by Sally Denton
Passengers were expected to rise at six a.m., then clean their berths and throw all garbage overboard; they were to air their bedding twice a week before morning prayer. After prayer, the passengers would return to their personal quarters—furnished by the emigrants themselves with beds and bedding and all cooking utensils—to prepare breakfast. After the meal they would spend the day writing letters, reading, and entertaining themselves. A large “supper” was served around noon, tea at three p.m., and a small meal around six p.m. At eight p.m., prayers were again offered, after which the emigrants would retire for the night.
Lectures were scheduled for the adults and classes set up for the children, with regular church services to be held on Sundays. The management and harmony of the Mormon ships were in great contrast to so many of the overcrowded, chaotic expeditions of the day, prompting Charles Dickens to note “the perfect order and propriety of all their social arrangements.” Under the logistical direction of Brigham Young, the Mormon emigration became legendary for its discipline and control. The swift punishment of apostates, or dissidents, ensured that only the most tenacious, most loyal would be gathered to Zion.
On January 11 the ship was towed out into the Mersey River, where the sails were unfurled and the captain waited for a “fair wind” to carry the ship into the sea a few miles away. But the ship was stuck there for days as heavy winds blew against it, pushing it backward—“the ship rolls as badly as if she were off the North Foreland Cape in a gale,” Jean Rio wrote. Then those aboard waited for the winds to shift in their favor. On January 23, at ten a.m., a tug hauled the ship out into the Irish Sea. Now, it seemed, the journey across the Atlantic would begin. But instead the passengers faced more wind “dead against us,” so that nearly everyone on board was seasick. “We who have hitherto escaped are obliged to hold on to anything that comes in our way in order to keep our feet,” Jean Rio wrote.
The next day the winds continued, with all but ten persons on board violently ill. “Myself, I am happy to say, with Eliza, are in the minority,” wrote Jean Rio. With the ship roiling end on end, the passengers were seized with a paralyzing fear. Such fear was not unfounded, with shipwrecks and vanishing vessels all too common. “As to myself,” Jean Rio wrote, “the sea has never had any terrors.” But the darkness and creaking that pervaded the ship at night, the vomiting passengers and crying children, the agitated sailors and wind-whipped sails unnerved even the most resolute of souls. One young woman went into labor as the sea hurled the helpless boat. When she delivered a healthy baby boy, after the most “dreadful night,” optimism was restored. The sacraments administered that Sunday brought new courage to a demoralized company.
Five days later they were in sight of the mountainous Irish coast, Dublin Bay filled with fishing boats and large ships. Finally, wrote Jean Rio, the winds had shifted, and escaping “this terrible Irish Sea” seemed imminent. She spent most of her time caring for little Josiah, who was weak but not markedly worse than at the time of their departure. Praying fervently that the sea would bring a curative miracle for the child, she alternated between attending to him and to the rest of her wretchedly seasick children and her in-laws.
On February 2, nearly a month after departure, they reached the Atlantic Ocean, traveling at a speed of eleven miles an hour. On that day Jean Rio cooked their last piece of fresh meat and burrowed in for what now seemed an interminable journey as the winds ebbed and arose again. She carried Josiah to the deck to show him the school of porpoises playing around the boat. A Dutch ship that saluted them broke the solitude of the broad expanse. But just as quickly as the wind had risen, it fell into a dead calm. “The folks at home, I suppose, are sitting by a good fire while we are on deck enjoying the view of a smooth sea in a warm sunshine,” she wrote.
Captivated by the serenity, she struggled to keep her own spirits high: “I can hardly describe the beauty of this night, the moon nearly at its fullest with a deep blue sky studded with stars, the reflection of which makes the sea appear like an immense sheet of diamonds.” Walking the deck late in the evening without a bonnet or a shawl, she noted the contrast of a calm sea with an earlier day when “we were shivering between decks and not able to keep our feet without holding fast to something or other. And if we managed to get on the upper deck, the first salute was a great lump of water in the face.” She went on: “I have seen the mighty deep in its anger with our ship nearly on her beam ends, and I have seen it, as now, under a cloudless sky and scarcely a ripple on its surface, and I know not which to admire most. I cannot describe it as it ought to be described, but I feel most powerfully the force of these words: ‘the Mighty God,’ which Handel has so beautifully expressed in one of his chronicles.”
