The Greater Journey

by David McCullough

  Among the writers was Nathaniel Parker Willis, like Morse a graduate of Yale, who with his poems and magazine “sketches” had already, at twenty-five, attained a national reputation. It was Willis who was traveling as a correspondent of sorts, having been assigned by the NewYork Mirror to provide a series of “letters” describing his travels abroad. He was a sociable, conspicuously handsome, even beautiful young man with flowing light brown locks, and a bit of a dandy. Wendell Holmes would later describe him as looking like an “anticipation of Oscar Wilde.” Willis was, besides, immensely talented.

  And so, too, was John Sanderson, a teacher in his fifties known at home in Philadelphia for his literary bent. He was going to Paris for reasons of health partly, but also to write about his observations in a series of letters, intending to “dress them up one day into some kind of shape for the public.”

  Except for Cooper and Morse, those embarking for France knew little at all about life outside their own country, or how very different it would prove to be. Hardly any had ever laid eyes on a foreign shore. None of the Bostonians had traveled more than five hundred miles from home. Though Cooper and his family spent a year in advance of their departure learning French, scarcely any of the rest had studied the language, and those who had, like Holmes and Sumner, had never tried actually speaking it.

  The newspapers they read, in Boston or New York or Philadelphia, carried occasional items on the latest Paris fashions or abbreviated reports on politics or crime in France, along with periodic notices of newly arrived shipments of French wine or wallpaper or fine embroidery or gentlemen’s gloves, but that was about the limit of their cognizance of things French. The Paris they pictured was largely a composite of the standard prints of famous bridges and palaces, and such views as to be found in old books or the penny magazines.

  Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had with French literature. And none, of course, could have known in advance that the 1830s and ’40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, not to say anything of Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music.

  It may be assumed they knew the part played by the French army and navy and French money during the American Revolution. They appreciated Lafayette’s importance and knew that with the deaths of Jefferson and Adams in 1826, he became the last living hero of the struggle for American independence. They knew about Napoleon and the French Revolution of 1789 and the horrors of the Terror. And fresh in mind was the latest violent upheaval, the July Revolution of 1830, the Paris revolt that had lasted just three days and resulted, at a cost of some 3,000 lives, in the new “Citizen King,” Louis-Philippe.

  Although born of the powerful Orléans family, the new ruler in his youth had supported the Revolution of 1789 and served bravely as an officer in the republican army before fleeing the Terror in 1793. For years he had been unable to return to France. Considered a moderate, Louis-Philippe was now king largely because of the support of the hugely popular Lafayette.

  When news of the July Revolution reached America, it was cause for celebration. The tricolor was unfurled on the streets of American cities. The “Marseillaise” was sung in theaters. New Yorkers put on a parade two and a half miles long. Louis-Philippe, as Americans knew, had spent three years of his exile from France living in the United States and traveled far and wide over much of the country. Well-mannered, still in his twenties, and with little or no money, he had made a favorable impression everywhere he went. He had worked for a while as a waiter in a Boston oyster house. He had been a guest of George Washington’s at Mount Vernon, and this, and the fact that he now had the approval of Lafayette, contributed greatly to how Americans responded to the new regime in Paris.

  Again except for Cooper and Morse, few of those bound for Paris in the 1830s had ever been to sea, or even on board a seagoing ship, and the thought, given the realities of sea travel, was daunting, however glorious the prospects before them.

  The choice was either to sail first to England, then cross the Channel, or sail directly to Le Havre, which was the favored route. Either way meant a sea voyage of 3,000 miles—as far as from New York to the coast of the Pacific—or more, depending on the inevitable vagaries of the winds. And there were no stops in between.

  Steamboats by this time were becoming a familiar presence on the rivers and coastal waters of America, but not until 1838 did steam-powered ships cross the Atlantic. As it was, by sailing ship, the average time at sea was no better than it had been when Benjamin Franklin set off for France in 1776. One could hope to do it in as little as three weeks, perhaps less under ideal conditions, but a month to six weeks was more likely.

  Nor were there regular passenger vessels as yet. One booked passage on a packet—a cargo ship that took passengers—and hoped for the best. But even the most expensive accommodations were far from luxurious. That there could be days, even weeks of violent seas with all the attendant pitching of decks, flying chinaware and furniture, seasickness and accidents, went without saying. Cramped quarters, little or no privacy, dismal food, a surplus of unrelieved monotony were all to be expected. Then, too, there was always the very real possibility of going to the bottom. Everyone knew the perils of the sea.

  In 1822, the packet Albion out of New York, with 28 passengers on board, had been caught in a fearful gale and dashed on the rocks on the coast of Ireland. Of the passengers, several of whom had been bound for Paris, only two were saved. At the time when James Fenimore Cooper and his family sailed, in the spring of 1826, a London packet fittingly named Crisis had been missing nearly three months, and in fact would never be heard from again.

  All who set sail for France were putting their lives in the hands of others, and to this could be added the prospect of being unimaginably far from friends, family, and home, entirely out of touch with familiar surroundings, virtually everything one knew and loved for months, possibly even years to come. In The Sketch Book, a work familiar to many of the outward-bound venturers, Washington Irving, describing his own first crossing of the Atlantic, made the point that in travel by land there was always a kind of “continuity of scene” that gave one a feeling of being connected still to home.

