The Amateur Emigrant, by Robert Louis Stevenson 9781474471954

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•T H E N E W E D I N B U R G H E D I T I O N O F T H E WOR K S OF ROBERT LOU IS STEV ENSON•

General Editors STEPHEN ARATA, RICHARD DURY, PENNY FIELDING, ANTHONY MANDAL

The Amateur Emigrant

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•T H E N E W E D I N B U R G H E D I T I O N O F T H E WOR K S OF ROBERT LOU IS STEV ENSON• to be complete in thirty-nine volumes Published so far

Prince Otto, edited by Robert P. Irvine Weir of Hermiston, edited by Gillian Hughes The Amateur Emigrant, edited by Julia Reid

In preparation

Kidnapped, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher St Ives, edited by Glenda Norquay More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, edited by Penny Fielding Short Stories IV: The Bottle Imp, Fables and Other Short Narratives, edited by William Gray Essays I: Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, edited by Robert-Louis Abrahamson Essays II: Familiar Studies, edited by Robert-Louis Abrahamson and Richard Dury Essays III: Memories and Portraits, edited by Alexander Thomson Essays IV: Uncollected Essays and Reviews, 1868–1879, edited by Richard Dury Essays V: Uncollected Essays, 1880–1894, edited by Lesley Graham The Silverado Squatters, edited by Julia Reid

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•T H E N E W E D I N B U R G H E D I T I O N O F T H E WOR K S OF ROBERT LOU IS STEV ENSON•

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General Editors

Stephen Arata Richard Dury Penny Fielding Anthony Mandal

Research Fellow

Lena Wånggren

Advisory Editor

Gillian Hughes

Editorial Board

Richard Ambrosini (University of Rome-III) Gerard Carruthers (University of Glasgow) Nicholas Frankel (Virginia Commonwealth University) Peter Garside (University of Edinburgh) Roslyn Jolly (University of New South Wales) Roger Luckhurst (University of London) Alison Lumsden (University of Aberdeen) Adrian Poole (University of Cambridge) Andrew Stauffer (University of Virginia) Kathryn Sutherland (University of Oxford) Chris Vanden Bossche (University of Notre Dame) Alexis Weedon (University of Bedfordshire)

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•ROBERT LOU IS STEV ENSON•

The Amateur Emigrant With Some First Impressions of America edited by Julia Reid

edinburgh university pr ess 2018

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© The University Court of the University of Edinburgh 2018 Edinburgh University Press The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh eh8 8pj Typeset in Adobe Arno Pro at the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, Cardiff University and the University of Edinburgh and printed and bound in Great Britain on acid-free paper at TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall isbn 978 0 7486 6974 5 (hb) 978 0 7486 6975 2 (epdf) 978 0 7486 9172 2 (epub) A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . ix Preface by the General Editors. . . . . . xiii List of Abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . xvii Chronology of Robert Louis Stevenson . . . xix Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . .   x xvii Composition . . . . . . . . . . . xxviii Suppression. . . . . . . . . . . xxxvii Partial Publication and Early Reception. . . xli Artistic Influences and Literary Contexts. . xlv Historical Contexts . . . . . . . . . xlix Afterlife and Influence. . . . . . . . li THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT Headnote . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . Part I. The Emigrant Ship The Second Cabin . . . . . . . . . Early Impressions. . . . . . . . . Steerage Scenes . . . . . . . . . . Steerage Types. . . . . . . . . . The Sick Man. . . . . . . . . . . The Stowaways . . . . . . . . . . Personal Experience and Review. . . . Part II. America: The Emigrant Train New York . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes by the Way to Council Bluffs . . . The Emigrant Train . . . . . . . . The Plains of Nebraska . . . . . . . The Desert of Wyoming . . . . . . . Fellow Passengers . . . . . . . . . Despised Races . . . . . . . . . . To the Golden Gates . . . . . . . .

2 3 7 13 20 28 41 49 60 73 84 95 102 105 109 113 117

Appendix Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . 121 vii

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contents

Essay on the Text. . . . . . . . . . . Composition . . . . . . . . . . . Manuscript . . . . . . . . . . . 1880 Galley Proofs . . . . . . . . . Suppression and Partial Publication . . . . Longman’s Magazine . . . . . . . . Across the Plains . . . . . . . . . . Edinburgh Edition . . . . . . . . . The Present Text. . . . . . . . . . Emendation List. . . . . . . . . . . End-of-Line Hyphens. . . . . . . . . Explanatory Notes. . . . . . . . . .

131 131 132 134 136 137 140 143 152 161 173 174

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Acknowledgements GENERAL EDITORS’ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The General Editors would like to express their thanks to The Royal Society of Edinburgh for their generous award of a Workshop Grant and an Arts and Humanities Major Research Grant which made it possible to establish the New Edinburgh Edition. A Research Associateship generously awarded by the Modern Humanities Research Association has been crucial for the continued work of the edition, and we are also greatly indebted to The John Liston Trust for a generous donation. The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland funded travel and the Moray Endowment Fund enabled digitization through an equipment grant. The edition has been supported in many ways by the Robert Louis Stevenson Club of Edinburgh including financial contributions towards the acquisition of images of manuscripts. The edition has benefited from an EU-funded internship programme administered at the University of Mainz and we would like to extend our thanks to Sigrid Rieuwerts. We would especially like to thank Roger S. Swearingen for advising and generously sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge of Stevenson, his works and his manuscripts. A large edition is always a collaboration across institutions and we acknowledge the support of the National Library of Scotland for their assistance with digitization and public events, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Huntingdon Library, the Archive of British Publishing and Printing at the University of Reading and the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum, St Helena, California. For their partnership in public events associated with the edition we are glad to thank the Edinburgh Writers’ Museum and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature. The Universities of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Virginia have supported the edition in many ways, and we would like to acknowledge the support and assistance of Jackie Jones and Edinburgh University Press Special thanks must to go Mr Tate Schieferle of Florida, the current representative of Stevenson’s family and owner of Stevenson’s surviving copyrights, for his interest and co-operation in the New Edinburgh Edition. ix

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acknowledgements VOLUME EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have incurred many debts during the preparation of this edition, and it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge the principal ones here. I have been enormously lucky to draw upon the editorial expertise and good counsel of Gill Hughes. Richard Dury has been characteristically generous with his knowledge and enthusiasm. Penny Fielding’s shrewd editorial advice, intellectual support and patience have guided me through the project and are much appreciated. Anthony Mandal helped greatly with the final preparation of the volume for publication. The Edinburgh office of the New Edinburgh Edition has provided indispensable support from start to finish. I am particularly grateful to Lena Wånggren, the Research Fellow, Sarah Ames, the Research Assistant, and Marina Held, Stefanie Grimm and Isabelle Stinner, the project interns. I am indebted, too, to the meticulous scholarship of other editors of Stevenson’s works, notably Roger Swearingen and Ernest Mehew. My thanks are due to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, for granting me the Frederick and Marion Pottle Fellowship in British Studies, which enabled me to transcribe the manuscript of The Amateur Emigrant. My archival research at the Beinecke was greatly facilitated by the librarians, especially Graham Sherriff, Moira Fitzgerald and Eva Guggemos. I would also like to thank the University of Leeds, for awarding me a valuable period of Arts Faculty Leave, and the National Humanities Center, where I was a Resident Associate during the final stages of preparing the edition. At the NHC, I thank especially Brooke Andrade and Sarah Harris for bibliographic assistance; Joel Elliott for help with the illustrations; and Karen Carroll for copy editing. Danni Corfield and Andrew Nash offered guidance at the Chatto & Windus Archive, housed in the Random House Group Archive at the University of Reading, and the archivists at the University of Glasgow Archive Services helped me to explore the Anchor Line collection. Tate Schieferle, the present representative of the Stevenson family, and copyright holder for the estate, has kindly granted permission to publish the manuscript of The Amateur Emigrant, and to quote and reproduce images from previously unpublished material. I am extremely grateful for this permission and, especially, for Tate Schieferle’s friendship and keen interest in the project. For permission to publish quotations and reproduce images from manuscript and printed material in its care, I should like to thank the x

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acknowledgements

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. I am also grateful to Bonhams auction house for permission to access and transcribe one previously missing manuscript page of The Amateur Emigrant; the Random House Group for permission to cite material from the Chatto & Windus Archive in the Random House Group Archive at Reading University, Special Collections, and at Rushden, Northamptonshire; and the University of Glasgow Archive Services for permission to cite material from the Anchor Line collection and to reproduce the photograph of the Devonia. The facsimile of the Dev­onia passenger list is reproduced courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration; and the map of the transatlantic railroad route is reproduced courtesy of Duke University Libraries. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary acknowledgement at the first opportunity. My colleagues at Leeds University, especially James Mussell, Francis O’Gorman, Jane Rickard, Richard Salmon and John Whale, have supported and encouraged me in many ways. Further afield, Roslyn Jolly, Alison Lumsden and Joseph Bristow offered valuable intellectual and practical advice. Towards the end of the project, April Masten and Vincent DiGirolamo provided perceptive comments on drafts. My greatest debt, as always, is to my family. Heartfelt thanks to Janet, Walter and Bryony for cheering me on; to Dan, for believing in the project, discussing ideas and reading countless drafts; and to Callum, Elspeth and Flora for all the joy and diversion.

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Preface by the General Editors In the thirty years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s death in 1894, no fewer than eight collected editions of his works were published. Even in an age when such projects were more common (and economically feasible) than they are now, that is an unusually high number, and it testifies to the endurance of Stevenson’s popularity over the first portion of the twentieth century. For the publishers involved, these were commercial rather than scholarly ventures, understandably so. Little effort was made to establish the accuracy of individual works. In most cases the editions reprinted texts that drew, either directly or at several removes, on the twenty-eight-volume Works of Robert Louis Steven­ son [Edinburgh Edition] (1894–98) overseen by Stevenson’s literary executor, Sidney Colvin. With good intentions and what now looks like questionable judgment, Colvin actively re-edited all of the works, altered some and suppressed others. He also had neither the means nor any compelling motivation to try to untangle the often complicated transmission history of many of the texts in his care. As a result, though the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson [Edinburgh Edition] gathered and made widely accessible nearly all of Stevenson’s numerous literary productions, it preserved them in forms that deviate in countless ways from what Stevenson actually wrote. The New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Steven­ son pays titular tribute to Colvin’s foundational assemblage. It aims, though, to provide what cannot be found in his or any subsequent collected edition, namely accurate texts for all of Stevenson’s substantial oeuvre. The New Edinburgh Edition is designed to appeal both to the general reader and the scholar. Each volume supplies attractive, uncluttered reading texts. Individual works are thoroughly annotated, allowing readers to grasp the full range of Stevenson’s allusions as well as to recover the myriad ways in which he responded to the contemporary world and his cultural heritage. Introductory essays trace composition and publication histories while providing contextual information designed to extend readers’ understanding and, we hope, enhance their appreciation. Textual essays describe the extant witness texts (e.g. manuscript, proof-sheet, periodical publication, single or multiple book editions) for each work as well as the relations among xiii

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them, while laying out the rationales for the copy texts chosen for the New Edinburgh Edition. In each volume, the textual apparatus provides a full listing of emendations and substantive variants. Overall, we trust that these volumes will help throw into higher relief Stevenson’s distinctive achievements as a creative writer. Those achievements extend across virtually all literary genres. During his lifetime Stevenson was known as a writer of exceptional versatility and skill. His output—in a career of only twenty years—included not just short and long prose fiction, but travel writing, essays, journalism, biography, poetry, drama and—near the end of his life—ethnographic and political studies of the South Seas. Much of this writing has fallen from view, and for some time now Stevenson’s reputation has rested, sturdily enough, on a small number of works: Treasure Is­ land, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, a few essays, a handful of poems and short stories. By bringing back into print works once highly regarded but long unavailable, the New Edinburgh Edition provides a more complete picture not only of Stevenson’s career but of his place in modern literary history. While it would of course be disingenuous to claim the same high aesthetic merit for each of his works, few are of mere historical interest. In this edition, readers will also find collected in one place pieces, most notably essays and short stories, that for various reasons were either never published or never reprinted after their initial periodical publication. Five volumes of Essays and four of Short Stories for the first time gather together in a uniform critical edition Stevenson’s substantial output in these genres. Henry James called Stevenson ‘a Scotchman of the world’, meaning that while his imagination remained rooted in his homeland—‘it is a good fortune for a genius to have had such a country as Scotland for its primary stuff ’, James notes—he was also a thoroughly cosmopolitan writer who drew inspiration from many literary and cultural traditions outside his own. In his life, too, Stevenson travelled through large portions of the habitable globe without ever losing sight, as it were, of his birthplace. As befits so peripatetic a writer, the volume editors for the New Edinburgh Edition are themselves drawn from across Europe, North America and the South Pacific. In a sense, nothing less than a global effort would suffice for an undertaking such as this one. For one thing, Stevenson’s manuscripts and other materials are scattered in archives, libraries and personal collections around the world. For Colvin and his immediate successors, the inaccessibility of much of this material would have frustrated any aspirations—had they had any— to produce an authoritative collected works. Since the 1970s, a numxiv

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ber of excellent editions of individual works have been published (and are acknowledged in the appropriate volumes here), but the far-flung dispersal of the relevant sources has until now discouraged efforts to produce a coordinated series of texts covering Stevenson’s entire oeuvre, all prepared by careful study of manuscripts and variant readings in lifetime editions and following unified scholarly procedures. Stevenson’s travels are relevant to the New Edinburgh Edition in another way. All evidence indicates that Stevenson, when he had the chance, preferred to be—indeed, insisted on being—minutely involved in the production of his works. An inveterate reviser and meticulous proofreader, at every stage from manuscript to final publication, Stevenson not only made changes but cancelled those made by, for instance, copy editors or typesetters. Unlike the vast majority of nineteenth-century authors, who happily ceded to printers the task of tidying up their manuscripts to conform to a particular house style, Stevenson resisted efforts to regularize the punctuation or even the grammar of his texts. One of his American editors, Edward Bok, wrote that ‘no man ever went over his proofs more carefully than did Stevenson’. This level of oversight, however, was seldom possible even in the best of circumstances. After 1887, as the Stevenson household moved from upstate New York to California to various locations in the South Pacific, it became virtually impossible. The sheer distances involved compelled Stevenson to relinquish much of his control once a work left his desk. Colvin’s editorial hand was heaviest, but errors and ‘corrections’ could creep in at multiple points in the line of transmission. Add to this the fact that Stevenson contracted with many different publishers in Great Britain and the United States, that his works often were issued more or less simultaneously in both countries under different imprints, that many of his shorter pieces appeared in periodicals before being revised and collected in volumes, that his more popular works went through multiple editions in short spaces of time, and that pirated editions abound, and the task of producing authoritative texts can be seen in all its fascinating, daunting complexity. With these considerations in mind, we have sought to devise editorial principles marked by rigour and consistency, but also flexibility. No single policy for copy text can be adopted because of the varying conditions of production that obtained at different moments in Stevenson’s career. Editors will normally take as copy text the most authoritative early edition—that is, the edition corresponding to the period in which Stevenson worked with greatest concentration and most sustained effort on the piece in question. In most but far from all cases, xv

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this means the first book edition of a work. For short texts (stories, essays, poems), the first publication in volume form is preferred to periodical publication as the version most carefully prepared and overseen by the author. In all cases, our aim is to publish accurate versions of texts as mediated by the differing circumstances of production and publication in which Stevenson collaborated. The New Edinburgh Edi­ tion of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson thus makes available, often for the first time, authoritative texts that scholars and critics can use in their work and that all readers can rely on.

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List of Abbreviations Listed below are abbreviations of works used recurrently throughout the current volume. Anchor

Anchor Line collection, University of Glasgow Archive Services. Reference is by collection number

Beinecke

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to GEN MSS 664 (the Edwin J. Beinecke Collection of Robert Louis Stevenson), citing box and folder number

Chatto

Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892)

CW Archive Chatto & Windus Archive, Random House Group Archive, University of Reading, Special Collections. All references are to letter or stock book and page number EdEd

The Amateur Emigrant, in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh Edition, 28 vols (Edinburgh: Chatto & Windus, 1894–8), iii, 1–166

Letters

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994–5). For reasons of clarity, a colon is used to separate volume from page numbers

LM

‘Across the Plains’, in Longman’s Magazine, 2.9 (July 1883), 285–304, and 2.10 (Aug 1883), 372–86

MS

1879–80 manuscript of The Amateur Emigrant. All but one extant page is held at the Beinecke Library (GEN MSS 664, box 24, folder 591); page 99 is in private hands, sold by Bonhams auction house in 2012 xvii

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list of abbr eviations

Rushden

Random House Group Archive and Library, Rushden, Northamptonshire. Collection is uncatalogued; reference is by date, document type and author

Travels

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and The Amateur Emigrant, ed. Christopher MacLachlan (London: Penguin, 2004)

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Chronology of Robert Louis Stevenson 1848 28 Aug: Thomas Stevenson, youngest son of the lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson, marries Margaret Isabella Balfour, youngest daughter of the Reverend Lewis Balfour, minister at Colinton near Edinburgh. 1850 13 Nov: Robert Lewis (‘Louis’ from c. 1869) Balfour Stevenson, only child, born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh. The family later move to 1 Inverleith Terrace (1853), then 17 Heriot Row (1857). 1852 Alison Cunningham (‘Cummy’) enters the family as Stevenson’s nurse (until Nov 1872). 1860 Stevenson’s Balfour grandfather dies: end of childhood visits to Colinton Manse. 1866 Nov: The Pentland Rising. 1867 Thomas Stevenson leases Swanston Cottage at the foot of the Pentland Hills (until 1880); Nov: Stevenson enters Edinburgh University as student of engineering (abandoned 1871), then law (graduates 1875). 1868 Visits harbour works at Anstruther (July) and Wick (late Aug–early Oct). 1869 Mar: elected to Speculative Society (fellow members include Charles Baxter, James Walter Ferrier and Walter Simpson); June: accompanies his father on an official tour of inspection of the lighthouses of the Orkney and Shetland islands. 1870 Apr–May: engineering site inspection at Dunoon; Aug: on the islet of Earraid, base for the building of the Dhu Heartach lighthouse.

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chronology 1871 Apr: abandons engineering studies for law; June: tour of Cockermouth and Keswick. Jan–Apr, Edinburgh University Magazine essays: ‘Edinburgh Students in 1824’, ‘The Modern Student Considered Generally’, ‘The Philosophy of Umbrellas’, ‘An Old Scotch Gardener’, ‘Debating Societies’, ‘The Philosophy of Nomenclature’. 1872 July–Aug: in Frankfurt with Walter Simpson, walking tour in the Black Forest. 1873 Jan: tells his father that he no longer believes the Christian religion; July: in England meets Fanny Sitwell and Sidney Colvin (who becomes his literary advisor and later editor); Nov: to Mentone as a cure for nervous exhaustion. Dec: ‘Roads’ (Portfolio—first professionally published essay). 1874 Mentone; Apr: Paris (from now until autumn 1878 he spends a third of his time in France), then Edinburgh; June: elected to Savile Club; July–Aug cruise of the Inner Hebrides with Walter Simpson aboard the schooner Heron; Oct: walking tour in Buckinghamshire. May: ‘Ordered South’ (Macmillan’s Magazine); June: ‘Lord Lytton’s Fables in Song’ (Fortnightly Review); Aug: ‘The Ballads and Songs of Scotland’ and ‘Scottish Rivers’ (Academy), ‘Notes on the Movements of Young Children’ (Portfolio); ‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’ (Cornhill Magazine—first of twenty Cornhill essays); Nov: ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’ (Portfolio); Dec: ‘A Quiet Corner of England’ (Academy). 1875 Feb: Leslie Stephen introduces Stevenson to W. E. Henley; Mar: article on Burns for Encyclopædia Britannica rejected; Mar–Apr: Paris and Barbizon (returns to the Fontainebleau area six more times 1875–78); July: called to the Scottish bar, receives £1000 from his father; Aug: Barbizon, walking tour of the Loing Valley with Simpson. Jan: ‘The Works of Edgar Allan Poe’ (Academy); Feb: An Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland; Apr: ‘An Autumn Effect’ (Portfolio); Sept–Oct: ‘John Knox and his Relations to Women’ (Macmillan’s); late 1875: ‘Pierre Jean de Béranger’ (Encyclopædia Britannica); Nov: ‘The Measure of a Marquis’ (Vanity Fair), ‘Mr Browning Again!’ (Vanity Fair).

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chronology 1876 Jan: ‘Winter’s Walk’ from Ayr along the coast of sw Scotland; Aug–Sept: ‘Inland Voyage’ canoe trip from Antwerp to Pontoise; Sept: to Paris then Grez, where he meets Fanny Osbourne. Feb: ‘The Poets and Poetry of Scotland’ (Academy); Apr: ‘Salvini’s Macbeth’ (Academy); May: ‘Forest Notes’ (Cornhill); June: ‘Jules Verne’s Stories’ (Academy), ‘Walking Tours’ (Cornhill); July: ‘The Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ’ (Academy); Aug: ‘Virginibus Puerisque’ (Cornhill); Dec: ‘Charles of Orleans’ (Cornhill). 1877 In Paris and Grez with Fanny Osbourne: Jan–Feb, June–July, Aug–Sept, Sept–Oct, and Dec to Mar 1878. Feb–Mar: ‘An Old Song’ (London—first published fiction); Feb: ‘On Falling in Love’ (Cornhill); Feb: short pieces in London: ‘A Salt-Water Financier’, ‘Mr Tennyson’s Harold’, ‘A Ball At Mr Elsinare’s’, ‘A Studio of Ladies’, ‘The Paris Bourse’, ‘Wallace’s Russia’; July: ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (Corn­ hill); Aug: ‘François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker’ (Cornhill); Oct: ‘A Lodging for the Night’ (Temple Bar—first fiction published under his own name). 1878 Paris; Mar: to London, visits George Meredith at Box Hill (further visits in 1879, 1882, 1886); June: Paris; July: Barbizon and Grez, then to London with Fanny Osbourne; Aug: Fanny Osbourne returns to her husband in California; Sept–Oct: Cévennes journey. Jan: ‘Will o’ the Mill’ (Cornhill), ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’ (Temple Bar); Mar: ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’ (Cornhill); Apr: ‘Æs Triplex’ (Corn­ hill), ‘A Plea for Gas Lamps’ (London); May: An Inland Voyage (first published volume), ‘Pan’s Pipes’ (London), ‘El Dorado’ (London); June–Oct: ‘Latter-Day Arabian Nights’ (London); June–Dec: ‘Notes on Edinburgh’ (Portfolio); July: ‘The English Admirals’ (Cornhill); Sept: ‘Child’s Play’ (Cornhill); Oct: ‘The Gospel According to Walt Whitman’ (New Quarter­ ly); Nov: ‘Leon Berthilini’s Guitar’ (London); Dec: Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. 1879 Mar: writes much of ‘Lay Morals’; 7 Aug: sails from Glasgow on the Devo­ nia; 17 Aug: arrives in New York; 30 Aug: arrives in Monterey after a train journey across North America; Dec: Fanny Osbourne (now in East Oakland) obtains a divorce; Dec: to San Francisco.

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chronology May: ‘Truth of Intercourse’ (Cornhill); June: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes; Oct: ‘Some Aspects of Robert Burns’ (Cornhill), ‘The Story of a Lie’ (New Quarterly). 1880 Living poorly in San Francisco, writes ‘Memoirs of Himself ’; Mar: moves to East Oakland, first lung haemorrhage; 19 May: marries Fanny Osbourne in San Francisco; May–July: honeymoon at Calistoga and at an abandoned mining cabin at Silverado; Aug: returns to Scotland with Fanny and her son Lloyd, agrees to withdraw The Amateur Emigrant; Nov: to Davos; Nov– Dec: reading for projected history of the Highlands. Mar: ‘Yoshida-Torajiro’ (Cornhill); June: ‘Henry David Thoreau’ (Corn­ hill); Sept–Oct: ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ (Cornhill); Nov: ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ (Fraser’s Magazine). 1881 Davos (to May); June–Aug: Pitlochry, writes ‘Thrawn Janet’ and most of ‘The Merry Men’; Aug–Sept: Braemar, begins Treasure Island and first ‘Child’s Garden’ verses; Oct: returns to Davos; Nov: unsuccessfully applies for Chair of History and Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University. Feb–Mar, short essays in the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘Health and Mountains’, ‘Davos in Winter’, ‘Alpine Diversions’, ‘The Stimulation of the Alps’, ‘The Misgivings of Convalescence’; Mar: ‘Samuel Pepys’ (Cornhill); Apr: ‘The Morality of the Profession of Letters’ (Fortnightly Review), Virginibus Pu­ erisque and Other Papers; Oct: ‘Thrawn Janet’ (Cornhill), ‘Treasure Island’ (Young Folks, to Jan 1882). 1882 Davos (to Apr); June–Sept: Scotland; Sept: Montpellier; Oct: Marseille, lung haemorrhages. Feb: Familiar Studies of Men and Books, ‘Bagster’s Pilgrim’s Progress’ (Maga­ zine of Art); Mar–Apr: Moral Emblems; Apr: ‘Talk and Talkers’ (Cornhill); May: ‘The Foreigner at Home’ (Cornhill); June–July: ‘The Merry Men’ (Cornhill); July: New Arabian Nights; Aug: ‘Talk and Talkers (a Sequel)’ (Cornhill), The Graver and the Pen; Nov: ‘Two Japanese Romances’ (Maga­ zine of Art), ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (Longman’s Magazine); Nov–Dec: ‘The Silverado Squatters’ (Century Illustrated Monthly—his first work published first in the USA). 1883 Marseille; Feb: Hyères (to June 1884); July–Aug: Royat. May: ‘A Modern Cosmopolis’ (Magazine of Art); Apr–May: ‘The Treasure of Franchard’ (Longman’s); July–Aug: ‘Across the Plains’ (Longman’s);

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chronology June–Oct: ‘The Black Arrow’ (Young Folks); Nov: Treasure Island, ‘A Note on Realism’ (Magazine of Art). 1884 Hyères. Jan: seriously ill (lung haemorrhages); June: Royat, then London; July: Bournemouth (to Aug 1887), first London performance of Deacon Bro­ die (written with W. E. Henley). Jan: The Silverado Squatters; Feb: ‘The Character of Dogs’ (English Illustrat­ ed Magazine); Apr: ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’ (Magazine of Art); May: ‘Old Mortality’; May–June: ‘Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters’ (Magazine of Art); Dec: ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (Long­ man’s), ‘The Body Snatcher’ (Pall Mall Christmas Extra). 1885 Bournemouth; in poor health (serious lung haemorrhages Apr, Aug–Sept); Apr: moves into the house renamed ‘Skerryvore’ in Bournemouth, begins close friendship with Henry James. Mar: A Child’s Garden of Verses (published in the USA by Scribner’s, their first Stevenson title); Apr: (with Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson) More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, ‘On Style in Literature: Its Technical Elements’ (Contemporary Review); Nov: Prince Otto (and Apr–Oct, Long­ man’s); Dec: ‘Olalla’ (Court and Society Review), ‘Markheim’ (The Broken Shaft: Unwin’s Annual 1886). 1886 Bournemouth; Thomas Stevenson depressed and in ill health; May: learning the piano; July: first musical composition. Jan: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; July: Kidnapped (and May–July, Young Folks); Nov: ‘Some College Memories’ (New Amphion). 1887 Bournemouth; May: Thomas Stevenson dies, Stevenson in Edinburgh for the last time; Aug: sails for New York with his mother, Fanny and Lloyd; Sept: agrees to write twelve monthly essays for Scribner’s Magazine; Oct: Saranac Lake, upper New York State (to Apr 1888). Feb: The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables; Apr: ‘Pastoral’ (Longman’s), ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ (Contemporary Review); May: ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’ (British Weekly), ‘The Manse’ (Scribner’s Magazine); June: ‘Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer’ (Contemporary Review); July: Underwoods; Nov: Memories and Portraits; Dec: ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’ (Yule Tide […] Cassell’s Christmas Annual).

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chronology 1888 Saranac Lake; Feb: withdraws ‘Confessions of a Unionist’ from Scribner’s Magazine; Mar: quarrel with Henley, McClure offers to syndicate letters written on a Pacific cruise; Apr–June: New York and Manasquan; May: signs contract for Fables; 28 June: leaves San Francisco with Fanny, Lloyd and his mother aboard the Casco; Aug: Marquesas; Sept: Paumotus; Sept– Dec: Tahiti, haemorrhages. Jan: Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin; June: The Black Arrow. Jan–Dec, monthly essays in Scribner’s Magazine: ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, ‘The Lantern-Bearers’, ‘Beggars’, ‘Pulvis et Umbra’, ‘Gentlemen’, ‘Some Gentlemen in Fiction’, ‘Popular Authors’, ‘Epilogue to An Inland Voyage’, ‘A Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art’, ‘Contributions to the History of Fife’, ‘The Education of an Engineer’, ‘A Christmas Sermon’. 1889 Jan–June: Hawaii; May: visits leper settlement at Molokai; June: leaves Honolulu aboard the Equator with Fanny, Lloyd and Joe Strong on a trading cruise through the Gilbert Islands; 7 Dec: arrives in Apia, Samoa. June: (with Lloyd Osbourne) The Wrong Box; Sept: The Master of Ballan­ trae (and Nov 1888–Oct 1889, Scribner’s Magazine). 1890 Jan: buys land at ‘Vailima’; Feb–Mar: Sydney; seriously ill, abandons idea of returning to Europe for a holiday; Apr–July: with Fanny on the Janet Nicoll cruise from Sydney through the Cook, Ellice, Gilbert and Marshall Islands to New Caledonia; Aug–Sept: Sydney; Sept: moves into a cabin on the Vailima estate. Mar: ‘Father Damien’; Dec: Ballads. 1891 Jan–Mar: Sydney; Apr: moves into the main house at Vailima. Feb–Mar: ‘The Bottle Imp’ (Herald; and Mar–Apr: Black and White); Feb– Dec: ‘The South Seas’ (Sun and Black and White). 1892 June: Belle Strong becomes his amanuensis; July: Belle obtains divorce from Joe Strong; Oct: starts Weir of Hermiston. Apr: Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays; June: (with Lloyd Osbourne) The Wrecker (and Aug 1891–July 1892, Scribner’s Magazine); July–Aug: ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (Illustrated London News), A Footnote to History. (With W. E. Henley) Three Plays.

