For the first-class passengers, it was possible to spend the entire day eating. Breakfast was served at eight o’clock, lunch at one, and dinner at seven, but platters of fresh fruit were available for the early risers, and cups of bouillon were brought around on trays in the midmorning, followed by sandwiches at noon, ices at three, tea at four, and sweets at five; and at nine o’clock, for those who somehow could still manage an appetite, a late supper was served in the main saloon. For sheer luxury the meals rivaled anything to be found at Delmonico’s or the Brunswick, the dishes prepared in the ornate style of the period, strongly French in influence and often named for generals and heads of state. A typical bill of fare for a dinner served on one of the oceangoing steamships of the period offered choices from twenty-nine separate dishes in nine courses, literally from soup to nuts. There was turtle soup to start, and blanquettes de poulet aux champignons, and filets de boeuf à la Bordelaise, and saddle of mutton with jelly, and ham in champagne sauce, and roast turkey with truffles, and pommes de terre Duchesse, and Marlborough pudding, and a great deal more, ending with a selection of fruits and nuts served with the café noir. The ship’s bakers began work at four in the morning to make the rolls and cakes for breakfast; the cooks, attired in their formal chef’s whites, turned out a banquet for hundreds of diners several times a day for a week straight, and did so from galley kitchens that rolled and tossed underfoot, in which the pots and pans had to be fitted into deep grooves to prevent them from sliding off the stove. A near battalion of uniformed household staff was in constant attendance, cooks and stewards and laundresses and chambermaids, transforming the modern steamship, in the much-used phrase of the day, into a floating palace, where guests could live for a week like royalty, with servants who appeared at the press of an ivory button, with a perpetually groaning board, a well-stocked library and an equally well-stocked bar, and a band of ready musicians: all of it helping to divert attention from the dark, churning water outside, from the too-real prospect of lurking icebergs, from the very absurdity of the notion, if one dwelled on it too long, of crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a boat.
For those traveling below, there were no such diversions. The majority of the passengers aboard the Augusta Victoria were not fed in grand style at all hours of the day, were not permitted a stroll on the upper deck, could not enter the smoking room or the music room or the library, did not have high-ceilinged staterooms—did not, indeed, have any rooms at all. For the seven hundred passengers traveling in steerage the experience of steamship life was an entirely different one. They slept in large, barracks-like rooms (unmarried men all together in one room, unmarried women in another, and married couples and their families in a third), dark, foul, airless places, blocked off from the rest of the ship by massive iron doors. Bathrooms were widely shared, not the private facilities offered on many of the modern ships. There were never enough sinks, and those that there were had to suffice for all purposes; dishes were washed and clothes cleaned in the same basins used to dispose of vomit. “No sick cans are furnished,” a U.S. Immigration Commission would later report, “and not even large receptacles for waste. The vomitings of the sick are often permitted to remain a long time before being removed. The floors, when iron, are continually damp, and when of wood they reek with foul odor because they are not washed.” No chambermaids ever descended with fresh linens, as the passengers here had to provide their own bedding, as well as their own plates, cups, and eating utensils; one of the regular sights of the steamship age was the long line of men and women waiting to trudge onto the ship, dressed nearly alike in dark bulky overcoats, lugging their shapeless bundles of bedding and crockery on their backs, like a defeated people in flight from advancing armies.
Breakfast was either bread and butter or oatmeal and molasses; lunch, the main meal of the day, included soup and a serving of meat or fish with potatoes and bread, and on Sundays a dessert; dinner consisted simply of tea with bread and butter, though sometimes there was a second dinner of oatmeal gruel. Unlike the formal service in the dining halls of the upper decks, in steerage the stewards simply set the food down in the middle of the table and left those who were seated around it to fend for themselves. Even this was an improvement over earlier generations of steerage, when the passengers were required to cook their own meals in one of the ship’s galleys. “It needs no imagination,” noted a magazine writer of the time, “to picture the struggle of immigrants, one against another, for a turn at the fire.”