  But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes—a gulf subjected to tempest and fear and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious.

  Sailings were regularly listed in the newspapers, and it was important to choose a good ship. Most were brigs: two-masted square-riggers carrying cargo of various kinds. The most desirable berths, those having the least motion, were near the middle of the ship. Fare to Le Havre was expensive, approximately $140.

  The last days before departure were filled with arranging the clothes needed for a long absence, selecting a stock of books to fill time at sea, and packing it all in large black trunks. Acquaintances who had made the trip before advised bringing an ample supply of one’s own towels.

  There were final calls to be made on friends, some of whom could be counted on to question the very thought of such a venture, whatever one’s reasons. Hours were devoted to farewell letters, parting sentiments, and words to the wise set down for children or younger siblings. “I am very glad, my dear, to remember your cheerful countenance,” wrote Charles Sumner to his ten-year-old sister from his room at the Astor House in New York the night before sailing. “I shall keep it in my mind as I travel over the sea and land. … Try never to cry. … If you find your temper mastering you, always stop till you can count sixty, before you say or do anything.”

  “Follow, my dear boy, an honorable calling, which shall engross your time and give you position and fame, and besides enable you to benefit
your fellow man,” Sumner lectured a younger brother in another letter. “Do not waste your time in driblets.”

  The mothers and fathers of the voyagers, for whom such partings could be profoundly painful—and who in many cases were paying for it all— had their own advice on spending money wisely and looking after one’s health. With good reason, they worried much about health, and the terrifying threats of smallpox, typhoid, and cholera, not to mention syphilis, in highly populated foreign cities. What wrong turns might befall their beloved offspring untethered in such places? The young men were warned repeatedly of the perils of bad company. They must remember always who they were and return “untainted” by the affectations and immorality of the Old World.

  The written “Instructions” of the eminent Boston physician John Collins Warren to his medical student son ran to forty pages and included everything from what he must study to how his notes should be organized, to what he should and should not eat and drink. Mason, as he was known, must choose his friends judiciously and avoid especially those “fond of theaters and dissipation.”

  Emotions ran high on the eve of departure. Melancholy and second thoughts interspersed with intense excitement were the common thing. “And a sad time it was, full of anxious thoughts and doubts, with mingled gleams of glorious anticipations,” wrote Charles Sumner in his journal. Samuel Morse was so distraught about leaving his children and his country that he descended into “great depression, from which some have told me they feared for my health and even reason.”

  But once the voyagers were on board and under way, nearly all experienced a tremendous lift of spirits, even as, for many, the unfamiliar motion of the ship began to take effect. “We have left the wharf, and with a steamer [tug boat] by our side,” Sumner wrote from on board the Albany departing from New York.

  A smacking breeze has sprung up, and we shall part this company soon; and then for the Atlantic! Farewell then, my friends, my pursuits, my home, my country! Each bellying wave on its rough crest carries me away. The rocking vessel impedes my pen. And now, as my head begins slightly to reel, my imagination entertains the glorious prospects before me. …

  Nathaniel Willis, departing from Philadelphia, described the grand spectacle of ten or fifteen vessels lying in the roads waiting for the pilot boat.

  And as she came down the river, they all weighed anchor together and we got under way. It was a beautiful sight—so many sail in close company under a smart breeze …

  “The dream of my lifetime was about to be realized,” Willis wrote. “I was bound for France.”

  Not all pioneers went west.

  II

  They sailed from several different ports and in different years. When Samuel Morse embarked out of New York in November 1829, it was with what he thought “the fairest wind that ever blew.” Emma Willard sailed in the fall of 1830; James Jackson, Jr., the medical student, in the spring of 1831; Nathaniel Willis that fall; and Wendell Holmes in 1833. George Healy, the aspiring young painter, made his crossing in 1834; John Sanderson, the Philadelphia teacher, in 1835. Charles Sumner set forth on his scholarly quest in 1837.

  At this juncture, as it happens, a young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, decided to brave the Atlantic in the opposite direction, sailing from Le Havre in 1831. He was twenty-five years old, short, and slightly built. Nothing about his appearance suggested any remarkable ability. His intention, he said, was to “inquire into everything” in America, “to see what a great republic is like.” He had never spoken to an American in his life. He had never been to sea.

  Samuel Morse had comparatively little comment about his crossing, beyond that it took twenty-six days, including five days and nights of gale winds, during which the motion of the ship was such that no one slept. Nathaniel Willis, who sailed on the nearly new brig Pacific, commanded by a French captain, enjoyed days of fair winds and smooth seas, but only after what to him was an exceedingly rough week when the one thing he had to smile about was the achievement of dinner.

  “In rough weather, it is as much as one person can do to keep his place at the table at all; and to guard the dishes, bottles and castors from a general slide in the direction of the lurch, requires a sleight and coolness reserved only for a sailor,” Willis wrote, in a picturesque account that was to delight readers of the NewYork Mirror.

