Cinders to Satin. Fern Michaels
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Mothers try to comfort their wailing babes. In one place there is an old woman who was separated from her family. She just sits, Mum, so quiet, living in a world of her own. One of the sailors said she is German, and she cannot talk to anyone or understand them.
Above us on this ship are the cabins, and they are all filled. It costs dear to travel in such luxury. Twenty-five pounds! Why would anyone who had that much money want to go to America?
Mr. Thatcher says there was a search for stowaways yesterday, just before we left the Mersey River for the open sea. First there was a roll call, and each ticket had to be presented as the name was called. I did not hear my name called because I was below deck (that is what the sailors call the steerage area where I am) taking care of Mrs. Thatcher. But Mr. Thatcher answered for me with my ticket. Afterward, he told us, the sailors and the ticket broker’s clerk went below with lanterns and long poles to search for stowaways. They turned barrels in case someone was hiding inside. With long poles they poked in dark corners and the piles of bedclothes. Three stowaways were found! Mr. Thatcher said they took a terrible beating from the crew and were thrown overboard into small boats to be taken back to the docks. Mum, what am I doing here?
Your everloving daughter,
Callandre
Ten days later Callie had a neat stack of letters ready to be posted to Peggy when she arrived in New York. She had just written that she didn’t know which was worse—the crowded conditions or the constant wetness. Since leaving Liverpool, they had enjoyed few hours of sunshine or clear weather. Clouds hung close over the Yorkshire, seeming to settle in an eternal pall over the tall masts. Drizzle and fog penetrated even the warmest clothing and made the decks so slippery that Captain Bailey posted sailors at the entrance to the hatches and companionways to prevent passengers from coming above to escape the stench of vomit and excrement below. Dysentery was becoming epidemic aboard ship, and there were whispered fears of an outbreak of cholera.
Paddy was tolerating the journey better than Callie had expected. Beth was the one plagued by the constant motion of the ship. It seemed to Callie that the young woman lived on the peppermint that Patrick had purchased from a fellow passenger at an appalling price. Everything aboard ship was dear, and Callie was glad she had followed Uncle Jack’s instructions to buy coffee and beans and tea and dried peas. The ship’s staples, which every passenger was promised, were dispensed the first day of the crossing and again on the seventh. Most of the food was inedible—worms and vermin had nested in the flour, and the fatback was thick with mold and on the verge of being spoiled. Before the voyage was over, the meat would have to be thrown overboard and the damp flour sifted and sifted again until barely enough remained to keep a man for a week.
Through the long days Callie took Paddy into her charge, telling him stories and encouraging him to nibble on the hard biscuit and to drink enough water. She was touched by Patrick’s gentle ministrations to Beth. He was at once tender and solicitous, seeing to her every comfort. Several times in the past few days Beth had experienced alarming cramps in her lower back, and some of the women looked at her with piteous understanding. All expected Beth would come due before her time and that it would be a hard birth. Even Patrick seemed subdued, his sense of adventure dulled by worry for his wife.
Yet even between ships, as the sailors called steerage class, the Irish spirit opposed hardship. After the first few nights, revelry and song relieved the monotony. Beth was even able to smile when a fiddler began playing melancholy ballads and Patrick Thatcher lifted his voice in song. His sweet tenor when he sang the “Maid of Killee’” brought tears to the toughest of men, and Callie cried, remembering it was the song Thomas always sang to Peggy.
Dearest Mother,
It is now eighteen days into this hellish voyage. Mrs. Thatcher seems much improved and is able to sip tea and a peas porridge I made with a precious bit of fatback. Little Paddy is my concern. His cheeks are ever flushed with fever, and his eyes burn brighter than coals. Three days, it is said, until we reach New York.
The weather is much improved, and there is sunshine and fair breezes. Today the ship’s doctor came below and cursed the stink and blamed the filth for the eleven passengers who died of the dysentery. Sailors brought down barrels of sea water and lye, and we were ordered to scrub and scrape and air the bedding. There was a great hullaballoo when the men were ordered to go on deck to air their clothes and wash themselves. The women attended these duties while the men were above. Grateful we are for this bit of good weather. It was the first I had heard of quarantine, and we must all be prepared for the doctor and the government inspector. Our first stop will be a place called Tompkinsville on Staten Island where we must pass inspection for disease. No amount of scrubbing will ever rid this ship of its stink!
Captain Bailey was preparing the Yorkshire to pass muster. Ships were generally cleaned for the first and only time just before entering port. Emigrants were made to scrub the steerage with sand, rinse it down, and then dry the timbers with pans of hot coals from the galley in an attempt to fool government officials into thinking that a clean and prosperous voyage had been made.
New York was fearful of ship fever, smallpox, and cholera, and the city was lucky to have escaped with no great epidemic such as had struck Quebec, Canada. Harking back to quarantine laws passed in colonial times, health officials set up a marine hospital on Staten Island, and all vessels coming into New York were required to anchor in the quarantine area and await inspection.
The quarantine ground was a stretch of bay marked by two buoys approximately one mile to the north and to the south. Those who died in quarantine were buried on the shore in trenches. The ground was soapstone rock, which was dug out by pick and shovel and broken into pieces to cover the coffins. This porous covering allowed the stink of rotting bodies to surface.
The Yorkshire’s captain had every reason to allay the suspicions of the government doctors. If disease was found aboard his ship, the passengers were sent into the hospital and the ship would be quarantined for thirty days. From Captain Bailey’s experience, those could be thirty days of hell. Twice before the Yorkshire had been grounded in quarantine; he knew what conditions loomed before him.
He also knew that the quarantine was a farce. Twice a week friends and family could visit those being detained at the hospital, and hundreds came and went on ferry boats between the island and the city. Rags and discarded bedding from Tompkinsville were sold to ragpickers and peddlers and found their way into the city before nightfall. Hundreds of emigrants awaiting clearance dug hovels for themselves on the thirty acres of hospital grounds rather than risk being contaminated within the filthy, overcrowded buildings where health care was at a minimum. Many ships failed inspection for unsanitary conditions only to have their passengers held “for their good as well as native Americans” in conditions far worse.
An old salt as well as an experienced businessman, Captain Bailey realized all too well the economic reasons for holding a thousand people at a time in relative captivity. While detained at Tompkinsville, emigrants needed to purchase the necessities of life: coffee, tea, and food stuffs. Cook pots, blankets, medicines, preventatives, and the like were offered at outrageous prices by the bands of peddlers and hawkers who paid the health officers a generous stipend to be “allowed” to ply their trade in Tompkinsville.
Callie craned her neck to see over Patrick’s shoulder as the Yorkshire sailed through the narrows. To the right was the low, flat land of New York City, buildings and wharves clearly visible along the harbor where ships’ masts on South Street stood like a never-ending forest. To the right were the ancient, crumbling walls of Fort Wadsworth, and beyond that, hundreds of ships lying at anchor. She heard the order to weigh anchor, and the sails reefed. The Yorkshire bobbed in the choppy waters of Upper Bay like a cork on a string. All eyes were turned to the Island of Manhattan, the place of their future, the hope of their new beginning. Tears brimmed, and all wondered if the great city of the western world would swallow them in one greedy gulp. Or would they find the promised land?
Hardly a spit away from Manhattan at the narrows was the shore of Staten Island, a narrow beachfront from which rocky ledges rose into shallow cliffs.