Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [125]
Immigrants to the United States traveled alone, in families, or even as transplanted communities. Some came only as sojourners, others as the first pioneers in chains of family members intent on permanent settlement. Increasingly, they came from regions of southern and eastern Europe that prior to the 1880s had been insignificant players in the peopling of America. Italy alone contributed tens of thousands of migrants each year during the 1890s, hundreds of thousands annually after 1900. Four fifths of the Italians came from the southern peninsula and Sicily (the mezzogiorno). Compared to the familiar English, Scottish, Irish, and Germans, the “new” immigrants from Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Italy seemed utterly foreign to many native-born Americans, who associated them with urban squalor, criminality, and, above all, disease. American state and federal governments shared that assessment, and beginning in the 1880s they built an increasingly elaborate system for the control of immigrant ships and the diseases they carried.16
Whether they began their journey by foot, wagon, or rail, immigrants from Europe or Asia got their first glimpse of America from a crowded, clamoring steamship. By 1870, steam had replaced wind as the force that powered the Atlantic crossing. During the next three decades, as the immigrant trade exploded, steamships grew larger and faster. Dozens of companies competed for immigrant fares, including Britain’s White Star and Cunard lines, France’s Companie Générale Transatlantique, Germany’s Hamburg-Amerika line, and New York–based Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Steel hulls, better boilers, and stronger engines enabled the construction of great ships weighing five thousand tons or more. Each might carry as many as three hundred passengers in their first- or second-class cabins and a thousand or more belowdecks in the steerage compartments—so named because of their location near the ships’ steering machinery.17
Companies packed steerage passengers onto tiers of narrow metal bunks that rose from dirty floors to low, sweaty ceilings. Toilet facilities were inadequate, portholes few. The lines running from southern Italy were notorious. One journalist, traveling as an immigrant from Naples in 1906, wondered how a steerage passenger was supposed to “remember that he is a human being when he must first pick the worms from his food . . . and eat in his stuffy, stinking bunk, or in the hot and fetid atmosphere of a compartment where 150 men sleep.” The introduction of third-class cabins on some lines around the turn of the century offered passengers a bit more space. But accommodations remained exceedingly tight for the vast majority making the ocean voyage to America.18
The discovery of smallpox aboard a crowded ship at sea, a common occurrence in the nineteenth century, was a harrowing event that called forth the full power of the captain. As “master of the vessel,” the captain’s legal authority over his crew and passengers was, in the words of one law scholar, “necessarily summary and virtually absolute.” The captain’s men pulled infected passengers from their bunks and isolated them in the ship’s infirmary. They fumigated compartments and personal effects. They vaccinated all aboard. Stoner’s Handbook for the Ship’s Medicine Chest instructed that the scabs from the sick passengers had to be carefully gathered up and burned, lest the infectious stuff be “conveyed not only to other parts of the ship, but to any part