Mass Migration and Safety at Sea
The greatest episode in human migration took place between 1815 and 1930, when 56 million Europeans emigrated overseas. The countries with the highest emigration were Great Britain (11.4 million), Italy (9.9 million), Ireland (7.3 million), Austria-Hungary (5 million), Germany (4.8 million), and Spain (4.4 million). English-speaking countries received the lion’s share—32.6 million went to the United States, 5 million to Canada, and 3.4 million to Australia. Less well known is the story of immigration to South America. Brazil took in 4.4 million Europeans and 6.5 million sailed for Argentina, where it was said that “Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Peruvians from the Incas, and Argentines from the ships.” Cuba’s population also exploded in the nineteenth century, leaping from 150,000 in 1763 to 1.3 million in 1860. The main sources of this growth were slaves, Chinese laborers, loyalists fleeing independence movements elsewhere in the Spanish Americas, and Spaniards. In addition to Europeans, who were by and large voluntary emigrants, about a million East Indian coolies were shipped to the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, and elsewhere in the British Empire; a quarter million Chinese reached Cuba and Peru; and the Japanese government helped arrange the transportation of about 165,000 laborers to Brazil, which was home to the second largest population of overseas Japanese after Manchuria.
Despite minor improvements, such as limiting the number of people that could be carried per registered ton, shipboard conditions for most passengers on most routes worsened through the first half of the nineteenth century, and reached their nadir during the mass exodus from Ireland during the Great Hunger. In the 1840s, about 1.3 million Irish emigrated to the United States, most in what were grimly dubbed “coffin ships.” In 1846 alone, more than 20 percent of all passengers died before reaching North America. A New York doctor who visited the sailing ship Ceylon the next year testified to a Senate committee on the conditions he found:
We passed through the steerage … but the indescribable filth, the emaciated, half-nude figures, many with the eruption [of boils or rashes] disfiguring their faces, crouching in the bunks or strewed over the decks and cumbering the gangways, broken utensils and debris of food spread recklessly about, presented a picture of which neither pen nor pencil can convey a full idea.… Some were just rising from their berths for the first time since leaving Liverpool, having been suffered to lie there during the entire voyage wallowing in their own filth.
The rate of illness aboard British ships was more than three times that on American or German ones. Following American precedent, British legislation of 1849 set minimum space requirements at 14 to 30 square feet (1.3 to 2.8 square meters) per passenger depending on the height of the deck, those on the orlop (lowest) deck being entitled to more space. Passenger berths could be no smaller than six feet by eighteen inches, and there could be no more than two tiers of bunks per deck. The practice of requiring passengers to supply their food for a six-week voyage began to change in 1830 when the city of Bremen legislated that ships provide passengers with cooked food. The British law of 1849 required that passengers be provided with three quarts of water daily as well as a weekly allowance of “2½ [pounds] of bread or biscuit (not inferior to navy biscuit), 1 lb. wheaten flour, 5 lbs. oatmeal, 2 lbs. rice, 2 ozs. tea, ½ lb. sugar, ½ lb. molasses.” By 1872 death rates fell to less than twelve per thousand aboard sailing ships, and to only one in a thousand on steamers, and these figures were halved again in the next five years. At this point, when virtually all transatlantic passengers traveled via steamship, all ship fares included food, although many passengers were still required to provide their own utensils and bedding.
Keeping order among passengers was a major problem aboard immigrant ships. Testifying before a legislative inquiry in New South Wales about whether the failure to segregate passengers by sex was “very injurious to the moral condition of the emigrants,” the second mate of a German ship reported: “There were about forty girls on board, some of them not more than from ten to twelve years old, and I am sure, and can lay an oath upon it, that I know for certain that every one left the ship as a prostitute.… All the sailors, every one, had their girls in the forecastle.” The most common approach to prevent such extremes of perversion was to separate passengers according to familial status—families in one part of the ship, single people in another—and by sex. Men and women aboard British ships on the three-month passage to Australia were segregated as early as 1834, but no similar restriction applied on the North Atlantic until 1852.
Such reforms as were undertaken tended to benefit European emigrants, but others were less fortunate. When the slave trade was abolished new opportunities for exploited labor opened in the coolie trade, the shipment of unskilled Indian and Chinese laborers, which lasted until after World War I. Britain was initially the leading carrier of coolies, but was superseded by France and Spain, while the United States was fourth. Technically indentured servants, coolies were slaves in all but name, kidnapped or duped into leaving China, and, like the indentured English before them, often worked to death by their masters. (Fifty percent of the coolies in Cuba did not survive their term of indenture.) Conditions endured by coolies were even worse than those encountered by impoverished European immigrants. The mortality rate was about 12 percent, but individual ships could lose 40 to 50 percent, and the trade was repeatedly compared with that in slaves, most eloquently by Frederick Douglass, a former slave himself, who described it as
almost as heart-rending as any that attended the African slave trade. For the manner of procuring Coolies, for the inhumanity to which they are subjected, and of all that appertains to one feature of this new effort to supply certain parts of the world with cheap labor, we cannot do better than to refer our readers to the quiet and evidently truthful statement … of one of the Coolies rescued from the ship Dolores Ugarte, on board which ship six hundred Coolies perished by fire, deserted and left to their fate by captain and crew.