Downstairs they ate their meals and afterward cleaned up as best they could, and they endured the toss of the ship and the loud ceaseless vibrations of the engines, and they talked, and squabbled among themselves over the available food and space, and their children ran and played games in the narrow passages of the lower deck. Even these basic activities served, for the other passengers on the ship, as yet another kind of shipboard recreation. For the passengers of the ship’s upper classes, it was a regular form of entertainment to lean over the railing of the top deck and observe those down in steerage, much like the society matrons who would order the drivers of their carriages to make a brief turn through the slum district so they might gain an agreeably shocking glimpse of how, as the journalist and social reformer Jacob A. Riis memorably put it, the other half lived, before hastening back uptown. It was “great fun to watch life in the steerage,” recalled one traveler of the time, adding, predictably enough, that “they were a merry lot, although deprived of nearly every comfort.” Sometimes, for extra fun, those up above tossed coins or candy to those down below, so that they might feel benevolent while watching the enjoyable scramble that ensued. In 1883 a Bostonian by the name of Fannie A. Tyler was reprimanded by her ship’s officers for bringing baked apples from her table to some of the children down in steerage; she had been moved to action by the pity she felt in comparing the happy, capering children at the top of the stairs to the hungry ones below. “The children among us pelt the little ones not so fortunate as they with nuts and raisins,” she wrote; “and these look up … with such eagerness they remind me of a nest of little birds waiting for the food the faithful mother-bird will surely bring.”
More often than not, those traveling in steerage were engaged in far more serious business than a European vacation, or a race around the world. Most were immigrants fleeing the poverty and oppression of their native countries for what they hoped would be a better life in the United States; or conversely, they were returning home with whatever little sums they had been able to save during their time there. The ships’ manifests reveal the men to have been policemen, farmers, sailors, waiters, weavers, gardeners, publicans, bricklayers; often they were identified in the most elemental terms, simply as worker. The women were generally categorized only as wife or single. They were, for the most part, people with trades and families, who had been thrown together in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, without sufficient air and light, made to subsist on fare that was as meager as it was monotonous. For those traveling in steerage, an oceangoing steamship was not a floating palace but a floating tenement: the class system did not stop at the water’s edge but was instead perfectly replicated, in miniature, aboard ship.
When Nellie Bly first came to the World offices two years before to seek work as a reporter, the story idea she had suggested was to sail back from England in steerage so that she might allow The World’s readers to learn about the appalling conditions endured by those below on their journey across the ocean. Now, as a celebrated World reporter, she was only a few steps away, but during her time on the Augusta Victoria she seems never to have set foot into steerage, and she never wrote a word about it.
NOVEMBER 21–22, 1889
Southampton, England
As the bad weather persisted, Bly grew increasingly nervous about her chances of catching the mail train from London to Brindisi; missing that train, she knew, meant failure, an end to the journey almost before it had begun. She could not help but question her decision to take the Augusta Victoria rath
er than the City of Paris: perhaps she had overplayed her hand, dared too much too soon. The Augusta Victoria had been due in Southampton at ten in the morning on Thursday, November 21, but it was already past noon before the Scilly Light was sighted to the southwest of Cornwall, the first glimpse of land since leaving New York. When the cry went up the passengers all rushed to the railing to see if they could make out the shore in the distance. It was just a bleak spot of rocky coastline, but at that moment it was, thought Bly, the most beautiful scenery in the world.
