A Passage

IX

As Samuel Johnson once said of going to sea: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned . . . a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company."

This was a truism until late in the 19th Century. Even passengers on clipper ships found traveling to be rough, wet and dangerous to life and limb. Clippers were first and foremost cargo vessels and their few passengers were usually tea merchants, missionaries going to or from the Orient, or relatively well-off dilettantes who wanted to adventure in the gold fields or in the Far East.

The plodding sailing packets that plied the Atlantic route had three types of passengers: Wealthy Anglo-Americans going from their homes in New York to their homes in London, business travelers, and immigrants. While the wealthy rubbed shoulders with the ship's Master and Senior Officers, and the business passengers were berthed and messed with the Deck Officers, the immigrants were crammed below decks with the cargo, the rats and the leaks. Immigrants ate what ordinary sailors ate, which was salt pork and hardtack and grog, only less fresh and less of it. Water was collected in scummy rainbarrels and was rarely fit to drink. There was no sanitation. There was little light and less fresh air. Berths for the poorest passengers consisted of swaying hammocks or wooden shelving built atop the keel in the narrow passages in the bow --- where one could feel every jolting wave --- or in the stern --- near the noisy mechanisms for the rudder and the engines and the screws (if the ship had any).

Third Class thus became known as "Steerage" because that's where it was. Amidst the filth, rats, puke, shit and misery of claustrophobia wedded to seasickness, steerage passengers died often. Bodies were disposed of after nightfall along with the trash. Sometimes a kind Master might hold a deck funeral. Most times, the Captain never knew (or cared) who died 'tween decks. Many times, unfortunates who had just passed out as a way of escaping the racket and the stench found themselves waking up in the water only to see the ship's stern racing away from them.

Despite the terrible conditions, immigrant traffic from the Old World to the New increased by leaps and bounds after the end of the Civil War in 1865. Slowly it began to occur to shipowners that immigrant traffic was actually worth money. Slowly, steerage conditions improved from horrific to merely terrible and from terrible to barely tolerable, and then from barely tolerable to acceptable. While individual immigrants might not be able to pay much, the volume of traffic promised to reap handsome profits.

The volume was there. Between 1880 and 1924, 2,000,000 Russian Jews emigrated to the United States. In the same period 4 million Italians arrived. And that did not begin to count the immigrants from other Eastern European countries and elsewhere, who collectively numbered in the millions. Each one of them came by ship.

The only way to get sufficient Third Class volume however was to build bigger and bigger ships. And the only way to attract Third Class passengers aboard was to make onboard conditions as good as possible for them. So although White Star ships like Oceanic, Olympic and Titanic, Cunard ships like Aquitania, Mauretania and Lusitania, and Inman Line ships like City of Paris and City of New York catered to an upscale clientele (especially White Star with its fleet of "Millionaire's Specials") the meat and potatoes of the Atlantic passenger trade was Third Class:

Titanic (1912) accommodated 833 passengers in First, 614 in Second, and 1,006 in Third; Lusitania (1907) could carry 552 in First, 460 in Second, and 1,186 in Third; the older City of New York (1889) could carry 540 in First, 200 in Second and 1,000 steerage passengers.

Third Class fares were relatively low and the service was basic, even on the best ships. In 1912, a single top-end steerage ticket on Titanic cost $40 --- equivalent to almost $900 today, a small fortune for an immigrant, but nothing compared to the $4,350 for a First Class luxury suite --- over $100,000 per person for a five day passage in today's money.