Mutinies aboard coolie ships were not uncommon, especially if the coolies believed they were bound for the guano-covered Chincha Islands off Peru. Battened belowdecks, mutineers often resorted to setting fires and, when allowed on deck, attacking the crew. In the case of the Dolores Ugarte, it was reported that after an ineffectual attempt to douse a mutineers’ fire the captain abandoned ship. One hatch was opened but no more than sixty people survived.
Such callous behavior aligned perfectly with Alexander Falconbridge’s observation that “a delight in giving torture to a fellow creature is the natural tendency” of the slave trade. This also helps explain the indifference and depravity evident in contemporary testimony about the passenger trades of the nineteenth century. The contempt shown by crews for the people in their charge, whether aboard the Arctic or the Ceylon, can be attributed to the fact that no one cared very much for sailors. In 1854, an American newspaper estimated that in the course of eighteen months, losses occurred at the rate of “one vessel lost every eleven hours; one stranded every forty-four hours; one abandoned every seventy-five hours, and one sailing and never afterwards heard from, every ten days.” Between 1830 and 1900, 20 percent of British mariners perished at sea, and under a law passed in 1870, sailors who signed on for a voyage and then sought to break their contract for fear the ship was unseaworthy could be jailed for three months, as more than sixteen hundred were in the next two years. Even after the peak of the desperate, famine-fueled migration to North America, an estimated one in six sailing ships in the passenger trades sank en route, and in 1873–74 more than four hundred ships and five hundred lives were lost just on the coast of the United Kingdom.
In thirty years, ship losses in Britain had doubled, driving up insurance rates and leading to hideous loss of life, and Parliament at long last legislated minimum standards for the safe operation of ships. One of the most far-reaching developments was the adoption of load lines showing the depth to which a ship could be loaded safely. In the 1830s Lloyd’s Register had recommended that ships have a freeboard of
three inches for every foot of depth of hold. (The earliest ship classification society, Lloyd’s was formed in 1760 as the Register Society at the coffee shop of Edward Lloyd; it published the first register of ships four years later.) By the mid-nineteenth century, the optional “Lloyd’s rule” was inadequate to stem the losses due to overloading. Parliamentarian Samuel Plimsoll maintained that because the value of a ship and its cargo for insurance purposes was whatever the owner said it was, insurance encouraged shipowners to send worn-out and overloaded ships to sea without regard to the safety of either passengers or crews, much less cargoes. Shipowners framed their opposition to reform in terms of the new mantra of free trade, the triumph of which was the repeal of the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts in 1850. Greed had replaced disease as the greatest threat to passengers and crews. As a supporter of shipowners who rejected regulation and oversight of their management put it, “They do not want a fussy, meddlesome, crochetty interference with their business, [nor] an artificial stimulus given to foreign trade by the imposition of needless, frivolous and embarrassing restrictions upon their trade.” Nonetheless, Plimsoll and others persevered and after two decades of lobbying passed the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, the first modern load line legislation. Where the line should be fixed was not determined until 1894, and other countries were slow to follow Britain’s lead; Germany passed legislation in 1903 and the United States not until 1924. Six years later the international Load Line Convention of 1930 established uniform regulations governing how deeply ships could be loaded depending on where they were sailing and the season.
Plimsoll Mark, or Load Line. The distance between the deck line and the mark to which a ship can be loaded safely is called freeboard, which varies according to when and where the vessel is sailing. Tropical (T), summer (S), and winter (W) are the marks that must not be submerged when the vessel is trading in a designated tropical, summer, or winter zone. Additional consideration is given to vessels sailing in freshwater (F) or carrying lumber (L). Winter, North Atlantic (WNA) designates the most dangerous waters—yet among the busiest—routinely used by commercial shipping. The initials on either side of the circle at the center of the mark indicate the classification society under whose rules the ship was designed and built. Here, LR stands for Lloyd’s Register.
Competition on the North Atlantic
Regardless of the dangers attendant on sea travel, people were going to sea in ever greater numbers and not just to emigrate or for business but to travel for travel’s sake. The year after passage of the Merchant Shipping Act, Katherine Ledoux published Ocean Notes for Ladies, a work best remembered for her macabre observation, “Accidents, too, and loss of life are possible at sea, and I have always felt that a body washed ashore in good clothes, would receive more respect and kinder care than if dressed in those only fit for the rag bag.” Off-putting though such advice might sound today, there was a demand for guides to shipboard etiquette and the practicalities of going to sea. In an age of congested and soulless air travel, it is difficult to conjure the public fascination generated by ocean liners, especially between the 1890s and 1950s, when the size of a nation’s merchant fleet was taken as a barometer of national greatness and the launch of new ships was followed as avidly as that of new consumer electronics today. Ships were a manifestation of a country’s industrial and engineering prowess, and while 51 percent of the world’s merchant tonnage sailed under the Red Duster, as the British merchant ensign is known, other countries competed for bragging rights especially in the elite transatlantic passenger trade.