On February 15, at the sign of “squally weather,” Josiah took a turn for the worse. As the winds became violent, Jean Rio joined her family for supper on the deck, where they were barely able to hold on to their plates as “shoals of flying fish” erupted before them. Then, as the ship pitched against the waves, six-year-old Charles West fell down the hatchway, landing on his head. His injuries were so serious that Jean Rio feared he might die, and his disorientation was made worse by a seeping eye inflammation that sealed his eyelids shut.
A week later Charles was still suffering, but it was her youngest who had sunk rapidly into death. At five-thirty p.m. on February 22, “my very dear little Josiah breathed his last.” Jean Rio felt that God had intervened to end her child’s suffering. She beseeched the captain to let her “retain his little body until tomorrow, when it will be committed to the deep nearly a thousand miles from land, there to remain until the word goes forth for the sea to give up its dead.”
Devastated by the loss, she faltered briefly in her stoicism. She was shaken by the reality that she would not be able to take her family “safely through to the city in the tops of the mountains,” in a reference to the Biblical Isaiah: “Now it shall come to pass in the latter days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the tops of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow to it.” The child’s body was removed to a cabin under the forecastle, where the older males of her family kept vigil over it throughout the night.
Jean Rio arose at dawn the next morning, a bright and clear Sunday she described as “beautiful.” Her brother-in-law Jeremiah and the ship’s second mate sewed “the body of our dear little fellow ready for burial,” encasing the boy in a canvas shroud. Attached to his feet was a mass of coal sufficient to sink the shroud to the bottom of the ocean.
At eleven o’clock, Jean Rio heard the tolling of the ship’s bell announcing the time had come. With her pen, she noted in her diary that the ship was at “44⁄14 west longitude, 25 ⁄ 13 north latitude.” She then went on deck for the burial of her last-born son. “This is my first severe trial after leaving my native land,” she wrote. “But the Lord has answered my prayer in this one thing: that if it was not His will to spare my boy to reach his destined home with us, that He would take him while we were on the sea. For I would much rather leave his body in the ocean than bury him in a strange land and leave him there.”
As quickly as the calm had appeared, the sea turned tempestuous again. Jean Rio awakened the following morning to a dense fog enveloping the ship and a torrential rainstorm that dropped four inches of water in five minutes. The crew scrambled to bring in the sails and ordered all passengers below deck. For an hour the ship rolled against the waves.
By the next day Charles was able to open his eyes into tiny slits, and the bandages on his head were removed. Without meat for nearly a month, some of the Mormon men decided to kill one of the porpoises swimming alongside the ship. They struck a five-foot-long dolphin with a plank and hauled it on board. After it was skinned and cut into servings, one of them presented Jean Rio with a piece. But she was unable to eat it, finding its coarseness and dark color unappealing.
For days, storms and hot weather dogged the ship. The sea was covered with foam
and gulfweed. Only the vision of flying fish and the ever-changing sky broke the monotony. “Our ship is the center of an immense circle, bounded only by the clouds,” Jean Rio wrote. “All is grand and beautiful and fully repays me for the inconvenience of a sea voyage.” Now, nearly six weeks at sea, the passengers had settled into a routine and life proceeded in its ordinariness: a baby was born, couples were married, disputes arose and were mediated. A bugle sounded at six o’clock every morning, and after breakfast, prayer, and the required chores were completed, the converts broke into small groups to play music or “gossip so the days pass along.” They had all acquired what the sailors called their sea legs, and Jean Rio prided herself in being able to “walk about the ship” regardless of the weather. She began to take pleasure in the mercurial swells she called “awful, yet grand.” In her diary she compared the waves to “the boiling of an immense kettle, covered with white foam, while the roaring of the winds and waves was like the bellowing of a thousand wild bulls.”
