The Other Side of the Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

the passage from Liverpool to Queenstown in order to experience firsthand what life was like for the steerage passengers. For as little as £5 ($25), an Inman ship would carry an emigrant from Liverpool to Philadelphia. The fare included three meals a day: arrowroot with sugar and milk, oatmeal porridge and molasses at breakfast; a mix of salt beef and fresh beef at dinner; tea and gruel for supper. Bland and monotonous it may have been, but a genuine improvement over the offerings of other lines, where emigrants had often been expected to provide their own food and prepare it during the voyage. Little wonder, then, that impoverished Irish families soon flocked to the Inman offices in Dublin and Queenstown. Other steamship lines, including Cunard, were quick to copy Inman’s success, and within a generation Queenstown had been transformed into one of the busiest emigration ports in Europe.
    A great many myths have built up around the flood of immigrants that flowed to the shores of the New World at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, aided by a spate of romanticized reporting, photographs, and artwork from the period. All too often the steerage passengers were portrayed as “tired, poor…huddled masses”—babushka- and shawl-clad mothers gripping the hands of small, wide-eyed children, or wide-eyed young men in ill-fitting clothing clutching their few belongings in loosely tied bundles, all hoping to find their fortunes in such exotic locales as New York, Pittsburgh, or Chicago.
    The truth was, as with so many subjects of the journalism of that day, a good deal more mundane. Despite the increasing numbers of central and southern Europeans emigrating to America, the majority of those leaving the Old World for the New were still Anglo-Saxon. Many were Germans, whose Fatherland was undergoing a bewilderingly rapid transformation from an agrarian society to an industrial juggernaut, with all the attendant social dislocations. Many others were Britons, often skilled or semi-skilled workers, sometimes craftsmen, occasionally members of the professions, forced by lack of work in England or Scotland to seek employment in America, as Great Britain began edging toward her slow industrial and economical decline. To these people a ship was transportation, its sole purpose to take them from Liverpool (or Southampton or Cherbourg or Queenstown) to Halifax, Boston, or New York. Passengers like these were not influenced by such luxuries as Grand Staircases, electric elevators, or swimming baths, the baubles dangled before potential First Class passengers to attract their patronage. Their interests lay in clean quarters and decent food. In this respect the Cunard Line served them admirably.
    Third Class berthing on a ship like the Carpathia was spread out along the lower three decks of the ship, the superstructure being the exclusive preserve of Second Class. The quarters would be divided into sections for single men, single women, married couples, and families. There was a near-Puritanical streak at work in the layout of these sections, peculiar to the morals and morality of the day, which made sure single men and women wouldn’t have cabins anywhere near each other. Single men were usually berthed forward, single women aft, with married couples and families distributed between the two areas. The cabins themselves were spacious, spotless, and if a bit austere, were by all reports comfortable enough. The unmarried men or women would share a room with three to five other passengers of the same sex, while married couples and families had rooms to themselves.
    The Third Class galley provided a fare that, while not spectacular, offered good food and plenty of it; in some cases, especially with those from the more impoverished Balkan countries or Irish counties, the steerage passengers ate better aboard ship than they ever had at home. All in all, they received a good deal more than most expected when they paid for