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chronology 1893 Jan: second wing of Vailima completed, starts St Ives; Feb–Mar: Sydney; July: civil war in Samoa. Feb: ‘The Isle of Voices’ (National Observer); Apr: Island Nights’ Entertain­ ments; Sept: David Balfour/Catriona (and Dec 1892–Sept 1893, Atalanta). 1894 Oct: Samoan chiefs build the Road of Gratitude to Vailima; Nov: first volume of the Edinburgh Edition published; 3 Dec: dies of cerebral haemorrhage. Aug: ‘My First Book: Treasure Island’ (The Idler; and Sept, McClure’s Maga­ zine); July (USA; Sept in UK): (with Lloyd Osbourne) The Ebb-Tide (and Nov 1893–Feb 1894, To-day; Feb–July 1894, McClure’s Magazine). 1895 The Amateur Emigrant. 1895, 1899, 1911 Letters. 1896 Weir of Hermiston, In the South Seas, ‘Lay Morals’, Fables, Songs of Travel. 1897 St Ives.

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Introduction On the afternoon of 7 August 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson embarked on the steamship the SS Devonia at Greenock, on the west coast of Scotland, and began the ten-day passage across the Atlantic. After the crossing, he spent one night in New York, and then made the transcontinental rail journey, arriving in California on 30 August, more than three weeks after he had left Scotland. At twenty-eight years of age, the only son of a respectable, middle-class Edinburgh family, Stevenson enjoyed a growing literary reputation but was yet to secure financial independence through his writing. The voyage arose from a crisis in his personal life: it was a desperate attempt to pursue his relationship with Fanny Osbourne, who had been Stevenson’s lover since they met in France in 1876, but had now returned to her husband in California. The Amateur Emigrant offers a vivid account of Stevenson’s journey. The work sketches life aboard the steamship and the train and evokes the indignities and privations which he shared with his working-class fellow emigrants. It omits any mention of Stevenson’s personal circumstances, and instead reflects on his journey across class borders and exposes the inadequacy of myths of heroic emigration. Defying his contemporaries’ expectations that the work would be another instalment of his ‘charming impressions de voyage’, The Amateur Emigrant was serious, socially engaged and politically provocative (Athenæum, 7 Feb 1880, 185). Conceived on a larger scale than his earlier travel writing, and weaving together a set of diverse literary influences, from social exploration literature and travel writing to French Naturalism and American literature, the work occupies a significant place in Stevenson’s oeuvre and in the development of travel writing as a genre. The work’s peculiar publication history reflects its challenging nature. At Stevenson’s father’s instigation, the book was withdrawn from publication at proof stage in 1880. It was published in truncated and abridged form in 1883, 1892 and 1895, but these early printed versions of the text departed in important ways from Stevenson’s original conception of the work. As the Essay on the Text explains, the present volume takes the manuscript as its principal copy text, seeking to return as far as possible to the work as conceived and written in 1879 and 1880. xxvii

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introduction COMPOSITION

Stevenson’s travels were shaped by the desire to write and to publish. In the cases of both An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Don­ key in the Cévennes (1879), the two books that first made his reputation, Stevenson’s journey was undertaken with a view to publication. Writing to his mother in September 1876, midway through the canoe holiday in France and Belgium that formed the basis of An Inland Voy­ age, he admitted that ‘I do not know that I would have stuck to it as I have done, if it had not been for professional purposes’ (Letters 2: 189). When he famously asserted in Travels with a Donkey that ‘I travel for travel’s sake’, he was in fact condensing a perhaps franker observation in his journal: ‘I travel for travel’s sake. And to write about it afterwards, if only the public will be so condescending as to read’ (Travels, 35; Cévennes Journal, 54). The journey to America would clearly make for good copy, and Stevenson seems to have planned from the start to write an account of his travels. His friend, the poet and journalist W. E. Henley, writing shortly after his departure, predicted: ‘It will end in a book, I expect’ (Letters 3: 5). Stevenson embarked on the voyage in what his friend Edmund Gosse called ‘violent opposition to all those whom he left in England and Scotland’ (284). Gosse went on to say that this opposition determined his ‘mode’ of travel, as Stevenson ‘did not choose to ask for money to be spent in going to California’ but ‘scraped together enough to secure him a steerage passage across the Atlantic’ (284). Indeed, relations with his strictly Presbyterian parents, only now recovering after the crisis caused by his loss of religious faith, had once again been pushed to the breaking point by the affair with Fanny, and Stevenson did not even tell his parents of his plans before leaving.1 Stevenson’s friends were united in their disapproval of his planned journey. On the eve of his departure, Henley and Sidney Colvin, the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University and Stevenson’s literary mentor, tried to dissuade him from travelling (Letters 3: 4). Stevenson intended to travel steerage class but in the end chose to travel second cabin (the intermediate class between steerage and saloon). Travelling steerage class clearly had attractions—besides those of cost—for a writer. The opening page of The Amateur Emigrant describes its author as ‘anxious to see the worst of emigrant life’ (7). ‘Slumming’ narratives were, indeed, increasingly popular during this period. Coincidentally, an exposé of conditions aboard a transatlantic steamer, ‘In the Steerage of a Cunard Steamer’, ran in the Pall Mall Ga­ xxviii

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zette during Stevenson’s crossing. However, Stevenson confesses that ‘I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger’, having paid six guineas extra for a table to write at: ‘I had some work to finish on the voyage, and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table at command’ (7). Second cabin was situated ‘in the very heart of the steerages’, and Stevenson mixed with steerage rather than saloon passengers. He travelled incognito as a working man: the passenger list, in which his identity is thinly disguised as ‘Robert Stephenson’, records his occupation as a ‘Clerk’ (see fig. 1, a facsimile of the first page of the passenger list).2 Conditions were hard, and writing his notes on board the lurching ship was tricky. As Stevenson wrote to Henley when he arrived in New York, the short story he now sent to his publisher was ‘all written in a slantindicular cabin with the table playing bob-cherry with the ink bottle’ (Letters 4: 7). The first mention of The Amateur Emigrant is in a letter Stevenson wrote to Colvin on 17 August, just before the ship docked in New York: ‘The voyage has been most interesting and will make, if not a series of Pall Mall articles, at least the first part of a new book. The last weight on me has been trying to keep notes for this purpose’ (Letters 3: 5). The second part of Stevenson’s journey, by train across the continent, was equally arduous, and he was plagued by ill health (a combination of scabies, common in the insanitary conditions of emigrant travel, and physical and mental exhaustion). He wrote later, ‘I was ill the whole time and have scarce a note, only about three pages in pencil in a penny notebook’ (Letters 3: 51). The process of writing up his notes began when Stevenson reached Monterey, the California town where Fanny and her family were staying. It was a time of personal anguish for all concerned. Fanny, her husband Sam and Stevenson struggled to understand and resolve their relationships with each other. From afar, his father, Thomas Stevenson, ashamed of his son’s conduct and anxious for his health, exerted pressure on him to return home. Thomas demanded querulously through Colvin in November, ‘Is it fair that we should be half murdered by his conduct? I am unable to write more about this sinful mad business’ (Beinecke 20, 530). Stevenson himself fell seriously ill with a fever. He was, however, already thinking of publishing his new travel work. Early in September, he asked Colvin to ‘see if my tour across ocean and continent, en amateur emigrant would not do for Pall Mall’ (Letters 3: 11). The phrasing suggests the conflict between his posture as a latterday gentleman on a Grand Tour and the need to sell his experience to a popular newspaper. Far from being an emigrant by choice—an xxix

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‘amateur’—he was a professional emigrant, his performance of the role providing much-needed funds. Stevenson worked on the narrative, aware that it departed from his previous writing. He reported to Colvin towards the end of September: ‘I work at the notes of the voyage. It will not be very like a book of mine; but perhaps none the less successful for that’ (Letters 3: 11). In early October, he mused further on this, predicting that the Amateur Emigrant would be ‘more popular than any of the others; the canvas is so much more popular and larger too’ (Letters 3: 15). The work as Stevenson wrote it between August 1879 and June 1880 had two parts. Part I, ‘The Emigrant Ship’, covered the steamship crossing of the Atlantic, and Part II, ‘America: The Emigrant Train’, opened with a chapter entitled ‘New York’ and then described the transcontinental railroad journey to California. He worked intermittently on Part I through the autumn of 1879. Progress appears to have stalled by October, with Part I nearly completed. The book was ‘about half drafted’, he reported in early October; ‘the draft of my book was laid aside at p. 68 or so’, he noted later that month (Letters 3: 15, 19). He finally dispatched Part I to Colvin in early December, writing, ‘I send you the first part of the Amateur Emigrant. 71 pp.: by far the longest and best of the whole’ (Letters 3: 29). The surviving manuscript is evidently the original sent to Colvin: as Ernest Mehew notes, the last page of Part I is ‘badly soiled […] and shows signs of folding’ (Letters 3: 29n). (For a detailed description of the manuscript, see the Essay on the Text, 132–4.) Stevenson expected Colvin to act as informal literary agent. The manuscript contains marginal queries directed to Colvin, asking him to pursue references. He also suggested in early December that Colvin ‘negotiate’ for Part I alone (‘It is the part best suited for serial production; […] the need for coin is pressing’), and wondered whether Leslie Stephen, whom he knew as editor of the Cornhill Magazine, might ‘introduce the stuff to [Frederick] Greenwood’, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette (Letters 3: 29). Stevenson’s thoughts at this point were firmly fixed on the need for money. ‘Whatever is done about any book publication’, he wrote in the same letter, ‘I must keep a royalty’. His assessment of the book’s literary merit was equivocal: he described it to Colvin as ‘rather a clever book, than anything else: the book of a man that is who has paid a great deal of attention to contemporary life, and not through the newspapers’ (Letters 3: 30). More despondently, he wrote to Henley that ‘The Emigrant is not good, and will never do for P. M. G., though it must have a kind of rude interest’ (Letters 3: 37). xxx

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Fanny’s divorce from Sam Osbourne came through on 12 December and, when Sam lost his job, Stevenson found himself responsible for supporting Fanny sooner than he had expected. He moved to San Francisco to be closer to Fanny, and felt an intensified need for The Amateur Emigrant to bring in money. The ‘second part of the Emigrant’ is still ‘waiting for me’, he reported to Colvin on 26 December, ‘But I trust something can be done with the first part, or by God, I’ll starve here’ (Letters 3: 39). Calculating the shortfall between his incomings and outgoings, he exclaimed, ‘If the Emigrant can’t make up the balance, why, damn the Emigrant, say I’ (Letters 3: 39). Stevenson’s aspiration to earn £200 a year, confided to Colvin in January 1880, expressed his desire to be financially independent and hence to prove his manhood (Letters 3: 47). Thus, he protested against Colvin’s talk of ‘lending me coin’: ‘you don’t understand; this is a test; I must support myself ’ (Letters 3: 47). Ideas of self-worth and ethics also informed his thoughts about his financial dependence on his parents: as he wrote in late January, ‘I am glad they mean to disinherit me; you know, Henley, I always had moral doubts about inherited money and this clears me of that forever’ (Letters 3: 57). Colvin and Henley, the two friends who saw Part I of the manuscript in December, were united in their disapproval of the work. Their literary judgment was no doubt informed by the hostility to Fanny shared by his close friends—an animosity which they extended to all of his Californian companions.3 Colvin confessed to Stevenson’s friend Charles Baxter on 22 December 1879, What disturbs me most of all about him is that the works he has sent me from out there are not good. I doubt whether they are saleable, and if so, whether they would do anything but harm to his reputation, this is more particularly true of the account of his voyage in the Emigrant Ship, on which I had built, and so had he, considerable hopes. But now that I have read it, I find it on the whole quite unworthy of him [….] [H]ere he is doing work which is quite below his mark, and will bring him, as my strong impression is, neither money nor credit. […] Of course I don’t believe that this cloud upon his talents […] is likely to last; but, I don’t believe that it will go as long as he lives away from his equals and has his mind full of nothing but this infernal business. And then, if his work is no good, how is he to live? Of course there is always the chance of his settling to some cadging second rate literary work out there, and if I xxxi

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am not mistaken Mrs. O. would not at all object to that result. (Beinecke 11, 281) Henley, to whom Colvin sent the manuscript, concurred entirely with Colvin’s sentiments, urging on 2 January that Stevenson ‘be brought to see that England & a quiet life are what he wants & must have if he means to make—I wont [sic] say reputation—but money by literature. We shall pass off all he’s done, but I won’t answer for much more’ (Beinecke 13, 356). This concern about Stevenson’s reputation marked the beginning of a lifelong pattern in which his friends tried to control what he wrote. Henley continued: ‘I don’t believe that our letters (I’ve not yet written being too blasphemously given towards California & Californian things to trust myself) will have any effect at all in diverting him’. Despite expecting that Stevenson will ‘resent (y)our criticism’, Henley thought it ‘right he should get [it]; et avec, a confident expression of hope for the future, & as confident a prediction that Montery [sic] and he will never produce anything worth a damn’. This belief that Stevenson would only produce ‘cadging second rate literary work’ if removed from Britain prefigures his friends’ wellknown dislike of his later Polynesian writings, encapsulated in Gosse’s supercilious judgment that ‘Within a three-mile radius of Charing Cross is the literary atmosphere, I suspect’.4 Unsurprisingly, Stevenson appeared hurt by Colvin’s and Henley’s criticism. On 18 January 1880, he wrote to Colvin that ‘you and Henley both seem to think my work rather bosh nowadays’ (Letters 3: 47). Defensively, he told Henley in late January: ‘I do not mind about the Emigrant. I never thought it a masterpiece. It was written to sell, and I believe it will sell’ (Letters 3: 56). Writing to Colvin around the same time, he stoically accepted his friend’s criticism, but protested against his harshness: I received this morning your long letter from Paris. Well, God’s will be done; if it’s dull, it’s dull [….] But fortunately dulness is not a fault the public hates; perhaps they may like this vein of dulness. […] Only, frankly, Colvin, do you think it a good plan to be so eminently descriptive, and even eloquent in dispraise? You rolled such a lot of polysyllables over me that a better man than I might have been disheartened. (Letters 3: 58–9) Refusing to be disheartened, he wrote defiantly that ‘It bored me hellishly to write the Emigrant; well, it’s going to bore others to read it; xxxii

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that’s only fair’ (Letters 3: 60). Colvin’s ‘long letter from Paris’ does not survive, but we get a flavour of it from his later recollection that Stevenson’s draft of Part I had seemed to me, compared to his previous travel papers, but a spiritless record of squalid experiences, little likely to advance his still only half-established reputation; and I had written to him to that effect, inopportunely enough, with a fuller measure even than usual of the frankness which always marked our intercourse.5 Receiving only negative feedback on Part I, and seriously ill and impoverished, Stevenson made poor progress with Part II, ‘America: The Emigrant Train’, which he worked on from January until June 1880. On 23 January, he told Colvin, ‘I fight away with the second part of the Emigrant; but it is uphill work’, the difficulties, he explained, being caused partly by the paucity of notes from the train journey (Letters 3: 51). ‘The Emigrant shall be finished and leave in the course of next week’, he wrote in late January; a month later he admitted, ‘I am still unable to finish the Emigrant although there are only some 15 pp. to do’ (Letters 3: 59, 64). Despite their disapprobation, Colvin and Henley sought a publisher for The Amateur Emigrant. Colvin reported unenthusiastically to Baxter, on 27 January 1880, ‘I hope soon to hear of a fair bargain having been made for the Emigrant, indifferent work as it is’ (Beinecke 11, 281). Henley’s friend James Runciman negotiated with the publisher William Isbister for the serialization of The Amateur Emigrant in the monthly periodical Good Words (Letters 3: 65n). On 3 February, Henley told Stevenson that ‘The “Emigrant” is not yet sold, but we have determined to bring it to an end this week’, and stressed the financial desirability of pursuing serialization: ‘you’d make so much more of it, in magazine and book form, than in book form alone’ (Beinecke 14, 359). Donald Macleod, the editor of Good Words, responded favourably, writing to Runciman on 4 February, ‘It is capital—full of force and character and fine feeling, and quite the kind of thing which will suit Good Words’ (Letters 3: 65n). An Athenæum notice on 7 February suggests Stevenson’s friends’ confidence about the book’s imminent serialization: Mr. R. L. Stevenson has produced a third set of his charming impressions de voyage. The book is called ‘The Amateur xxxiii

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introduction

Emigrant,’ and sets forth how its author journeyed as a steerage passenger from Glasgow to New York, and how he afterwards went out West, from New York to California, in an emigrant train. His narrative will most probably see daylight first in the pages of a monthly magazine. (185–6) Stevenson himself felt far from confident about the prospects for publication. At one remove from the negotiations, as letters often took three weeks or longer to travel between California and the United Kingdom, he wrote to Colvin that he had heard ‘nothing of my own Emigrant, except that Isbister is doing something or is not—but what?—God knows’ (Letters 3: 65). Moreover, as Henley reported to Stevenson on 12 February, the timing of publication was proving problematic: There’s no news yet of the ‘Emigrant’. The last accounts of it were good, if a little peculiar. Macleod is anxious to keep it— would take it very ill if you withdrew it; but his arrangements for the year are made, and he would like to hold it over till 1881. To this we made no objection, provided that he paid posh on the nail; and that is what we are waiting to know if he’ll do. If he would, it would be the best thing possible. The ‘Emigrant’ is feeble, stale, pretentious; & if you saw it now, you’d writhe and cower over it. If it be held over, you’ll probably get a chance of rewriting. (Beinecke 14, 359) Henley’s comments on Stevenson’s writing could be cruel: here, his supposedly constructive suggestion (‘you’ll probably get a chance of rewriting’) is belied by the casually scathing remark that Stevenson should ‘writhe and cower’ over his work. Macleod evidently would not pay in advance, so Henley and Colvin withdrew the manuscript and sent it to Charles Kegan Paul, the publisher of An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey. On 2 March 1880, Henley asked Stevenson to ‘Send us the Emigrant as soon as poss. Part I is in the hands of the Diplomatic Keg [Kegan Paul]; & the D.K. wants Part II. Whether to accept or regret I know not’ (Beinecke 14, 359). Stevenson may not have been pleased by this development, as he found ‘the vile Paul’ difficult to deal with (Letters 3: 7). He had been dissatisfied with Kegan Paul’s terms for his earlier books, complaining that ‘The foul Paul is not to give me my coin [for Travels with a Don­ key] till the day of publication’ (Letters 2: 303).6 He was probably talking about his dealings with Kegan Paul in his essay ‘Authors and Pubxxxiv

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lishers’ when he described ‘a young author’ who is ‘kept outside the ring’ by his publisher and who has ‘little hope of ever entering upon his postponed royalties’ (Beinecke 25, 598, written c. 1890–1). For Vir­ ginibus Puerisque, which Kegan Paul was to publish in 1881, Stevenson was paid £20 for the copyright, and reported with frustration, ‘I only got £20 for Virginibus Puerisque. I could take Paul by the beard and knock his head against the wall’ (Letters 3: 261; Swearingen, 57). The terms agreed for The Amateur Emigrant have not survived, but it is possible that they involved a payment of £20.7 Stevenson struggled to complete Part II. He later confessed, ‘God only knows how much courage and suffering is buried in that MS. The second part was written in a circle of hell unknown to Dante; that of the penniless and dying author’ (Letters 3: 75). During this period, Mary Carson, Stevenson’s Irish landlady in San Francisco, looked after him with ‘motherly’ care (Osbourne, 40). She also supplied some of the copy for Part II of The Amateur Emigrant, showing him a letter dated 1860, from her eleven-year-old brother, Martin Mahoney. The letter told of another brother’s death on the emigrant journey from Missouri to California, a perilous undertaking before the coming of the transcontinental railroad (see fig. 2, a facsimile of the first two pages of the letter; Beinecke 17, 422). Stevenson transcribed the letter for the chapter entitled ‘The Desert of Wyoming’, omitting just a few lines, mostly those that might identify the protagonists. According to Katharine Osbourne, Mary Carson was unaware of Stevenson’s interest in the letter until, many years later, ‘one day the mail brought Mrs. Carson a copy of the completed volume and she beheld her precious letter, and the memory of her little brother […] immortalized’ (45–6). Stevenson must have dispatched most of Part II sometime in late February or March 1880. Colvin reported enthusiastically to Henley in March: ‘I’ve got the second half, nearly all, of Louis’s Emigrant: and it’s as good as the first half was bad’ (Letters 3: 76n). Stevenson, his confidence in the work probably eroded, received Colvin’s praise with scepticism: ‘I suppose it is politeness bids you murmur praise about Part 2. I refuse mildly but firmly to believe it worth a damn; for I know the subject to be without interest and the treatment staggering’ (Let­ ters 3: 76). By the end of March, negotiations with Kegan Paul were drawing to a close, and Henley told Stevenson on 28 March: ‘We are to settle about the Emigrant to-morrow’ (Beinecke 14, 359). Kegan Paul & Co. began to have the work typeset, using the manuscript sent to Colvin, which has compositors’ names in the margins: the surviving galley proofs were printed on 19 April. xxxv

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Stevenson’s health had long been precarious. In mid-March 1880, now in Oakland, he suffered a lung haemorrhage; he and Fanny believed that this was the onset of tuberculosis (Harman, 193–4). Slowly recovering, he wrote to Colvin in late March or early April, ‘As soon as I have done the last few pages of the Emigrant they shall go on to you. But when will that be? I know not quite yet—I have to be so careful’ (Letters 3: 72). At this stage, Stevenson’s parents intervened with the promise of an annual allowance. They had already been somewhat mollified to learn of Fanny’s divorce and the couple’s planned marriage. Provided that there was ‘as long a delay as possible’ before the marriage, Thomas Stevenson had declared himself ‘prepared to do my best in the matter’ (Letters 3: 54n). They now learnt that their son was critically ill. As Stevenson reported to Colvin in mid-April, ‘My dear people telegraphed me in these words: “Count on 250 pounds annually.” ’ (Letters 3: 75). With the security of an annual allowance, Stevenson now wanted to revise The Amateur Emigrant in line with his friends’ criticism. He instructed Colvin: ‘Recover the sheets of the Emigrant, and post them registered to me. And now please give me all your venom against it; say your worst and most incisively’ (Letters 3: 75). ‘When I had to go on anyway, for dear life’, Stevenson explained, he had resented criticism, but now he welcomed the chance to ‘make it right or perish in the attempt’ (Letters 3: 75). He also hoped that Good Words might run the work after all: ‘Had not the Good Words bargain better hold now? if it can be reopened. It would be a beginning of a change, and Paul seems to have behaved most disobligingly about the essays’.8 Stevenson received and corrected proofs, and completed the final pages of the manuscript, while he was on a honeymoon of sorts. Following their marriage on 19 May 1880 in San Francisco, Stevenson and Fanny spent two months in Calistoga and in the disused mining encampment of Silverado on the slopes of Mount Saint Helena, an experience which formed the basis of The Silverado Squatters (1883). The galley proofs of Part I of The Amateur Emigrant arrived during this period. The surviving galleys, which are analysed in detail in the Essay on the Text (134–6), show that Kegan Paul & Co.’s typeset text was very faithful to Stevenson’s manuscript, but they are heavily marked, indicating that the revisions made at proof stage would have been extensive, and the resulting volume, had it been published, much less faithful to the manuscript text. The deletions and annotations, in Kegan Paul’s, Colvin’s and Stevenson’s hands, point to an attempt to shape and control the author’s style and reputation. Kegan Paul and Colvin xxxvi

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frequently object to Stevenson’s descriptions of the filth and degradation which he shared with the steerage passengers. Kegan Paul finds one such passage ‘needlessly nasty’, and Colvin condemns another as ‘Intolerably nasty in itself and pompous and feeble in the commentary’ (see figs 3 and 4, facsimiles of these proof annotations; see also Essay on the Text, 136). Stevenson complied with most but not all of these deletions. By this stage, perhaps worn down by Henley’s and Colvin’s criticism, he seems to have lost his belief in The Amateur Emigrant and been willing to edit and cut his own work as directed. He wrote to Colvin in late May 1880, I have received the first sheets; not yet the second bunch, as announced. It is a pretty heavy, emphatic piece of pedantry; but I don’t care; the public I verily believe will like it. I have excised all you proposed and more on my own movement. But I have not yet been able to rewrite the two special pieces which, as you said, so badly wanted it; it is hard work to rewrite passages in proof. (Letters 3: 83) A later letter, presumably referring to the missing ‘second bunch’ of proofs, betrays a similar lack of confidence: Stevenson tells Frances Sitwell on 17 June that ‘I got the proofs after they had lain a month in San Francisco’, noting ruefully that ‘they are pretty bad, and I am sadly unfit to better them; they do not read to me as if I had written them’ (Letters 3: 86). During these months, too, Stevenson completed the final pages of the manuscript. On 4 June, he wrote in an unfinished letter to Colvin: ‘Today at last I send the last of the Double Damned Emigrant. It was all written, after a fashion, months ago, before I caved in; yet I have not had the pluck and strength to finish copying these few sheets before today’ (Letters 3: 85). By June 1880, the period of creative composition—the period when he worked on The Amateur Emigrant with the greatest and most sustained concentration and effort—was over. SUPPRESSION

When he was well enough, Stevenson returned to the United Kingdom with Fanny and her son. His father had told Baxter in the autumn of 1879 that ‘I fear he may be travelling on the cheap & therefore wish his immediate return by first class home’ (Beinecke 20, 530). He xxxvii

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must have been relieved by the trio’s travel arrangements: Pullman car and then first-class passage on the City of Chester from New York to Liverpool, where they arrived on 17 August 1880 (Hart, xxxvi). From August to October, Stevenson, Fanny and her son Sam (later known as Lloyd) stayed with Thomas and Margaret Stevenson in Strathpeffer and Edinburgh, and Stevenson started to rebuild his relationship with his parents. In late August, with The Amateur Emigrant typeset and proofed, the decision was taken to suppress the work. Stevenson reported to Colvin: My father desired me still to withdraw the Emigrant, in the meantime, and I have written to Paul to break it to him gently. I fear there will be a storm; and I suppose that at any rate I shall remain under an obligation to him to produce the book again, in better form, for the same sum. But whatever may be the pecuniary loss, my father is willing to bear it; and the gain to my reputation will be considerable. (Letters 3: 97) Stevenson presents this as a consensual decision, but there was clearly a degree of pressure exerted on an author who, as we have seen, desired to secure a living by literature and to be financially independent. It is not known when Thomas Stevenson first read the manuscript, as Margaret destroyed her son’s letters from his departure to the States until June 1880 (Letters 3: 1). But by this stage Thomas evidently had strong views about the unsuitability of the work, and Stevenson, financially dependent on his father, was hardly in a position to demur. His letters from this period are affectionate and full of gratitude for his parents’ generosity. Nonetheless, Thomas sought an unusual degree of control over what his son published, and Stevenson himself was at times submissive and at times defiant. The previous year, Stevenson had apparently withheld the proof sheets of Travels with a Donkey from his father: rebuking his son for ‘irreverent’ language in that work, Thomas wrote on 8 June 1879, ‘So much for your absurdity in not letting me see your proof sheets’ (Maixner, 64). Later, revising Treasure Island for volume publication, Stevenson was to comply to some extent with Thomas’s wishes, reworking the character of Ben Gunn to satisfy his father’s call to ‘interject a long passage […] of a religious character’.9 The decision to suppress The Amateur Emigrant once taken, Stevenson sought to extricate himself from his obligation to Kegan Paul. Writing to his parents on 11 October from London, en route for Davos in the Swiss Alps, where he travelled in search of health, Stevenxxxviii

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son asked, ‘Could not my father send me a cheque for £20 and then I could go and see Paul and pay him down without trouble’ (Letters 3: 107). Soon, the news of the work’s withdrawal was made public, with an Athenæum notice on 23 October, repeated in the Manchester Guard­ ian, announcing that ‘Mr. R. L. Stevenson has determined to suppress his “Amateur Emigrant,” announced by us some little time ago, and has withdrawn it from his publisher’s hands’ (534). Stevenson did not envisage, at this stage, that the suppression of The Amateur Emigrant was final. In December 1880, he wrote to Henley of his regret that the dedication to his cousin Bob, which prefaced The Amateur Emigrant, had not yet seen the light of day: the dedication was ‘in proof, but the delay of the Emigrant delays it’ (Letters 3: 146). On 1 April 1881, Stevenson raised with his parents the question of publishing The Amateur Emigrant, asking, My father is done with Henderson now? I want to know. For I think of publishing the Emigrant. [The writer J. A.] Symonds who got the loan of the proof thinks it greatly the simplest and most interesting of my performances; and a book so different from the others would do me good. He thought also […] that many allusions would grow mal-à-propos if I left it in my portfolio. This, on looking over it again, I feel. I could also leave out the names of the Clyde and the like; so that it could be identified with nowhere. I should try it again with Good Words, and see if I could not get my hundred pounds; own, anyway, it would be a good thing to land a little money. (Letters 3: 167) The letter sheds light on the commercial interests involved in Stevenson’s father’s earlier disapproval of the book. Thomas Stevenson, a distinguished lighthouse engineer, was evidently a business associate of the Henderson brothers, who were partners in the Anchor Line of steamships, and owners of D. & W. Henderson, a shipbuilding and engineering business in Glasgow.10 The Devonia, in which Stevenson sailed, was an Anchor Line steamship. Thomas Stevenson’s reply, dated 7 April 1881, was sharp and immediate, opening by deploring his son’s ‘total want of business habits’ (Beinecke 20, 531). In Stevenson’s own letter, he had worried, significantly, about his dreams ‘that I had lost all your money’ (Letters 3: 167). Thomas rejected outright the idea of publishing The Amateur Emigrant:

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I am so far done with Henderson that he is my chief friend & he came to Edinburgh to conciliate between us & the Glasgow people & to arrange payment of our £2000 account. So nothing can be done that can possibly reflect upon him. (Beinecke 20, 531) It is easy to understand how The Amateur Emigrant might have been perceived as damaging to the Hendersons’ commercial interests. The work repeatedly depicts instances of the steamship crew’s inhumanity to the steerage passengers. The discussion of stowaways would also have been provocative. Stevenson claimed that ‘the line on which I sailed’ was ‘said to be particularly favoured by stowaways’, with the blind eye turned to the stowaway meaning that he or she was ‘half sure to make out the voyage and be landed, a free citizen and independent voter, at the harbour of New York’ (51). The Anchor Line’s own Man­ ual of Instructions for the Use of Captains and Officers took the practice of stowing away very seriously, warning that any employee ‘conniving at’ or allowing stowing away, even ‘under pretence of [the stowaway’s] working his or her passage’, ‘will be dismissed from the service’.11 The Amateur Emigrant does not name the Anchor Line or the Devonia, but readers might infer their identities without difficulty. Stevenson’s letter indicated willingness to make revisions to ensure that the shipping line could not be identified; but Thomas’s response demonstrates that he was unprepared to compromise. Moving from the commercial to the literary aspects of the work, Thomas continues by setting himself against J. A. Symonds’s judgment: I entirely disagree with your friend Symmons [sic] as to the Amateur Voyage. I think it not only the worst thing you have done, but altogether unworthy of you. And as I am on the subject I must say that I highly disapprove of the light & irreverent way in which you bring in the great name of God in your essays[.] I do beg that for my sake you will give this vulgar & sinful habit the gobye for ever. (Beinecke 20, 531) Here, the transition from ‘worst’ to ‘unworthy of you’ and the association of these qualities with the ‘irreverent’ nature of Stevenson’s new volume of essays (Virginibus Puerisque) imply that The Amateur Emi­ grant’s deficiencies are moral as well as aesthetic.

