contact is but slight, 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 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 manoeuvring
on the outskirts of acquaintance. The sea, the ship, and the
seamen were soon as familiar as home to these half-conscious little
ones. It was odd to hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore
words to designate portions of the vessel. 'Go 'way doon to yon
dyke,' I heard one say, probably meaning the bulwark. I often had
my heart in my mouth, watching them climb into the shrouds or on
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. 'He'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 dear to them; but the life
of poorer folk, where necessity is so much more immediate and
imperious, braces even a mother to this extreme of endurance. And
perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should break his neck
than that you should break his spirit.

And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention
one little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5,
and who, wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the
ship. He was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-
white hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet 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 his family
lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
and sang aloud 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 trades, 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 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 sufficient. 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 biscuit, others on their
own private supplies, and some paid extra for better rations from
the ship. This marvellously changed my notion of the degree of
luxury habitual to the artisan. I was prepared to hear him
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 dare say a dozen of others
agreed to do so, and I thought we should have been quite a party.
Yet, when I brought up my rug about seven bells, there was no one
to be seen but the watch. That chimerical 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 these healthy workmen down below. One would think we had been
brought up in a fever country; yet in England the most malarious
districts are in the bedchambers.

I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the
night so quietly to myself. The wind had hauled a little ahead on
the starboard bow, and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter near
the fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night.

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