The Sages, Goodwins, and Deans were making their first Atlantic crossings, but another large family party were Swedish sojourners: William Skoog, aged forty, a mining laborer from Hällekis, Västergötland, had lived for some years with his wife, Anna, in Iron Mountain, Michigan, where he labored in the Pewabic Mine. They left Iron Mountain in 1911, but soon regretted their decision, and reached the Titanic via Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Hull with their four small children. The Skoogs were related to two young women who had long debated going to America together but hesitated until they seized the chance of accompanying the Skoogs to Iron Mountain. Both they and all six of the Skoogs perished: large, adhesive families who would not be separated had no chance of entering a lifeboat together.
A few third-class passengers acted as couriers for inexperienced groups of immigrants. Olaus (“Ole”) Abelseth, aged twenty-five, from Ørskog, a Norwegian fishing village east of Ålsund, had first gone to America at the age of sixteen or seventeen and had worked as a farm laborer at Hatton, North Dakota, an agricultural community on the Red River flowing toward Lake Winnipeg. He then started his own livestock farm in Perkins County, South Dakota: a remote, backward area where the little townships had names like Antelope, Bison, Horse Creek, Lone Tree, Rainbow, and White Butte. Abelseth had revisited Norway in the winter of 1911–1912 and was leading a group from Ålsund to Bergen, Newcastle, and Southampton, comprising his cousin Karen Abelseth, aged sixteen, also from Ørskog; another cousin, Peter Søholt, together with his brother-in-law Sigurd Moen (a carpenter-joiner of twenty-five from Bergen); Anna Salkjelsvik (twenty-one, from Skodje, near Ålsund, heading for Proctor, Minnesota); and Adolf Humblen (forty-two, a farmer from Ålsund).
Another guide for a Swedish traveling party was Oskar Hedman, who originated from Umva and had emigrated to the United States in 1905 at the age of twenty-one. Initially he worked at a hotel in Bowman, North Dakota, and as a motorcar driver for local businesses in Bowman, and saved enough money to buy land outside the town. By 1912 he was working for a realtor (based in Saint Paul, Minnesota), recruiting immigrants and chaperoning them on their journeys from Scandinavia. On the Titanic he was accompanying a group of about seventeen Swedes, few of whom had more than a few words of English. One of those who could speak English was Edvard Larsson-Ronsberg, a cook in the logging town of Missoula, Montana. Aged twenty-two, a farmer’s son from Ransbysäter, Lysvik, Värmland, he had returned to collect his fiancée, Berta Nilsson, aged eighteen, from Ransbysäter.
Several Lebanese women were returning to America after visiting their home villages: Mary Abrahim, or Abraham, aged eighteen, of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, had been to see her parents; and Catherine Joseph, whose husband pushed a pedlar’s cart collecting scrap iron and junk in Detroit, had taken their two children to visit the old country. Most is known about a thirty-eight-year-old Lebanese woman originally called Shawnee or Shawneene Abi Saab. She had married George Whabee, but they used the surname of George after moving to the United States, where she adopted the nickname Jenny when consorting with Americans. The couple had hoped to amass enough money to buy land in Lebanon, but he died in 1908. She went door-to-door doing laundry and housework with her rough, capable hands, and brought over her three sons and two daughters to live with her in Youngstown, Ohio. Her teenage son Thomas became dangerously ill in 1910, mountain air was recommended, and he was helped back to Lebanon by another son. She rushed to Lebanon in 1911 when his condition deteriorated, but arrived after the funeral. For several months she grieved in Lebanon before embarking at Cherbourg on a 4-guinea ticket. It was as a bereft mother that she was returning to America, where her future work lay in a steel mill in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and later in an ice-cream-cone factory started by her children.
Other wives were bringing out their children to join husbands who were already settled in the United States. The Lebanese Latifa Baclini, aged twenty-three, was joining her husband in New York together with her three daughters, aged five, three, and nine months; she was also chaperoning a fifteen-year-old girl on her way to New York to marry. Alma Pålsson, aged twenty-nine, was wife of Nils Pålsson, originally a miner in Gruvan, Skåne, Sweden. After a mining strike had disillusioned him with life in Sweden, he had gone in 1910 to Chicago, where he worked as a tram conductor and saved money to bring over his family. Two of Alma Pålsson’s brothers worked there, too. She was traveling with two sons aged six and two, and two daughters aged eight and three, to join her husband. Her body was recovered wearing a brown skirt with a green cardigan and boots but no stockings, for she had dressed in frightened haste. Her effects included sixty-five kroner and a mouth organ.
