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The events of the passage may be given paucis verbis. We had nine accouchements in the steerage amongst the emigrants, some of them premature from violent sea-sickness, and seven deaths all children. Our deaths, as I have said, were confined to the children. The adults kept free from fever; an astonishing fact, when the confinement and closeness of a steerage birth is taken into account.
I told the fiddler he was a happy man, carrying happiness about with him in his fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact. "It is a privilege," I said. He thought a while upon the word, turning it over in his Scots head, and then answered with conviction, "Yes, a privilege." That night I was summoned by "Merrily danced the Quaker's Wife" into the companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5.
It appeared the old pioneers had in few cases attained a comfortable fortune for their old age. "I know," he added, "that your friend Colonel Pendleton has dropped a good deal of money over in Europe. Somebody told me that he actually was reduced to take a steerage passage home. It looks as if he might gamble it's an old Californian complaint."
Let me pause for a minute to look out over the sea sparkling in the sun, or to gaze at a sailor going aloft to the gaff-topsails, or running out the bowsprit, and I am sure to hear the hateful voice, "'Ere, you, 'Ump, no sodgerin'. I've got my peepers on yer." There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the gossip is going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight.
Several men of our group were now called to work, and I was ordered below to bring up a hammock, and swing it in the steerage. I was vexed, as I would have given anything to have helped to welcome the whaleboat back. When the odd jobs I had been called to were done with, and I returned to the deck, it was just too late to see her hauled up.
"The deaths on board ship show whether they were seamen or passengers, and the passengers are marked as cabin and steerage. But after landing it was impossible to keep an account of classes." Brandon carefully ran his eye down the long list, and read each name. Those for which he looked did not appear. At last he came to the list of those who had died on shore.
"A hundred dollars for the steerage." When Joe heard this his heart sank within him. It seemed to be the death-blow to his hopes. He had but fifty dollars, or thereabouts, and there was no chance whatever of getting the extra fifty. "Couldn't I pay you fifty dollars now and the rest as soon as I can earn it in California?" he pleaded. "We don't do business in that way."
The survivors from the Daphne being also ordered home to stand their trial for the loss of that vessel, I thought I could not do better than secure one of the remaining berths in the Lilian's cabin the men being accommodated in the steerage. Thus we had the mutual pleasure of each other's society all the way home.
In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but three! This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety, since he was travelling with her. The steerage stewardess was indignant with him, the doctor regarded him with suspicion. The first-cabin passengers, who made up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and often enquired of him about his charge.
The quarter-deck, it is true, forms a sort of local distinction, and the poor creatures in the steerage seem the rejected of Providence for the time being; but all who know life will readily comprehend that the pele-mele of the cabins can seldom offer anything very enticing to people of refinement and taste.
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