Though many on board were terrified, she remained dauntless. The only inconvenience, she noted, was the aching in her bones from the “incessant motion.” The fact that the headwinds had driven them back hundreds of miles broke the spirit of many, but she relished the entire adventure: “I could only look, wonder and admire, for through all our literal ups and downs I have felt no fear.”
The collective mood improved on March 9, as the ship passed the Bahamas and the expectation of their soon reaching America grew. The harsh winds shifted to cool breezes, and the cerulean hues of the Caribbean had a tranquilizing effect on the company, whose nerves had been especially frayed after the excommunication of one of their elders for “inconsistent conduct.” Elder William Booth, who had conducted the funeral service for little Josiah, had had sexual relations with Sister Thorn, the wife of a fellow elder, and this “deeply grieved” her husband and shocked the Saints who had entrusted their spiritual salvation to this man. “We all hope he will soon be able to forget her entirely,” Jean Rio wrote of the aggrieved Elder Thorn. Then, three of the more respected women in the company were excommunicated for “levity of behavior with some of the officers of the ship.”
Now the Caribbean torridity blasted the passengers, with “nearly half of our company affected more or less with the prickly heat.” The ship’s captain provided a large tub of fresh water for “dipping” the children, who were covered from head to toe with an irritating rash. “The men amuse themselves after another fashion,” Jean Rio wrote. “They put on a thin pair of drawers and pour buckets of water over each other.”
On the evening of March 10 they caught their first glimpse of a stationary, revolving light. Passing within three miles of what Jean Rio identified as the Island of Great and Little Isaacs and Green Turtle Island—now-defunct names for islands off the coast of Cuba—they celebrated the first sight of civilization they had had in nearly ten weeks. The lighthouse was situated on an island forty miles long, an uninhabited stretch except for a harbor where dozens of small schooners were anchored.
“Passed Buch Island, also Double-Headed Shot,” Jean Rio wrote in her diary on March 12. “This is not exactly an island but a long chain of rocks.” The ship entered the Gulf of Mexico two days later, and from that point forward the climate was “immensely hot.” She counted seventeen sailboats of various sizes, elegant against the aquamarine bay. “I have often wondered and read of the beauty of Italian skies, but I am sure they cannot exceed in splendor that which, at this moment, arches over the Gulf of Florida, or Mexico, as it is mostly determined.”
The next day, the crew measured the fresh water on board the ship and calculated that there remained a twenty-three-day supply. Despite the delays on the open sea, the company was well supplied, and there was ample water for the final jaunt across the gulf to New Orleans. Jean Rio was taken with the scenery and the fact that they had almost arrived, and she refused to succumb to the pessimism and apprehension infecting many on board. “At seven in the evening a violent squall came on,” she wrote, “driving most of the passengers below. Myself, with a few others, remained on deck, bidding defiance to the rain for the sake of enjoying the night of lightning which was very beautiful, seeming to illuminate one half of the horizon at once.” Even though the night was as rough as “when skirting the Bay of Biscay,” she stayed up to watch the light show. When the rest of her family fell prey to seasickness, she remained absorbed in the momentous occasion. “To my astonishment,” she wrote upon awakening the following morning, “the sun was rising on our starboard now,” and the water was “a perfect mirror.”
At noon on March 18, a steamship came out to meet the boat and pull it in to anchor at the island of Belize. “A boat has come alongside us loaded with oysters, which have found a ready market,” she wrote. The houses in the village were reflected perfectly in the water. “There is a small schooner lying at anchor just by the landing place, and every rope and block in her rigging is seen reversed exactly as if standing on an immense looking glass.”
The next morning a steamer took the George W. Bourne in tow, pulling the battered but intact vessel 110 miles up the Mississippi River to New Orleans. “America at last!” Jean Rio wrote upon arrival in the city two days later.