A glimpse of third-class shipboard life is provided by that mouth organ. A good number of passengers wandered the decks with accordions, mouth organs, even fiddles in their hands or pockets. The sound of cheerful, amateurish music was often heard in third-class corridors or decks. After crossing from New York to Southampton after the war, scrutinizing every move and attitude of his fellow first-class passengers, Sinclair Lewis depicted an old man, taking the sea air on the promenade deck, “commenting on the inferiority of the steerage passengers who, on the deck below, altogether innocent of being condescendingly observed by the gentry-by-right-of-passage-money, jigged beside a tarpaulin-covered hatch to the pumping music of an accordion.”9
Arnold Bennett, crossing the Atlantic in 1911, found the starboard deck crowded with third-class passengers after breakfast. It was a playground studded with “entrances to paradises forbidden to them.” He noticed a “natural brazenness” about some young women, “girls who would not give and take to me in passing.”10 The deck was certainly a playground for carefree gangs of boys. Frankie Goldsmith, then aged nine, explored the ship with half a dozen other boys, improvising games on deck, clambering over bollards and ventilators. After leaving Ireland, the children chose Goldsmith to try a trick. He climbed a baggage crane, clutched the cable under its arm, and then hoisted himself hand over hand to the end of the arm, before dropping down onto the deck. The cable proved to be coated with grease to protect it from corrosion, and a gaggle of nearby sailors roared with laughter as he struggled to keep hold of the cable. His mother subjected him to robust scrubbing before she was satisfied that he was clean.
Stephen Graham’s estimate of the third-class Englishwomen was mixed: “There are the women who are going out to their sweethearts to be married, and the wives who are going to the husbands who have ‘made good’; there are the girls who have got into trouble at home and have slid away to America to hide their shame; there are girls going to be domestic servants and girls doomed to walk the streets.”11 There were also wives whose marriages had collapsed. Margaret Ford was a Scotswoman of forty-eight whose husband had left her after the birth of their fifth child in 1904. She reared chickens to keep her family; the two eldest daughters became domestic servants, her son of eighteen was a blacksmith, and her boy of sixteen was a messenger. The eldest daughter was working in a household on Long Island, and Margaret Ford had decided to join her in America. She traveled with her four children, a servant girl whom her daughter knew, her sister-in-law, and the latter’s husband, a Scottish-born plumber, with their son of eight and daughter of seven. All ten of Margaret Ford’s party died.
Rhoda Abbott was another mother making her way in life after the collapse of her marriage. She had been brought up in the southern English market towns of Aylesbury and Saint Albans. She had left for Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893 and two years later married a middleweight boxing champion, Stanton Abbott. They had two sons, Rossmore, born in 1896, and Eugene, born in 1899; but she had separated from her husband by 1911, when she and her two sons had crossed on the Olympic to test life in Saint Albans with her widowed mother. There she supported herself as a seamstress, while Rossmore Abbott is said to have worked as a boot maker or for a jeweler, and Eugene attended Priory Park School. After six months in Saint Albans, the two American boys were homesick, and Rhoda Abbott determined to return to Rhode Isla
nd. After buying three tickets, the Abbotts were transferred to the Titanic because of the coal strike. It is said that she and her sons—by then aged sixteen and thirteen—were Salvation Army workers. Once embarked, she befriended Amy Stanley, Emily Goldsmith, and May Howard, who all had cabins near her. Her sons roamed the ship, and doubtless gorged themselves like all hungry boys at mealtimes when confronted by a breakfast menu of oatmeal porridge with milk, liver and bacon, Irish stew, bread and butter, marmalade with Swedish bread, tea or coffee followed by a main meal of vegetable soup, boiled mutton with capers, green peas, boiled potatoes, cabin biscuits, and plum pudding.