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partia l publication and ear ly r eception PARTIAL PUBLICATION AND EARLY RECEPTION

Over the next few years, Stevenson continued to entertain the possibility of publishing The Amateur Emigrant, but his confidence in the work was perhaps dented. His friends’ disapproval of Part I of the work shaped his thinking about the options for publication. Writing to Henley on 31 March 1882, for example, Stevenson raised the possibility of publishing Part II of The Amateur Emigrant alongside The Sil­ verado Squatters, noting that ‘Colvin, you know, opt. max., passed the “Emigrant Train”; so […] there will be nothing absolutely disgraceful’ (Letters 3: 308). Here, for all the jokiness of his reference to Colvin as ‘optimus maximus’, Stevenson’s letter confirms that Colvin’s disparagement of Part I as ‘disgraceful’ was responsible for the abridgement and distortion of the work as originally conceived. As a result, The Ama­ teur Emigrant was initially published only in truncated form: the final seven chapters of Part II appeared serially in 1883 and were reprinted in 1892. In 1895, when Part I was eventually published alongside Part II, in the Edinburgh Edition, the work was further abridged. Material from The Amateur Emigrant first appeared in 1883, as financial pressure led Stevenson to serialize the final seven chapters of Part II, retitled ‘Across the Plains’, in Longman’s Magazine. The Essay on the Text discusses the publication history of the Longman’s serial text and analyses the changes made to the manuscript text (137–40). The most significant change, of course, was the decision to publish only the final seven chapters: a decision that reflected Colvin’s preference for Part II and that compromised the integrity of the original work. The chapters that were printed were fairly faithful to the manuscript copy. The longest and most interesting deletions concern railway officials’ inhumane treatment of the emigrants; Stevenson’s physical sufferings, probably as a result of scabies; the insanitary conditions on the railroad cars; and the unpleasant society composed by his fellow emigrants. In 1892, the Longman’s serial text was reprinted, alongside other essays, in Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays, published by Chatto & Windus. Again, the Essay on the Text considers in detail the publication history of this volume (140–3). Stevenson, who by this time was living in the South Seas and preoccupied with his Pacific writings, was disengaged throughout the process of preparing the book for publication. He described Across the Plains in November 1891 as ‘Colvin’s book not mine’ (Letters 7: 197). The text of ‘Across the Plains’ as published in the 1892 volume made minimal revisions to the 1883 Longman’s serial text. The only significant deletions were of pasxli

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sages discussing anti-Chinese agitation and the plight of the Native Americans of Carmel Valley (see Essay on the Text, 143). Across the Plains was a successful volume, in terms of both sales and reviews. Chatto & Windus ordered 4000 copies of the standard edition, priced at 6s., and 100 large paper ones from the printers on 8 February 1892.12 The firm’s ledgers record that, to July 1892, 2716 copies of Across the Plains had been sold at 1s. royalty and 100 at 3s. 6d. royalty, for which Stevenson received £153 6s. (more than half of that year’s total royalties of £272 9s.). In a letter of August 1892, Chatto & Windus mentioned the gratifying sales of Across the Plains and communicated the firm’s eagerness to publish more of Stevenson’s travel writing: ‘the sale for “Across the Plains” you will notice shows an improvement on the previous volumes of Essays. We wish we might publish your new book on Samoa’ (CW Archive, A/27, 229). Stevenson repeatedly expressed satisfaction with the sales: in April 1893, in a letter to Baxter, he referred to the ‘exceptionally good sales of Across the Plains’ (Letters 8: 54). By December 1894, the original print run was exhausted, and the publishers ordered another 500 copies to be printed; they continued to order printings of 500 copies a year until at least 1897, and in the early years of the new century the numbers were even higher. The critical reception, too, was favourable: as Stevenson noted in August 1892, ‘The critics seem to taste it […] as well as it could be hoped’ (Letters 7: 310). An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey had captivated readers and critics with their gentle charm and good humour, their stylistic elegance and the intimate, whimsical narrative voice; they were seen as a triumph of style over content. Critics interpreted ‘Across the Plains’ as another instalment in the same vein, fastening on its self-conscious preoccupation with the author’s own impressions, its conversational style and its search after aesthetic effect, and not seeming to register that the Stevenson of this work was more sombre, socially engaged and politically challenging. The Scot­ tish Leader, on 14 April 1892, claimed ‘Across the Plains’ as ‘one of the best examples of the author’s egotistically gossipping style’, placing it in the tradition of the personal essay (Maixner, 381). The review described the work as a ‘charming essay’, in the mould of Michel de Montaigne, and declared that ‘the writer’s own personality is freely and studiously utilised’, the chief aim being to ‘make a literary effect’. It dismissed Stevenson’s interest in the realities of emigrant life as solipsistic affectation, referring to his ‘deliberate posing’:

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Mr Stevenson may have been as limp as possible in that shed on the quays of New York; he may have been as disreputable as he pleased before the Commissary of Châtillon-sur-Loire, but in his account […] he seems as carefully draped in his shabby garments as ever Chatham was in his bandages and flannel. (Maixner, 381) Reviewers saw the journey itself as unimportant: Richard Le Gallienne described ‘Across the Plains’ as ‘the inspired log of trivial voyaging’ (463). Nor did the emigrants whom Stevenson observed much interest the reviewers. The Saturday Review disparaged the ‘[c]rude people, crude manners, and […] loathsome atmosphere’ of the emigrant train, marvelling that Stevenson’s ‘magic language’ could make ‘the ugly appear beautiful, the dull interesting’ (630). The reviewer noted that ‘we do not care much about the very scurvy occupants of the American car. They are kept in the background. Always in the van of those who cry “Art for art’s sake,” Mr. Stevenson’s […] subject is subservient to form’ (630). In 1895, the Edinburgh Edition of The Amateur Emigrant was published, as the third volume in the collected edition of Stevenson’s works. The Essay on the Text explains in detail the publication history of this work and analyses the most significant textual revisions (143–52). The Edinburgh Edition text marked the first publication of Part I and the first chapter of Part II of the manuscript, but it deviated in important ways from the work as originally written. The division between Parts I and II was relocated and, at a distance of about fifteen years from the period of composition, major cuts were made to the previously unpublished material. Baxter and Colvin had planned the collected edition in the early months of 1894. Colvin, perhaps surprisingly given his earlier hostility to Part I of The Amateur Emigrant, proposed including it alongside the previously published ‘Across the Plains’. Part II of the Edinburgh Edition text, entitled ‘Across the Plains’, largely follows the text of the 1892 volume publication. But the Edinburgh Edition retitles Part I ‘From the Clyde to Sandy Hook’— the manuscript title was ‘The Emigrant Ship’—and extends it to include the first chapter of Part II of the manuscript, ‘New York’ (presumably to preserve the integrity of the material already published as ‘Across the Plains’). Most importantly, Colvin and Stevenson made major deletions to Part I of the Edinburgh Edition, the previously unpublished material. It is impossible to know who was responsible for particular omissions. On 18 May 1894, responding to Colvin’s request xliii

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that he recast the text, Stevenson sent it ‘well slashed’ and gave his friend ‘permission’ to ‘slash it some more on your own account’ (Let­ ters 8: 287–8). Colvin reported in turn that he had ‘carried farther your excisions and compressions […] especially in passages of reflection & social speculation’ (Beinecke 11, 284). Stevenson’s 18 May letter cedes authorial responsibility, expressing his lack of confidence in the work. The ‘slashing’ conducted by Stevenson and Colvin was extensive. The most striking excisions, as examined in the Essay on the Text (149–52), are descriptions of steerage squalor, provocative analyses of the relations between classes, discussions of stowaways, scathing remarks on English labourers and reflection on the tensions in the Anglo-American relationship. Most of the passages excised are of the reflective or speculative nature that Colvin disliked, but there are also lengthy deletions of narrative, such as the stories told about the Irishman Barney. Stevenson died unexpectedly, suffering a brain haemorrhage at his home in Samoa, in December 1894, shortly before the publication of the Edinburgh Edition volume in January 1895. The critical reception of The Amateur Emigrant was largely favourable. Interest was intensified and made more poignant by the fact that, in the Glasgow Herald’s words, ‘the third volume of the lordly Edinburgh Edition of Mr Stevenson’s writings’ was ‘the first that has been issued since the tidings of his untimely death’ (24 Jan 1895). The Edinburgh Edition had now, The Bookman observed, become a ‘memorial’ (21). For the Glasgow Herald, the volume held ‘a peculiar interest as containing one of the few additions to the Stevenson canon that the world is still entitled to expect’ (24 Jan 1895). The Bookman reviewer expressed some curiosity about the reasons for the work’s suppression: ‘As it is up to the standard of the sequel, and is of peculiar interest from a personal point of view, it is not easy to say why it was excluded before’ (21). The Glasgow Herald, too, described it as an ‘incisive and brilliant piece of work’, and speculated that ‘the writer’s friends’ had perhaps been ‘afraid of the consequences of his very unvarnished account of life […] in the steerage of an ocean steamer’; the fact that the work was now published in an ‘abridged’ form supported this supposition (24 Jan 1895). Critics were more alert than in 1892 to the work’s exploration of cross-class sympathies. The Glasgow Herald observed that Stevenson ‘dwells on the characteristics and types of the passengers[;] […] it was the steerage passengers whom he found interesting, and his description of their life on board ship is very realistic’ (11 Jan 1895). The Bookman celebrated ‘Stevenson’s genial, catholic, yet keenly critical temperament’, declaring that he ‘was studying, anatomizing his fellow travellers all the xliv

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time, weighing them, pumping them, and yet never apart from them, never cold to their interests and wants’, subjecting them to a ‘sympathetic yet critical reflection’, with ‘not a shadow of patronage’ (21). The Glasgow Herald raised some questions about Stevenson’s motivation in writing a slumming narrative, referring to the voyage as a ‘curious episode in Mr Stevenson’s career’, undertaken ‘for the sake of gaining experience of the seamy side of things and knowledge of humanity’ (24 Jan 1895). Mostly, though, critics saw him as sympathetic to the emigrants: ‘kindly’, in the Evening Telegraph’s words (3), and ‘curiously democratic in his affections’ according to Francis Watt (48). ARTISTIC INFLUENCES AND LITERARY CONTEXTS

Stevenson’s travels were undertaken in the company, both literal and metaphorical, of texts. In ‘Walking Tours’ (1876), Stevenson observed that ‘a volume of Hazlitt’s essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine’s songs; and for Tristram Shandy I can pledge a fair experience’ (689). In The Amateur Emigrant, Stevenson carries across the States ‘the whole of Bancroft’s History of the United States in six fat volumes’ (84; see Explanatory Notes). Other texts travel with Stevenson in a less tangible sense, shaping the ways in which he sees and understands new lands. Emigrant songs, novels and travelogues frame Stevenson’s perceptions from the moment he sets sail. ‘We were indeed a musical ship’s company’, he writes, ‘and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion and the songs of all nations’ (17). Stevenson weaves together disparate voices and influences: he uses Robert Gilfillan’s sentimental lament, ‘O, why left I my hame?’, to throw into relief the squalor of steerage class, for example; he invokes the journeying heroes of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; and he contrasts his own hardships with those described in a letter written in 1860 by a young boy on the California Emigrant Trail. The Amateur Emigrant’s focus on its author’s subjective impressions owes much to Sentimentalism and Romanticism. Critics often detected the influence of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) on Stevenson’s travel writing (see li); and, indeed, Stevenson was indebted to Sterne, both in his use of a journey to explore questions of identity and selfhood, and in his adoption of a digressive narrative form. William Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Going a Journey’ (1822), with its emphasis on inward as well as outward journeys, was also a touchstone for Stevenson. Hazlitt had declared that, xlv

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when travelling abroad, ‘We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings, “Out of my country and myself I go.” ’ (53). Stevenson echoed Hazlitt’s words when he reflected on his crossing of class boundaries in The Amateur Emigrant: Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the Ocean combined both. ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’ sings the old poet; and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates and consideration. Part of the interest and a great deal of the amusement flowed, at least to me, from this novel situation in the world. (60) Stevenson’s glee in being incognito also recalls Hazlitt’s celebration of the traveller’s loss of identity. ‘Oh! it is great to shake off the trammels of the world and of public opinion’, Hazlitt had written, ‘—to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity […] and become the creature of the moment, clear of all ties’ (44). The Amateur Emigrant, like much of Stevenson’s non-fiction, demonstrates the influence of the personal essay tradition. In ‘A College Magazine’ (1887), Stevenson recalled that as a young man he ‘played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, […] to Montaigne’ (59). Stevenson cultivates a conversational style and an apparent emotional intimacy with his readers; he enacts a struggle for candid self-disclosure (though some areas, such as his romantic history, are resolutely veiled). Central to Stevenson’s debt to the personal essay tradition is the essayist’s persona as the idler: as, in Joseph Addison’s words, ‘a Spectator of Mankind’ (3). Stevenson’s ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (1877) perfects this persona, celebrating the importance of ‘curiosity’, and of responding to ‘random provocations’ (83). The Amateur Emigrant evinces this curiosity, as Stevenson seeks out the ambiguities, foibles and ironies of human personality. His description of his pleasure in travelling incognito is perhaps also indebted to Charles Baudelaire, whose Petits Poèmes en Prose (1869) had been an important influence on the young author (Letters 2: 142). Baudelaire wrote of ‘le parfait flâneur’ (‘the perfect idler’): ‘L’observateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito’ (‘The observer is a prince who everywhere enjoys his incognito’) (64). Stevenson’s investigation of a journey across class boundaries forms an important part of the literature of social exploration, a genre that flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as middlexlvi

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class explorers sought to witness and participate in life in the urban slums. ‘Slumming’ narratives, from James Greenwood’s A Night in a Workhouse (1866) to Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), cast an anthropological eye inward on the British underclass. The Amateur Emigrant shares many features with these narratives, making literal the imagery of ‘descent’ that characterizes social explorers’ journey into the slums: ‘To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an adventure that required some nerve’ (46). Exposés of slum life often appeared in the popular newspapers and magazines that proliferated in the late Victorian years. Perhaps some of the disapproval of The Amateur Emigrant stemmed from this association with the new mass-market readership. Henley, in June 1881, compared Travels with a Donkey to The Amateur Emigrant in revealing terms: ‘The one’s art, the other’s journalism’ (Beinecke 14, 360). Stevenson’s narrative discloses the ambivalent class politics of the slumming narrative. His narrative persona lays claim to a democratic radicalism, identifying with steerage passengers and lambasting the snobbery of saloon passengers who take a sightseeing tour through steerage. Yet the saloon passengers’ voyeurism subtly recalls the curiosity which led Stevenson to seek out ‘the worst of emigrant life’ (7). Stevenson is, moreover, at pains to distance himself from his fellows. When he realizes that a brass plate distinguishes second cabin from steerage, he records his flattered vanity with disarming honesty: I was incognito […] not so much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman […]. Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of spirits I could go down and refresh myself with a look at that brass plate. (9) Alongside a liberal reading of the emigrants as victims of economic circumstance, Stevenson draws on the conservative contemporary rhetoric of inborn atavism: ‘We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, […] a shipful of failures’ (14). Here, Stevenson implicates himself in the degeneracy, but it is notable that he ascribes emigration to unfitness, not economic pressure; and the narrative elsewhere articulates a middle-class fear of militant, organized labour. A further influence on Stevenson’s careful documentation of the squalid emigrant conditions is offered by French Naturalism, and specifically Émile Zola. Stevenson notes of the physical degradation suffered by steerage passengers: ‘A writer of xlvii

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the school of M. Zola would here find an inspiration for many pages’ (23). The affiliation with Naturalism is perhaps surprising, as during the 1880s Stevenson came to be known as a cheer-leader for the romance revival, a staunch opponent of realism and a critic of Zola; in later years, though, he expressed admiration for the French author (see Explanatory Notes, 181). American literature, and writing about America, forms another important literary context for The Amateur Emigrant. At a time of British condescension to American literature, Stevenson took writers from the United States seriously, publishing important essays on Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. His interest in Whitman is particularly significant. Stevenson read Leaves of Grass in the 1871 edition, which emphasized the reconstruction of a new social order in the wake of the Civil War.13 In ‘Walt Whitman’ (1878), Stevenson hailed the poet as emblematic of the new nation, calling him a ‘prophet’ whose work articulated a new ‘democratic idea of humanity’ and an ‘intense Americanism’ (92, 94, 117). The Amateur Emigrant evinces a Whitmanesque interest in how a future literature might arise from the American experience. Stevenson’s imagination is seized by the literary opportunities offered by ‘all this epical turmoil’: it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended and the most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this? But alas! it is not these things that are necessary; it is only Homer. (106–7) Narratives of westward travel and expansion underlie The Amateur Emigrant, forming an influence that Stevenson both obeys and resists. Long before the historian Frederick Jackson Turner articulated, in 1893, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, the idea of the United States’ Manifest Destiny to people the West had powerfully associated racialized concepts of freedom, masculinity and westward movement. In 1835, Washington Irving contrasted European travel, which encouraged American youth ‘to grow luxurious and effeminate’, with a ‘tour on the prairies’, which would ‘produce that manliness, simplicity and self-dependence most in unison with our political institutions’ (43). Stevenson admits the allure of the myth xlviii

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of the heroic pioneer: ‘For many years, America was to me a sort of promised land; “westward the march of empire holds its way” ’, he writes, quoting George Berkeley’s prophecy of a new golden age in the West (75; see Explanatory Notes). Imagery of Old World belatedness and New World energy and youth infuses The Amateur Emigrant. Yet Stevenson’s romantic expectations are increasingly unsettled, as he realizes that a ‘few wild story books which delighted his childhood form the imaginative basis of his picture of America’ (76). The narrative charts his gradual disenchantment with the heroic myth of emigration, which he calls the ‘great epic of self-help’ (13). On the train journey across the States, he emphasizes those who are excluded from the American dream of equality, notably the Chinese, abused by his fellow travellers, and the equally vilified Native Americans, ‘over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days’ (115). Literary and popular representations of America shape Stevenson’s preconceptions but break down in the face of a more complex reality. Candidly exposing the racial condescension underlying his own expectations, Stevenson describes his first meeting with an African American: this man, being ‘strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels of my youth’, Stevenson observes, ‘marched me farther into the country of surprise’ (89). HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

When Stevenson embarked on the Devonia, Britain—along with Continental Europe and the United States—was in the grip of the Long Depression. British unemployment rates rose sharply in 1878–9, and commentators were ever more concerned about urban poverty and joblessness. A new ‘mass’ unionism developed from the 1860s and industrial action became increasingly common. Stevenson explores some of these developments in the early chapters of The Amateur Emigrant (13–14, 48). The nineteenth century also saw a demographic revolution, as unprecedented numbers of Europeans migrated to the New World. Scotland lost proportionately more of her citizens than any other Western or Central European country except Ireland and Norway (Devine, 87). Until the early nineteenth century, the Highlands had seen the highest rate of emigration, but by the 1850s the urban and industrial central Lowlands supplied most Scottish emigrants, in proportional as well as absolute terms (Devine, 89). Contemporaries constructed a powerful myth of the Scot as the ideal emigrant. In 1880, for example, W. J. Rattray extolled the ‘extraordinary activity xlix

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of the emigrant or traveling and adventurous Scot all over the world’ (i, 207). This hagiographic tradition of writing about Scottish emigration ignores the many emigrants who were less fortunate or ambitious, and Stevenson’s account provides a useful corrective. Transatlantic and transcontinental travel had changed rapidly over the previous decades. The journey across the Atlantic took six weeks in the 1850s but only ten days in 1879 (Devine, 93). The Devonia, an iron single-screw steamship of 4200 tons, built in 1877, was one of the largest and fastest in the company’s Atlantic fleet (see fig. 5, a photograph of the ship). As Stevenson’s account leaves in no doubt, steamship travel was segregated by class, catering for both élite and mass travel. A newspaper cutting from the Anchor Line archive describes the Devonia as ‘a floating palace’, furnished with ‘every appliance that science or ingenuity could suggest’; but while the saloon accommodation is ‘simply luxurious’, steerage quarters are described, more tersely, as ‘fitted with ventilating fanners’ (Anchor GB 248 UGD 255/1/8/2). The journey across the States, too, had recently been transformed, with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. This railroad followed the route of the old emigrant trails for the most part, and connected the western terminus of the existing rail network, at Council Bluffs, Iowa, with the Pacific coast (see fig. 6, a map of the railroad route across the States). The railroad was to transform the West, accelerating the process by which western states and territories joined the Union. Accounts of the journey across ocean and continent proliferated in this period, but writers usually travelled by saloon class and Pullman car, offering a different perspective from Stevenson’s account of steerage class and emigrant train. In Westward by Rail (1871), for example, W. Fraser Rae described his steamship as ‘a floating hotel’ and lauded ‘the great railway which Americans justly class among the grandest and most wonderful achievements of modern times’ (363, 69). In 1879, the United States was in the midst of profound social and economic transformation. The era of Reconstruction, following the American Civil War, had ended in 1877. Stevenson arrived in the States during the Gilded Age, a period of extreme wealth and poverty, of political corruption and corporate power, and of mistrust of the socalled robber barons—a suspicion reflected in Stevenson’s description of American railway magnates as ‘gentlemen in frock coats’ bent on ‘a fortune and subsequent visit to Paris’ (106). Westward expansion was transforming the nation. In the years from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1890, eight new western states and territories entered l

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after life and influence

the Union (Nebraska, Colorado, North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming). Many contemporaries viewed the West as a land of opportunity, but westward expansion relied on the dispossession of Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains. Stevenson’s penultimate chapter, ‘Despised Races’, demonstrates his melancholy awareness of this process (115–16; see also Explanatory Notes). Settlers had encroached on Native American lands on the Great Plains from the 1850s, and the federal government harassed and oppressed them, forcing them onto reservations and pursuing assimilationist policies alongside aggressive military action. The conflict with the United States Army saw one after another Native American people defeated, although there were some temporary victories, most famously at Little Bighorn in June 1876, when Sioux and Cheyenne warriors successfully defended tribal land (White, 104). In California, which was ceded to the United States in 1848, Native Americans were also subject to forms of brutal oppression that originated in their forced labour on Spanish missions in the eighteenth century (White, 40–1, 338–40). While Stevenson is scathing about present-day EuroAmerican treatment of Native Americans, he presents a romanticized and benign image of Native American life on colonial-era Spanish missions (115–16). Nor was the West a land of opportunity for other minority groups, such as the Mexican and Chinese labourers employed by the railroads and mining companies. Economic depression and unemployment stoked latent anti-Chinese sentiment, which erupted in agitation and violence, particularly in California, and resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Stevenson explores anti-Chinese prejudice in ‘Despised Races’ (113–15; see also Explanatory Notes). AFTERLIFE AND INFLUENCE

The Amateur Emigrant did not receive much positive critical attention in the decades following Stevenson’s death. In 1905, Chatto republished Part I of the Edinburgh Edition Amateur Emigrant in Essays of Travel. Critical responses demonstrate a persistent emphasis on Stevenson’s affectedness and aestheticism. For Arthur Clutton-Brock, The Amateur Emigrant evinced Stevenson’s ‘effort […] to sympathise’ but also his ‘artificiality of […] style’ and ‘Johnsonian pomposity’ (348– 9). The Athenæum’s favourable review notes that Stevenson’s ‘itineraries, if they are not quite sentimental journeys, come very near being so’, suggesting that ‘he played the “sedulous ape” ’ to Sterne (24 June 1905, 781). Indeed, Stevenson’s critical reputation was at its lowest ebb li

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introduction

in the first half of the twentieth century. Throughout these years, too, the Edinburgh Edition served as copy text for all editions of The Ama­ teur Emigrant, and the work as Stevenson originally composed it was not available. In 1966, James D. Hart’s From Scotland to Silverado published the deleted passages from Stevenson’s manuscript, though this text otherwise followed the Edinburgh Edition. Roger Swearingen’s limited edition, The Amateur Emigrant, with Some First Impressions of America (1976–7), was the first publication to take Stevenson’s manuscript as its principal copy text.14 From the 1980s onwards, The Amateur Emigrant has attracted serious critical interest. Jonathan Raban declares the work ‘a living nightmare, and a masterpiece’ and contrasts it with what he sees as the ‘belle-lettristic’ charm of his previous travel writing (i, iii). James Wilson celebrates the book’s ‘directness and absolute honesty of response’, seeing Stevenson’s shift from the realism of The Amateur Emi­ grant to the romance of his 1880s fiction as, in some ways, a retreat from a painful imaginative engagement with social realities (91). Thus, ironically, the work’s naturalism, contemporaneity and challenging politics—those qualities that distressed Stevenson’s friends at the time—now form the basis of The Amateur Emigrant’s reappraisal. The Emigrant, as Roslyn Jolly observes, is ‘an early experiment in realistic, politically provocative writing’; and although ‘the public would see little of this side of Stevenson while his father lived’, these qualities later distinguished his Pacific work (4). The work thus occupies a crucial position in a modern Stevenson canon. The present edition, returning readers as far as possible to the text as originally written, and examining the reasons for its suppression and neglect, aims to contribute to its reassessment. Written when Stevenson was still a young man, The Amateur Emigrant challenges the conventional reading of his transition from early romance to mature realism, from escapism to political engagement. It is also a significant work in the history of travel writing. With its engaging narrative persona and vibrant sketches of emigrant life, the work self-consciously reflects on a journey across class and national borders, interrogating myths of emigration and exploring oppression and prejudice.

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notes NOTES 1. See Stevenson’s mother’s account of his departure, in Margaret Isabella Stevenson, ‘Notes about Robert Louis Stevenson’, autograph manuscript, undated, GEN MSS 684, Robert Louis Stevenson Collection, box 2, folders 58–9, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 2. All the illustrations can be found in the Appendix, 121–9. 3. See, for example, Henley to Baxter, 16 Aug 1879, in Letters 3: 5; Harman, 155, 164, 169–71, 187–8, 204–5. 4. Edmund Gosse to G. A. Armour, 31 Jan 1891 (Maixner, 375). 5. Colvin, headnote in Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends, ed. Sidney Colvin (New York, 1899), i, 192. 6. Stevenson was paid £20 for An Inland Voyage, with royalties of 1s. a copy to begin after 1000 copies sold; he was paid £30 for Travels with a Donkey, with royalties of 4s. a copy to begin after 700 copies sold; in 1884, Kegan Paul’s accounts still showed a loss of £180 on Stevenson’s first three books (Swearingen, 30, 35, 30). 7. On 11 October 1880, Stevenson asked his father for £20 in order to repay Kegan Paul: see the present Introduction, xxxviii–xxxix. 8. The volume of essays to which Stevenson refers was eventually published, by Kegan Paul, as Virginibus Puerisque (London, 1881). 9. Thomas Stevenson to Stevenson, 26 Feb 1882 (Maixner, 127). Stevenson replies that ‘as you say, we’ll put a whole religious tract in that very place’, but his changes are relatively minor: Stevenson to Thomas Stevenson, early March 1882, in Letters 3: 292. 10. R. S. McLellan, Anchor Line 1856–1956 (Glasgow, [1956]), Anchor GB 248 UGD 255/1/32/23. 11. Manual of Instructions for the Use of Captains and Officers of ‘Anchor’ Line Steamers, issued by Henderson Brothers (1876), rev. edn (Glasgow, 1884), 19, 154, 19, Anchor GB 248 UGD 255/1/5/18. 12. All the details in this paragraph derive from the following stock books and records in the Chatto & Windus Archive: CW B/2/15, 728; CW B/2/2, 642; CW B/2/3, 206; CW B/2/16, 749. 13. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871). Stevenson’s copy is held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 14. Later editions by Andrew Noble and Christopher MacLachlan take Swearingen’s and Hart’s editions, respectively, as copy texts.