The British-built, three-masted ship Tusitala of 1883 and the German-built Cunard Line passenger ship Berengaria, commissioned in 1913, outward bound from New York around 1930. The last generation of deepwater working sail and the heyday of the ocean liner—which provided regularly scheduled trips across all the major oceans, especially the North Atlantic—all but coincided. Square-riggers remained commercially competitive in some trades through the 1930s, while the engine-only steamship dominated long-distance routes from the 1890s until the coming of the passenger jet in the 1960s. From a Cunard Line brochure for the Berengaria in the Norman H. Morse Ocean Liner Collection; courtesy of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland.
By the turn of the century, British primacy on the North Atlantic was under threat from both Germany and the United States. Foremost of the German shipping executives of the time was Albert Ballin, who eventually became general director of the Hamburg-America Line (Hapag). Although a Jew of modest origins, Ballin had a steadfast belief in Germany’s maritime potential that earned him the friendship of the maritime-minded Kaiser Wilhelm II. By 1900 he had helped make Hapag the largest shipping line in the world, with ninety-five oceangoing ships serving a diversified portfolio of routes around the world, and by 1914 twice as many ships served 350 regular ports of call. As remarkable, the world’s second largest company was the Bremen-based Norddeutscher Lloyd. Although its operations were global, by the 1880s the company was supreme on the North Atlantic, where it carried 816,000 passengers between 1881 and 1891, 50 percent more than Hapag, and more than Britain’s White Star and Cunard combined. In 1897 it ushered in a new generation of superliners with the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The first of only fourteen ships ever built with four funnels, this was the first non-British ship to set a transatlantic speed record since the Collins Line’s Baltic in 1854, winning the “blue riband” with an average speed of more than twenty-two knots.f
In 1902, American financier J. P. Morgan mounted a more complex challenge to Britain’s merchant marine with the founding of the International Mercantile Marine, a conglomerate that acquired a controlling interest in five major shipping companies and forged revenue-sharing agreements with Hapag and Norddeutscher Lloyd. In response to Morgan’s acquisition of the White Star Line, the British government offered Cunard a loan of £2.6 million for the construction of two passenger liners, with an annual subsidy for each, on condition that the company remain wholly British for twenty years and that the ships could be requisitioned in wartime. The result was construction of the Lusitania and Mauretania, the largest and most luxurious liners of their day. The sister ships traded honors for the fastest transatlantic ship until 1909, when the Mauretania set a westbound record that stood for twenty years; eastbound, she beat her own record seven times. A U-boat sank the Lusitania in 1915 but the Mauretania remained in service until 1935.
By this time, the opulence of the gilded-age ocean liner had given way to a sleeker aesthetic. The first vessel to employ on a grand scale the ocean liner style (later known as art deco) characteristic of the interwar transatlantic fleet was the French Line’s Ile de France of 1927. Her spacious public rooms included a three-deck-high restaurant, a four-deck-high grand foyer, and a Gothic chapel adorned with fourteen pillars. And for the benefit of her Prohibition-weary American passengers she sported what was thought to be the longest bar in any passenger ship. By the end of the decade, the prewar rivalry on the North Atlantic was in full swing. In 1929, Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Bremen and Europa captured the blue riband, an achievement especially notable because they were the first major civilian ships built with bulbous bows, originally developed by the American naval architect David Taylor in 1912. Although such a rounded appendage below the waterline looks ungainly, the bulbous bow deflects water and thereby reduces resistance and improves speed, fuel efficiency, and stability. The bulbous bow remained something of a novelty until after the Bremen’s launch, but it did not become a standard feature in hull design until after World War II.
Following the success of the Ile de France, the French Line determined to build the largest and most beautiful ship in the world, the design of which fell to naval architect Vladimir Yourkevitch, then an émigré laboring in obscurity in an automobile factory, but who had been responsible for the hull form of the Russian navy’s innovative Borodino-class battlecruisers of 1912. Yourkevitch’s design resulted in the
Normandie. German engineers overseeing trials of the Russian-designed French ship pronounced it “unimprovable.” In addition to a bulbous bow, Normandie’s hull had an “unmistakably and distressingly pear-shaped” sectional profile amidships. Above the waterline, to heighten the ship’s streamlined appearance, Yourkevitch enclosed all the deck machinery and designed the three ovoid funnels with a slight rake and in diminishing size. Ignoring the economic devastation of the Great Depression, the Normandie was intended for a deluxe trade, and no two of the four hundred first-class rooms were decorated alike. As Ballin had done with the Vaterland (later the United States Line’s Leviathan) in 1913, rather than allow the funnels to interrupt the ship’s grand public spaces—the air-conditioned dining room was longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—Yourkevitch used split uptakes to create massive open areas, and from center stage of the ship’s theater, the first on a ship, one could see daylight beyond the open promenade of the first-class grill room 150 meters aft. The Normandie was being converted to a troopship in 1942 when she caught fire and capsized at her berth in New York. She is survived by her great rival, Cunard’s faster but somewhat dowdier Queen Mary, which entered service a year after the Normandie and is today a floating hotel in Long Beach, California.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 74
