Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [38]
Louisa sailed on the North German Lloyd liner Nurnberg, accompanied by two young widows she had met in the emigrant hotel where everyone stayed before the voyage. Louisa was booked to travel in something called steerage, but had no idea what that meant. No one had told her she was supposed to bring her own blanket. Aboard ship, she and her new friends entered a great chamber “with nothing but wooden boxes on short wooden legs, with a thin mattress of straw on it, nothing else—they called them beds! Rows and rows of them. At the entrance was a great barrel, and we wondered for what?”
Louisa estimated that two hundred people occupied the hold, including complete families. “Oh I thought I would die. And cried bitterly. The two young widows felt just as bad as I did, and we shook hands that we would not be separated.”
Soon after the voyage began, everyone got seasick, and the purpose of the great barrel became all too evident.
Louisa rebelled. She and her friends accosted an officer and demanded a more private place. They were women, after all. And single.
The officer had never before heard such a request, but agreed to look into the matter and later that day offered them a room in the stern, even to build them a partition for privacy—provided they could gather enough other single women to make the effort worthwhile. Louisa and her friends corralled thirty-four.
The journey to New Orleans and from there to Lake Charles took forty-two days. Her adventures began as soon as she arrived. She tried her first banana, and fell in love with it. She met her first black man. She was walking through a lovely stand of pine trees, when he appeared suddenly on the path ahead. “I got so scared that I just sat down, but he only said ‘Good Day’ and passed. He did not kill me.”
She caught the measles. “I got very sick,” she said. “For a long time someone had to be up all night with me, and I did not even know it.” She finally got out of bed six weeks later. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw that someone had cut off all her hair. She weighed only eighty-nine pounds, one-third less than when she had stepped off the boat. She had been beautiful. Now she was ugly. She was weak and vulnerable to other illness. A doctor advised that she move to a place with a healthier climate, perhaps Galveston.
Her train was halfway across one of the trestles that spanned Galveston Bay when she awoke and saw only water on both sides of her coach. She was terrified. She had not known Galveston was on an island and wondered how exactly she had ended up aboard a boat.
She was glad, later, that she had been unable to see the flimsy trestle. “I would have been scared even more.”
In Galveston, Louisa took work as a housekeeper for a family named Voelker. On a Sunday visit to the home of Mrs. August Rollfing, the widow of a sea captain who had drowned in a storm off Galveston, she met Mrs. Rollfing’s nephew, also named August. He was, Louisa confessed, “the nicest looking young man I had ever seen.”
Not just handsome—but talented. He was a painter, and he played guitar and piano, and sang so beautifully. “He had a lovely tenor voice and I enjoyed it more than anything else in the world.”
Some while later he proposed to her, if a mite obliquely. “Don’t you think, Louisa, we could always be happy together, and that we should get married?”
It was a lucky thing that neither put much stock in omens.
One evening in November 1885, a week before their wedding, Louisa sat working on her wedding dress, a wonderful thing of gray cashmere with lace trim. She stopped work around midnight, folded the dress carefully, and brought it up to the room. “I wasn’t even asleep when the fire whistle blew, and we saw a fire over at the north.”
A powerful north wind was blowing—a blue norther—which quickly fueled the fire and blew sparks and large flaming cinders onto downwind homes. Another