Except for the Le Havre lines, which brought over thousands of German immigrants to America, the packets carried few steerage passengers until after 1840. During the first two decades, steerage business in general was just an afterthought; if a packet didn’t fill the ‘tween-deck’s upper hold with fine freight, the ship’s carpenter would fashion temporary bunks of rough, unplaned lumber, and the steeragewould take on human cargo at twenty dollars a head. That fare paid only for the cramped bunk and a place on deck to cook. Steerage passengers had to bring their own food, pots and pans, and plates and utensils. The tightly packed steerage became a fetid horror at night and in bad weather. Two small ventilating hatches had to be closed in rain or heavy seas. The steerage air mingled a stifling bouquet of foul bilge water, rotting wood and ropes, and human sweat, vomit and excrement. At times these closed-down conditions went on for days, getting worse until the storm lifted.
Everybody, cabin and steerage passengers alike, felt better up on deck. There one could breathe fresh air and take walks, play shuffleboard, and watch the sea and the other passengers. A dampening shipboard rhythm of ennui and lassitude gradually settled onto the company. Earnest intentions of reading, writing and needlework were laid aside, and people lounged away the time. Even the most trivial daily events – meeting and (after due inquiry) identifying another ship, sighting a whale or porpoise, or discovering a stowaway – took on gripping, inordinate significance. Wagers were placed on the daily run and the date of arrival. After evening tea, the dining saloon might hold lectures, charades, rounds of whist and singing. A bold man could even venture, trolling, into the ladies’ cabin. ‘This snuggery affords tolerable convenience for a little flirtation, ’ noted the Irish actor Tyrone Power, ‘if you are lucky enough to get one up.’
On clear nights, far from the obscuring lamps of shore, and in the prevailing deprived mood of being easily diverted, passengers seized on natural light shows. The sun would fall into the western horizon, a blazing ball that slowly guttered out as though being submerged in the sea. The moon would rise, never before so distinctly. Stars filled the sky, brighter and denser than when seen from land. Whole new constellations revealed themselves to the naked eye. In every direction, the sky arched all the way down to the horizon. Shooting stars zoomed around this vast inverted bowl, and the aurora borealis looked deeper and more brilliant in its roses and purples. From the Europe in 1835, cruising along at nine knots, Anna Eliot Ticknor of Boston watched the phosphorescence tossed up by the bow. The foam at the stern glittered like diamonds. Distant waves broke and lit up. Porpoises darted around, leaving trails like seaborne comets. The sails and rigging glowed. It was all so wild and beautiful.
People stayed up late because sleeping was so difficult. After the sumptuous meals and lounges, the private sleeping quarters inevitably disappointed: small, unheated, dimly lit, and poorly ventilated. ‘About as big as that allowed to a pointer in a dog-kennel,’ the English novelist Frederick Marryat groused. ‘I thought that there was more finery than comfort.’ The berth, generously called a bed, offered thin sacking over boards and a hollow down the middle that was supposed to hold the occupant in place. Emerson’s sides grew sore from rolling back and forth. ‘Oh for a bed!’ Fanny Kemble keened. ‘A real bed! Any manner of bed, but a bed on shipboard!’ Settled down for sleep, a passenger could not miss the remarkable, unexpected variety of noises on a wooden sailing ship. The waves kept up a steady background of thumps and pulses, generating constant small motions in the seams of the hull, flexing and twisting, which caused sharp creaking sounds in the jointed woodwork of bulkheads, cabin partitions and steerage bunks. Passengers lay awake in their berths, trying not to hear. The animal barnyard overhead maintained a running, distressed commentary. The mates and sailors yelled back and forth, their footfalls thuddingly heavy at night, as they changed sails and scraped down the deck with screeching holystones. Wind whistled through the rigging. Morning could take a long time coming.
The English author and protosociologist Harriet Martineau wrote the fullest, most forgiving account of a packet voyage. In August 1834, thirty-two years old, she had just completed a popular series of short stories that improbably urged the beauties of classical economics. For over two years she had written so constantly that she could not spare time even to take a walk. With that work finally done, basking in her first great success, she booked passage for New York on the Red Star Line’s United States, 140 feet and 650 tons. Martineau looked forward to a restful month on the ocean without mail, newspapers, or intruding strangers, and then would travel around America to report on that boisterous, unmatured experiment in democracy.
She catalogued the twenty-three cabin passengers on board: a Prussian physician, a New England preacher, a Boston merchant ‘with his sprightly and showy young wife’, a high-spirited young South Carolinian returning from study in Germany, a newly married couple who kept to themselves, a Scottish army officer whose many crotchets amused the young people, an elderly widow, a Scottish lady of undisclosed age, and a young man from Yorkshire. The rest were English and American merchants, transatlantic veterans not deemed interesting enough by Martineau for detailed comment. With two or three exceptions, they all mingled congenially into a single travelling party.
The voyage began slowly, dawdling through calm days of little wind. The Americans, longing for home, became anxious. Martineau seized the welcome quiet time to think and be still. On the third day the wind freshened and the sea churned, leaving the dining saloon empty at dinner as most passengers remained seasick in their berths. The next morning, Martineau rose unsteadily but forced herself to dress and go up on deck to escape the bilious sights and activities below. Captain Nathan Holdredge took her to a seat by the rail. She looked out to sea, avoided noticing the invalids strewn around the deck, and felt better after half an hour. The wind was too strong for a large, flaring bonnet, but she tried a warm black silk cap, snugly fitted, which she recommended for any woman at sea.
An uncommon traveller, Martineau had two qualities that maintained her spirits on the ocean: a bottomless curiosity and delight in new experiences, and an absolute refusal to be discouraged by anything whatever. After six days of mostly unhelpful winds, the United States was still only three hundred miles from Liverpool; at that rate the voyage would take two months. No matter. ‘Our mode of life was very simple and quiet; to me, very delightful,’ she wrote. ‘A voyage is the most pleasant pastime I have ever known.’ After breakfast, the happiest meal of the day, she sat down to write a long article, the one major task she had set herself for the trip. The New England preacher would find her a place on deck, out of the wind and sun, and there she wrote through luncheon until two o’clock. Children from the steerage peered at the famous lady writer over her shoulder and from behind chests and casks. One particular man planted himself in front of her, arms akimbo, and stared at the point of her pen, transfixed by the mysterious act of female composition.
Finished writing for the day, she took her position at the rail and exulted in the passing scene. If she wanted to be left alone, she held a volume of Shakespeare. Otherwise someone joined her. ‘I strongly suspect,’ she later reflected, ‘that those who complain of the monotony of the ocean do not use their eyes as they do on land.’ She saw Portuguese men-of-war, flying fish, dolphins, and the web-footed birds called Mother Carey’s chickens. A sail on the horizon brought everyone over to look and exclaim. Early one morning a distant ship made signals of distress. Great flutters of excitement; ‘the faces of the gentlemen began to wear, in anticipation, an expression of manly compassion.’ Captain Holdredge took in sail and hove to. The other ship, it turned out, had only lost her longitude bearing. Holdredge shouted it out, angry over losing valuable time for such a small matter, and ordered the sails up again.
The captain, kind and