As darkness fell, the Augusta Victoria continued its path along the jagged southeastern English coast. Just after midnight the lights of Hurst Castle were sighted at the entrance to the Solent, the narrow strait between the English mainland and the Isle of Wight. If the ship could proceed at full speed it might reach Southampton in time for Nellie Bly to catch the one A.M. train to London, but the water continued to be very rough, with a strong wind bearing straight down on the ship, and by the time the Augusta Victoria had rounded the long strip of sand that divides the Solent from the Southampton River and finally sailed into port, it was two o’clock Friday morning—sixteen hours past schedule. Still more critical time was lost in waiting for the tugboat to arrive to take off the departing passengers. Several of Bly’s companions from the captain’s table had stayed up late to see her off, and she spent the last minutes idly chatting with them and nervously walking up and down the deck. Tracey Greaves, The World’s London correspondent, was supposed to meet her in Southampton, but the hour was so late that she did not expect Greaves still to be there. Everyone was wrapped in traveling rugs against the night’s chill; she could see her breath steam and rise in the air. The minutes dragged on. She felt herself standing at the threshold of a great room, not permitted to enter. Her satchel had been ready since noon.
It was half past two before the tugboat finally pulled up alongside the Augusta Victoria and a gangplank was set into place. Bly positioned herself near the top of the gangplank. A tall young man stepped up on deck, looking over the waiting passengers in a quick, bright way that made her think he must be the World reporter. “Nellie Bly?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied gratefully, holding out her hand, which he gave a cordial grasp while asking if she had enjoyed her trip, and if her baggage was ready to be transferred.
Her baggage, she answered, was already in her hand.
A few more warm handclasps, last best wishes sent all around, a little dry feeling of sadness in her throat, and she hurried down the gangplank onto the tugboat waiting to take the passengers to shore. The boat bobbed maddeningly for a few more minutes on the waves, and then the hum of the engines grew louder and the tug pulled away from the glow of the Augusta Victoria toward the darkness of the shore. The cabin was stuffed full of luggage and mail and lit by an old oil lamp with a smoked globe; Bly stood with Tracey Greaves and the other passengers up on deck, shivering in the cold fog.
Greaves turned to her. He had exciting news. “Mr. and Mrs. Jules Verne,” he said, “have sent a special letter asking that, if possible, you stop to see them.”
“Oh, how I should like to!” Bly exclaimed. Then she thought for a moment. Jules Verne, she knew, lived in Amiens, France. “Isn’t it hard,” she murmured, half to herself, “to be forced to decline such a treat.”
“I think it can be done,” said Greaves, “if you are willing to go without sleep or rest for two nights.”
The last train, he explained to her, had already left for London, and the next one would not leave until morning. If they had to remain in Southampton all night there would not be enough time to make the detour to Amiens on the way to Brindisi. There was, however, still one hope. He had been talking to the Southampton postmaster and officials of the London Southwestern Railway, and according to post office regulations, if the mails landed on the Southampton dock between one and three o’clock a special train could be ordered for the delivery of mail, and the railway officials had promised that Bly would be provided with a seat on the train. Everything now hinged on whether that mail train would be run. He said grimly, “We shall see when we land what they decide to do.”
It was almost three in the morning when the tug pulled up to the Southampton wharf, as dreary and dingy a place, Bly thought, as ever existed. The Custom House was a large, almost empty shed with a single railroad track running behind it. Greaves took her gripsack and escorted her quickly inside. Dim lights left the corners of the room in shadow; a few sleepy-looking men in rumpled uniforms sat behind long, low tables. “Where are your keys?” one of them asked, taking the bag from Greaves.
“I have none,” said Bly. “The satchel is not locked.”
The customs officer said to Greaves, “Will you swear that it does not contain any tobacco or tea?”
“Don’t swear,” Bly told Greaves, and then turned to the official and said, “It’s mine.”
The officer seemed highly amused by this, and with a broad smile he made a chalk mark on the bag and dismissed them.
Too nervous to remain inside, Bly headed out of the back door of the Custom House and waited in the chilling damp. She looked at her watch. It was just three o’clock. She peered into the distance, as far down the tracks as she could see. Through the fog, like a ghostly rider, the special mail train was moving toward the station.
