All Standing

by Kathryn Miles

  Yet for would-be immigrants, the opulence in Baltimore paled in comparison to what was being promised on the other side of the continent, where flakes of gold had been discovered the year before at Sutter’s Saw Mill in Coloma, California. Since then, a variety of settlements had taken root with names like El Dorado, Gold Hill, and Diamond, all seeking to capitalize on the gold rush that was now taking place. Since its discovery in late 1848, California gold had, as the New York Herald put it, “set the public mind almost on the highway to insanity.” Up and down the eastern seaboard, cottage industries had sprung up in response to the rumors of unimaginable riches to be had on the opposite coast. Dry goods stores began specializing in everything needed to outfit a prospecting forty-niner: pans and gold-testing kits, pickaxes and rubber boots, and for the most optimistic of the lot, money belts and safes.14 Longtime citizens and newly arrived Irish immigrants alike joined in the frenzy, pawning assets and leveraging savings to join in the mad rush westward.

  At St. Joseph, Missouri, alone, more than four thousand wagons had crossed the Mississippi River that season, all on their way west. They brought with them nearly 20,000 people and an estimated 300,000 animals, mostly oxen and mules. Those not interested in traveling overland thronged the docks in places like Baltimore, where masses of people crowded onto schooners and barques, headed for the treacherous Cape Horn and, eventually, the streams of California. They were wooed by what promised to be the first pure experiment in free market economies: tent cities were springing up with names that evoked the climate there: Whiskeytown and Rough and Ready. It was, at long last, proof positive that Manifest Destiny was not only an appealing idea, but also a viable policy.

  News of this boom had taken all of Europe by storm. Promoting Baltimore as a stop on the road to California would allow Donovan to charge a premium on tickets and to once again distinguish himself from the other ship owners, as no other vessels from Tralee would be landing there. In preparation, he printed up additional passenger contract tickets; he ordered rice and molasses to feed his passengers. He blanketed the newspapers with ads for his fine, fast ship, noting with no small amount of irony that, while they wasted little ink in speaking out against him, these same newspapers still happily took his advertising business. Not that he really needed the ads anyway. Word had spread quickly that the Jeanie would sail again. The story of Nicholas Reilly, already a year old, was still fresh in the minds of many, and even though the barque had completed only one passenger voyage, the Jeanie Johnston was known to be a lucky ship.

  21

  Crossing the Bar

  JAMES ATTRIDGE didn’t know what to make of his cousin’s decision. Had Donovan forgotten about the massive crew losses he sustained in New York? Donovan had insisted that the Jeanie carry ballast, not passengers, on this previous voyage, which meant that the ship’s quarters had been drastically altered for the nonhuman cargo. U.S. naval law was too restrictive and the season too short to prepare the Jeanie to ferry passengers to America. Apparently those regulations were no longer of much concern to the importer.

  They were plenty troubling to Attridge, though, who was now responsible for the retrofit needed for the Jeanie to pass inspection. America had new rules about the number of people on board, the size of their bunks, the amount of ventilation and provisions they would require while on board. Getting the Jeanie up to standards was clearly going to take some work. Who was going to do it? Once upon a time, Attridge had been famous for preserving his crewmen from voyage to voyage. This new immigrant trade seemed to have changed all that; not even the promise of uninterrupted paid work was enough to keep most of his crew on board. After returning from New York, nearly all his men left the vessel, including Gabriel Seldon, who had signed on to the barque Glory, a Baltic timber ship, for the winter months. Seldon knew he was welcome on board any of Attridge’s ships; the captain just had to hope that his cook and steward made it back in time. Meanwhile he would depend more heavily than ever on his first mate, Thomas Campion. The rest of the crew, he supposed, could be found in Liverpool and Cork.