Few third-class passengers were negligent of their clothes, though none, of course, dressed like Lady Duff Gordon’s mannequins. Bridget McDermott from Addergoole in Ireland had lately been into the market town of Crossmolina to buy clothes for her journey, and others no doubt had spent money to look their best. The Croatian laborer Josip Drazenovic wore a striped green and gray suit, brown striped shirt, and black boots—carrying his pipe and a set of rosary beads. His fellow Croatian Ignjac Hendekovic wore a white shirt with an embroidered front above his blue striped trousers and leather sandals. We know about the clothes only of those whose possessions were methodically noted when their bodies were recovered from the ocean. The inventory makes poignant reading. A Jewish Russian, Sinai Kantor, carried a pocket telescope in his gray and green suit. Mansour Hanna from Lebanon had dressed in a hurry and went into the freezing water wearing only gray flannel underpants and undershirt, clutching amber beads. Sixteen-year-old Rossmore Abbott wore whatever he could swiftly lay his hands on: gray trousers, green cardigan, blue jersey, black boots, and a brown overcoat containing an empty wallet and two little knives. Mary Mangan from Addergoole dressed methodically in a black skirt, blouse, coat, and boots, with a red cardigan and green raincoat, and all her treasures—rosary beads; medallion; gold bracelet, locket, watch, and brooch; and her diamond solitaire ring. Will Sage, aged fourteen, was found in gray knickerbockers. Shortly before his death, Sidney Goodwin, aged nineteen months, had been lovingly coddled in a gray coat with fur on its collar and cuffs, a brown serge frock, a petticoat, a pink woolen undershirt, brown booties, and stockings. These are the clothes of the poor and striving. One unidentified corpse is described thus: “four feet, six inches, about fourteen-years old, golden brown hair, very dark skin, refined features. Lace-trimmed red-and-black overdress, black underdress, green striped undershirt, black woollen shawl and felt slippers. Probably third-class.”12
As with the voyagers from Cornwall and Guernsey in the second-class cabins, there were clusters of third-class passengers from the same vicinities—ill-starred as their destinies proved. There were twenty passengers from the village of Hardin in Lebanon and another twelve from Kfar Mishki; fourteen passengers from Addergoole in Ireland; eight passengers from Gumoshtnik in Bulgaria; and others from Keghi in Armenia.
Hardin was an isolated upland village reached by a single road, inland from the coastal town of Batroun. It stood 1,110 meters above sea level surrounded by thick woodland, mountainside terraces, and bleak snowy cliffs containing caverns, on a high rock platform. There was a temple to the god Mercury, supposedly erected in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, and a ruined medieval Christian chapel. Hardin’s inhabitants were persecuted Marronite Christians, who began leaving for the United States—many of them to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Often they were sojourners, intending to spend years in the Mahjar, or host society, but intent on returning periodically, and perhaps permanently, when they were old, to their homeland, al-watan.
A few years earlier Gertrude Bell had traveled south of Hardin to visit the ruins at Balbec. There she lodged with a woman named Kurunfuleh—meaning “Carnation Flower”—whose husband was “seeking his fortune in America,” where she wished to join him. Bell spent several hours talking with her, her son and daughter, and friendly relations who called to play their lutes. The Islamic majority of the Balbec population, called the Metawileh, were renowned for “fanaticism and ignorance,” Bell reported: when they heard of the Japanese victories over Russia in the war of 1905, they shook their fists at their Christian neighbors, saying, “The Christians are suffering defeat! See, now, we too will shortly drive you out and seize your goods.” Bell asked why she did not return to her own village, where she would be protected. “Oh lady,” Kurunfuleh replied, “I could not endure it. There no-one has any business but to watch his neighbour, and if you put on a new skirt the village will whisper together and mock at you.” Life pinched so tightly in Lebanon, Bell reported, that all upland Christians who could scrape together their passage money were leaving for the United States: “it is next to impossible to find labour to cultivate the corn, the mulberry and the vine . . . The Lebanon province is a cul de sac, without a port of its own and without commerce.”13
Almost all the twenty voyagers from Hardin were heading for Wilkes-Barre, encircled by collieries producing anthracite coal, and misleadingly nicknamed “Diamond City.” We know their names, but little more of them. All embarked at Cherbourg, having traveled via Beirut and Marseille; almost all, except for the shoemaker Gerios Youssef, heading for Youngstown, were listed as farmhands or laborers. Borak Hannah, aged twenty-seven (also known as Hannah Assi Borah), was a farm laborer with relations in Wilkes-Barre but was heading for the home of a man named Hassey in Port Huron, Michigan. A few months later, in July, he married the man’s daughter, became a factory worker, then ran fruit stores in Marlette and Port Huron, and ended his days as a tavern keeper in Port Huron.
From Kfar Mishki—a Christian settlement in Lebanon’s lower Bekaa Valley—came a dozen third-class voyagers mostly aiming at Ottawa. Boulos Hanna, an eighteen-year-old laborer seeking work in the steel mills of Youngstown, was an exception. Mariona Assaf, aged forty-five, who had gone to work in Ottawa some five years earlier, first as a pedlar and then as a greengrocer, had returned to Kfar Mishki to see the two sons she had left behind. She was now heading back from Lebanon, via Cherbourg, to Ottawa with a young cousin and nephew. The travelers from Kfar Mishki spent three days on horseback to reach Beirut, with some of their kin walking with them for the first hours: not for them the railway journey between Beirut and the uplands. “There is no sense of any man having a private right in his own affairs,” reported an English clergyman who had lately made the trip and found that many of his fellow travelers could speak in broken French. “The gentleman on your left is a merchant, and before he has done with you, he will have ascertained the exact price you paid for your Kodak, your aneroid, watch, chain, hat and boots. The elderly and somewhat raw-boned person opposite, on whom his black velvet vest with great buttons sits badly, is consumed with the desire to know your name, and your friend’s name, and your country, and your religion . . . he volunteers the one fact—certainly a remarkable one—that he has himself been in Manchester, and found it ‘très joli.’”14
The Metawileh who celebrated Japan’s victory at Port Arthur, the Kodak in the Bekaa Valley, the nosy old Syrian who enjoyed the bright lights of Manchester—they are all evidence of the globalization of news and rumor, of gimcrack novelties and shallow curiosity that characterized the Titanic world of 1912. In broken language, with gestures and smiles and scowls, some at least of the third-class passengers will have explored common ground, shown off their knowledge, and asked questions. Friendly, suspicious, overinquisitive, muddled: they were on the way to becoming Americans.