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introduction WORKS CITED Addison, Joseph. Essay No. 1 [‘The Spectator’s Account of Himself ’], Spectator, 1 March 1711, rptd in the Spectator, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London, 1714), i, 1–5. The Athenæum, 7 Feb 1880, 185–6: ‘Literary Gossip’. The Athenæum, 23 Oct 1880, 534–5: ‘Literary Gossip’. The Athenæum, 24 June 1905, 781–3: ‘Our Library Table’. B. ‘In the Steerage of A Cunard Steamer’, Pall Mall Gazette, 9 Aug 1879, 11–12; 12 Aug 1879, 11; 14 Aug 1879, 11–12. Baudelaire, Charles. ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863), in L’Art romantique (Paris, 1869), 51–114. The Bookman, 8.43 (Apr 1895), 21: ‘The Edinburgh Stevenson’. Clutton-Brock, A. ‘Stevenson on his Travels’, Speaker: The Liberal Review, 8 July 1905, 348–9. Devine, T. M. To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750–2000 (London, 2011). Evening Telegraph, 11 Jan 1895, 3: ‘The Late R. L. Stevenson’s New Book’. Glasgow Herald, 11 Jan 1895, 7: ‘Our London Correspondence’. Glasgow Herald, 24 Jan 1895, 7: ‘Literature’. Gosse, Edmund. Critical Kit-Kats (New York, 1896). Harman, Claire. Stevenson: A Biography (London, 2005). Hart, James D. ‘Introduction’, in Stevenson, From Scotland to Silverado, xiii–li. Hazlitt, William. ‘On Going a Journey’, in Table-Talk: Or, Original Essays, 2 vols (London, 1821–2), ii, 35–53. Irving, Washington. A Tour on the Prairies (Paris, 1835). Jolly, Roslyn. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (Farnham, 2009). Le Gallienne, Richard. ‘A Review’, The Academy, 14 May 1892, 462–4. Maixner, Paul (ed.). Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage (London, 1981). Osbourne, Katharine. Robert Louis Stevenson in California (Chicago, 1911). Raban, Jonathan. ‘Introduction’, in Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant (London, 1984), [i–vi]. Rae, W. Fraser. Westward by Rail: The New Route to the East (New York, 1871). Rattray, W. J. The Scot in British North America, 4 vols (Toronto, 1880–4). Saturday Review, 28 May 1892, 630–1: Review of Across the Plains.

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wor ks cited Stevenson, Robert Louis. ‘Walking Tours’, Cornhill Magazine, 33.198 ( June 1876), 685–90. —   —. ‘An Apology for Idlers’, Cornhill Magazine, 36.211 ( July 1877), 80–6. —   —. ‘Walt Whitman’ (1878), in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London, 1882), 91–128. —   —. ‘A College Magazine’, in Memories and Portraits (London, 1887), 57–76.  ——.  From Scotland to Silverado, ed. James D. Hart (Cambridge ma, 1966).  ——.  The Amateur Emigrant, with Some First Impressions of America, ed. Roger Swearingen, 2 vols (Ashland or, 1976–7).  ——.  The Cévennes Journal: Notes on a Journey through the French Highlands, ed. Gordon Golding (Edinburgh, 1978).  ——.  From the Clyde to California: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Emigrant Journey, ed. Andrew Noble (Aberdeen, 1985).  ——.  Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and The Amateur Emigrant, ed. Christopher MacLachlan (London, 2004). Swearingen, Roger. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (Hamden ct, 1980). Watt, Francis. ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and Edinburgh’, Art Journal (Feb 1896), 46–50. White, Richard. ‘It’s your Misfortune and None of my Own’: A History of the American West (Norman ok, 1991). Wilson, James. ‘Landscape with Figures’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Andrew Noble (London, 1983), 73–95.

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Contents page, 1879–80 manuscript of The Amateur Emigrant.

Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Beinecke 24, 591.

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HEADNOTE

The present text uses the manuscript composed in 1879 and 1880 as principal copy text, supplementing it where manuscript pages are missing with the earliest printed version. The points of transition between copy texts are indicated by a star (). For further explanation, see Essay on the Text, 154.

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TO ROBERT ALAN STEVENSON

Our friendship was not only founded before we were born by a community of blood, but is in itself near as old as my life. It began with our early ages and, like a history, has been continued to the present time. Although we may not be old in the world, we are old to each other, having so long been intimates. We are now widely separated, a great sea and continent intervening; but memory like care mounts into iron ships and rides post behind the horseman. Neither time nor space nor enmity can conquer old affection; and as I dedicate these sketches, it is not to you only, but to all in the old country, that I send the greeting of my heart. R. L. S.

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

PA RT I The Emigrant Ship

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The Second Cabin I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow. Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and voluble over their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening estuary; and with the falling temperature the gloom among the passengers increased. Two of the women wept. Any one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all absconding from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged, and no common sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard bow announced that our ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in mid-river, at the tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of bulwark, a street of white deckhouses, an aspiring forest of spars, larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an incorporated town in the land to which she was to bear us. I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although anxious to see the worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage, and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have a table at command. The advice was excellent; but to understand the choice, and what I gained, some outline of the internal disposition of the ship will first be necessary. In her very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs. A little abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives admission to three galleries, two running forward towards Steerage No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines. The starboard forward gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and below the officers’ cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement. 7

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the a mateur emigr ant

There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this strip. He does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds berths and a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys a distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say, differs not only on different ships, but on the same ship according as her head is to the east or west. In my own experience, the principal difference between our table and that of the true steerage passenger was the table itself, and the crockery plates from which we ate. But lest I should show myself ungrateful, let me recapitulate every advantage. At breakfast, we had a choice between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make, the two were so surprisingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof conclusive of some chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could distinguish a smack of snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling and dish-cloths in the second. As a matter of fact I have seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting which had been supplied them. In the way of eatables at the same meal we were gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was common to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and sometimes rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt junk, and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding days, instead of duff, we had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the name of a plum-pudding. At tea we were served with some broken meat from the saloon; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form of spare patties or rissoles; but as a general thing, mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish neither hot nor cold. If these were not the scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely; yet we were all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily. These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and porridge which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage; so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I might as well have been in the steerage outright. Had they given me porridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly contented with the fare. As it was, with a few biscuits and some whisky and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my spirits up to the mark. The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of sentiment. In the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage of discovery between 8

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 the second cabin

decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck. Who could tell whether I housed on the port or starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was only there that my superiority became practical; everywhere else I was incognito, moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after all, and had broken meat to tea. Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of spirits I could go down and refresh myself with a look at that brass plate. For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six guineas is the steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you remember that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, and, in five cases out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or privately pays the steward for extra rations, the difference in price becomes almost nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food comparatively varied, and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman, may thus be had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-passengers in the second cabin had already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and declared it was an experiment not to be repeated. As I go on to tell about my steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not alone in their opinion. Out of ten with whom I was more or less intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind them assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence until they could afford to bring them by saloon. Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on board. Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much goodwill and character. Yet it had some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally known by the name of ‘Johnny,’ in spite of his own protests, greatly diverted us by his clever, cross-country efforts to speak English, and became on the strength of that an universal favourite—it takes so little in this world of shipboard to create a popularity. There was, besides, a Scots mason, known from his favourite dish as ‘Irish Stew,’ three or four nondescript Scots, a fine young Irishman, O’Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve a special word of condemnation. One of them was Scots: the other claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he was born in England; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and nurtured, but ashamed to own his country. He had a sister on board, whom he faithfully neglected throughout 9

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the voyage, though she was not only sick but much his senior, and had nursed and cared for him in childhood. In appearance he was like an imbecile Henry the Third of France. The Scotsman, though perhaps as big an ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have only bracketed them together because they were fast friends, and disgraced themselves equally by their conduct at the table. Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly married couple, devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they had first seen each other years ago at a preparatory school, and that very afternoon he had carried her books home for her. I do not know if this story will be plain to Southern readers; but to me it recalls many a school idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and nine confronting each other stride-legs, flushed with jealousy; for to carry home a young lady’s books was both a delicate attention and a privilege. Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as much old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her husband, and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself. We had to take her own word that she was married; for it was sorely contradicted by the testimony of her appearance. Nature seemed to have sanctified her for the single state; even the colour of her hair was incompatible with matrimony, and her husband, I thought, should be a man of saintly spirit and phantasmal bodily presence. She was ill, poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty table-cloth shocked her like an impropriety; and the whole strength of her endeavour was bent upon keeping her watch true to Glasgow time till she should reach New York. They had heard reports, her husband and she, of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between these two cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific, had seized on this occasion to put them to the proof. It was a good thing for the old lady; for she passed much leisure time in studying the watch. Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let it run down. It was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands of a watch must never be turned backwards; and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she started it again. When she imagined this was about due, she sought out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen, who was embarked on the same experiment as herself and had hitherto been less neglectful. She was in quest of two o’clock; and when she learned it was already seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted up her voice and cried ‘Gravy!’ I had not heard this innocent expletive since I was a young child; and I suppose it must have been the same with the other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our fill. 10

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 the second cabin

Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he mine, during the voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only scooped gravy; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the president who called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest. I knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me. For as there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up from another hand in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man’s place of birth. So it was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea; and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean voyages having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern. By his own account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. A few years back, he had been married and after a fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead and the money gone. But his was the nature that looks forward, and goes on from one year to another and through all the extremities of fortune undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting things to rights. He was always hovering round inventions like a bee over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He had with him a patent medicine, for instance, the composition of which he had bought years ago for five dollars from an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a hundred pounds (I think it was) to an English apothecary. It was called Golden Oil; cured all maladies without exception; and I am bound to say that I partook of it myself with good results. It is a character of the man that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones with his bottle. If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed 11

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the day’s experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a day’s kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical species, and we angled as often as not in one another’s baskets. Once, in the midst of a serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair of us indeed.

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Early Impressions We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was now complete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon the deck. There were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and one Russian; all now belonging for ten days to one small iron country on the deep. As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand. The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the young men enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the bo’sun’s whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of man. This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; many were married and encumbered with families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing dis13

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position. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance. In a word I was not taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like Marmion, ‘in the lost battle, borne down by the flying.’ Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination. A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment, and makes a trifling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle as we please, we are not born economists. The individual is more affecting than the mass. It is by the scenic accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England. Yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter. The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the decks scraping acquaintance after their fashion also. ‘What do you call your mither?’ I heard one ask. ‘Mawmaw,’ was the reply, indicating, I fancy, a shade of difference in the social scale. When people pass each other on the high seas of life at so early an age, the contact is but slight, and the relation more like what we may imagine to be the friendship of flies than that of men; it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so open in its communications and so devoid of deeper human qualities. The children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick as thieves 14

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at a fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously manœuvring on the outskirts of acquaintance. The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon as familiar as home to these half-conscious little ones. It was odd to hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore words to designate portions of the vessel. ‘Co’ ’way doon to yon dyke,’ I heard one say, probably meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my mouth, watching them climb into the shrouds or on the rails while the ship went swinging through the waves; and I admired and envied the courage of their mothers, who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at these perilous feats. ‘He’ll maybe be a sailor,’ I heard one remark; ‘now’s the time to learn.’ I had been on the point of running forward to interfere, but stood back at that, reproved. Very few in the more delicate classes have the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to them; but the life of poorer folk, where necessity is so much more immediate and imperious, braces even a mother to this extreme of endurance. And perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should break his neck than that you should break his spirit. And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention one little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who, wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in motion. To meet him, crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little triumph of the human species. Even when his mother and the rest of his family lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy. Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but few advances. We discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new world, or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we condoled together over the food and the vileness of the steerage. One or two had been so near famine that you may say they had run into the ship with the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the best in the best of possible steamers. But the majority were hugely discontented. Coming as they did from a country in so low a state as Great Britain, many of them from Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as dead, and many having long been 15

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out of work, I was surprised to find them so dainty in their notions. I myself lived almost exclusively on bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to them, and found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient. But these working men were loud in their outcries. It was not ‘food for human beings,’ it was ‘only fit for pigs,’ it was ‘a disgrace.’ Many of them lived almost entirely upon biscuit, others on their own private supplies, and some paid extra for better rations from the ship. This marvellously changed my notion of the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was prepared to hear him grumble, for grumbling is the traveller’s pastime; but I was not prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to myself. Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no question of the sincerity of his disgust. With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise. A single night of the steerage had filled them with horror. I had myself suffered, even in my decent second-cabin berth, from the lack of air; and as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined to sleep on deck, and advised all who complained of their quarters to follow my example. I daresay a dozen of others agreed to do so, and I thought we should have been quite a party. Yet when I brought up my rug about seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch. That chimerical terror of good night-air, which makes men close their windows, list their doors, and seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had sent all these healthy workmen down below. One would think we had been brought up in a fever country; yet in England the most malarious districts are in the bedchambers. I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the night so quietly to myself. The wind had hauled a little ahead on the starboard bow, and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter near the firehole, and made myself snug for the night. The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle and cradling movement. The ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her bowels occupied the mind, and prepared it for slumber. From time to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay, and recall me to the obscure borders of consciousness; or I heard, as it were through a veil, the clear note of the clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea-cry, ‘All’s well!’ I know nothing, whether for poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of these two syllables in the darkness of a night at sea. 

The air was still quiet and pure, when I awoke with something on my feet, which was heavy and kept violently moving and grinding 16

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down upon me. It was at first a bare sensation, but in the second or two that intervene betwixt sleep and waking, I became conscious of discomfort and even of pain. I sat up bewildered, and found a very tall, white, grizzled old man, grimed with coal, writhing beside me on the deck. Next moment he was upright on his feet; the next, resting on his toes, his hands and the crown of his head, like one about to turn a somerset; and the next, rolling with loud groans upon his belly. It may sound almost humourous in a description; but what with the age of the performer, and the cries of pain with which he accompanied his incongruous antics, it was not only astonishing but ghastly to behold. I believe I must have stared at him for a good minute in sheer, idle wonderment, before I found sense enough to ask him what was wrong. ‘It’s the cramps, the cramps in my stomach,’ he moaned, still tumbling antically on the deck. Leaping to my feet, I ran to the galley which was already open, and told what I had seen. No one was surprised. It was a thing of course that a fine man should now and then drink too much cold water in the sweltering labours of the night; and cramp was but the natural punishment of this excess. Without haste or interest, the doctor was summoned to the scene, and the patient carried below to his bunk, where he lay sick during the remainder of the voyage. It was the first time I had ever seen a human being suffer from this cruel affection; but it was not destined to be the last. The day had dawned fairly enough; and during the early part, we had some pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards nightfall, the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose so high that it was difficult to keep one’s footing on the deck. I have spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship’s company; and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion and the songs of all nations. Night after night we gathered at the aftermost limit of our domain, where it bordered on that of the saloon. Performers were called up with acclamation, some shame-faced and hanging the head, others willing and as bold as brass. Good, bad or indifferent, Scotch, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse, the songs were received with generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scotch accent, varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the violin. The performers were all humourous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers in private life; but as soon as they were arrayed for the dance, they conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral. I have never seen decorum pushed so far; 17

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and as this was not expected, the quadrille was soon whistled down, and the dancers departed under a cloud. Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen from another rank of society, would have dared to make some fun for themselves and the spectators; but the working man, when sober, takes an extreme and even melancholy view of personal deportment. A fifth form schoolboy is not more careful of dignity. He dare not be comical; his fun must escape from him unprepared, and above all it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration. I like his society under most circumstances; but let me never again join with him in public gambols. But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even the inclemencies of sea and sky. On this rough Saturday night, we got together by the main deckhouse in a place sheltered from the wind and rain. Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane deck, and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to support the women in the violent lurching of the ship; and when we were thus disposed, sang to our heart’s content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the music hall, such as ‘Around her splendid form, I weaved the magic circle,’ sounded bald, bleak and pitifully silly. ‘We don’t want to fight but, by Jingo, if we do,’ was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night. I observed a Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to the general effect. And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example of the sincerity with which the song was rendered; for nearly all with whom I conversed upon the subject, were bitterly opposed to war and attributed their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan. Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices that took up the burthen, how the sentiment came home to each. ‘The Anchor’s Weighed’ was true for us. We were indeed ‘Rocked on the bosom of the stormy deep.’ How many of us could say with the singer ‘I’m lonely tonight, love, without you’ or ‘Go someone and tell them from me, to write me a letter from home!’ And when was there a more appropriate moment for ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ than now when the land, the friends and the affections of that mingled but beloved time, were fading and fleeing behind us in the vessel’s wake? It pointed forward to the hour when these labours should be overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a meeting in the sanded inn, when those who had parted 18

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in the spring of youth should again drink a cup of kindness in their age. Had not Burns contemplated emigration, I scarce believe he would have found that note. This was the first fusion of our little nationality together. The wind sang shrill in the rigging; the rain fell small and thick; the whole group, linked together as it was, was shaken and swung to and fro as the swift steamer shore into the waves. It was a general embrace, both friendly and helpful, like what one imagines of old Christian Agapes. I turned many times to look behind me on the moving desert of seas, now cloud-canopied and lit with but a low nocturnal glimmer along the line of the horizon. It hemmed us in and cut us off on our swift-travelling oasis. And yet this waste was part a playground for the stormy petrel; and on the least tooth of reef, outcropping in a thousand miles of unfathomable ocean, the gull makes its home and dwells in a busy polity. And small as was our iron world, it made yet a large and habitable place in the Atlantic, compared with our globe upon the seas of space. All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were prostrated by sickness; only five sat down to tea in the Second Cabin, and two of these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I heard an old woman express her surprise that ‘the ship didnae gae doon,’ as she saw some one pass her with a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scotch psalms. Many went to service and, in true Scotch fashion, came back malcontent with their divine. ‘I didnae think he was an experienced preacher,’ said one girl to me. It was a bleak uncomfortable day; but at night by six bells, although the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all wracked and blown away behind the rim of the horizon and the stars came out thickly overhead. I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this hurly burly of the winds and waters, as ever at home upon the summer woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the water with a roar and shook the ship from end to end, the bows battled with loud reports against the billows; and as I stood in the lee scuppers and looked up to where the funnel leaned out over my head vomiting smoke, and the black and monstrous topsails blotted, at each lurch, a different crop of stars, it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing of small account, and that just above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.

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Steerage Scenes Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort. Down one flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space, the centre occupied by a hatchway which made a convenient seat for about twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope and the carpenter’s bench afforded perches for perhaps as many more. The canteen, or steerage bar, was on one side of the stair; on the other, a no less attractive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable interpreter. I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a barrel, and many merry evenings prolonged there until five bells when the lights were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to roost. It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard, who lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in Strathspey time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience of white-faced women. It was as much as he could do to play, and some of his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had crawled from their bunks at the first, experimental flourish, and found better than medicine in the music. Some of the heaviest heads began to nod in time, and a degree of animation looked from some of the palest eyes. Humanly speaking, it is a more important matter to play the fiddle even badly than to write huge works upon recondite subjects. What could Mr. Darwin have done for these sick women? But this fellow scraped away; and the world was positively a better place for all who heard him. We have yet to understand the economical value of these mere accomplishments. 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 Scotch 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. This was, properly speaking, but a strip across a deck house, lit by a sickly lantern which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship. Through the open slide-door, we had a glimpse of a gray night sea, with patches of phosphorescent 20

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foam flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and the horizon rising and falling as the vessel rolled to the wind. In the centre the companion ladder plumped down sheerly like an open pit. Below, on the first landing and lighted by another lamp, lads and lasses danced, not more than three at a time for lack of space, in jigs and reels and hornpipes. Above, on either side, there was a recess railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide and four long, which stood for orchestra and seats of honour. In the one balcony, five slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in a comely group. In the other was posted Orpheus, fiddling with pith, his body, which was convulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to his somnolent, imperturbable, Scotch face. His brother, a dark man with a vehement, interested countenance, who made a god of the fiddler, sat by with open mouth, drinking in the general admiration and throwing out remarks to kindle it. ‘That’s a bonny hornpipe now,’ he would say; ‘it’s a great favourite with performers; they dance the sand dance to it.’ And he expounded the sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long ‘Hush!’ with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes—‘He’s going to play “Auld Robin Gray” on one string!’ And throughout this excruciating movement, ‘On one string—that’s on one string,’ he kept crying. I would have given something myself, that it had been on none; but the hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two and thus introduced myself to the notice of the brother: who directed his talk to me for some little while, keeping, I need hardly mention, true to his topic like the seaman to the star. ‘He’s grand of it,’ he said confidentially. ‘His master was a Music Hall man.’ Indeed the music hall man had left his mark; for our fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old airs: ‘Logie o’ Buchan,’ for instance, he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a set of quadrilles, and had never heard it called by name. Perhaps after all, the brother was the more interesting performer of the two. I have spoken with him afterwards repeatedly, and found him always the same quick, fiery bit of a man, not without brains; but he never showed to such advantage as when he was thus squiring the fiddler into public note. There is nothing more becoming than a genuine admiration; and it shares this with love, that it does not become contemptible although misplaced. The dancing was but feebly carried on. The space was almost impractically small; and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of bashfulness about this innocent display, with a surprising impudence and roughness of address. Most often, either the fiddle lifted up its voice unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be footing it and snap21

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ping fingers on the landing. And such was the eagerness of the brother to display all the acquirements of his idol, and such the sleepy indifference of the performer, that the tune would as often as not be changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad, before the dancers had cut half a dozen shuffles. In the meantime, however, the audience had been growing more and more numerous every moment; there was hardly standing room round the top of the companion; and the strange instinct of the race moved some of the new-comers to close both the doors, so that the atmosphere grew insupportable. It was a good place, as the saying is, to leave. The wind hauled ahead with a head sea. By ten at night, heavy sprays were flying and drumming over the forecastle; the companion of Steerage No. 1 had to be closed, and the door of communication through the second cabin thrown open. Either from the convenience of the opportunity, or because we had already a number of acquaintances in that part of the ship, Mr. Jones and I paid it a late visit. Steerage No. 1 is shaped like an isosceles triangle, the sides opposite the equal angles bulging outward with the contour of the ship. It is lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks apiece, four bunks below and four above on either side. The companion lands about the middle of the greatest length, and thus cuts the open space between the pens into two unequal apartments, or a drawing room and boudoir. Each of these is furnished with a table and fixed benches; that in the forward space being shaped to a point, a triangle within a triangle, to fit the inclination of the ship’s timbers. At night the place is lit with two lanterns, one to each table. As the steamer beat on her way among the rough billows, the light passed through violent phases of change and was thrown to and fro and up and down with startling swiftness. You were tempted to wonder, as you looked, how so thin a glimmer could control and disperse such solid blackness. Even by day much of the steerage enjoyed but a groping twilight. I presume (for I never saw it) that some cleansing process was carried on each morning; but there was never light enough to be particular; and in a place so full of corners and so much broken up by fixtures and partitions, dirt might lie for years without disturbance. The pens, stalls, pews—I know not what to call them—were besides, by their very design, beyond the reach of bucket and swab. Each broad shelf with its four deep divisions, formed a fourfold asylum for all manner of uncleannesses. When the pen was fully occupied, with sixteen live human animals, more or less unwashed, lying immersed 22

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together in the same close air all night, and their litter of meats, dirty dishes and rank bedding tumbled together all day in foul disorder, the merest possibilities of health or cleanliness were absent. If it was impossible to clean the steerage, it was no less impossible to clean the steerage passenger. All ablution below was rigorously forbidden. A man might give his hands a scour at the pump beside the galley, but that was exactly all. One fellow used to strip to his waist every morning and freshen his chest and shoulders; but I need not tell you he was no true steerage passenger. To wash outside in the sharp sea air of the morning is a step entirely foreign to the frowsy, herding, over-warm traditions of the working class; and a human body must apparently have been nurtured in some luxury, before it courts these rude shocks and surprises of temperature in which many men find health and vigour. Thus, even if the majority of passengers came clean aboard at Greenock, long ere the ten days were out or the shores of America in sight, all were reduced to a common level, all, who have stewed together in their own exhalations, were uncompromisingly unclean. A writer of the school of M. Zola would here find an inspiration for many pages; but without entering farther into detail, let me mention the name of sea sickness, and leave its added horrors to the imagination of the reader. I have said that, on our voyage, the ship was a good deal below her full complement of passengers. Perhaps not a half of the pens numbered their complete sixteen; and every here and there an empty bunk afforded elbow room and something like a wardrobe to the neighbours. Steerage No. 1 was specially intended for single men; yet more than one family was here installed among the others. It was strange to note how the different nationalities had drawn apart; for all English speakers were in the foremost bunks, and Germans and Scandinavians had clustered aft into a couple of pens upon the starboard side. The separation was marked and openly recognised. I remember coming down one morning to look for the Russian, and being told that I should find him ‘back there wi’ the Germans.’ When Jones and I entered the steerage, we found a little company of our acquaintances seated together at the triangular foremost table. A more forlorn party, in more dismal circumstances, it would be hard to imagine. The motion, here in the ship’s nose, was very violent; the uproar of the sea often overpoweringly loud. The yellow flicker of the lantern span round and round and tossed the shadows in masses. The air was hot, but it struck a chill from its fœtor. From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human noises of the sick joined into a kind of 23

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farmyard chorus. In the midst, these five friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could in company. They looked white and heavyeyed; nor was it wonderful if they were indisposed; for aside from the suggestive noises which assailed the ear, there was forced upon the mind, in this quarter of the ship, a strong and almost disquieting sense of the swiftness of her advance and the rudeness of her conflict with the sea. Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and sensations. One piped, in feeble tones, ‘O, why left I my hame?’ which seemed a pertinent question in the circumstances. Another, from the invisible horrors of a pen, where he lay dog-sick upon the upper shelf, found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give us several verses of the ‘Death of Nelson’; and it was odd and eerie to hear the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts of dark corners, and ‘This day has done his dooty’ rise and fall and be taken up again in this dim inferno, to an accompaniment of plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the rattling spray showers overhead. It seemed to me that the singer, at least, that day had done his duty. For to sing in such a place and in such a state of health is cheerfully heroic. Like a modern Theseus, he thus combated bad air, disease and darkness, and threw abroad among his fellows some pleasant and courageous thoughts. All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness had interrupted the activity of their minds; and except to sing, they were tongue-tied. There was present, however, one tall, powerful fellow of doubtful nationality, being neither quite Scotch nor altogether Irish, but of surprising clearness of conviction on the highest problems. He had gone nearly beside himself on the Sunday, because of a general backwardness to indorse his definition of mind as ‘a living, thinking substance which cannot be felt, heard or seen’—nor, I presume, although he failed to mention it, smelt. Now he came forward in a pause with another contribution to our culture. ‘Just by way of change,’ said he, ‘I’ll ask you a scripture riddle. There’s profit in them too,’ he added, ungrammatically. This was the riddle. ‘C and P Did agree To cut down C; But C and P Could not agree 24

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Without the leave of G. All the people cried to see The crueltie Of C and P.’ Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo! We were a long while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily wondering how a man could be such a fool; but at length he put us out of suspense and divulged the fact that C and P stood for Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. The more I study his enigma, which is given here with critical exactitude, the more deeply am I astonished by its feebleness and historical inaccuracy. It touches moreover, in an insidious, unsettling way, on a serious problem of faith; and is probably, take it for all in all, the work of an infidel propaganda in collaboration. Or perhaps it is a memoria technica for some exceedingly complicated date? I advise the reader to get it off by heart; for some day, who knows? it might be useful to him. For my own part, I shall never forget either the riddle or the time and place in which I heard it; and as for its propounder, though I cannot think either philosophy or history to be his forte, he seemed a brave and a warm-hearted man, and he was good to hear when he spoke about his wife and children. I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the motion and the close air likewise hurried our departure. We had not been gone long, we heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the five fell sick. We thought it little wonder on the whole for the sea kept contrary all night. I now made my bed upon the second cabin floor, where although I ran the risk of being stepped upon, I had a free current of air, more or less vitiated indeed, and running only from steerage to steerage, but at least not stagnant; and from this couch, as well as the usual sounds of a rough night at sea, the hateful coughing and reaching of the sick and the sobs of children, I heard a man run wild with terror beseeching his friend for encouragement. ‘The ship’s going down,’ he cried with a thrill of agony. ‘The ship’s going down,’ he repeated, now in a blank whisper, now with his voice rising towards a sob; and his friend might reassure him, reason with him, joke at him—all was in vain and the old cry came back, ‘The ship’s going down.’ There was something panic and catching in the emotion of his tones; and I saw in a clear flash, what an involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship. If this whole parishful of people came no more to land, into how many houses would the paper carry woe? and what a great part of the web of our corporate and living human life would be 25

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rent across for ever? The next morning when I came on deck, I found a new world indeed. The wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through great, dark, blue seas, the ship cut a swathe of curded foam. The horizon was dotted all day with companionable sails; and the sun shone pleasantly on the long, heaving deck. We had many fine weather diversions to beguile the time. There was a single chessboard and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as more conspicuously well done than the former. A party of gentlemen (I speak in the sense of caste alone) would have excelled my workman friends at hop-step-and-jump or push-the-stick, but they would scarce have displayed the same patience in these lesser exercises of the mind. We had a regular daily competition to guess the vessel’s progress; and twelve o’clock, when the result was published in the wheelhouse, came to be a moment of considerable interest. But the interest was unmixed. Not a bet was laid upon our guesses. From the Clyde to Sandy Hook, I never heard a wager offered, far less taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner, which we had rebaptised, in more manly style, Devil and four Corners, was my own favourite game; but there were many who preferred another, nameless so far as I know, which was diverting enough to the onlookers, but must have developed a tendency to headache in those who played. The humour of the thing was to box a person’s ears till he found out who had cuffed him. The harder the smacks, the better we were all pleased. I have watched it for half an hour at a time; nor do I think it was a sense of personal dignity alone, which moved me to refrain from joining. This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of weather and in the highest possible spirits. We got in a cluster like bees, sitting between each other’s feet under lee of the deck houses. Stories and laughter went around. The children climbed about the shrouds. White faces appeared for the first time and began to take on colour from the wind. I was kept hard at work making cigarettes for one amateur after another; and my less than moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly down sat the fiddler in our midst and began to discourse his reels and jigs and ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air and throw in the interest of human speech. Through this merry and good-hearted scene, there came three 26

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cabin passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with little, gracious titters of indulgence and a Lady-Bountiful air about nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in social questions, and have always nourished an idea that one person was as good as another. But I began to be troubled by this episode. It was astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their eyes searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage! We were, in truth, very innocently, cheerfully and sensibly engaged; and there was no shadow of excuse for the swaying, elegant superiority with which these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of their squire. Not a word was said; only, when they were gone, Mackay sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we were all conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the course of our enjoyment. We had been made to feel ourselves a sort of comical lower animal. Such a fine thing it is to have manners! One compliment I must make to the saloon passengers: this was the only invasion of our territory that I witnessed from beginning to end of the voyage. It was a piece of very natural and needful delicacy. We were not allowed upon their part of the ship; and so they were, and ought, to be chary of intruding upon ours. Reciprocity can alone justify such a privilege. I do not say but that a cabin passenger may once in a while slink forward under cover of night, just as some careful householders, when the servants are once in bed, descend to the kitchen for a cigar. We also, when night had fallen, installed ourselves along the hot water pipe with our backs to the saloon deckhouse. But except in some exceptional, anonymous or apologetic fashion, I give it as my experience, the visit of a cabin passenger will be regarded as an intrusion in the steerage.