  That left the matter of his apprentices; for at least another year the Shipping Acts required Attridge to carry them on all voyages. Daniel Collins remained on board from the previous season; he was joined in early February by Florence Sullivan, a fifteen-year-old also from Tralee. Signing on an apprentice like Sullivan was the law, but that didn’t make it any less onerous a task for a captain. The 1835 amendment to the Merchant Shipping Act expanded the apprentice program specifically to accommodate boys like Sullivan, who, destitute, might otherwise be considered a strain on their local community. The thinking behind the act was that a multiyear apprentice program would provide the boys with applicable skills and employment while maintaining the strength of the merchant fleet. The Board of Guardians was empowered by the British government to bind such boys by indentures, provided they could prove to two justices of the peace that they were at least thirteen and “of sufficient health and strength.” It was at the board’s expense that Florence Sullivan was delivered to Attridge, along with a copy of his baptismal record and £5 for clothing and bedding, to be worked off over the duration of his apprenticeship—and beyond, if necessary.

  This was far from a popular program for many ship captains, who found themselves responsible for young boys with as little sailing experience as they had vested interest in being at sea. That many resorted to rough treatment of their bound charges is apparent from the language of the 1835 revised act, which created extensive punishments for “hard or ill usage” of apprentices and reminded captains in no uncertain terms of the British statutes regarding assault and battery.

  Florence Sullivan could neither read nor write when he arrived on board the Jeanie in February of 1849. That alone was hardly remarkable; three of the able-bodied seamen on that voyage were also illiterate, but unlike Sullivan they at least came with sail-handling experience and an understanding of what kinds of hardship the next several months would have in store. Sullivan had never before left the confines of Tralee, let alone climbed aboard a large vessel destined for North America.

  Nevertheless the boy arrived on the docks at the appointed time. Fair-skinned and a little short for his age, he kept his gray eyes turned down, as if apologizing for his tenderness or already regretting the choice that had been made for him.

  He arrived at a nearly deserted vessel. Attridge had not yet secured a replacement crew, and Campion was overseeing a skeleton staff that included two British seamen, John Kneen and Robert McIntyre, as well as Christian Peterson, a Danish sailor who had recently left the schooner Bideford, which had been making immigrant runs between southwestern England and Newfoundland. Attridge’s situation began to look up when Seldon returned, and just in the nick of time. The steward quickly went to work assisting Campion with preparations for the passengers and their departure.

  Attridge meanwhile struggled to locate his remaining crew. The confused ship’s articles from that voyage—a sharp contrast to his normally fastidious record keeping—say much about his sense of urgency. For the first time in his career, Attridge was finding it hard to come by a crew. A week before their scheduled departure, only ten had signed on. Along with the late addition of Thomas Twyford from Limerick as second mate—apparently, none of the other men had the qualifications necessary for this position—the remaining four seaman were added in the last days leading up to the departure. It was a highly unusual state of affairs for a captain who so prided himself on organization and protocol.

  A total of 135 immigrants, including five infants under the age of one year, boarded the newly refitted vessel in early March, then settled into a hold that still smelled of grain and freshly cut wood. The average age of the passengers was twenty-two; most were men who, if not single, at least were traveling without wife or family. The majority listed their occupation as laborer or artisan; there were coopers and cart wrights, smiths and shoemakers, carpenters and cattlemen. The second largest group were young women travel
ing alone, including Catherine Martin, a spinster from Tralee, and Mary Evans from nearby Ardfert. The remaining passengers were mostly farm families with small children, including the widow Eliza O’Leary and her three children: Mary, age thirteen; Jerry, ten; and Anne, seven. At forty, Eliza was one of the oldest passengers on board, and as a widow she had a certain status among both the single women and the young families.

  The Jeanie left on March 14 under nearly perfect sailing conditions—a rare and beautiful gift on the North Atlantic. The good weather held for two weeks, giving the O’Learys much-needed time to get adjusted to life at sea. During their walks on deck, the children spied porpoises with faces like pigs and whales bigger than they could have imagined. They marveled at sea swallows and flying fish, which leaped from the water and seemed to glide alongside the Jeanie’s massive black hull. Such wonderment was a welcome relief from the cramped and shadowy conditions below deck.