Addergoole lies above the shores of Lough Conn—the Lake of the Hound—and beneath the bleak slopes of Nephin Mór in County Mayo. Mayo is a county in the west of Ireland, its wild shores hammered by Atlantic winds and rain, with few shelter belts of trees, although Addergoole lies on the protected inland side of Nephin Mór. The soil is as barren as the weather is bleak. Nearby at Erris is the largest bog in Ireland. Potatoes were the chief crop: pigs, sheep, cattle, and poultry were the other staples of Mayo’s subsistence farming. There had been turbulent relations between Protestant
landlords and Catholic tenants in the recent past: Addergoole was not far from the localities where Lord Leitrim, Lord Mountmorres, and the bailiff of Lord Ardilaun had been assassinated. White Star’s local agent, Thomas Durcan of Castlebar, one of a family known as the Fighting Durcans, had sold tickets to ten of the fourteen Addergoole voyagers.
Every place name in Ireland is like a tune, Marianne Moore thought. The hamlets and farms dispersed about the parish of Addergoole made a medley of tunes: Carrowskeheen, Cuilmullagh, Cuilnakillew, Cum, Derrymartin, Knockfarnaught, Terryduff, Tonacrick. From Cuilmullagh came Annie Kelly, who was going to join female cousins in Chicago and destined to become a nun in Adrian, Michigan. She was a cousin of two young men, James Flynn, from Cuilnakillew, who was joining his brother in New York, and Pat Canavan, from Knockmaria, who was heading for Philadelphia.
Two weeks later, a Chicago journalist spoke to Annie Kelly and Annie McGowan, the sole survivors of the Addergoole voyagers. Several of the party were “Yanks,” “Irish lads and lassies who have been to America and come back to Ireland for a look at the old place and the blessing of the old father and mother, before they go back to America to stay for good and all.” The Yanks included Kate Bourke, formerly McHugh, and Kate McGowan, who had both left Mayo for Chicago when they were young girls. Kate McHugh had returned to Addergoole, where she married John Bourke, who had never thought of going to America. However, when her old Yank friend Kate McGowan came for a short visit to Terryduff, her family’s corner of Addergoole, the Bourkes decided to sell his farm at Carrowskeheen and accompany her back to Chicago. The Bourkes were accompanied by his sister Mary; also traveling with them were Honora (“Nora”) Fleming, in her early twenties, and Mary Mangan, who had lived for some years with a sister in the States and, having got engaged to an Irishman there, had returned for a visit to Ireland before her marriage. The Bourkes’ friend Kate McGowan left Terryduff for the last time with her young teenage niece Annie McGowan, who had relations already settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. On board the Titanic, John and Kate Bourke “sat apart most of the day by themselves, talking and talking. There was no end of their talking about . . . what he would do in America with all the money he was taking with him from selling the farm. He was for taking a long time what to do with it, but Kate would be always telling him that America was not Ireland, and that a man must decide quickly what to do, for money would run just as fast away from you in America as toward you, if a man was not looking out.” John Bourke thought of buying horses and becoming a teamster. For the rest of the Addergoole voyagers the voyage was like a picnic outing. “The fun they had coming out, the games and quadrilles, the story-telling and the fortune-telling! It was grand.” There were Addergoole girls going to America for the first time: from Cum, Bridget Donahue, aged twenty-one; from Derrymartin, Delia Mahon, aged twenty; from Knockfarnaught, Bridget Delia McDermott, who was heading for cousins in Saint Louis, Missouri; and another cousin of Annie Kelly’s, Mary Canavan, aged twenty-two, from Tonacrick. “The young girls would talk about what they would do in America before they were married. That is, they would talk about it when they were not scurrying around the deck laughing and making friends here and there with everybody, and it’s a God’s mercy that Annie Kelly did joke with one of the stewards and he take notice of the girl, or she would not have been alive this moment.”15
Voyagers of the Titanic: Passengers, Sailors, Shipbuilders, Aristocrats, and the Worlds They Came From Page 16