To describe the scenery on each side of this mighty stream needs a better pen than mine. No description that I have ever read has done it anything like justice. Sugar and cotton plantations abound. The houses of the planters are built in cottage style, but large, with verandas on every side and beautiful gardens. At a little distance are the Negro huts, from thirty to fifty on each plantation. They are built of wood with a veranda along the front, painted white. And most have either jasmine or honeysuckle growing over them. Each cottage has a long piece of garden ground attached to it. In general appearance they are certainly very far superior to the cottages inhabited by the poor in England. Groves of orange trees are very numerous, the perfume from which is very delightful as the breeze wafts it toward us. Thousands of peach and plum trees are here growing wild and are now in full blossom. We saw plenty of wild geese, also foxes and a raccoon or two. Storks fly here in numbers, over our heads, and settle down on the riverside and stretch out their long necks, looking at us as if in astonishment. There is an endless variety of landscape. The only thing that detracts from its beauty is the sign of the hundreds of Negroes at work in the sun. Oh, slavery, how I hate thee!
Fifty-six days after clearing the Liverpool harbor, on March 20, 1851, the ship had reached America. Elder Gibson proudly wrote in his official report that no company of Saints had ever crossed the Atlantic with fewer catastrophes: “This pleasant voyage was marked by one marriage, three births, two converts among crew members, and the death of a small boy who was dying of consumption when he boarded the ship.”
Church officials cautioned the emigrants about swindlers who used what one writer described as “ardent spirits” to lower the Saints’ guard, and especially about the rich French cuisine that could wreak havoc on the stomachs of those who had subsisted for almost two months on little more than biscuits and oatmeal.
Eager to disembark, Jean Rio would spend the next two days at an opulent residence in the “Paris of the Bayous”—at that time the world’s fourth-ranking port, second only to New York City in the United States, and one of the wealthiest cities in the country. She carried a letter of introduction from her friend “Miss Longhurst of Grover Street, Bedford Square” to Miss Longhurst’s sister, Mrs. Blime, “the wife of a French gentleman residing here.” Bursting into tears at the sight of a countrywoman, Mrs. Blime gave Jean Rio a guided tour in a horse-drawn carriage through the wide but unpaved city streets.
“The roads themselves are not kept in order as they are in London,” Jean Rio wrote. “Just now the weather is hot and dry, so in crossing them you sink in dust up to the ankles. In wet seasons, I am told, they are one continuous canal. Great lumps of stone are placed across the ends of the streets, about two feet under, to enable foot passengers to go fr
om one side to another.” It was the first time she had seen a city laid out in “exact squares, crossing each other at right angles. The spaces between the streets are called blocks.”
The flavor and culture of the city was unmistakably French, though the population seemed evenly split between the French and the “Negroes.” Never before in all her world travels had she seen a city so conspicuously divided between the rich and the poor. Palatial estates lined Bourbon and Royal streets, while the ubiquitous ramshackle slave quarters dotted the outlying areas. She was particularly taken with the attire of both the haves and the have-nots.
The higher class of citizens—there is no nobility in America, though never was there a people fonder of titles: colonels, majors, captains, judges, and squires being as plentiful as blackberries—the Upper-Ten dress very handsomely in European style, the ladies especially, and they dress their slaves even more expensively. I saw slave girls following their mistresses in the streets, clad in frocks of embroidered silk or satin, and elegantly worked muslin trousers, either blue or scarlet, Morocco walking shoes and white silk stockings, with a French headdress similar to that worn by the Savoyards, composed of silk with all the colors of the rainbow co-mingled. Jewelry glitters on their dusky fingers (which are plainly seen through their lace gloves) and in their ears. Their only business in the streets seems to be to follow the ladies who own them and carry their reticule.
Bonnets are not worn, but a queer-looking thing made of muslin, something like the Quakers’ bonnets except that the front is not rounded off. They are stiffened with cane or strips of pasteboard. The front is twelve inches deep, with a horseshoe crown, and curtain half a yard in depth, and when on the head answers the purpose of bonnet and shawl. I thought them the most odd-looking things I had seen, but was soon glad to avail myself of the comfort of one in this blazing sun.