  As bleak as it could be on board, a tight camaraderie was forming nevertheless. Eliza O’Leary had taken Catherine Martin and Mary Evans under her wing; the two young women counted on Eliza as something between an older sister and a second mother, and they were glad for the extra care—especially when the storms came.

  The worst of them arrived on the morning of April 11 and grew increasingly violent throughout the day, sending the Jeanie over “mountainous” waves, only to then drop the vessel into a “deep abyss.” Others crashed across the deck, submerging much of the vessel before dissipating in furious foam. The passengers were certain they would all perish.1

  Had they been privy to what was occurring above them, they would have been all the more terrified. Not long after departing from Tralee, John White and John Jenkins, two of the halest crew members on board, fell ill. Both were from Cardigan, Wales, where rumors of a resurgence in cholera were surfacing. Dr. Blennerhassett sequestered the two men at once, monitoring them closely for the telltale signs of a disease he knew well. As the storms bore down on the vessel, he knew these two men would be missed terribly by the rest of the crew. It was imperative that he get them back on their feet—and that he keep others from falling ill. Over the course of the voyage, the young doctor had far more luck with the latter than he did the former. As far as he could tell, the two men did not have cholera. Although they would remain in the barque’s makeshift hospital until arriving in Baltimore, at least they would be the only two people there.

  Neither White nor Jenkins saw America appear like a mirage on the horizon, but many of the passengers did. And at least some were on deck when a pilot boarded the vessel and directed them into the Chesapeake Bay. They watched with wonder as Annapolis and the Virginia coast passed by, as forest changed to farmland and eventually the growing skyline of Baltimore.

  Restrictions at the port of Baltimore were as tight as any in the world. The pilot directed the Jeanie to the quarantine ground on the main branch of the Patapsco River. There, not far from where Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” nearly forty years earlier, an invisible line ran between Fort McHenry and the Board of Health Hospital, marking the stopping place for any passenger-carrying vessel. Once there, Attridge ordered his men to raise a large yellow flag atop the mainmast, a warning that the Jeanie Johnston arrived in the United States carrying disease on board and was to be avoided at all costs.

  Nearby, passengers aboard the German vessel Johanis were awakened at 4 A.M. on their inspection date so that there would be plenty of time for everyone to scrub and dress. Richard Blennerhassett probably insisted on similar protocol, particularly given the implications of the quarantine flag.

  Once the Maryland state physician arrived, he conferred briefly with Attridge and then set about examining each of the passengers. Chief among the doctor’s mandates was to check for any appearance of smallpox, which had reached epidemic levels in Baltimore in each of the previous four years.2 Any sign of the disease would require Attridge to dock the Jeanie at the infectious lazaretto established on the north side of Fort McHenry, where additional purifications would take place—all at significant cost (and delay) to the captain.3 The penalty for not doing so would be even more severe: $500 (about $13,000 today) for the initial infraction, an additional $50 for every hour the vessel remained in breach of quarantine.

  For many residents of the port city, that seemed a small price to pay to prevent the return of 1847’s mortality rates. But it soon proved insufficient. By the time the Jeanie Johnston arrived in Baltimore, Dr. Crumpe’s prediction had proven all too accurate: the real killer that year was cholera, and it arrived with great ferocity. In Liverpool, more than four thousand people would die that year; in Ireland, cholera was rumored to be killing more people than starvation.4 Mortality rates there were already topping 40 percent. By the end of the year, an estimated thirty thousand Irish would die as a direct result of the disease.

  For Blennerhassett, these statistics soon hit close to home. One of the first to succumb was his cousin Annabella. Barely thirty years old and known for her kindness and her beauty, Annabella was a favorite in Tralee. Two years earlier she had witnessed both the birth of her baby daughter and the death of her husband. Since then she had struggled to raise the girl alone while dedicating herself to the service of the poor and her parish church. That she had fallen victim to the scourge seemed too much to bear for those who knew her, and, as with the so-called respectable victims of typhus, her death rattled public perception of the disease.5Here, once again, was disturbing proof that none of the gentry wanted to acknowledge: just like typhus, cholera made no class distinctions, attacking the most polite of the upper class with the same force as it did the indolent peasant.