NOVEMBER 14, 1889
New York
OUTSIDE THE SKY DARKENED TO BLACK; IN THE LIGHTED TRAIN COMPARTMENT the glass slowly turned from window to mirror. Her face, Elizabeth Bisland thought, looked drawn and pale with nerves, but that new sailor’s hat was very becoming. If she pressed her nose to the glass she could dimly make out the contours of the passing landscape. The inky blackness of the night had blotted out all traces of human activity, so that the land seemed as wild and unknowable as it must have when Henry Hudson sailed up the river seeking the passage to Asia. In the distance the cliffs of the Palisades rose sheer against the sky, like the wall of a massive stone fortress guarding undreamed-of treasures. She was too exhausted, her thoughts still too jumbled, to concentrate on the book in her lap. Later, she would have trouble remembering anything from those first hours. She knew, at least, that she was on the Fast Western Express of the New York Central Railroad, traveling north along the eastern bank of the Hudson River. If all went well, she would be arriving in Chicago’s Union Depot the following evening. From there she would transfer to an Omaha-bound train, and in Omaha connect to a train on the Union Pacific line for San Francisco. The journey from coast to coast would be completed in less than five days, amid a splendor that beggared the imagination. It was as though, in purchasing a ticket, she had been allowed inside one of those grand mansions she passed by on her way to the Cosmopolitan offices.
The New York Central Railroad ran out of Grand Central Depot, and the Pennsylvania Railroad out of the Jersey City terminal, and the rival companies had waged a long battle to outdo each other in the amenities they offered their customers (that is to say, their first-class customers—for passengers on trains, like those on steamships, were always divided by class). The very first car produced for the New York Central’s Chicago express had been designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany himself, and the subsequent cars were, if anything, even more opulent. The exteriors of the cars were painted the colors of plums and chocolate and olives—dark colors better hid the soot produced by the locomotive—and stenciled with gilt and silver; the interiors had panels of ebony, tiger maple, tulip, amboyna, and other rare woods, combined in ornate decorative patterns. Meticulously turned pieces of wood bloomed into flowers, dragons, winged lions, or whatever else suited the fancy of the craftsman in the railroad shop. New techniques of marquetry were developed; it turned out to be possible, by lightly scorching satinwood in hot sand, to realistically convey the texture of a rose leaf. Individual cars were done in styles suggested by earlier civilizations: English baronial, Italian Renaissance, Spanish mission, Chinese dynasty, ancient Egyptian. A fully equipped train carried not just sleeper c
ars and a dining car, but also a library car and a smoker car and a parlor car and a barber car; there was talk one day of railroad cars with billiard tables and bowling alleys. Some trains provided stenographers and secretaries for their business travelers. That very morning the Pennsylvania line had announced that it would introduce “ladies’ maids” onto its Cincinnati- and Chicago-bound trains. “Their duties will be those of a maid in one’s own household,” a news story reported, “and they will be particularly charged with the care of ladies traveling alone, ladies with children, and invalids.”
The Fast Western Express began its long ascent into the mountains, a single moving light in a world of darkness. The train rolled past the stone redoubt of West Point, past the high country estates of wealthy New Yorkers. There was a low murmur of conversation in the car. Porters moved through the aisle preparing beds for the night. The New York Central Railroad provided actual compartments for passengers in its sleeper cars, not the curtained Pullman sleepers still in use by the Pennsylvania Railroad. A seventy-foot-long car could hold ten compartments; at the ends of the car were three men’s and two women’s washrooms. Gathering the toiletries case from her Gladstone bag, Elizabeth Bisland used one of the washrooms; then, back at her seat, she climbed up into her sleeper compartment, pulling the door closed behind her, and in that tight space began what she called the “futile wrestlings” with her clothes. Eventually she managed to undress, slipping on her nightgown and then, over it, a warmer dressing gown; it would not do, she told herself, to catch a cold at the very outset of her journey. Her pillow was at the end of the berth toward the front of the train; the window by her feet she cracked open ever so slightly, just enough to allow the free circulation of air in the little compartment without creating a draft.
Eighty Days Page 12