Free The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 by Pierre Berton Page B

which the eye did not prefer to close. Everything was dirty, sticky and disagreeable to the touch. Every impression was offensive. Worse than this was the general air of immorality. For fifteen hours each day, I witnessed all around me this improper, indecent and forced mingling of men and women who were total strangers and often did not understand one word of the same language. People cannot live in such surroundings and not be influenced.…”
    These were the words of an American civil servant. Undoubtedly, the Slavic peasants, long used to cramped quarters, were less fastidious. To them, the real horror of the ocean crossing was not the lack of privacy but the storms that raged across the North Atlantic. One of these emigrants, Theodore Nemerski, has left a graphic account of hisown experiences aboard the ancient vessel Christiana in the spring of 1896. Nemerski was one of the first Galicians to be influenced by Professor Oleskow’s pamphlet O Emigratsii . He got a copy fresh from the press and with eight other members of his family boarded the ship at Hamburg in April. At first, the journey was bearable, but four days out of port, the storm broke:
    “Good Lord! What fear grips one here. You look, and here from the side there appears a great opening. The water has drawn back and the whole ship simply flies into that void, turning almost completely over on its side. And here all of a sudden a huge mountain with a great roar and clatter of the waves tears into the ship, spilling over the top onto the other side. This is no place to be!…escape inside.
    “Inside you find complete panic … all are silent … whispering prayers … awaiting the end.…
    “Some tied their eyes so as not to see this terror, while they hung onto the bed so they would not fall out. Suddenly water is coming in to the inside from the top, splashing from wall to wall. The people are in lament. Some cry, some complain: Did we need this? It was good for us to live in the old country. This is all on account of you … I listened to you and now we shall all perish.…”
    On the Arcadia , another ancient sailing craft with an auxiliary engine, the crew herded the passengers below and locked the hatches when the storm struck. Fifteen hundred Galicians clung to the four tiers of iron beds, praying and vomiting, the stench so ghastly that those stewards who ventured in were themselves taken sick. An old man and a child died before the storm abated, but that was not the end. The ship struck an iceberg, and when the hole in her side was repaired, the captain discovered he was beset – locked in the grip of the frozen ocean. All of the passengers were herded back up on deck and required to race from side to side – back and forth, back and forth – on signals from the ship’s whistle until the Arcadia was finally shaken free from her icy embrace. By this time, most of the baggage was soaked and ruined. One month after they had left their home villages, the hapless passengers finally landed at Quebec City.
    For those who were able to eat, the steerage food was generally execrable: filthy water, rotten herrings, dirty potatoes, rancid lard, smelly meat, eaten from unwashed dishes and cutlery. The staple meat was pork – not the best remedy for a queasy stomach. Thirty years after his ordeal, one immigrant wrote: “To this moment I cannot face the warm smell of pork without sweat starting on my forehead.”Another, who travelled steerage on the Bavaria in 1904, claimed that he was served pig’s feet three times a day and “had visions of millions of pigs being sacrificed so that their feet could be given to the many emigrants leaving Europe.”
    The more fortunate travelled third class, which was a notch better than steerage, although it did no more than provide decently for the simplest human needs. As one woman put it, “to travel in anything worse than what is offered in the third class is to arrive at the journey’s end with a mind