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Steerage Types The type of man in our steerage was by no means one to be despised. Some were handy, some intellectual, and almost all were pleasantly and kindly disposed. I had many long and serious talks, and many a good bout of mirth with my fellow passengers and I thought they formed, upon the whole, an agreeable and well informed society. We had a fellow on board, an Irish American, for all the world like a beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed; with great, splay crowsfeet round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his moustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, aye, ages long ago; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and—without hyperbole—no buttons to his trousers. Even in these rags and tatters, the man twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of sham jewelry; and I have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his brow; he was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say anything either true or kind or interesting; but there was entertainment in the man’s demeanour. You might call him a half educated Irish Tigg. The Russian makes a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow. Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his antecedents. Some said he was a Nihilist escaping: others set him down for a harmless spendthrift, who had squandered 50,000 roubles and whose father had now despatched him to America by way of penance. Either tale might flourish in security; there was no contradiction to be feared; for the hero spoke not one word of English. I got on with him, lumberingly enough, in broken German, and learnt from his own lips that he had been an apothecary. He carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket book, and remarked that it did not do her justice. The cut of his head stood out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness. The first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but although the features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and unhomely cast, the eye both reassured and touched. It was large and very dark and soft, with an expression of dumb endurance, as if 28

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it had often looked on desperate circumstances and never looked on them without resolution. He cried out when I used the word. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘not resolution.’ ‘The resolution to endure,’ I explained. And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said ‘Ach, ja’ with gusto, like a man who has been flattered in his favourite pretension. Indeed he was always hinting at some secret sorrow; and his life, he said, had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of the steerage may have represented at least some shadow of the truth. Once and once only, he sang a song at our concerts, standing forth without embarrassment, his great stature somewhat humped, his long arms frequently extended, his Kalmuck head thrown backward. It was a suitable piece of music, as deep as a cow’s bellow and wild like the White Sea. He was struck and charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners. At home, he said, no one on a journey would speak to him but those with whom he would not care to speak; thus unconsciously involving himself in the condemnation of his countrymen. But Russia was soon to be changed; the ice of the Neva was softening under the sun of civilisation; the new ideas, ‘wie ein feines Violin,’ were audible among the big, empty drum-notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great revival, though with a somewhat indistinct and childish hope. We had a father and son who made a pair of Jack-of-all-Trades. It was the son who sang the ‘Death of Nelson’ under such contrarious circumstances and who contributed on many other occasions to make the voyage a happy period for all. He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he could touch the organ, had led two choirs, and played the flute and piccolo in a professional string band. His repertory of songs was, besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best to the very worst within his reach. Nor did he seem to make the least distinction between these extremes, but would cheerfully follow up ‘Tom Bowling’ with ‘Around her splendid form.’ The father, an old, cheery, small piece of manhood, could do everything connected with a tinwork from one end of the process to the other, use almost every carpenter’s tool, and make picture frames to boot. ‘I sat down with silver plate every Sunday,’ said he, ‘and pictures on the wall. I have made enough money to be rolling in my carriage. But, sir,’ looking at me unsteadily with his bright, rheumy eyes, ‘I was troubled with a drunken wife.’ He took a hostile view of matrimony in consequence. ‘It’s an old saying,’ he remarked—‘God made ’em and 29

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the devil he mixed ’em.’ I think he was justified by his experience. It was a dreary story. He would bring home £3 on Saturday, and on Monday all the clothes would be in pawn. Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up a paying contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid jobs. ‘A bad job was as good as a good job for me,’ he said. ‘It all went the same way.’ Once, the wife showed signs of amendment; she kept steady for weeks on end; it was again worth while to labour and to do one’s best. The husband found a good situation some distance from home and, to make a little upon every hand, started the wife in a cook-shop; the children were here and there, busy as mice; savings began to grow together in the bank; and the golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy family. But one week my old acquaintance, getting earlier through with his work, came home on the Friday instead of the Saturday; and there was his wife to receive him, reeling drunk. He ‘took and gave her a pair o’ black eyes,’ for which I pardon him, nailed up the cookshop door, gave up his situation, and resigned himself to a life of poverty with the workhouse at the end. As the children came to their full age, they fled the house and established themselves in other countries; some did well, some not so well; but the father remained at home alone with his drunken wife, all his sound-hearted pluck and varied accomplishments depressed and negatived. Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the chain and run from home like a schoolboy? I could not discover which; but here at least he was, out on the adventure, and still one of the bravest and most youthful men on board. ‘Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again,’ said he; ‘but I can do a turn yet.’ And the son to whom he was going? I asked. Was he not able to support him? ‘O yes!’ he replied. ‘But I’m never happy without a job on hand. And I’m stout; I can eat a’most anything; you see no craze about me.’ I should say, to finish this sketch, that he was usually more given to listen than to speak; he was indeed an indefatigable hearer, always on the edge of the group, pipe in hand, with his best ear upraised; and though unlettered and, I think, ignorant, loved to hear serious things discussed. It is strange that I should have permitted myself to use the word ignorant, about a man who understood and could successfully practise so great a variety of trades; and yet the word must remain, for there is no other to convey my meaning. Thus I have known people to declare both painters and musicians stupid, because their thoughts, 30

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lying out of the literary path, are not suited for display in company. Colours or sounds, chisels or vices, about whatever the mind may be occupied, it is still enlarged and invigorated; and it yet remains a question, whether these thoughts which cannot be clothed and rendered commonplace in words, may not be after all the most bracing and veracious. At least it would be ignorance itself to think my old acquaintance ignorant. Although one profession may be dully acquired betwixt sleep and waking, to change from one to another implies both activity and courage of the mind. For no inducement that I can fancy, would I set myself to learn another business; because the mind has grown slothful and dreads to grapple with a mass of fresh details. This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a drunken father. He was a capable man with a good chance in life; but he had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of sherry, and involved his sons along with him in ruin. Now they were on board with us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood. Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to the most generous, cheerful and human parts of man; but it could have adduced many instances and arguments from among our ship’s company. I was one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotchman, running to fat and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste for poetry and a genial sense of fun. I had asked him his hopes in emigrating. They were like those of so many others vague and unfounded. Times were bad at home; they were said to have a turn for the better in the States; and a man could get on anywhere, he thought. That was precisely the weak point of his position; for if he could get on in America, why could he not do the same in Scotland? But I never had the courage to use that argument, though it was often on the tip of my tongue; and instead I agreed with him heartily, adding with reckless originality, ‘if the man stuck to his work and kept away from drink.’ ‘Ah!’ said he slowly. ‘The drink? You see that’s just my trouble.’ He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the same time with something strange and timid in his eye, half shamed, half sorry, like a good child who knows he should be beaten. You would have said, he recognised a destiny to which he was born, and accepted the consequences mildly. Like the merchant Abudah, he was at the same time fleeing from his destiny and carrying it along with him: the whole at an expense of six guineas. As far as I saw, drink, idleness and incompetency were the three great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first and foremost, this trick of being colported over seas, appears to me the silliest 31

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means of cure. It is like turning in bed when you are down with a fever; you will find the new position as uneasy as the last. You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometime fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now and where you stand? Cœlum non animam. Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whiskey, only not so good. A sea voyage will not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap pleasure; emigration has to be done before we climb the vessel; an aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself. Properly speaking and in the majority of cases, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible than another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul tragically shipwrecked. In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure is resorted to by way of anodyne. The pleasure seeker set forth upon life with high and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly good and nobly happy, though at as little pains as possible to himself; and it is because all has failed in his celestial enterprise, that you now behold him rolling in the garbage. Hence the comparative success of the teetotal pledge; because to a man who had nothing, it sets at least a negative aim in life. Somewhat as prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider, the reformed drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating drinks, and may live for that negation. There is something, at least, not to be done each day; and a cold triumph awaits him every evening. We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under the name of Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of the intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically, he was a small Scotchman, standing a little back as though he were already carrying the elements of a corporation, and his looks somewhat marred by the smallness of his eyes. Mentally, he was endowed above the average. There were but few subjects on which he could not converse with understanding and a dash of wit; and from these he had voluntarily abstracted his intelligence. His style in talking was remarkable; his words were selected with great discretion and out of a full possession of the English language; and he delivered himself slowly and with gusto, like a man who enjoyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater, speaking with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to launch and emphasize an argument. When he began a discussion, he could not bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone, without once relinquishing a point. An engineer by trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines, except 32

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the human machine. The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse gases. He had an appetite for discrete facts, which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads. What is called information was indeed a passion with the man; and he not only delighted to receive it, but could pay you back in kind. With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer young, on his way to a new country with no prospects, no money and but little hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair. ‘The ship may go down for me,’ he would say; ‘now or tomorrow, I have nothing to lose and nothing to hope.’ And again: ‘I am sick of the whole damned performance.’ He was, like the kind little man already quoted, another so-called victim of the bottle. But Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt masters and a corrupt state policy; and after he had been one night overtaken and playing the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade. It was a treat to see him manage this; the various jesters withered under his gaze; and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely force and a gift of command which might have ruled a senate. In truth, it was not whiskey that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good, human purposes but conversation. Of all the helpless, dead, dry, wooden theories of the universe, his was perhaps the most dismal and, as it seems to me, the most mistaken. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful figment of Economy, as if it had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took me to task—a novel cry to me—upon the overpayment of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid than artizans; yet the artizan made threshing machines and butter churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produced a mere fancy article. Mackay’s notion of a book was Hoppus’s Measurer. Now, in my time, I have possessed—and even studied that work. I found Hoppus a careful although scarce a stimulating writer; and I own he left something in my soul unsatisfied. If I were to be left tomorrow on Juan Fernandez, Hoppus’s is not the work that I should choose for my companion volume. 33

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I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made him own that he had taken pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view, insignificant; but he was too wary to advance a step beyond the admission. It was in vain for me to argue, that here was pleasure ready made and running from the spring; whereas his ploughs and butter churns were but means and mechanisms to give men the necessary food and leisure before they start upon the search for pleasure. He jibbed and ran away from such conclusions. The thing was different, he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what had to do with food. ‘Eat, eat, eat,’ he cried; ‘that’s the bottom and the top.’ By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by unnoticed and had to go without his tea. He had enough sense and humour (indeed he had no lack of either) to have chuckled over this himself in private; and even to me, he referred to it with the shadow of a smile. Here, at least, was my contention in a nutshell: his sentiments were saddening to me, yet it was with interest that I listened to him as he spoke; on his side, although he forgot the staff of life for the pleasure he had in continuing the dispute, he thought my views not only silly but wickedly wrong. For Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sort of poor human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves; and he had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as the Riddler’s definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued, passionate production of corn and steam engines, he resented like a conspiracy against the people. Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that it was only in good books or in the society of the good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I was in a different world from him. ‘Damn my conduct,’ said he. ‘I have given it up for a bad job. My question is, can I drive a nail?’ And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously seeking to reduce the people’s annual bellyful of corn and steam engines. I feel there is some mistake in this alarm, and that the people could get through life perhaps with less of either. But when I hinted something of that view, and that to spend less was, after all, as good a way out of the difficulty of life as to gain more, he accused me, in almost so many words, of the sin of aristocracy and a desire to grind the masses. Perhaps there was some indelicacy on my part in presenting him with such an argument; for it is not in his class that such a movement must be inaugurated; and we must see the rich honest, before we need look 34

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hopefully to see the poor considerate. Mackay was the very man to be reclaimed by total abstinence; and if reclaimed, would present a typical instance of those useless successes and victorious defeats which are too often the only trophies of the movement. The sort of reformation that I care about must be of a more sweeping order. I have not the least aversion to the continued poverty of many tipplers; I am far more concerned about the continued prosperity and power of many unworthy capitalists. Although I am far from cherishing unfriendly feelings towards Mackay, for the man both interested and amused me, it seems still an open question whether, for the general interests of the race, he had not better remain poor and drink himself to death. There was nothing in him worth saving but his talents, which he would be sure to misapply. He had no hope but to make money and to squander it. As he is, you have a shiftless, tippling engineer; but let him be rich, and he will be an oppressor of men. Workingman and master are but John and Jack; and when Mackay bewails the hard condition of his class, he is only rejecting the legitimate outcome of his own philosophy. ‘Damn my conduct!’ is an agreeable and light-hearted sentiment on a man’s own lips; but it becomes practically inconvenient when it is adopted as a principle by others. It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of culture; that a narrow and pinching way of life not only exaggerates to a man the importance of material conditions, but indirectly, by denying him the necessary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant of larger thoughts; and that hence springs this overweening concern about diet, and hence the bald view of existence professed by Mackay. Had this been an English peasant, the conclusion would be tenable. I was already a young man when I was first brought into contact with some of the heavy English labourers of Suffolk; and only those who have some acquaintance with the same class in Scotland, can conceive the astonishment and disgust with which I viewed the difference. To me, they seemed scarce human, but like a very gross and melancholy sort of ape; and though I may have been unfortunate in the examples that fell under my observation, the fact of my amazement is enough to my present purpose. The feeling was the more impressed on me after my return to Scotland, by a conversation with a labourer upon the shores of Fife. This man was cleaning a byre, in which I was driven to take refuge from a squall of rain; and he sat down by my side, fantastically, not to say disgustingly, bedaubed with liquid manure. But his mind was clean and vigorous and full of grave thoughts. He spoke with me of 35

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education, culture and the learned professions. ‘Aye,’ said he, ‘that’s the thing for a man to be happy. Ye see, he has aye something ayont.’ It would be hard to set forth more clearly the advantages of an intellectual life. You could not call this man uncultured; and yet his is no uncommon case among the field labourers of Scotland. A sound, sometimes even an ambitious education lays the basis; the metaphysical and sentimental turn of the race leads them, at their outdoor work, to brood and improve on what they have learned; the Bible and even the Shorter Cat­ echism (like it or not, as you please) are works of a high scope which stimulate the mind; and many a peasant has his own heresy or holds orthodoxy on some tenure of his own. As a people, they are not ignorant, not uncultured and certainly, you would say, not materialistic. But look at Mackay. He had most of the elements of a liberal education. He had skirted metaphysical and mathematical studies. He had a thoughtful hold of what he knew, which would be exceptional among bankers. He had been brought up in the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with incongruous pride, the story of his own brother’s deathbed ecstasies. Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil himself, and was adrift like a dead thing among external circumstances, without hope or lively preference or shaping aim. And farther, there seemed a tendency among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps two thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan school, by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and setting the stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity and interest, leads at last directly to material greed? Not in Scotland alone, but in New England also, there are features that might justify the suspicion. Nature is a good guide through life; and the love of simple pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an Irishman who based his claim to the widest and most affectionate popularity, precisely upon these two qualities: that he was natural and happy. He boasted a fresh colour, a tight, little figure, unquenchable gaiety and indefatigable good will. His clothes puzzled the diagnostic mind, until you heard he had been once a private coachman; when they became eloquent and seemed a part of his biography. His face contained the rest and, I fear, a prophecy of the future; the hawk’s nose above accorded so ill with the pink baby’s mouth below. His spirit and his pride belonged, you might say, to the nose; while it was the general shiftlessness expressed by the other, that had thrown him from situation to situation and at length on board the emigrant ship. Barney ate, so to 36

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speak, nothing from the galley; his own tea, butter and eggs supported him throughout the voyage; and about mealtime, you might often find him up to the elbows in amateur cookery. His was the first voice heard singing among all the passengers; he was the first who fell to dancing. From Lough Foyle to Sandy Hook, there was not a piece of fun undertaken, but there was Barney in the midst. You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our concerts—his tight little figure stepping to and fro and his feet shuffling to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement—and to have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest, between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each song to a conclusion. He was not only a great favourite among ourselves, but his songs attracted the lords of the saloon, who often leaned to hear him over the rails of the hurricane deck. He was somewhat pleased but not at all abashed by this attention; and one night, in the midst of his famous performance of ‘Billy Keogh,’ I saw him spin half round in a pirouette and throw an audacious wink to an old gentleman above. This was the more characteristic as, for all his daffing, he was a modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves. He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly; nor throughout the passage did he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his innocent freedoms and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin where politeness must be natural to walk without a fall. He was once seriously angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because they supplied no fish on Friday. For Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotchman struck up an indecent song, Barney’s drab clothes were immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader’s permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior powers of mind which rendered him incomprehensible, partly from his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to the Irishman. I have seen him slink off with backward looks of terror and offended delicacy, while the other, in his witty, ugly way, has been professing hostility to God and an extreme theoretical readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot. These utterances hurt the little coachman’s modesty like a bad word. His love for music was inborn and generous; none had so ready an applause as Barney; I have seen the delight with which he was introduced to Scotch dance music and his silent contempt for the melodies 37

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of the Oxford Music Hall. And it is à propos of Barney that I must relate the great change which overtook the organization of our nightly concerts. Barney had no distaste for whiskey; and he and the young Jack-of-all-Trades received many a stiff glass from enthusiastic hearers. The fiddler, on the other hand, being silent and almost morose, fiddled away nightly and received no invitations to the bar. This partiality began to prey upon his mind; and one evening he made a clean breast of it to Jones and threatened to strike work. Here was a bombshell in our camp. Barney and the Jack-of-all-Trades were certainly our two most esteemed vocalists; we might have continued to run the concerts on their attraction only; but it was not to be thought of that a valued collaborator should retire under a sense of neglect. The fiddler, too, should have his whiskey. It was decided to collect money, and offer a little collation upon deck to the performers in a body. I am afraid we were all a little thoughtless, and I in the front rank; for meeting Barney, I opened the matter to him without preparation and in terms that were perhaps too naked. He flushed to his neck. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I do not sing at your concerts any more’: adding he was glad enough to sing to amuse his friends, but would not sing at all for whiskey. I could only murmur that I thought he was right; and on that, he turned upon his heel and left me to my degradation. As everybody connected with the affair was now in a false position, and myself in the falsest, I retired to the cabin or, in so many words, hid myself. What passed on deck, I never rightly knew. It appears, however, it was a scene of consternation for awhile; and Jones and young O’Reilly were cursing me for my defection. I must own I left them to bear the brunt that evening; but my time came too; for as I was sitting below and making some pretence to write my notes, I received a message that Barney wished to speak with me on deck. I went up with the resignation of the condemned criminal, feeling that if he wished my blood, it was no less than due to him, and, generally, that I had been blunt, inconsiderate and ungentlemanly. But there he was—bless his heart!—waiting to load me with apologies. He had spoken sharply; he had been impolite; he could not rest till he was pardoned. ‘You have always been a good friend to me,’ was his humble way of putting it, when the fact was that we had been good friends together. I protested that it was I alone who stood in need of pardon; but he would hear of no such thing; and I daresay we walked half an hour about the deck, before he consented to a compromise by which we were to pardon one another. Meantime the system of concerts had been permanently destroyed, not at all, as Barney maintained, by his pride and ill-temper, but by a 38

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general want of tact among the rest of us; and instead, a select company moved by invitation into the second cabin. It was a kind of high life below stairs, which pleased me far less than our public and open air festivals of the past. But in their small way, they were not unsuccessful and offered some curious features. The fiddler combed his hair before appearing on this new and more select stage; and another performer, the young bride of whom the reader has been told, now lifted up a small and rather sweet pipe in little drawing-room ditties, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by her husband. But the point was the effect produced on Barney. In this small, quiet and, so to speak, genteel society, he opened like a rose. Pleasure looked out of his eyes. He seemed less merry than on deck, but his manners grew more affectionate and domestic; I have never seen a gallantry so kind as that with which he treated the ladies of this small circle; and he would have sung himself to death to give us pleasure. Nor can I find words to tell you with what enthusiasm he greeted the singing of the bride. These drawing-room songs were exactly after his heart; he delighted in that music-mistress style; I believe the very smallness of the voice seemed to him a mark of refinement. Up to nearly midnight, he sat on deck declaring and exaggerating his delight. His Irishisms and merry simplicities of speech were our current money and went round the steerage like the day’s news. Once, he got two pills from the Doctor, took one, and brought the other back with scorn. He was of Captain Burnaby’s mind, it appeared; nothing would please him but Cockle’s pills and not less than four of these. The Doctor protested he had but one box, which he reserved for his own use and that of the cabin passengers. ‘Sure, Doctor,’ said Barney, ‘am n’t I not the same Christian as yourself and the cabin passengers?’ I need hardly say, the pills were given. Indeed he had only to spring the brogue on any one of us, and he could command what we had. One story more I must relate, as I have some notes of what he said, and the incident besides completes the character of Barney. I have spoken of a semi-official position, that of assistant to the Steerage steward, and how rapidly the semi-officials grew disgusted and resigned the place. The second of these had reigned, as I said, for a whole day. About noon on the morrow, a good many of us were hanging round the hatchway at the foot of companion No. 2 and 3, when round came the steerage steward, with his white sheet of loaves girt about him, like a man going forth to sow; and behind, carrying with both hands a huge tin dish of butter, who but Barney? He was greeted with acclamation; passed among us, rosy and smiling, half amused, 39

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half gratified with the distinction; and followed his superior down one of the galleries, with an overdone air of business, like a child helping to lay the table. Perhaps ten minutes elapsed; and then Barney reappeared at full speed out of the steerage, set the dish down upon the hatchway with a bang, and threw himself rolling on the tarpaulin. ‘The divel in your butter!’ he cried, and buried his face in his hands. The sheeted steward now followed and looked distressfully on his assistant amid shouts of laughter. It was some time before he found anything to say, and even then his voice came hollow from a profound consciousness that he should exhort in vain. ‘Come along!’ he cried feebly. ‘Up with it, Johnny!’ ‘Sorry am I that iver you took Johnny in your mouth,’ retorted Barney. And the steward, seeing all was over, departed in search of other help; Barney had concluded his career as a semi-official; how the rations were finally served out upon that occasion is more than I can tell. Meantime Barney picked himself up, a rueful looking Barney. ‘I must go on deck,’ said he. ‘I’m sick wid their butter. I can feel the smell of it!’ ‘It’s rotten,’ struck in an old woman. ‘Rotten?’ cried Barney, brightening up. ‘Well, I’ll tell ye. I gave a Dutchman down there the fŭll of me hat of it. He wouldn’t be plased wid less!’ And so, greatly comforted by having raised another laugh, and callously unconcerned at his desertion, he departed upon deck and shall disappear from these pages.

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The Sick Man One night, Jones, the young O’Reilly and myself were walking arm in arm and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a head wind blew chill and fitful; the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain; and the fog whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense like a mosquito. The decks were deserted. Even the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight. We passed the furnaces and through a blast of heat; and as we cleared the deck house, met the wind upon our cheek; and these alternations alone marked our promenade. For some time, we observed something lying black and huddled in the scuppers, not far from where I was wakened by the fireman. At first we made light of it; but as we passed again and again, it began insensibly to occupy our minds; and as we reached the spot, the talk would languish, the pace would halt, and our three heads would all be inclined to that side. Almost unconsciously, we were beginning to grow interested in the black bundle; and before long by a natural process, we should have stopped of our own accord to satisfy our curiosity. But the matter was taken out of our hands; for the bundle heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran to the rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman, whether beautiful or the reverse, it was impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly in the wet scuppers and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. He had been sick and his head was in his vomit. We asked him what was amiss; and he replied incoherently, with a strange accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen the Doctor twice, and had walked the deck against fatigue till he was overmastered and had fallen where we found him. Jones remained by his side, while O’Reilly and I hurried off to seek the Doctor. We knocked in vain at the Doctor’s cabin; there came no reply; nor could we find anyone to guide us. It was no time for delicacy; so we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up a ladder and touching my hat to the officer of the watch, addressed him as politely as I could: ‘I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in the lee scuppers; and I can’t find the Doctor.’ 41

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He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat harshly—‘Well, I can’t leave the bridge, my man,’ said he. ‘No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,’ I returned. ‘Is it one of the crew?’ he asked. ‘I believe him to be a fireman,’ I replied, going merely on my last experience. I daresay officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly, whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or from something humble and conciliatory in my address, the officer in question was immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice much freer from constraint, advised me to find a steward and dispatch him in quest of the Doctor who would now be in the smoking room over his pipe. One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3. That was his smoking room of a night. I have asked myself repeatedly whether I should give his exact rank, and I find my heart fails me. If I call him Blackwood, I shall have a name answerable enough to his appearance, and leave him to the enjoyment of his privacy. I do not wish to bear tales out of school against an individual. O’Reilly and I rattled down the companion, breathing hurry; and in his shirt sleeves and perched across the carpenter’s bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood: a neat, bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank twang in his speech. I forget who was with him; but the pair were enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes. I daresay he was tired with his day’s work and eminently comfortable at that moment; and the truth is I did not stop to consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath. ‘Steward,’ said I, ‘there’s a man lying bad with cramp, and I can’t find the Doctor.’ He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that is the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth— ‘That’s none of my business,’ said he. ‘I don’t care.’ So far as I have gone, I have not often heard an uglier speech; the French, in their academical manner, would call it cynical; brutal and devilish must serve the turn of a homely English speaker. I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat. The thought of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with indignation. I looked at O’Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked like assault and battery every inch of him. But we had a better card than violence. 42

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‘You will have to make it your business,’ said I, ‘for I am sent to you by the officer on the bridge.’ Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer, but put out his pipe, gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand strolling. From that day forward, I should say, he improved to me in courtesy, as though he had repented his evil speech and were anxious to leave a better impression. But I cannot help it: I hate every button upon that man’s jacket. When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and two or three late stragglers had gathered around and were offering suggestions. One proposed to give the patient water, which was promptly negatived. Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed to be let lie; but as it was at least as well to keep him off the streaming decks, O’Reilly and I supported him between us. It was only by main force that we did so, and neither an easy nor an agreeable duty; for he fought in his paroxysms like a frightened child, and moaned miserably when he resigned himself to our control. ‘Take care of your knee,’ said I to O’Reilly, ‘I have got mine in the vomit.’ I thought the patient too much occupied to mind our observations; but he heard me, relaxed his struggles, and began to twist in a new way with his arm across his body. I could not imagine what he was at; till suddenly forth came a coloured handkerchief; and he held it out to me, saying ‘Wipe your knee wi’ that.’ We all know about Sir Philip Sidney: here is a Roland for his Oliver. It is easier to say a fine thing on the field of honour than in such a scene of physical disgrace; and the number of persons is considerable who would be shorn of all romantic notions by having been dog-sick immediately before and on the very spot where the occasion rose. It was the unaffected courtliness of a good heart. You have wet your knee in my service; well then, here is my handkerchief! It is true the man thought he was come to his last hour: a thought to favour dignity. That was indeed his argument against our friendly violence. ‘O let me lie!’ he pleaded. ‘I’ll no get better anyway.’ And then, with a moan that went to my heart, ‘O, why did I come upon this miserable journey?’ I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in the close, tossing steerage: ‘O, why left I my hame?’ Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the galley, where we could see a light. There he found a belated cook scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he 43