  Whatever was plaguing White and Jenkins, it wasn’t enough to concern the state physician inspecting the vessel. He ordered the two sailors to a marine hospital operated by Washington University medical students.6 Once they were removed, he then cleared the vessel—still reeking of the sulfur and vinegar used to disinfect it—for Baltimore proper.

  22

  No Irish Need Apply

  THE DOCKS at the foot of Baltimore’s Clinton Street were busy on May 3. There the Jeanie Johnston vied with seventeen other vessels for space in the crowded harbor. Traffic was congested with brigs and schooners, some arriving from other cities on the eastern seaboard. Dozens of others arrived from the Caribbean with sugar and molasses, then quickly departed again with the grain and iron needed to support the sugarcane industry.1 Dwarfing all these ships were enormous Brazilian freighters, all loaded deep with coffee—America’s favorite commodity—and destined for one of the nearly two hundred warehouses flanking the wharf.

  As soon as he arrived, Attridge dashed off a letter to Nicholas Donovan assuring him that all of the passengers had arrived in good health. He promptly deposited it on the first steamer heading back across the Atlantic. Luckily for him, that steamer departed before the rash of bad news he would have been bound to report as well. The very evening the barque landed, two of his newest crew members, Christian Peterson of Denmark and William Thomas of Cork, went missing without leave. Peterson would eventually become a blacksmith in Chicago, where he died in 1917. Thomas was never heard from again.

  The next day young Florence Sullivan also fled the vessel, no doubt wooed by the promise of what America had to offer. Like Peterson, he quickly moved westward but soon found that the Horatio Alger myth was harder to realize than it seemed. He eventually enlisted in the army in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he joined recruits with names like Byrne, Kelley, and Feeney in the fight against New Mexico, Native Americans, and anyone else who did not believe in the Divine Providence of his race. Attridge would have to receive special dispensation to sail without the required number of apprentices.

  But that was the least of his worries. The longer the Jeanie remained at the dock, the more men she lost. By May 22, Attridge was down eight crew members, leaving him with a little more than half the men necessary to sail the vessel back to Tralee. While the remaining men busied th
emselves tearing out the well-worn emigrant bunks and replacing them with tons of Indian corn, Attridge sat first in the Baltimore police station and then its customs house, giving depositions about the deserted sailors. He had lost others before, but not on this scale. He had plenty of time to think about this exodus as he walked the docks for a week, eventually securing six sailors for the return trip. All of them hailed from North America; there would be little chance they would desert upon arrival in Tralee.

  The Jeanie set sail on June 6, leaving behind a stack of forms and depositions no doubt embarrassing to Attridge. She also left behind her 135 passengers, many of whom were finding their new city more than a little shocking. Baltimore may have done a fair business in coffee and molasses, but in 1849 its real commodity was human beings. Forty years earlier, the United States had prohibited the importation of captured African people, but that didn’t make the country any less dependent on their enslavement. More than ever, trafficking slaves between states was big business, and Baltimore was at the very heart of it. For many in Baltimore, the appearance of a gang of slaves, handcuffed in pairs and paraded by the dozens in heavy chains, was commonplace. Not so for Eliza O’Leary, who, like the Reillys, had never seen a person of color before meeting Gabriel Seldon. On many a night, long bands of slaves were marched down her street, the dull footsteps and clank of chains rising up to her second-floor window. This was not the America she had been promised.

  Eliza had found a house for rent on the edge of Baltimore’s already notorious neighborhood, “Pigtown.” A three-story row house made of common brick and crowded onto a dusty road, her new home was a far cry from the pastoral landscape surrounding the cottage she left behind. While her new neighborhood had little of the starvation and disease she had witnessed back in Ireland, Pigtown nevertheless took more than a little getting used to.