  “Prenez garde!” shouts the captain as the sea strikes, and in the twinkling of an eye everything is seized and held up to wait for the lurch, in attitudes that would puzzle the pencil of [Samuel] Johnson to exaggerate. With his plate of soup in one hand, and the larboard end of the tureen in the other, the claret bottle between his teeth, and the crook of his elbow caught around the mounting corner of the table, the captain maintains his seat upon the transom, and with a look of most grave concern, keeps a wary eye on the shifting level of his vermicelli. The old weather-beaten mate, with the alacrity of a juggler, makes a long leg back to the cabin of panels at the same moment, and with his breast against the table, takes his own plate and the castors, and one or two of the smaller dishes under his charge; and the steward, if he can keep his legs, looks out for the vegetables, or if he fails, makes as wide a lap as possible to intercept the violent articles in their descent.

  Once conditions improved, there was no happier man on board than Willis. He gloried in the sea air and smooth sailing. “It is a day to make one in love with life,” he wrote one brilliant morning. “Hundreds of sea birds are sailing around us … the sailors, barefoot and bareheaded, are scattered over the rigging, doing ‘fair-weather’ work. …”

  Willis was the sole passenger on board his ship, in contrast to Wendell Holmes, who crossed on the packet Philadelphia, out of New York, with thirty other passengers in cabin class and fifteen in steerage. The Philadelphia was considered top-of-the-line. (“The accommodations for passengers are very elegant and extensive,” it was advertised. Beds, bedding, wine, and “stores of the best quality” were always provided.) The cabin passengers were mostly from Boston. Several were friends of Holmes’s, including a convivial fellow Harvard graduate, Thomas Gold Appleton, one of the Beacon Hill Appletons (and brother of Fanny), who was trying to make up his mind whether to become an artist or a writer, and having a thoroughly fine time in the meanwhile.

  They sailed in April and enjoyed gentle seas nearly the whole way, the kind travelers dreamed of. As Appleton’s journal attests, one unremarkable day followed another:

  I felt nothing of that do-little drowsy ennui that I had expected. I varied my amusements, and found them all delightful. I talked sentiment with Dr. Holmes; then flirted in bad French with Victorine [a maid accompanying one of the women passengers]; soon joined with Mr. Curtis and our two doctors in a cannonade of puns.

  Everyone was in high spirits. One dinner was followed by a night of singing made especially memorable when a “voice in the steerage gave us a succession of stirring ballads.”

  The morning after, however, “the still-life of the day previous had undergone a sea change.” Struggling to get out of his bunk, Appleton was nearly pitched head-first through the window of his cabin. Having succeeded in dressing, “bruised and battered,” he went aloft. The live chickens and ducks on board were “chattering in terror,” the captain shouting “pithy orders” through a trumpet to sailors standing “at ridiculously acute angles with the deck.”

  Few appeared for breakfast that morning, fewer still for dinner. But peace returned soon enough, and Appleton, his desire to paint stirring, studied the “deeply, darkly, beautifully blue” sea, “that blue which I had heard of, but never saw before. The water hissed and simmered as we clove its ridges, running off from the sides in long undulating sheets of foam, with partial breaks of the most exquisite beryl tint.”

  “A most delightful evening,” he began another of his journal entries. “The moon showed but a lurid disk, and that was soon lost behind brown-black volumes of a long curtain of hanging cloud. It was glimmering darkness, and our sole spectacle was the water. How
magnificent that was!”

  What an odd, good-for-nothing life we lead! [he observed happily several days later] A prolonged morning nap, jokes … a turn on deck, a sluggish conversation, a book held in the hand for an hour or two, another turn on deck; the bell sounds—we dash to dinner; three courses, laughter, candles, tea, and the moon …

  Only when, at dinner the following night, the captain mentioned the possibility of “vast islands of ice” did the mood change. “This all frightened us pretty considerably,” Appleton wrote, “and I could not get to sleep for hearing, in fancy, the crushing of our ship on an iceberg. …” When, by morning, the danger had passed, life on board resumed its pleasant pattern.

  So sweet and benign a crossing was the exception. For nearly all the rest of the voyagers came days of howling winds and monstrous seas when death seemed imminent. For Emma Willard, who sailed from New York on the Charlemagne, it was “a rough crossing” indeed. She had come aboard with her health much on her mind. What exactly her troubles were she never explained. There was repeated talk of weather. “Some of the older passengers play a covert game to frighten those who are fresh and timid,” she wrote. She paid them no mind. Then heavy weather struck. Worse than the raging winds of day were the seas after the winds abated. “Then the waters rise up in unequal masses, sometimes lifting the vessel as if to the heavens, and again plunging her as if to the depths below; and sometimes they come foaming and dashing and breaking over the ship, striking the deck with a startling force.” Most terrifying was a night of mountainous seas breaking over the ship.

  Thus with the raging element above, beneath, and around us; with nothing to divide us from it, but a bark whose masts were shaking, whose timbers were creaking and cracking, as they were about to divide; the feeling of the moment was, a ship was a vain thing for safety; that help was in God alone. Thoughts of ocean caverns—of what would be the consequence of one’s death, naturally rise in the mind at such a time.