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sought to borrow. The scullion was backward. Was it one of the crew? he asked. And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured him that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and came towards us at an easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger. The light, as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set and grizzled with years; but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from us the expression and even the design of his face. So soon as the cook set eyes on him, he gave a sort of whistle. ‘It’s only a passenger!’ said he; and turning about, made, lantern and all, for the galley. ‘He’s a man anyway,’ cried Jones in indignation. ‘Nobody said he was a woman,’ said a gruff voice which I recognised for that of the Bo’swain. But I think he must have made the remark to give himself a countenance, and because he lacked the courage of his qualities; for, far from joining against us, he helped Jones to get the lantern from the cook. All this while, there was no word of Blackwood or the Doctor; and now the officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck rails, if the Doctor were not yet come. We told him not. ‘No?’ he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry aft in person. Ten minutes after, the Doctor made his appearance deliberately enough and examined our patient with the lantern. He made little of the case, had the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent him forward to his bunk. Two of his neighbours in the Steerage had now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow that such ‘a fine, cheery body’ should be sick; and these, claiming a sort of possession, took him entirely under their own care. The drug had probably relieved him, for he struggled no more, and was led along plaintive and patient, but protesting. His heart recoiled at the thought of the steerage. ‘O, let me lie down upon the bieldy side!’ he cried. ‘O, dinna take me down!’ And again: ‘O, why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?’ And yet once more, with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the fourth word: ‘I had no call to come.’ But there he was; and by the Doctor’s orders and the kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the companion of Steerage No. 1 into the den allotted him. At the foot of our own companion, just where I had found Blackwood, Jones and the Bo’swain were now engaged in talk. This last was a gruff, cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a century upon the seas; square-headed, goat-bearded; with heavy blonde eyebrows, and an eye without radiance but indeflexibly steady and hard. 44

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I had not forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered also that he had helped us about the lantern; and now seeing him in conversation with Jones and being choked with indignation, I proceeded to blow off my steam. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘I make you my compliments upon your Steward,’ and furiously narrated what had happened. ‘I’ve nothing to do with him,’ replied the Bo’swain. ‘They’re all alike. They wouldn’t mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon the top of another.’ And he made a quaint gesture with his pipe, expressive, as far as my imagination served me to interpret, of someone going up in an explosion. This was enough. A very little humanity went a long way with me after the experience of the evening. A sympathy grew up at once between the Bo’swain and myself; and that night and during the next few days, I learned to appreciate him better. He was a remarkable type, and not at all the kind of man you find in books. He had been at Sebastopol under English colours; and again in a States ship, ‘after the Alabama and praying God we shouldn’t find her.’ He was a high Tory and a high Englishman. No manufacturer could have held opinions more hostile to the working man and his strikes. ‘The workmen,’ he said, ‘think nothing of their country. They think of nothing but themselves. They’re damned greedy, selfish fellows.’ He would not hear of the decadence of England. ‘They say they send us beef from America,’ he argued; ‘but who pays for it? All the money in the world’s in England.’ The Royal Navy was the best of possible services according to him. ‘Anyway the officers are gentlemen,’ said he; ‘and you can’t get hazed to death by a damned non-commissioned —— as you can in the army.’ Among nations, England was the first; then came France. He respected the French navy and liked the French people; and if he were forced to make a new choice in life, ‘by God, he would try Frenchman!’ For all his looks and rough, cold manners, I observed that children were never frightened for him; they divined him at once to be a friend; and one night when he had chalked his hand and went about stealthily setting his mark on people’s clothes, it was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling over his boyish monkey trick. In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man. I was afraid I should not recognise him, so baffling had been the light of the lantern; and found myself unable to decide if he were Scotch, English or Irish. He had certainly employed north-country words and elisions; but the accent and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and incongruous in my ear. 45

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To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an adventure that required some nerve. The stench was atrocious, heavy and sour and rancid; each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves into their clothes in the twilight of the bunks. You may guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for myself also, when I heard that the sick man was better and had gone on deck. The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with pink and amber; the foghorn still blew, stertorous and intermittent; and to add to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash down the decks. But for a sick man, this was heaven compared to the steerage. I found him standing on the hot water pipe just forward of the saloon deckhouse. He was smaller than I had fancied and plain looking; but his face was distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid gray from a distance, but, when looked into, full of changing colours and grains of gold. His manners were mild and uncompromisingly plain; and I soon saw that when once started, he delighted to talk. His accent and language had been formed in the most natural way; since he was born in Ireland, had lived quarter of a century on the banks of Tyne, and was married to a Scotch wife. A fisherman in the season, he had fished the East Coast from Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over and the great boats, which require extra hands, were once drawn up on shore till the next Spring, he worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces or along the wharves unloading vessels. In this comparatively humble way of life, he had gathered a competence and could speak of his comfortable house, his hayfield and his garden. On this ship, where so many accomplished artizans were fleeing from starvation, he was present on a pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York. Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the steerage and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such counsels. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he had told his adviser, ‘I’ll get on for ten days. I’ve not been a fisherman for nothing.’ For it is no light matter, as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken, iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an anchorage where he dare not lie or a harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows. The life of a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard work and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at 46

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some bleak fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky, and after fifty hours’ unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop will give him credit for a loaf of bread. Yet the steerage of the emigrant ship had been too vile for the endurance of a man thus rudely trained. He had scarce eaten since he came on board, until the day before when his appetite was tempted by some excellent pea-soup. We were all much of the same mind on board and, beginning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not wisely but too well; only, with him the excess had been punished, perhaps because he was weakened by former abstinence, and his first meal had issued in a cramp. He had determined to live henceforth on biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return to England, to make the passage by saloon. The second cabin, after due inquiry, he scouted as another edition of the steerage. He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. ‘Ye see, I had no call to be here,’ said he; ‘and I thought it was by with me last night. I’ve a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me; and I had no real call to leave them.’ Speaking of the attentions he had received from his shipmates generally, ‘They were all so kind,’ he said, ‘that there’s none to mention.’ And except in so far as I might share in this, he troubled me with no reference to my services. This was choice courtesy. I write with all measure, and except in the matter of bowing and scraping, I have never met a finer gentleman. He had the essentials of that business, in all senses of the expression, by heart. But what affected me in the most lively manner, was the wealth of this day labourer, paying a two months’ pleasure visit to the States and proposing to return in the saloon; and the new testimony rendered by his story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage, as to the habitual comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging homeward from the fields. Our roads lay together, and it was natural that we should fall into talk. He was covered with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant creature; who thought the Atlantic cable was a secret contrivance of the masters, the better to oppress labouring mankind; and I confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred pounds in the bank. But this man had travelled over most of the world, and enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American railroad, with two dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night; whereas my fellow passenger had never quitted Tyne side, and had made all that he possessed in that same accurst, downfalling England, whence skilled mechanics, engineers and millwrights and carpenters, 47

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were fleeing as from the native country of starvation. Fitly enough, we slid off onto the subject of strikes and wages and hard times. Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost in his own pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say and held strong opinions on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters and, on my leading him on, of the men also. The masters had been selfish and obstructive; the men selfish, silly and light-headed. He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which he had been present and the somewhat long discourse which he had there pronounced, calling into question the wisdom and even the good faith of the Union delegates; and although he had escaped himself through flush times and starvation times with a handsomely provided purse, he had so little faith in either man or master and so profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs, that he could think of no hope for our country outside of a sudden and complete political subversion. Down must go lords and church and army, and capital, by some happy direction, must change hands from worse to better, or England stood condemned. Such principles, he said, were growing ‘like a seed.’ From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually ominous and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my workman fellow passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid and fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he was a gentleman; he disapproved the policy which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his panacea, to rend the old country from end to end and from top to bottom and, in clamour and civil discord, remodel it with the hand of violence. I thought of the Bo’swain, and wondered how such men and measures would recommend themselves to him and his like, if he had any. I thought too of the blessings of emigration: that men sufficiently instructed, who had for long times together received wages greater than many a man of letters and who yet, from drunkenness, shiftlessness and lack of balance, had failed flatly in life’s battle, could still escape and make a new beginning somewhere else. For if the polity is to be subverted and the state’s pedestals thrown down, let it be by clear-seeing people strung up by inborn generosity to the task, and not by waifs and beggars exasperated by external and perhaps well deserved reverses.

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The Stowaways On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our companion, steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking cap. His face was pale with pale eyes and spiritedly enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full of pith and verve, his manners forward but perfectly presentable. The lad who helped in the second cabin told me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was but thought, ‘by his way of speaking and because he was so polite, that he was someone from the saloon.’ I was not so sure; for to me there was something equivocal in his air and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home; though even then, he would have spoken with a clearer accent, and his pronunciation would either have respected orthography more thoroughly or slurred it in a different manner. But making every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could have heard him tell his own stories; they were so swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits of acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction. There were tales of the P. and O. Company, where he had been an officer; of the East Indies where, in former years, he had passed through his apotheosis and lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers where he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides of life: each introducing some vigorous thumbnail portrait. He had the talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen. The best talkers usually address themselves to some particular society; there they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know Russian and yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a frank, headlong power of style, and a broad, human choice of subject, that would have turned any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric talker, plain, strong, taking and cheerful; and the things and the people of which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the minds of those who heard him. This, with a certain add49

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ed colouring of rhetoric and rhodomontade, must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the ears of Duchesses and Hostlers. Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure in his narration. The Engineers, for instance, was a service which he praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the sergeants; but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in particular, one among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had imagined. But then there came incidents more doubtful, which showed an almost impudent greed after gratuities and a truly impudent disregard for truth. And then there was the tale of his departure. He had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine day, with a companion, slipped up to London for a spree. I have a suspicion that spree was meant to be a long one; but God disposes all things; and one morning, near Westminster Bridge, whom should he come across but the very sergeant who had recruited him at first? What followed? He himself indicated cavalierly that he had then resigned. Let us put it so. But these resignations are sometimes very trying. At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself away from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he was. ‘That?’ said Mackay. ‘Why, that’s one of the stowaways.’ ‘No man,’ said the same authority, ‘who has had anything to do with the sea, would ever think of paying for a passage.’ I give the statement as Mackay’s, without endorsement; yet I am tempted to believe that it contains a grain of truth; and if you add, that the man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it may even pass for a fair representation of the facts. We gentlemen of England who live at home at ease have, I suspect, very insufficient ideas on the subject. All the world over, people are stowing away in coalholes and dark corners and, when ships are once out to sea, appearing again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck. The career of these sea-tramps partakes largely of the adventurous. They may be poisoned by coal gas or die by starvation in their place of concealment; or when found, they may be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised land, the port of destination, and alas! brought back in the same way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to the magistrate and the seclusion of a county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two, and departed for a farther country than America. On Jones’s last passage before that on which I met him, no fewer than eleven had presented themselves from different quarters of 50

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the ship: and the captain had them all in irons until two of their number fainted and the passengers interposed to beg them off. Just as the confraternity of beggars know and communicate among themselves the generous or saving character of different houses; just as in the old days before the Prison Discipline Act, many indigent persons might have been observed on the approach of winter making for the neighbourhood of Wakefield Jail, where, for a petty theft or aggravated misdemeanour, the best sort of criminal entertainment might be had till the return of Spring; so, among the stowaway class, one line of steamers is distinguished from another by the nature of the treatment which they may expect on board. Thus the line on which I sailed, was said to be particularly favoured by stowaways with their faces towards the States; and thus such another, greatly preferred by saloon passengers, is shunned like the plague by a sea-tramp. On this last, he would invariably be brought back and punished; on the former, he is half sure to make out the voyage and be landed, a free citizen and independent voter, at the harbour of New York. When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray for: that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his forgiveness. After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels himself as secure as if he had paid for his passage. It is not altogether a bad thing for the company, who get more or less efficient hands for nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and every now and again, find themselves better paid than by a whole family of cabin passengers. Not long ago, for instance, a packet was saved from nearly certain loss, by the skill and courage of a stowaway engineer. As was no more than just, a handsome subscription rewarded him for his success; but even without such exceptional good fortune, as things stand in England and America, the stowaway will often make a good profit out of his adventure. Four Engineers stowed away, last summer, on the same ship, the Circassia; and before two days after their arrival, each of the four had found a comfortable berth. This was the most hopeful tale of emigration that I heard from first to last; and as you see, the luck was for stowaways. My curiosity was wonderfully inflamed by what I heard; and next morning, as I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to find the ex-Royal Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint of a deck house. There was another fellow at work beside him, a lad not more than twenty, in the most miraculous tatters, his handsome face sown with grains of beauty and lighted up by expressive eyes. Four stowaways had been found aboard our ship before she left the Clyde; but these two had alone escaped the ignominy of being put ashore. 51

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Alick, my acquaintance of last night, was Scotch by birth and by trade a practical engineer; the other was from Devonshire and had been to sea before the mast. Two people more unlike by training, character and habits, it would be hard to imagine; yet here they were together scrubbing paint. Alick had held all sorts of good situations and wasted many opportunities in life. I have heard him end a story with these words: ‘That was in my golden days when I used finger glasses.’ Situation after situation failed him; then followed the depression of trade; and for months, he had hung round with other idlers, playing marbles all day in the West Park and going home at night to tell his landlady how he had been seeking for a job. I believe this kind of existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he might have long continued to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade, let us call him Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was continually threatening to slip his cable for the States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her Brown. Some months afterwards, Alick met another old chum in Sauchiehall Street. ‘By the bye, Alick,’ said he, ‘I met a gentleman in New York who was asking for you.’ ‘Who was that?’ asked Alick. ‘The new second engineer on board the So-and-so,’ was the reply. ‘Well, and who is he?’ ‘Brown, to be sure.’ For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the Cir­ cassia. If that was the way of it in the States, Alick thought it was high time to follow Brown’s example. He spent his last day, as he put it, ‘reviewing the yeomanry’; and the next morning, says he to his landlady: ‘Mrs. X., I’ll not take porridge to day, please; I’ll take some eggs.’ ‘Why, have you found a job?’ she asked, delighted. ‘Well, yes,’ returned the perfidious Alick. ‘I think I’ll start today.’ And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for America. I am afraid that landlady has seen the last of him. It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion that attends a vessel’s departure; and in one of the dark corners of Steerage No. 1, flat in a bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage from the Broomielaw to Greenock. That night, the ship’s yeoman (if I have the name of that officer correctly) pulled him out by the heels and had him before the mate. Two other stowaways had already been found and sent ashore; but by this time night had fallen, they were out in the middle of the estuary, and the last steamer had left them till the 52

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morning. ‘Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal,’ said the mate, ‘and see and pack him off the first thing tomorrow.’ In the forecastle, he had supper, a good night’s rest and breakfast; and was sitting placidly with a pipe, fancying all was over and the game up for good with that ship, when one of the sailors grumbled out an oath at him, with a ‘What are you doing there?’ and ‘Do you call that hiding anyway?’ There was need of no more; Alick was in another bunk before the day was older. Shortly before the passengers arrived, the ship was cursorily inspected. He heard the round come down the companion and look into one pen after another until they came within two of the one in which he lay concealed. Into these last two, they did not enter but merely glanced from without; and Alick had no doubt that he was personally favoured in this escape. It was the character of the man to attribute nothing to luck and but little to kindness; whatever happened to him he had earned in his own right amply; favours came to him from his singular attraction and adroitness, and misfortunes he had always accepted with his eyes open. Half an hour after the searchers had departed, the steerage began to fill with legitimate passengers, and the worst of Alick’s troubles was at an end. He was soon making himself popular, smoking other people’s tobacco and politely sharing their private stock of delicacies; and when night came, he retired to his bunk beside the others with composure. Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already far behind and only the rough North-Western hills of Ireland within view, Alick appeared on deck to court inquiry and decide his fate. As a matter of fact, he was known to several on board and even intimate with one of the engineers; but it was plainly not the etiquette of such occasions for the authorities to avow their information. Every one professed surprise and anger on his appearance, and he was led prisoner before the captain. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’ inquired the captain. ‘Not much,’ said Alick; ‘but when a man has been a long time out of a job, he will do things he would not under other circumstances.’ ‘Are you willing to work?’ Alick swore he was burning to be useful. ‘And what can you do?’ asked the Captain. He replied composedly that he was a brassfitter by trade. ‘I think you will be better at engineering?’ suggested the officer with a shrewd look. ‘No, sir,’ says Alick simply. (‘There’s few can beat me at a lie,’ was his 53

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engaging commentary to me as he recounted the affair.) ‘Have you been to sea?’ again asked the captain. ‘I’ve had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no more,’ replied the unabashed Alick. ‘Well, we must try and find some work for you,’ concluded the officer. And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine room, lazily scraping paint and now and then taking a pull upon a sheet. ‘You leave me alone,’ was his deduction. ‘When I get talking to a man, I can get round him.’ For my own part, I should have drawn a different conclusion, namely, that when a man is determined to be in a good humour, nothing will put him out. The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian—it was notable that neither of them told his name—had both been brought up and seen the world in a much smaller way. His father, a confectioner, died and was closely followed by his mother. His sisters had taken, I think, to dressmaking. He himself had returned from sea about a year ago and gone to live with his brother who kept the George Hotel (‘It was not quite a real hotel,’ added the candid fellow) and had a hired man to mind the horses. At first the Devonian was very welcome; but as time went on, his brother not unnaturally grew cool towards him, and he began to find himself one too many at the George Hotel. ‘I don’t think brothers care much for you,’ he said, as a general reflection upon life. Hurt at this change, nearly penniless and too proud to ask for more, he set off on foot and walked eighty miles to Weymouth, living on the journey as he could. He would have enlisted; but he was too small for the army and too old for the navy; and thought himself fortunate at last to find a berth on board a trading dandy. Somewhere in the Bristol Channel, the dandy sprang a leak and went down; and though the crew were picked up and brought ashore by fishermen, they found themselves with nothing but the clothes upon their back. His next engagement was scarcely better starred; for the ship proved so leaky and frightened them all so heartily during a short passage through the Irish Sea, that the entire crew deserted and remained behind upon the quays of Belfast. Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian. He could find no berth in Belfast, and had to work a passage to Glasgow on a steamer. She reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday; the Devonian had a bellyful that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to provide against the future, and set off along the quays to seek employment. But he was now not only penniless; his clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have the look of a street arab; and captains will have nothing 54

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to say to a raggamuffin; for in that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the man. You may hand, reef and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck. The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals. He had not the impudence to beg, although, as he said, ‘when I had money of my own, I always gave it.’ It was only on Saturday morning, after three whole days of starvation, that he asked a scone from a milkwoman, who added of her own accord a glass of milk. He had now made up his mind to stow away, not from any desire to see America, but merely to obtain the comfort of a place in the forecastle and a supply of familiar sea fare. He lived by begging, always from milkwomen and always scones and milk, and was not once refused. It was vile wet weather and he could never have been dry. By night, he walked the streets; and by day, slept upon Glasgow Green and heard, in the intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians of the spot clear up intricate points of doctrine and appraise the merits of the clergy. He had not much instruction; he could ‘read bills on the street’ but was ‘main bad at writing’; yet these theologians seem to have impressed him with a genuine sense of amusement. Why he did not go to the Sailors’ Home, I know not; I presume there is in Glasgow one of these institutions which are by far the happiest and the wisest effort of contemporaneous charity; but I must stand to my author, as they say in old books, and relate the story as I heard it. In the mean time, he had tried four times to stow away in different vessels, and four times had been discovered and handed back to starvation. The fifth time was lucky; and you may judge if he were pleased to be aboard ship again, at his old work and with duff twice a week. He was, said Alick, ‘a devil for the duff.’ Or if devil was not the word, it was one, if anything, stronger. The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable. The Devonian was as willing as any paid hand, swarmed aloft among the first, pulled his natural weight and fierily upon a rope, and found work for himself when there was none to show him. Alick, on the other hand, was not only a skulker in the grain, but took a humourous and finegentlemanly view of the transaction. He would speak to me by the hour in ostentatious idleness; and only if the Bo’swain or a mate came by, fell to languidly for just the necessary time till they were out of sight. ‘I’m not breaking my heart with it,’ he remarked. ‘So I observe,’ said I, with cordial adhesion. Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he was stationed; he watched the preparations for a second or so suspiciously; and then—‘Hullo!’ said he, ‘here’s some real work coming. I’m off.’ And 55

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he was gone that moment. Again, calculating the six guinea passage money and the probable duration of the passage, he remarked pleasantly that he was getting six shillings a day for this job—‘and it’s pretty dear to the company at that.’—‘They are making nothing by me,’ was another of his observations; ‘they’re making something by that fellow.’ And he pointed to the Devonian, who was just then busy to the eyes. The more you saw of Alick, I must own, the less you were tempted to respect him. His natural talents were of no use either to himself or others; for his character had degenerated like his face, and become pulpy and pretentious. Even his power of persuasion, which was certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being lost or neutralised by over confidence. He lied in an aggressive, brazen manner, like a pert criminal in the dock; and he was so vain of his own cleverness, that he could not refrain from boasting, ten minutes after, of the very trick by which he had deceived you. ‘Why, now I have more money than when I came aboard,’ he said one night, exhibiting a sixpence, ‘and yet I stood myself a bottle of beer before I went to bed yesterday. And as for tobacco, I have fifteen sticks of it.’ That was fairly successful indeed; yet a man of his superiority and with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows? have got the length of half a crown. I warn Alick as a sort of well wisher: if he persist, the days of finger glasses are gone by for him forever, and he may have to clean paint in earnest, or do yet dirtier work before the end. For instance, he spent a whole evening recounting to Jones and me a series of very cheap and blackguardly exploits, in which poor women were his easy and unpitied victims. A man of his talent and habit of the world, should have perceived the effect he was producing. A man who prides himself upon persuasion, should learn the persuasive faculty of silence, above all as to his own misdeeds. It is only in the farce and for dramatic purposes, that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents to the world at large. Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate Alick; for at the bottom of all his misconduct there was a guiding sense of humour that moved you to forgive him. It was more than half as a jest that he conducted his existence. He was never entirely serious in a thought. ‘O, man,’ he said to me once with unusual emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, ‘I would give up anything for a lark.’ And he stood for a while, smiling, with half shut eyes; and then proceeded to tell me how he would have passed the time on board, if he had been a passenger and free. It was fortunate for many that he had to mind his white paint; for his plan was unkind; yet I cannot deny that it was funny. There was a girl on board, a tall, blonde, handsome, strapping Irishwoman, with a 56

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wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick had dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that defies analysis. On her and her various admirers, and trusting implicitly in his own powers of talk, he based schemes of mystification that would have put a score of people by the ears in eight and forty hours and kept the rest of the ship’s company in inextinguishable mirth. The Devonian, who always listened to him greedily as to a god, suggested some modification of the plan. ‘You don’t understand how to work these things,’ observed Alick loftily. ‘I suppose I don’t, I suppose you do,’ retorted the Devonian. ‘God!’ cried Alick with fervour, ‘I’ve had a career of experience at least!’ It was in relation to his fellow stowaway that Alick showed the best or, perhaps I should say, the only good points of his nature. ‘Mind you,’ he said, suddenly changing his tone, ‘mind you, that’s a good boy. He wouldn’t tell you a lie. A lot of them think he is a scamp because his clothes are ragged, but he isn’t; he’s as good as gold.’ To hear him, you became aware that Alick himself had a taste for virtue. He thought his own idleness and the other’s industry equally becoming. He was no more anxious to insure his own reputation as a liar, than to uphold the truthfulness of his companion. And he seemed unaware of what was incongruous in his attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters. But he was one who looked largely upon life, and would have been equally ready to adjudge the Montyon prize for virtue or to sit as umpire in a competition of liars. It was not surprising that he should take an interest in the Devonian; for the lad worshipped and served him in love and wonder. Busy as he was, he would find time to warn Alick of an approaching officer, or even to tell him that the coast was clear and he might slip off and smoke a pipe in safety. ‘Tom,’ he once said to him, for that was the name which Alick ordered him to use, ‘if you don’t like going to the galley, I’ll go for you. You aint used to this kind of thing, you aint. But I’m a sailor. And I can understand the feelings of any fellow, I can.’ Again, he was hard up and casting about for some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in this respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick offered him the half of one of his fifteen sticks. I think, for my part, he might have increased the offer to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of them, and not lived to regret his liberality. But the Devonian refused. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re a stowaway like me. I won’t take it from you. I’ll take it from some one who’s not down on his luck.’ It was notable in this generous lad, that he was strongly under the 57

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influence of sex. If a woman passed near where he was working, his eyes lit up, his hand paused and his mind wandered instantly to other thoughts. ‘C’est Vénus tout entière.’ It was natural that he should exercise a fascination proportionally strong upon women. He begged, you will remember, from women only, and was never refused. Without wishing to explain away the charity of those who helped him, I cannot but fancy he may have owed a little to his handsome, long nose, to his attractive eyes, to the grains of beauty in his face, and to that quick, responsive nature, formed for love, which speaks eloquently through all disguises and can stamp an impression in ten minutes’ talk or an exchange of glances. He was the more dangerous in that he was far from bold, but seemed to woo in spite of himself and with a soft and pleading eye. Ragged as he was, and many a scarecrow is in that respect more comfortably furnished, even on board he was not without some curious admirers. One day, he was lying for warmth in the upper stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when the Irish Tommy came past, very neatly attired, as was her custom. ‘Poor fellow,’ she said, stopping, ‘you haven’t a vest.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wish I ’ad.’ Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his embarrassment, for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe and began to fill it with tobacco. ‘Do you want a match?’ she asked. And before he had time to reply, she ran off and presently returned with more than one. That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is concerned, of what I will make bold to call this love affair. There are many relations which go on to marriage and last during a lifetime, in which less human feeling is engaged than in this scene of five minutes at the stoke-hole. It was perhaps because of this strong principle of sex in his character, that the Devonian’s chief aspiration was after a clean shirt. That, and I hope many other things, have now been given him; for he worked so well and was so willing and pleasant on board, that he was offered a berth on the steamer into which he had crept unbidden. I have already recommended the emigrant rather to go second cabin than steerage. Let me add, if he has the tact to carry it out and wisely to choose both his steamer and his hiding place on board, that he had better go as stowaway than either. The forecastle, I am told, is a far more desirable lodging than steerage No. 1; the fare is better and more cleanly served; and if his body be sound, the deck work will only 58

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benefit his health and keep his mind cheerful and disengaged. In point of economy, there is, of course, no comparison possible: the stowaway passage costing exactly nothing. At the same time, it is awkward to reach a foreign land with only sixpence, and that was all that the persuasive Alick had managed to scrape together on the passage. To be taken where you want to go and then brought back again for punishment in irons, is, to say the least of it, annoying. And to perish of hunger and bad air in a solitary coal hole, like a poisoned rat behind the skirting, is a tragical and ghastly death. These are the pro’s and con’s, on which the reader may decide his own conduct for himself. Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but in a larger sense of the word, I have yet more to add. Jones had discovered and pointed out to me, a young woman who was remarkable among her fellows for a pleasing and interesting air. She was poorly clad to the verge, if not over the line, of disrespectability, with a ragged old jacket and a bit of a sealskin cap no bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her whole expression and her manner even in ordinary moments, told of a true womanly nature, capable of love, anger and devotion. She had a look, too, of refinement, like one who might have been a better lady than most, had she been allowed the opportunity. When alone, she seemed preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes and chary of speech and gesture, not from caution but poverty of disposition: a man like a ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and tended and waited on with her eyes, as if he had been Amadis of Gaul. It was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this delicate, sad woman caring for him. He seemed, from first to last, insensible of her caresses and attentions, and she seemed unconscious of his insensibility. The Irish husband who sang his wife to sleep, and this Scotch girl serving her Orson, were the two bits of human nature that most appealed to me throughout the voyage. On the Thursday before our arrival, the tickets were collected; and soon a rumour began to go round the vessel; and this girl with her bit of sealskin cap became the centre of whispering and pointed fingers. She also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she was on board with neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom she travelled was the father of a family, who had left wife and children to be hers. The ship’s officers discouraged the story, which may thus have been a story and no more; but it was believed in the steerage, and the poor girl had to encounter many curious eyes from that day forth. 59

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Personal Experience and Review Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the Ocean combined both. ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’ sings the old poet; and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates and consideration. Part of the interest and a great deal of the amusement flowed, at least to me, from this novel situation in the world. I found that I had, what they call, fallen in life with absolute success and verisimilitude. I was taken for a steerage passenger; no one seemed surprised that I should be so; and there was nothing but the brass plate between decks to remind me that I had once been a gentleman. In a former book, describing a former journey, I expressed some wonder that I could be readily and naturally taken for a peddler, and explained the accident by the difference of language and manners between England and France. I must now take a humbler view; for here I was among my own countrymen, somewhat roughly clad to be sure but with every advantage of speech and manner; and I am bound to confess that I passed for nearly anything you please except an educated gentleman. The sailors called me ‘mate’; the officers addressed me as ‘my man’; my comrades accepted me without hesitation for a person of their own character and experience, but with some curious information. One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason; several, and among these at least one of the seamen, judged me to be a petty officer in the American navy; and I was so often set down for a practical engineer, that at last I had not the heart to deny it. From all these guesses, I drew one conclusion which told against the insight of my companions. They might be close observers in their own way and read the manners in the face; but it was plain that they did not extend their observation to the hands. There is nothing strange in the omission: the only marvel being that, where we are all so much interested about our neighbours, so few should have learned to look critically at a part of the body, uncovered like the face and nearly as eloquent and personal. To the saloon passengers also, I sustained my part without a hitch. It is true I came little in their way; but when we did encounter, there was no recognition in their eye, although I confess I sometimes courted it in silence. All these my inferiors and equals took me like the trans60

