Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [28]
If Susanna winced at the number of emigrants on her ship, she was even more appalled at the conditions in which they were obliged to travel. Steerage-class passengers had a miserable time. The Anne was a relatively small boat, and its seventy-two cheap-fare passengers were crammed into a space only sixty feet long by ten feet wide and five and a half feet high. On the eastward passage across the Atlantic, timber plugged this space; now, on the westward voyage, it was filled with double rows of berths made of rough planks hastily nailed together. Baggage, utensils and food supplies jammed the aisle, and there was little ventilation. Children played in the fetid darkness; dirty bilge water slopped across the floor; rats swarmed up from the hold. On long, storm-plagued voyages, the smell of unwashed bodies, rotting food and vomit was suffocating. Emigrant ships were supposed to feed all their passengers, but few captains bothered to load sufficient supplies of biscuit, flour, salt pork and fresh water to last the whole voyage. When the daily provisions were distributed, they were almost always too meagre and often spoiled.
The worst of the emigrant ships came from Ireland’s twenty-one ports, carrying the wretched cargo of refugees from famine, fever and the regular failures of the potato crop. By the mid-nineteenth century, the boats had earned the nickname “coffin ships.” But the brigs, brigantines and schooners leaving Scotland’s eighteen ports or England’s thirty-six carried their own burdens of misery. And in the event of a shipwreck, steerage-class passengers usually drowned; lifeboats were provided for cabin-class passengers only. Life in steerage was awful. “Sir, a ship is worse than a jail,” wrote that cynical realist Dr. Samuel Johnson. “There is, in jail, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind: and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger.”
The Anne’s sails were hoist on July 1. A week later she had weathered the storms off Scotland’s eastern coast and was into the Atlantic Ocean. During the first days at sea, Susanna revelled in the lack of demands on her. Within the past four months, she had faced a bewildering series of changes: the birth of her first child, preparing everything she might need for a future in an unknown land, saying farewell to her mother and sisters whom she might never see ever again. Now she could catch her breath. She could finally give little Katie all her attention. She could nurse her in the privacy of the cabin with no interruptions. When the weather was good, she might sit out on the deck and watch the waves. She played with Captain Rodgers’s Scottish terrier, Oscar, who had made eleven transatlantic voyages and whose mate had a litter of three puppies during the voyage: “When my arms were tired with nursing, I had only to lay my baby on my cloak on deck, and tell Oscar to watch her, and the good dog would lie down by her and suffer her to tangle his long curls in her little hands in the most approved baby fashion, without offering the least opposition.”
The Moodies’ maidservant took care of all the laundry, which was done in an iron tub on deck