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formed monarch in the story, for a mere, common, human man. They gave me a hard, dead look, with the flesh about the eye kept unrelaxed. With the women this surprised me less, as I had already experimented on the sex by going abroad through a suburban part of London simply attired in a sleeve-waistcoat. The result was curious. I then learned for the first time and by the exhaustive process, how much attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all male creatures of their own station; for in my humble rig, each one who went by me caused me a certain shock of surprise and a sense of something wanting. In my normal circumstances, it appeared, every young lady paid me the tribute of a cunningly dissembled glance; and though I had often not detected it when it was given, I was well aware of its absence when it was withheld. My height seemed to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she passed me like a dog. This is one of my grounds for supposing that what are called the upper classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable impression on what are called the lower. And I wish someone would continue my experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of toilette a man becomes invisible to the well-regulated female eye. Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more complete test; for even with the addition of speech and manner, I passed among the ladies for precisely the average man of the steerage. It was one afternoon that I saw this demonstrated. A very plainly dressed woman was taken ill on deck. I think I had the luck to be present at every sudden seizure during all the passage; and on this occasion, found myself in the place of importance, supporting the sufferer. There was not only a large crowd immediately around us, but a considerable knot of saloon passengers leaning over our heads from the hurricane deck. One of these, an elderly, managing woman, hailed me with counsels. Of course, I had to reply; and as the talk went on, I began to discover that the whole group took me for the husband. I looked upon my new wife, poor creature, with mingled feelings; and I must own she had not even the appearance of the poorest class of city servant maids, but looked more like a country wench who had been employed at a roadside inn. I confess openly, I was chagrined at this. Now was the time to go and study the brass plate. To such of the officers as knew about me, the doctor, the purser and the stewards, I appeared in the light of a broad joke. The fact that I spent the better part of my day in writing, had gone abroad over the ship and tickled them all prodigiously. Whenever they met me, they referred to my absurd occupation with familiarity and breadth of hu61

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mourous intention. Their manner was well calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes. You may be sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts of a gentleman, but you scarce publish the feeling to his face. ‘Well?’ they would say. ‘Still writing?’ And the smile would widen into a laugh. The purser came one day into the cabin and, touched to the heart by my misguided industry, offered me some other kind of writing, ‘for which,’ he added pointedly, ‘you will be paid.’ This was nothing else than to copy out the list of passengers. It was odd how my feeling of amusement was tempered by soreness. One of the sailors was the only man on board, besides my particular friends, who could be persuaded to take my literary character in earnest. I discussed the subject with him one night until his watch was over; he was much interested by all that I told him; and in return recommended me a work called Tom Holt’s Log, the principal incidents of which he obligingly described. I hand over the recommendation, fresh as I received it, to the reader; for I have not yet had an opportunity to see the book in question. But I will propose a wager, founding on a pretty large induction, that it is either excellent or downright penny trash. There seems to be no medium in the taste of the unliterary class; mediocrity must tremble for its judgement; either strong, lively matter solidly handled, or mere ink and banditti, forms its literary diet. Another trick of mine which told against my reputation, was my choice of roosting place in an active draught upon the cabin floor. I was openly jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a considerable knot would sometimes gather at the door to see my last dispositions for the night. This was embarrassing, but I learned to support the trial with equanimity. Indeed, I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly and naturally upon my spirits. I accepted the consequences with readiness, and found them far from difficult to bear. The steerage conquered me; I conformed more and more to the type of the place not only in manner but at heart; growing hostile to the officers and cabin passengers who looked down upon me, and day by day greedier for small delicacies. Such was the result, as I fancy, of a diet of bread and butter, soup and porridge. We think we have no sweet-tooth as long as we are full to the brim of molasses; but a man must have sojourned in the workhouse before he boasts himself indifferent to dainties. Every evening, for instance, I was more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea. If it was delicate, my heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish, I was proportionally downcast. The offer of a little jelly from a fellow passenger more provident than myself, caused a marked 62

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elevation in my spirits. And I would have gone to the ship’s end and back again for an oyster or a chipped fruit. Judge, then, of my delight, when a turn of events made me a sort of favoured inferior and welcome in the chief steward’s office. It fell out thus. One day at dinner, the soup for the first time failed us. A despicable broth was followed by a piece of fresh meat no less despicable, and some salt horse racier than game. I left table, went aft to the steward, told him I could eat nothing, and was at once supplied with bread and cheese for which he would not suffer me to pay. Meanwhile, during my absence, indignation had warmed up to the boiling point around the second cabin table. One of the company volunteered to write a letter of complaint, which he sealed, without showing it to any one, and handed over to the others to be laid before the captain in a deputation. The letter was brought and the plan explained to me on deck. As no one had seen the terms and the writer himself proposed to remain in the background, I discouraged the whole affair; the deputation fell through; and the missive was delivered single-handed by O’Reilly, who little imagined on what errand he had been dispatched. By three in the afternoon, the petard had burst; and the steward, the understewards and the whole second cabin were playing their parts in an absurd but most unpleasant tragi-comedy. The letter, on being opened, was found to be without a signature. With an odd alternation of dash and prudence, the man who hotly volunteered to lead the attack, had but given a run-away knock and disappeared, leaving O’Reilly in the breach. The prolonged consequences, the councils, the diplomacy, nay, the tears, which flowed from this ill-judged manoeuvre, are too many to be set down here. But as I found myself unpleasantly situated, having made a complaint that very day, I sent a note disclaiming the authorship of the letter. That, like the famous pin which the young gentleman picked up before the merchant’s window, was the beginning of my fortune. Thenceforth, I found myself a welcome visitor in the steward’s box. I could see the cabin passengers at table; I was shown the bill of fare for the day; and when I left, the steward would fill my pocket with greengages. I have not been in such a situation since I was a child and prowled upon the frontiers of a dinner party. But I found myself unchanged by time. I looked with the same envy on the good things passing by for others. The bill of fare was mine; I pored over it, whetted my appetite, made a dozen dinners in ten minutes and grovelled soul and body in Barmecide feasts; and when the talk was over, made my departure, happy like a tipped schoolboy, with my pocketful of fruit. 63

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I had regained the holy simplicity, the frank, piratical instincts of my youth; I was back in Eden and the glades of Arcady; and if I was still a gentleman on a brass plate, in relation to these greengages I may call myself a savage. Perhaps I understand in a more human manner than before, the tithes exacted by domestic servants. In other ways, I was content with my position. It seemed no disgrace to be confounded with my company; for I may as well declare at once I found their manners as gentle and becoming as those of any other class that I have had an opportunity of studying. I do not mean that my friends could have sat down without embarrassment and laughable disaster at the table of a Duke. That does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a difference of usage. Thus, I flatter myself that I conducted myself well among my fellow passengers; yet my most ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults, but to have committed as few as possible. I know too well that my tact is not the same as their tact, and that my habit of a different society constituted, not only no qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and becomingly in this. When Jones complimented me—because I ‘managed to behave very pleasantly’ to my fellow passengers, was how he put it—I could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment to be such as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English. I daresay, this praise was given me immediately on the back of some unpardonable solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a whole. We are all ready to laugh at the ploughman among lords; we should consider also the case of a lord among the ploughmen. I have seen a lawyer in the hovel of a Hebridean fisherman; and I know, but nothing will induce me to disclose, which of these two was the better gentleman. Some of our finest behaviour, though it looks well enough from the boxes, may seem even brutal to the gallery. We boast too often manners that are parochial rather than universal; that, like a country wine, will not bear transportation for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the kitchen. To be a gentleman is to be one all the world over and in every relation and grade of society. It is a high calling, to which a man must first be born and then devote himself for life. And unhappily, the manners of a certain, so-called upper grade, have a kind of currency and meet with a certain external acceptation throughout all the others; and this tends to keep us well satisfied with slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishment of a clique. But manners, like art, should be human and central. Some of my fellow passengers, as I now moved among them in a relation of equality, seemed to me grand gentlemen. They were not 64

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rough, nor hasty, nor disputatious; debated pleasantly, differed kindly; were helpful, gentle, patient and placid. The type of manners was plain and even heavy; there was little to please the eye but, so far as I am concerned, nothing to shock; and I thought gentleness lay more nearly at the spring of behaviour than in many more ornate and delicate societies. I say delicate, where I cannot say refined; a thing may be fine like ironwork, without being delicate like lace. There was less delicacy; the skin supported more callously the natural surface of events, the mind received more bravely the crude facts of human existence; but I do not think that there was less effective refinement, less consideration for others, less polite suppression of self. Of Barney and the old fisher, for instance, I may hope the reader has now some notion of his own; let him ask himself if he meets gentlemen so accomplished at his club. Not every day by many, I am sure. And I know for my part, that I have had a great opportunity, and should have learned some better manners for the future. It will be understood that I speak of the best among my fellow passengers; for in the steerage, as well as in the saloon, there is a mixture. The women, in particular, too often displeased me by something hard and forward, by something alternately sullen and jeering both in speech and conduct. But, to begin with, this may have been my own fault, for the game of manners is more easily played with a good partner; and in the second place, it may have depended entirely on the difference of sex. I am led to fancy this, because it was in the younger women alone that I was thus displeased. The elder and the married women behaved to me in my capacity of steerage passenger and their co-equal, exactly as they would if I had come on horseback with a groom behind me. What, then, ailed the girls? May I not construe these taunts and tiffs and sulks, as so many challenges into the field of courtship? Many animals and the youth of even the most delicate classes, conduct their love dalliance under the similitude of a quarrel; and something of this modest subterfuge survives perhaps in every marriage or advanced flirtation. Now the girls of our company and perhaps the people of that class (among themselves) may prefer at least to open the campaign on these aggressive tactics. They are forward and backward to provoke the men, that the first kiss may be taken in a tussle and furiously resented. At least I was not amenable to these advances, if such they were; and I thought the women greatly and even surprisingly inferior to the men. It is true that the class of women who emigrate is not likely, for many reasons, to be the best. And I should add, what seems hardly necessary, for it is involved in every word that 65

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I have written on the subject, that these were all Scotch and Irish girls; not one from England. The men, to return to those with whom I felt myself in sympathy and of whom I may therefore hope to write with a greater measure of truth, were not only as good in their manners but endowed with very much the same natural capacities and about as wise in deduction, as the bankers and barristers of what is called society. One and all were too much interested in discrete facts, and loved information for its own sake with too rash a devotion; but people in all classes display the same appetite as they gorge themselves daily with the miscellaneous gossip of the newspaper. Newspaper reading, as far as I can make out, is often rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture. I have myself palmed off yesterday’s issue on a friend, and seen him reperuse it for a continuance of minutes with an air at once refreshed and solemn. Workmen perhaps pay more attention; but though they may be eager listeners, they have rarely seemed to me either willing or careful thinkers. Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which we can perceive relations in that field, whether great or small. Workmen and certainly those who were on board with me, I found wanting in this quality or habit of the mind. They did not perceive relations, mutually reactive and conditioned by a million others; but leaped to a so-called cause, and thought the problem settled. Thus the cause of everything in England was the form of government, and the cure for all evils was, by consequence, a revolution. It is surprising how many of them said this, and that none should have had a definite thought in his head as he said it. Some hated the church because they disagreed with it; some hated Lord Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all hated the masters, probably with reason. But these were but adminicles; they were not the root of the matter; the true reasoning of their souls ran thus: I have not got on; I ought to have got on; if there was a revolution, I should get on. How? They had no idea. Why? Because—because— well, look at America! To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you come to that. At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one question in modern home politics, though it appears in many shapes, and that is the question of money; and but one political remedy, that people should grow wiser and better. My workman fellow passengers were as impatient and dull of hearing on the second of these points as any member of parliament; but they had some glimmerings of the first. They would not hear of improvement on their part; but wished the world made 66

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over again in a crack, so that they might remain improvident and idle and debauched and yet enjoy the comfort and respect that should accompany the opposite virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could see, that many of them were now on their way to America. But on the point of money, they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far as they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual income; a question which should long ago have been settled by a revolution, they did not know how, and which they were now about to settle for themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the Atlantic in a steamship of considerable tonnage. And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income question is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided, if there be no wisdom and virtue to profit by the change. It is not by a man’s purse, but by his character, that he is rich or poor. What have the colliers done with their great earnings? My Irish labourer had his three hundred pounds in bank, and was still young. My old North Sea fisher took a pleasure trip to see the States, and had his house and hayfield by the Tyne. There come periods in every country when the struggle for existence grows too fierce to be endured, and a man will do well, if he is able, to escape where the forces are balanced more evenly and daily bread is an affair of course. But to travel after high wages, I have been told by workmen, is never the way to come to easy circumstances, even for the best. And as for those who have already had their opportunity, and lost it, and come out of the flush times in England as poor as they began, we may well wonder with what hope they take to emigration. Wages must fluctuate; work must come and go; the power of manual labour is a gift so common that none but the exceptionally skilled can count upon employment; and when the evil days are here again, the rest shall emigrate once more and once more with empty pockets. I do not at all despise the relief of a time, however brief and passing, of comparative ease in money matters; for while any man can be poor for a month or two with equanimity and even merriment, it is the long continuous drag and the daily recurrence of the same small cares that weary patience and lead on despair. Let them follow high wages, by all means; but let them not suppose that either a change of country or a change of government will make those rich or contented who are without the virtues of the state. Barney will be poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them go where they will and wreck all the governments under heaven, they will be poor until they die. Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his surprising idleness and the candour with which he confesses the fail67

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ing. It has to me been always something of a relief, to find the poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better grace. The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his childhood up. He excused himself for his defective education on the ground that he had been overworked from first to last. Even now, he said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a book. In consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was occupied for four or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of the twenty-four, and then principally in walking; and the remainder of the day he passed in born idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his back against a door. I have known men do hard literary work all morning, and then undergo quite as much physical fatigue by way of relief, as satisfied this powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at least, like all the educated class, did so much homage to industry as to persuade himself he was industrious. But the average mechanic recognises his idleness with effrontery; he has even, as I am told, organised it. I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact. A man fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen and was brought into hospital with broken bones. He was asked what was his trade, and replied that he was a Tapper. No one had ever heard of such a thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they besought an explanation. It appeared that when a party of slaters were engaged upon a roof, they would now and then be taken with a fancy for the public house; now a seamstress, for example, might slip away from her work and no one be the wiser; but if these fellows adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would cease and thus the neighbourhood be advertised of their defection. Hence the career of the Tapper. He has to do the tapping and keep up an industrious bustle on the housetop, during the absence of the slaters. When he taps for only one or two, the thing is child’s play; but when he has to represent a whole troop, it is then that he earns his money in the sweat of his brow. Then must he bound from spot to spot, reduplicate, triplicate, sextuplicate his single personality, and swell and hasten his blows, until he produce a perfect illusion for the ear, and you would swear that a crowd of emulous masons were continuing merrily to roof the house. It must be a strange sight from an upper window. I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was astonished at the stories told by my companions. Skulking, shirking, malingering, were all established tactics, it appeared. They could see no dishonesty 68

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where a man who is paid for an hour’s work gives half an hour’s consistent idling in its place. Thus the tapper would refuse to watch for the police during a burglary, and call himself an honest man. It is not sufficiently recognised that our race detests to work. If I thought that I should have to work every day of my life as hard as I am working now, I should be tempted to give up the struggle. And the workman early begins on his career of toil. He has never had his fill of holidays in the past; and his prospect of holidays in the future is both distant and uncertain. In the circumstances, it would require a high degree of virtue not to snatch alleviations for the moment. There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good talking of a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working men. Where books are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of information will be given and received by word of mouth; and this tends to produce good talkers and, what is no less needful for conversation, good listeners. They could all tell a story with effect. I am sometimes tempted to think that the less literary class show always better in narration; they have so much more patience with detail, are so much less hurried to reach the points, and preserve so much juster a proportion among the facts. At the same time, their talk is dry; they pursue a topic ploddingly; have not an agile fancy; do not throw sudden lights from unexpected quarters; and when the talk is over, too often leave the matter where it was. They mark time instead of marching. They think, only to argue, not to reach new conclusions; and use their reason rather as a weapon of offence than as a tool for self-improvement. Hence, the talk of some of the cleverest was unprofitable in result, because there was no give and take; they would grant you as little as possible for premiss, and began the dispute under an oath to conquer or to die. But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting than that of a wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, hopes and fears of which the workman’s life is built, lie nearer to necessity and nature. They are more immediate to human life. An income calculated by the week is a far more human thing than one calculated by the year, and a small income, simply from its smallness, than a large one. I never wearied listening to the details of a workman’s economy, because every item stood for some real pleasure. If he could afford pudding twice a week, you know that twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and was physically happy; while if you learn that a rich man has seven courses a day, ten to one the half of them remain untasted, and the whole is but misspent money and a weariness to the flesh. The difference between England and America to a working man, was thus most human69

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ly put to me by a fellow passenger: ‘In America,’ said he, ‘you get pies and puddings.’ I do not hear enough, in economy books, of pie and pudding. A man lives in and for the delicacies, adornments and accidental attributes of life, such as pudding to eat and pleasant books and theatres to occupy his leisure. The bare terms of existence would be rejected with contempt by all. If a man feeds on bread and butter, soup and porridge, his appetite grows wolfish after dainties. And the workman dwells in a borderland, and is always within sight of those cheerless regions where life is more difficult to sustain than worth sustaining. Every detail of our existence, where it is worth while to cross the Ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive and enthralling by the presence of genuine desire; but it is all one to me whether Crœsus has a hundred or a thousand thousands in the bank. There is more adventure in the life of the working man, who descends as a common soldier into the battle of life, than in that of the millionaire who sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke, and only directs the manœuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear about the career of him who is in the thick of the business; to whom one change of market means an empty belly, and another a copious and savoury meal. This is not the philosophical but the human side of economics; it interests like a story; and the life of all who are thus situated partakes in a small way of the charm of Robinson Crusoe; for every step is critical, and human life is presented to you naked and verging to its lowest terms.

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PA RT I I America: The Emigrant Train

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New York As we drew near to New York, I was at first amused and then somewhat staggered by the cautions and the grisly tales that went the round. You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till you were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military precaution; for the least you had to apprehend was to awake next morning without money or baggage or necessary raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from the ranks of mankind. I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum of fact. Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns of the Cévennes and that by a learned professor; and when I reached Pradelles, the warning was explained; it was but the far-away rumour and reduplication of a single terrifying story already half a century old and half forgotten in the theatre of the events. So I was tempted to make light of these reports against America. But we had on board with us a man whose evidence it would not do to put aside. He had come near these perils in the body; he had visited a robber inn. The public has an old and well grounded favour for this class of incident, and shall be gratified to the best of my power. My fellow passenger, whom we shall call M‘Naughten, had come from New York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work. They were a pair of rattling blades; and leaving their baggage at the station, passed the day in beer saloons and with congenial spirits until midnight struck. Then they applied themselves to find a lodging and walked the streets till two, knocking at houses of entertainment and being refused admittance or themselves declining the terms. By two, the inspiration of their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary and humble; and after a great circuit, found themselves in the same street where they had begun their search and in front of a French hotel where they had already sought accommodation. Seeing the house still open, they returned to the charge. A man in a white cap sat in an office by the door. He seemed to welcome them more warmly than when they had first presented themselves, and the charge for the night had somewhat unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a quarter. They thought him ill73

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looking, but paid their quarter apiece, and were shown upstairs to the top of the house. There, in a small room, the man in the white cap wished them pleasant slumbers. It was furnished with a bed, a chair and some conveniences; the door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was a couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed and the other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes see valuable watercolours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of art more than usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the hope of finding something of this last description, that M‘Naughten’s comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first. He was startlingly disappointed. There was no picture. The frame surrounded and the curtain was designed to hide an oblong aperture in the partition, through which they looked forth into the dark corridor. A person standing without could easily take a purse from under the pillow or even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed. M‘Naughten and his comrade stared at each other, like Vasco’s seamen, ‘with a wild surmise’; and then the latter, catching up the lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain. There he stood petrified; and M‘Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by the wrist in terror. They could see into another room, larger in size than that which they occupied, where three men sat crouching and silent in the dark. For a second or so, these five persons looked each other in the eyes; then the curtain was dropped; and M‘Naughten and his friend made but one bolt of it out of the room and down the stairs. The man in the white cap said nothing as they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once more in the open night, that they gave up all notion of a bed and walked the streets of Boston till the morning. No one seemed much cast down by these stories; but all inquired after the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put myself under the conduct of Mr. Jones. Before noon of the second Sunday we sighted the low shores outside of New York harbour; the steerage passengers must remain on board to pass through Castle Garden on the following morning; but we of the second cabin made our escape along with the lords of the saloon; and by six o’clock, Jones and I issued into West Street sitting on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage waggon. It rained miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was scarce a lull and no cessation of the downpour. The roadways were flooded; a loud, strident noise of falling water filled the air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing. It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of money, 74

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to be rattled along West Street to our destination: ‘Reunion House, No. 10 West Street, one minute’s walk from Castle Garden; convenient to Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers and Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, Lodging per night 25 cents; Private rooms for families; No charge for Storage or Baggage; Satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell, Proprietor.’ Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a humble hostelry. You entered through a long bar room; thence passed into a little dining room; and thence into a still lesser kitchen. The furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung, in the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes. There is something youthful in this fashion which pleases me; it runs into the advertisements; they do not merely offer you your money’s worth of perfunctory attendance, but hold out golden prospects and welcome you with both hands; such a proprietor defies black care to follow you into his saloon; such another, touching the keynote with precision, invites you to his bar, ‘to have a good time with the boys.’ So they not only insure their own attention but the wit and friendly spirit of their guests. Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor and was going on, in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. Mitchell sternly interposed and explained the situation. He was offering to treat me, it appeared; whenever an American bar keeper proposes anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to treat; and if I did not want to drink, I must at least take the cigar. I took it bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career on the wrong foot. I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have been from a variety of reasons: even the best cigar often failing to please, if you smoke three quarters of it in a drenching rain. For many years, America was to me a sort of promised land; ‘westward the march of empire holds its way’; the race is for the moment to the young; what has been and what is, we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is to be, yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. Greece, Rome and Judæa are gone by forever, leaving to generations the legacy of their accomplished work; China still endures, an old inhabited house in the brand-new city of nations; England has already declined, since she has lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. 75

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It will be hard for an American to understand the spirit. But let him imagine a young man, who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following bygone fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep house together by themselves and live far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the American Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was still conducted in the open air and on free, barbaric terms; as if it had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume, forms of procedure and sad, senseless selfdenial. Which of these two he prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly for himself. He would rather be houseless than denied a passkey; rather go without food than partake of a stalled ox in stiff, respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his life according to the dictates of the world. He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine laws, the Puritan sourness, the fierce sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of country towns. A few wild story books which delighted his childhood form the imaginative basis of his picture of America. In course of time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating details: vast cities that grow up as by enchantment, the birds, that have gone south in Autumn, returning with the Spring to find thousands camped upon their marshes and the lamps burning far and near along populous streets; forests that disappear like snow; countries larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man running forth with his household gods before another, while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that hustle, courage, action and constant, kaleidoscopic change, that Walt Whitman has seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful and loquacious verses. Even the shot-gun, the navy revolver and the bowie knife, seem more connected with courage than with cruelty. I remember a while ago when Chicago was burned, hearing how a man, ere he began to rebuild his house, put up a board with some such inscription as the following: ‘All lost. Have a wife and three children. Have the world to begin again’; and then in large capitals the word: ‘ENERGY.’ The pluck and the expansion are alike youthful, and go straight to a young heart. Yes, it seemed to me, here was the country after all; here the undaunted stock of mankind, worthy to carve a new world. 76

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I think Americans are scarce aware of this romantic attraction exercised by their land upon their cousins over sea. Perhaps they are unable to detect it under a certain jealousy and repentant soreness with which we regard a prosperity that might have been ours but for our own misconduct. Perhaps, too, we purposely conceal it; for we do not yet despair of the old ship. And perhaps the feeling flourishes more freely in the absence of any embodied and gently disappointing Uncle Sam. Europe is visited yearly by a crowd of preposterous fellows who, stung by some inattention or merely sick with patriotism, decline their titles of superiority in our ears and insult us with statistics by the page. From some such excursion, they return full of bitterness because the English show so small an interest and so modified a pleasure in the progress of the States. Truly; but perhaps we should please them better, if they would measure the growth of America on some different standard from the decline of England. That capital essayist, Mr. Lowell, suffered much from ‘a certain condescension in foreigners,’ by which they made him feel that America was still young and incomplete; there is, I fear, a certain assumption in the American, by which he manages to taunt us with our age and debility. And since I am on this subject, let me courteously invite each American citizen who purposes travelling in Europe, either to hold his peace upon the subject of the Alabama claims; or if he must discuss the matter, to first refund from his own pocket the money which was paid by the one party and accepted by the other to conclude and definitively bury the dispute. The first American I ever encountered after I had begun to adore America, quarrelled with me, or else I quarrelled with him, about the Alabama claims. He has not been the last. Yet I never started the subject; indeed I know nothing about it, except that the money was paid; and fight for my flag in ignorance like a man before the mast. It is possible that some people are always best at home, though the reverse is scandalously true of others. I have just been reading Mr. Charles Reade’s Woman Hater (for which I wish to thank him), and I am reminded of Zoe Vizard’s remark: ‘What does that matter? We are abroad.’ Sedentary, respectable people seem to leave some vital qualities behind them when they travel: non omnia sua secum; they are not themselves, and with all that mass of baggage, have forgotten to put up their human virtues. A Bohemian may not have much to recommend him, but what he has, is at least his own and indefeasible. You may rely as surely upon his virtues as upon his vices, for they are both bred in the bone. Neither have been assumed to suit the temper of society, or depend in any degree on the vicinity of Portman Square. 77

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But respectable people, transplanted from their own particular zone of respectability, too often lose their manners, their good sense, and a considerable part of their religion. For instance I have not yet seen the Sabbatarian who did not visibly relax upon the continent. Hence perhaps the difference between the American abroad and the American at home. If one thing were deeply written on my mind, it was this: that the American dislikes England and the English; and yet I had no sooner crossed the Atlantic, than I began to think it an unfounded notion. The old country—so they called it with an accent of true kindliness— was plainly not detested; they spoke of it with a certain emotion, as of a father from whom they had parted in anger and who was since dead; and wherever I went, I found my nationality an introduction. I am old-fashioned enough to be patriotic, particularly when away from home; and thus the change delighted and touched me. Up to the moment of my arrival, I had connected Americans with hostility, not to me indeed, but to my land; from that moment forward, I found that was a link which I had thought to be a barrier, and knew that I was among blood relations. So much had I written some time ago, with great good sense, as I thought, and complete catholicity of view. But it began at first to dawn upon me slowly, and was then forced upon me in a thunderclap, that I had myself become one of those uncivil travellers whom I so heartily condemned: that while here I was, kindly received, I could not find a good word nor so much as a good thought for the land that harboured me; that I was eager to spy its faults and shrank from the sight of virtues as if they were injustices to England. Such was the case; explain it how you may. It was too like my home, and yet not like enough. It stood to me like a near relation who is scarce a friend, and who may disgrace us by his misconduct and yet cannot greatly please by his prosperity. I can bear to read the worst word of a Frenchman about England, and can do so smiling; but let an American take up the tale, and I am all quivering susceptibility from head to foot. There is still a sense of domestic treachery when we fall out, and a sense of unwarrantable coolness even when we agree. Did you ever read the parable of the Prodigal Son? Or do you fancy, if things had been reversed and the prodigal come home in broadcloth and a chaise and four, that his brother who had stayed at home and stood by the old concern, would be better satisfied with the result? He might have been; not I. I have not enough justice in me for a case so trying. And then in one version of the parable, the prodigal was driven from home with barbarous usage; and O! what a bitterness is 78

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thus added to the cup! Your own Benjamin Franklin has foreseen my case. ‘Were it possible for us to forget and forgive,’ he wrote, ‘it is not possible for you (I mean the British nation) to forgive the people you have so heavily injured.’ Incisive Franklin! Yours is the prophecy, mine the ill-feeling. I have all the faults of my forefathers on my stomach; I have historical remorse; I cannot see America but through the jaundiced spectacles of criminality. And surely if jealousy be, as I believe it is, only the most radical, primæval and naked form of admiration—admiration in war paint, so to speak—then every word of my confession proves a delicate flattery like incense. Sail on, O mighty Union! God knows I wish you a noble career. Only somehow, when I was younger, I used to feel as if I had some portion in your future; but first I began to meet Americans in my own home, and they did not run to greet me as I hoped; and then I came myself into these States, and found my own heart not pure of ancient hatred. With that I knew I was a stranger, and you did but justice to refuse me copyright. Yet it is with disappointed tenderness that I behold you steaming off to glory in your new and elegant turret ship, while I remain behind to go down with the old three-decker. We have feelings that will not be uttered in prose; and where poetry is absent, jingle must serve the turn. With half a heart I wander here   As from an age gone by, A brother—yet, though young in years,   An elder brother I! You speak another tongue from mine,   Though both were English born. I towards the night of time decline:   You mount into the morn. Youth shall grow great and strong and free   But age must still decay. Tomorrow for the States—for me   England and yesterday! Here I was at least in America, and was soon out upon New York streets spying for things foreign. The place had to me an air of Liverpool; but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would have looked inviting. We were a party of four, under two umbrellas: Jones and I and 79

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two Scotch lads, recent immigrants and not indisposed to welcome a compatriot. They had been six weeks in New York and neither of them had yet found a single job or earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present they were exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare. The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such a dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at which I should have hesitated: the devil was in it but Jones and I should dine like heathen emperors. I set to work asking after a restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical looking passers-by to ask from. Yet, although I told them I was willing to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to cheap, fixed-price houses where I would not have eaten that night for the cost of twenty dinners. I do not know if this were characteristic of New York, or whether it was only Jones and I who looked un-diner-ly and discouraged enterprising suggestions. But at length, by our own sagacity, we found a French Restaurant, where there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole. I never entered into the feelings of Jack-on-land so completely as when I tasted that coffee. I suppose we had one of the ‘private rooms for families’ at Reunion House. It was very small; furnished with a bed, a chair and some clothes pegs; and it derived all that is necessary for the life of the human animal through two borrowed lights: one, looking into the passage; and the second opening, without sash, onto another apartment where three men fitfully snored or, in intervals of wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long. It will be observed that this was almost exactly the disposition of the room in M‘Naughten’s story. Jones had the bed; I pitched my camp upon the floor; he did not sleep until near morning; and I, for my part, never closed an eye. Some of this wakefulness was due to the change from shipboard; but the better part, in my case, to a certain distressing malady which had been growing on me during the last few days and of which more anon. At sunrise, I heard a cannon fired; and shortly after the men in the next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle over their toilettes. The sound of their voices, as they talked, was low and moaning like that of people watching by the sick. Jones, who had at last begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then opened unconscious eyes upon me where I lay. I found myself growing eerier and eerier, for I daresay I was a little fevered by my restless night; and hurried to dress and get downstairs. You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and reso80

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nant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court. There were, if I remember rightly, three basin stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a looking glass and a pair of questionable combs. Another Scotch lad was here, scrubbing his face with a good will. He had been three months in New York and had not yet found a single job nor earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present, he also was exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare. I began to grow sick at heart for my fellow emigrants. Of my nightmare wanderings in New York, I spare to tell. I had a thousand and one things to do; only the day to do them in; and a journey across the continent before me in the evening. It rained with patient fury; every now and then I had to get under cover for awhile in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under this continued drenching, it began to grow damp on the inside. I went to banks, post offices, railway offices, restaurants, publishers, booksellers, money changers, and wherever I went a pool would gather about my feet, and those who were careful of their floors, would look on with an unfriendly eye. Wherever I went, too, the same traits struck me; the people were all surprisingly rude and surprisingly kind. The money changer cross-questioned me like a French commissary, asking my age, my business, my average income, and my destination, beating down my attempts at evasion, and receiving my answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he shook hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly quarter of a mile in the rain to get me books at a reduction. Again in a very large publishing and bookselling establishment, a man, who seemed to be the manager, received me as I had certainly never before been received in any human shop, indicated squarely that he put no faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the names of books or give me the slightest help or information, on the ground, like the steward, that it was none of his business. I lost my temper at last, said I was a stranger in America and not learned in their etiquette; but I could assure him, if he went to any bookseller in England, of more handsome usage. The boast was perhaps exaggerated; but like many a long shot, it struck the gold. The manager passed at once from one extreme to the other; I may say that from that moment he loaded me with kindness; he gave me all sorts of good advice, wrote me down addresses, and came bare-headed into the rain to point me out a restaurant, where I might lunch; nor even then did he seem to think that he had done enough. These are (it is as well to be bold in statement) the manners of America. It is this same opposition that has most struck 81

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me in people of almost all classes and from east to west. By the time a man had about strung me up to be the death of him by his insulting behaviour, he himself would be just upon the point of melting into confidence and serviceable attentions. Yet I suspect, although I have met with the like in so many parts, that this must be the character of some particular state or group of states; for in America, and this again in all classes, you will find some of the softest mannered gentlemen in the world. I returned to Mitchell’s to write some letters; and then made the acquaintance of his stripling daughter. She was a slip of a girl at that attractive period of life when the girl just begins to put on the forms of the woman, and yet retains an accent and character of her own. Her looks were dark, strange and comely. Her eyes had a caressing fixity, which made you inclined to turn aside your own. She was what is called a reading girl, and it was because she saw books in my open knapsack as I sat writing at a table near the bar, that she plucked up courage to address me. Had I any songs? she asked me, touching a volume with her finger. I told her I had not; but she still hovered by, and again inquired, If any of the books were nice? I gave her a volume of my own, not because I thought it nice, but because it had a likeness of myself in the frontispiece, which I thought it would amuse the child to recognise. She was delighted beyond measure, and read a good many pages aloud to her sister as I sat writing; the sister, I must confess, soon wearied and ran away; but the other child, with admirable courage, persevered till it was time for me to go. I wish her a kind husband who will have, without my wishing it, a most desirable wife, particularly for an author. I went to a chemist’s in Broadway, a great temple near the Post Office, where I was examined and prescribed for by a fine gentleman in fine linen and with the most insinuative manners. My wrists were a mass of sores; so were many other parts of my body. The itching was at times overwhelming; at times, too, it was succeeded by furious stinging pains, like so many cuts with a carriage whip. There were moments when even a stoic or an Indian Gymnosophist might have been excused for some demonstration of interest; and for my part, I was ready to roll upon the floor in my paroxysms. The gentleman in fine linen told me, with admirable gravity, that my liver was out of order, and presented me with a blue pill, a seidlitz powder and a little bottle of some salt and colourless fluid to take night and morning on the journey. He might as well have given me a cricket bat and a copy of Johnson’s dictionary, I might have lived exclusively on blue pill and been 82

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none the better. But the diagnosis of the gentleman in fine linen was hopelessly at fault. Perhaps he had moved too exclusively in elegant circles; perhaps he was too noble-minded to suspect me of anything disgraceful. The true name of my complaint, I will never divulge, for I know what is due to the reader and to myself; but there is every reason to believe that I am not the only emigrant who has arrived in the Western world with similar symptoms. It is indeed a piece of emigrant experience, though one which I had not designed to share. Should any person be so intoxicated by my description of an emigrant’s career, as to desire to follow in my footsteps, here is a consideration which may modify if not eradicate the wish. But I have since been told that with a ring of red sublimate about the wrist, a man may plunge into the vilest company unfearing. I had no red sublimate: that is my story; hence these tears. I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell’s towards evening, that I had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks and trousers, and leave them behind for the benefit of New York city. No fire could have dried them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their present condition was to spread ruin among my other possessions. With a heavy heart, I said farewell to them, as they lay, a pulp in the middle of a pool, upon the floor of Mitchell’s kitchen. I wonder if they are dry by now. Mitchell hired a man to carry my baggage to the station which was hard by, accompanied me thither himself and recommended me to the particular attention of the officials. No one could have been kinder. Those who are out of pocket, may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent meals and find an honest and obliging landlord. I owed him this word of thanks, before I enter fairly on the second and far less agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.

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Notes by the Way to Council Bluffs Monday. It was, if I remember rightly, five o’clock when we were all signalled to be present at the Ferry Depot of the Railroad. An emigrant ship had arrived on the Saturday night; another on the Sunday morning; our own on Sunday afternoon; a fourth early on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday, a great part of the passengers from these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was to travel. There was a babel of bewildered men, women and children. The wretched little booking office and the baggage room, which was not much larger, were crowded thick with emigrants and were heavy and rank with the atmosphere of dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding stood by the half hour in the rain. The officials loaded each other with recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone, blustering and interfering. It was plain that the whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many passengers. My own ticket was given me at once, thanks to Mr. Mitchell’s recommendation; and an oldish man, who preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage registered and counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he should give me the word to move. I had taken along with me a small valise, a knapsack which I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag of my railway rug, the whole of Bancroft’s History of the United States in six fat volumes: it was as much as I could carry with convenience even for short distances; but it insured me plenty of clothing; and the valise was, at that moment and often after, useful for a stool. I am sure I sat for an hour in the baggage room; and wretched enough it was; yet when at last the word was passed to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was only to exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger. I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West Street to the river. It was dark; the wind blew clean through it from end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and baggage, hundreds of one and tons of the other. I feel I shall have a difficulty to make myself believed; and certainly the scene must have been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily repetition. It was 84

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a tight jam. There was no fairway through the mingled mass of brute and living obstruction. Into the upper skirts of the crowd, porters, infuriated by hurry and overwork, clove their way with shouts. I may say that we stood like sheep, and that the porters charged among us like so many maddened sheep dogs. And I believe these men were no longer answerable for their acts. It mattered not what they were carrying, they drove straight into the press and, when they could get no farther, blindly discharged their barrowful. With my own hand, for instance, I saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother’s knee, she sitting on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose that there were many similar interpositions in the course of the evening. It will give some idea of the state of mind to which we were reduced, if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother of the child paid the least attention to my act. It was not till some time after, that I understood what I had done myself; for to ward off heavy boxes seemed, at the moment, a natural incident of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to progress such as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted the spirits. We had accepted this purgatory, as a child accepts the conditions of the world. For my part, I shivered a little and my back ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, and all the activities of my nature had become tributary to one massive sensation of discomfort. At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the crowd began to move, heavily straining through itself. About the same time some lamps were lighted and threw a sudden flare over the shed. We were being filtered out into the river boat for Jersey City. You may imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded, through the dense, choking crush, every one overladen with packages or children and yet under the necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way; but it ended at length for me, and I found myself on deck under a flimsy awning and with a trifle elbow room to stretch and breathe in. This was on the starboard; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side by which we had entered. In vain the seamen shouted them to move on and threatened them with shipwreck; these poor people were under a spell of stupor and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily as ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept over the river in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated steamers running many knots and heralding their approach by strains of music. The contrast between these pleasure embarcations and our own grim vessel, 85

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with her list to port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants, was of that glaring description which we count too obvious for the purposes of art. The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede. I had a fixed sense of calamity; and to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was common to us all. A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear, presided the disorder of our landing. People pushed and elbowed and ran, their families following how they could. Children fell, and were picked up to be rewarded by a blow. One child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with increasing shrillness as though verging towards a fit; an official kept him by her; but no one else seemed so much as to remark her distress, and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest. I was so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in the hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station; so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover. There was no waiting room; no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and for at least another hour (or so it seemed) we had to camp upon the draughty, gaslit platform. I sat on my valise, too crushed to observe my neighbours; but as they were all cold and wet and weary and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which we had been subjected, I believe they can have been no happier than myself. I bought half a dozen oranges from a boy; for oranges and nuts were the only refection to be had. As only two of them had even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under the cars and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the track after my leavings. God knows they would get little comfort from these balls of yellow fibre. But the touch completes the misery of the picture. You will tell me, perhaps, that people are jostled, driven, and condemned to wait in the cold and rain, to get upon an excursion train or to see a new piece in a theatre; and that these discomforts are constantly, if not always cheerfully, supported. I cannot deny it; but whether it was because the trial lasted so long, or because we were here whole families together, carrying all their worldly goods and bent upon a serious end, I know only that I have never seen fellow creatures so stricken down, nor suffered, in my own person, such complete paralysis of mind. The whole business was a nightmare while it lasted, and is still a nightmare to remember. If the railway company cared— but then it does not, and I should address the winds. The officials, who are to blame for this unnecessary suffering, are without doubt humane men and subscribe to public charities; but when all hands are piped, they may find their duty lay some other way. Kindness is the first of 86

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virtues; and capacity in a man’s own business the greatest kindness in his reach. At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected and far from dry. For my own part, I got out a clothes brush, and brushed my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my blood into the bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour to whom I lent my brush, appeared to take the least precaution. As they were, they composed themselves to sleep. I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and been twice ordered to change carriages and twice countermanded, before I allowed myself to follow their example. Tuesday. When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing idle; I was in the last carriage and, seeing some others already strolling to and fro about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as from a caravan by the wayside. We were near no station, nor even, so far as I could see, within sight of any signal. A green, open, undulating country stretched away upon all sides. Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the contours of the land were soft and English. It was not quite England; neither was it quite France; yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes. It was in the sky and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to find a change. Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe. There is more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple, brown, and smoky orange, in those of the new. It may be from habit, but to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it has a duskier glory and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as though America were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the orient of Aurora and the springs of day. I thought so then by the railroadside in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the continent. If it be an illusion, it is one very deeply rooted and in which my eyesight is accomplice. Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were summoned by the cry of ‘All aboard!’ and went on again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid for this in the flesh; for we had no meals all that day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale; but we were so many and so ravenous, that 87

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though I tried at every opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow my way to the counter. Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer’s day. There was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers and the delved earth; these, though in so far a country, were airs from home. I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. For we are creatures of the shore; and it is only on shore that our senses are supplied with a variety of matter, or that the heart can find her proper business. There is water enough for me by the coasts of any running stream; or if I must indeed look upon the ocean, let it be from along the seaboard, surf-beat, strewn with wreck and dotted at sundown with the clear lights that pilot home-bound vessels. The revolution in my surroundings was certainly joyful and complete; and when I had asked the name of a river from the Brakesman, the least surly of his class whom I encountered, and heard that it was called the Susquehan­ na, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley. None can care for literature in itself, who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humourous and picturesque, as the United States of America. All times, races and languages have brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Bellefontaine and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London associations of red-brick, Sloane Square and the King’s Road, is own suburb to stately and primæval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas;* and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation of a plague. Old, red Manhattan lies, like *  Please pronounce Arkansaw, with the accent on the first.

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an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified New York. The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear—a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular. Late in the evening, we were landed in a waiting room at Pittsburg. I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her children; these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance farther on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables, I left her in the waiting room to seek a dinner for myself. I mention this meal, not only because it was the first of which I had partaken for about thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me the honour to wait upon me after a fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look and gesture marched me farther into the country of surprise. He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark but of a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their parallel in England. A butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of sighing patience, which one is often moved to admire. And again the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time, he is familiar like an upper form boy to a fag, he unbends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper, much as, with us, a young, free and not very self-respecting master might behave to a good looking chambermaid. I had come prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result. Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of etiquette: if one should offer to tip the American waiter? Certainly not, he told me. Never. It would not do. They considered themselves too highly to accept. They would even resent the offer. As for him and 89

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me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation; he, in particular, had found much pleasure in my society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those rare conjunctures—Without being very clear-seeing, I can still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly pocketed a quarter. Wednesday. A little after midnight, I convoyed my widow and orphans on board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. This had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched. My preference was founded on a work which appeared in Cassell’s Family Paper and was read aloud to me by my nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who in the last chapter very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald Some-body-or-other: a trick I never forgave him. The idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from uninhabited islands. Just you put me on an uninhabited island, I thought, and then we’ll see! But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We were now on those great plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country was flat like Holland; but far from being dull, all through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the train and in my waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed an elegance peculiar to itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long, aërial vistas; and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; but I am afraid not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the heart and seemed to travel with the blood. Day came in with a shudder. White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them more often on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from horizon to horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing damps and foul marasmus. The fences along the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement: one to recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague. At the point of day, and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the state, who had got in at some way sta90

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tion, pronounced it, with a doctoral air, ‘a real fever and ague morning.’ The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She had conceived at first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she was at no pains to conceal. But being a woman of a practical spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her children fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was such a rattle by nature, and so powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell me the story of her life. I heard about her late husband, who seemed to have made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays. I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to friends. At one station, she shook up her children to look at a man on the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she explained how she had been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how far matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his desistance that she was now travelling to the west. Then, when I was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my judgement on that type of manly beauty. I admired it to her heart’s content. She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but broidered as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her past; yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these confidences, steadily aware of her aversion. Her parting words were ingeniously honest. ‘I am sure,’ said she, ‘we all ought to be very much obliged to you.’ I cannot pretend that she put me at my ease; but I had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike. A poor nature would have slipped, in the course of these familiarities, into a sort of worthless toleration for me. We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out of the cars, bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the station of a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city. I remember having subscribed, let us say sixpence, toward its restoration at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I thought it would be a graceful act for the corporation to refund that sixpence or, at the least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But there was no word of restitution. I was that city’s benefactor, yet I was received in a third class waiting room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and eggs at my own expense. I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in Chi91

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cago. I sat, or rather lay, on some steps in the station, and was gratefully conscious of every point of contact between my body and the boards. My one ideal of pleasure was to stretch myself flat on my back with arms extended, like a dying hermit in a picture, and to move no more. I bought a newspaper, but could not summon up the energy to read it; I debated with myself if it were worth while to make a cigarette, and unanimously decided that it was not. When it was time to start, I descended the platform like a man in a dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after car, as I came up with it, was not only full but overflowing. My valise, my knapsack, my rug, with these six ponderous tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; and there was a great darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by gas. When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rugs; the world seemed to swim away into the distance; and my consciousness dwindled within me to a mere pin’s head, like a taper on a foggy night. When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat down beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the dozen, as they say. I did my best to keep up the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if something depended upon that. I heard him relate, among many other things, that there were pickpockets on the train who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caught the words, I do not think I properly understood the sense until next morning; and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it. What else he talked about I have no guess. I remember a gabbling sound of words, his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly explanatory; but no more. And I suppose I must have shown my confusion very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German, supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar with the English tongue; and finally, in despair, he rose and left me. I felt chagrined; but my fatigue was too crushing for delay; and stretching myself as far as that was possible upon the bench, I was received at once into a dreamless stupor. The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the suburbs after a dîner fin, and was bent on entertainment while the journey lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next upon another emigrant, who had come through from Canada and was not one jot less weary than myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I found next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative 92

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man. After trying him on different topics, it appears that the little German gentleman flounced into a temper, swore an oath or two, and departed from that car in quest of livelier society. Poor little gentleman! I suppose he thought an emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments of digestion. He should have met Alick; Alick and he would have been like brothers. Thursday. I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling; for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge with sweet milk and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi. Another long day’s ride followed, with but one feature worthy of remark. At a place called Creston, a drunk man got in. He was aggressively friendly, but according to English notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train. For one stage, he eluded the notice of the officials; but just as we were beginning to move out of the next station, Cromwell by name, by came the Conductor. There was a word or two of talk; and then the official had the man by the shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through the car, and sent him flying onto the track. It was done in three motions, as exact as a piece of drill. The train was still moving slowly, although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his feet without a fall. He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand, while the other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys. It was the first indication that I had come among revolvers, and I observed it with some emotion. The Conductor stood on the steps with one hand on his hip, looking back at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature, for he turned without farther ado, and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell, followed by a peal of laughter from the cars. They were speaking English all about me; but I knew I was in a foreign land. Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri river. Here we were to stay the night at a kind of caravanserai set apart for emigrants. But I gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated myself from my companions, and marched with my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom, in my plain European way, I should call the boots, were installed behind a counter like bank tellers. They took my name, assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my packages. And here came the tug of war. I wished to give up my packages into safe keeping; but I did 93

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not yet wish to go to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel. It was of course some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. Thus every difference of habit modifies the spoken tongue, and even to send off a telegram or order a dish of oysters without some foreign indirectness, an Englishman must have partly learned to be an American. I speak of oysters, because that was the last example that I came across: in San Francisco, if you ask to have your oysters opened, it means they are to be taken from the shell. Some such international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency. He refused, and that with the plainness of the west. This American manner of conducting matters of business is, at first, highly unpalatable to the European. When we approach a man in the way of his calling, and for those services by which he earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired servant. But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk with a view to exchanging favours if they shall agree to please. I know not which is the more convenient, nor even which is the more truly courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately tends to be continued after the particular transaction is at an end, and thus favours class separations. But on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open field for the insolence of Jack-in-office. I was nettled by the coloured gentleman’s refusal, and unbuttoned my wrath under the similitude of ironical submission. I knew nothing, I said, of the ways of American hotels. But I had no desire to give trouble. If there was nothing for it but to get to bed immediately, let him say the word, and though it was not my habit, I should cheerfully obey. He burst into a shout of laughter. ‘Ah!’ said he. ‘You do not know about America. They are fine people in America. O! you will like them very well. But you musn’t get mad. I know what you want. You come along with me.’ And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like an old acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel. ‘There,’ said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder—‘go and have a drink!’ 94

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The Emigrant Train All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might meet with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table. I had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once more, and put apart with my fellows. It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the Emigrant House; with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and called name after name in the tone of a command. At each name, you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us; and I soon concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children. The second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling alone, and the third to the Chinese. The official was easily moved to anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were both quick at answering their names and speedy in getting themselves and their effects on board. The families once housed, we men carried the second car without ceremony by simultaneous assault. I suppose the reader has some notion of an American railroad car: that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat roofed Noah’s ark, with a stove and a convenience one at either end, a passage down the middle, and transverse benches upon either hand. Those destined for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme plainness, nothing but wood entering in any part into their constitution, and for the unusual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned. The benches are too short for anything but a young child. Where there is scarce elbow room for two to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie. Hence the Company, or rather, as appears from certain bills about the Transfer Station, the Company’s servants, have conceived a plan for the better accommodation of travellers. They prevail on every two to chum together. To each of the chums they sell a board and three square cushions stuffed with straw and covered with thin cotton. The benches can be made to face each other in pairs, for the backs are reversible. On the approach of night, the boards are laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide enough for two and long 95

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enough for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions with the head to the conductor’s van and the feet to the engine. When the train is full, of course this plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to every bench. Neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree. It was to bring about this last condition, that our white-haired official now bestirred himself. He made a most active master of ceremonies, introducing likely couples and even guaranteeing the amiability and honesty of each. The more happy couples, the better for his pocket; for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds. His price for one board and three straw cushions began with two dollars and a half; but before the train left and I am sorry to say long after I had purchased mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half. I cannot suppose that emigrants are thus befooled and robbed with the connivance of the Company; yet this was the Company’s servant. It is never pleasant to bear tales; but this is a system; the emigrants are many of them foreigners and therefore easy to cheat, and they are all so poor that it is unmanly to cheat them; and if the white-haired leech is not contumeliously discharged in this world, I leave him with all confidence to the devil in the next. As for the emigrant, I have better news for him. Let him quietly agree with a chum, but bid the official harpy from his sight; and if he will read a few pages farther, he shall see the profit of his reticence. The match maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some ladies, I showed myself too eager for union at any price; but certainly the first who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined the honour without thanks. He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man, I think from Yankee land, looked me all over with great timidity, and then began to excuse himself in broken phrases. He didn’t know the young man, he said. The young man might be very honest, but how was he to know that? There was another young man whom he had met already in the train; he guessed he was honest, and would prefer to chum with him upon the whole. All this without any sort of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent. I began to tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left rejected. But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly smartness in his manner. To be exact, he had acquired it in the navy. But that was all one: he had at least been trained to desperate resolves; so he accepted the match; and the whitehaired swindler pronounced the connubial benediction and pocketed his fees. The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train. I am 96

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afraid to say how many baggage waggons followed the engine; certainly a score; then came the Chinese; then we; then the families; and the rear was brought up by the Conductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his caboose. The class to which I belonged was of course far the largest, and we ran over, so to speak, to both sides; so that there were some Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families. But our own car was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight or nine, who had the hooping cough. At last, about six, the long train crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri river to Omaha, westward bound. 

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars. There was thunder in the air, which helped to keep us restless. A man played many airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to, until he came to ‘Home, sweet home.’ It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen. I have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered good or bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment. If you wallow naked in the pathetic, like the author of ‘Home, sweet home,’ you make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their weakness. It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment was interrupted. An elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard and about as much appearance of sentiment as you would expect from a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop that ‘damned thing.’ ‘I’ve heard about enough of that,’ he added; ‘give us something about the good country we’re going to.’ A murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the performer took the instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then struck into a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately the emotion he had raised. The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform, singing ‘The Sweet By-and-bye’ with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for, the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale. Their charge began with twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before 97

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the train went on again, to fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what I had paid for mine at the Transfer. This is my contribution to the economy of future emigrants. A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early next morning the newsboy went around the cars, and chumming on a more extended principle became the order of the hour. It requires but a copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried on most economically by a syndicate of three. I myself entered a little after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare 

was my own nickname on the cars; Pennsylvania, that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of a place in the state of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessant chewing and smoking, sometimes alternately, sometimes both combined. I have never seen tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners used these implements, one after another, according to who was first awake; and when the firm had finished, there was no want of borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade to the platform of the car. There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash his face and neck and hands: a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet. On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar and necessary vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the cars. Before the sun was up, the stove would be brightly burning; at the first station, the natives would come on board with milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would be filled with little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasantest hour of the day. There were meals to be had however by the wayside: a breakfast in the morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and supper from five to eight or nine at night. We had rarely less than twenty minutes for each; and if we had not spent many another twenty min98

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utes, waiting for some express upon a side track among miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up to time. For haste is not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through on sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerable brethren; should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they cannot in consequence predict the length of the passage within a day or so. The meals, taken overhead, were palatable; and they were not dear, at least for us. I had the pleasure, at one station, of dining in the same room with express passengers eastward bound, getting dish for dish the identical same dinner, and paying exactly half the charge. It was an experience in which I delighted, and I began to see the advantages of a state of Emigrancy. Civility is indeed the main comfort that you miss. Equality, though conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as to an emigrant. Thus, in all other trains, a warning cry of ‘All aboard’ recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as I was alone with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I found this ceremony was prætermitted; the train stole from the station without note of warning, and you had to keep an eye upon it even while you ate. The annoyance is considerable; and the disrespect both wanton and petty. Many Conductors again will hold no communication with an emigrant. I asked a conductor one day, at what time the train would stop for dinner; as he made no answer, I repeated the question, with a like result; a third time I returned to the charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away. I believe he was half ashamed of his brutality; for when another person made the same inquiry, although he still refused the information, he condescended to answer and even to justify his reticence in a voice loud enough for me to hear. It was, he said, his principle not to tell people where they were to dine; for in that, one answer led to many other questions, as What o’clock it was? or How soon should we be there?—and he could not afford to be eternally worried. As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal of your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy. He has it in his power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant’s lot. The newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer, was a dark, bullying, contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs. Indeed in his case, matters came nearly to a fight. It happened thus: He was going his rounds through the cars with some commodities for sale, and coming to a party who were at Seven-up or Cassino (our two games) upon a bed board, slung down a cigar box in the middle of the cards, 99

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knocking one man’s hand onto the floor. It was the last straw. In a moment the whole party were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was ordered to ‘get out of that directly, or he would get more than he reckoned for.’ The fellow grumbled and muttered; but ended by making off; and was less openly insulting in the future. On the other hand, the lad who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento, made himself the friend of all, and helped us with information, attention, assistance and a kind countenance. He told us where and when we should have our meals and how long the train would stop; kept seats at table for those who were delayed; and watched that we should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily hurried. You, who live at home at ease, can hardly realise the greatness of this service; even had it stood alone. When I think of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his bright face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the benefactor of his kind. Perhaps he is discontented with himself; perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a hero of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man’s work and bettering the world. I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy. I tell it because it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness of the American, on which I have already remarked. It was immediately after I had left the Emigrant train; and I am told I looked like a man at death’s door, so much had this long journey shaken me. I sat at the end of a car; and the catch being broken and myself feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with my foot for the sake of air. In this attitude, my leg debarred the newsboy from his box of merchandise. I made haste to let him pass when I observed that he was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he came upon me unawares. On these occasions he most rudely struck my foot aside; and though I myself apologised, as if to show him the way, he answered me never a word. I conceive I had a right to do as I was doing; it was no fault of mine if the car was out of repair; he must have seen, besides, my willingness to spare him trouble; and had I been Obstruction in person, it would not have justified either his violence or his silence. I chafed furiously; and I fear the next time it would have come to words. But suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and a large, juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the newsboy, who had observed that I was looking ill, and so made me this present out of a tender heart. For the rest of the journey, I was petted like a sick child; he lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale; and 100

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came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up. I hate myself now, to think how little I encouraged him; but as was said by one of the best of men, taciturnity is another word for selfishness.

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The Plains of Nebraska It had thundered on the Friday night; but the sun rose on Saturday without a cloud. We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory on the top of a fruit waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me, and to spy in vain, for something new. It was a world almost without a feature: an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard board; on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track, innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown piece, bloomed in a continuous flower bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard board. The train toiled over this infinity, like a snail upon a plastered wall; and being the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to assume in our regard. It seemed miles in length, and either end of it within but a step of the horizon. Even my own body or my own hand, seemed great things in that emptiness. I note the feeling the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others. Day and night above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers: a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land. To one hurrying through by steam, there was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken prison-line of the horizon. Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days, at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the dead green waste under foot and the mock102

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ing, fugitive horizon. But the eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil. It is the settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the creature of variety. Upon what food does it subsist in such a land? What livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off from books, from news, from company, from all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs. A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope. He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he had not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst of the same great level, and has approached no nearer to the one object within view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his advance. We are full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers; and wise people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings. But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? His is a wall paper with a vengeance—one quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness. His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter, till the man runs into his cabin and can repose his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains. Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadæ, summer and winter, cattle, wife and family, the settler may create a full and various existence. We exaggerate the difficulties of a situation when we conceive and criticise it in fancy; for we forget that people live in this world by the day or week. Theory shows us an unbroken tenor to the last sickness; but the actual man lives it in pieces, and begins afresh with every morning. The blind can comfortably exist while seeing nothing; but there is this difference that they are not blind by choice. A man who is married is no longer master of his destiny, and carries a compensation along with him wherever he may go. But what can bring to Nebraska a lone, unfettered bachelor, who has all the world before him and might starve, if he preferred, in London or New York? One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way station selling milk. She was largely formed; her features were more than comely; she had that great rarity, a fine complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind, dark and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It 103

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would have been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard board, as if it were a billiard board indeed, and these only models that had been set down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire. This extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a strong impression of artificiality. With none of the litter and discolouration of human life, with the paths unworn and the houses still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely scenic. The mind is loath to accept it for a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, or the great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a play room. And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points, or at least it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely civilised. At North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man asked another to pass the milk jug. This other was well-dressed and of what we should call a respectable appearance; a darkish man, high spoken, eating as though he had some usage of society; but he turned upon the first speaker with extraordinary vehemence of tone: ‘There’s a waiter here!’ he cried. ‘I only asked you to pass the milk,’ explained the first. Here is the retort verbatim: ‘Pass! Hell! I’m not paid for that business; the waiter’s paid for it. You should use civility at table, and, by God, I’ll show you how!’ He would show him how! I wonder what would be his charge for the twelve lessons. And this explosion, you will not forget, was to save himself the trouble of moving a milk jug a distance of perhaps thirty inches. The other man, very wisely, made no answer, and the bully went on with his supper as though nothing had occurred. It pleases me to think that some day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney; and that perhaps both may fall.

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The Desert of Wyoming To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains. I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, like an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas! and it was a worse country than the other. All Sunday and Monday, we travelled through these sad mountains or over the main ridge of the Rockies which is a fair match to them for misery of aspect. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders; cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications—how drearily, how tamely, none can tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch of sward, not one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternal sage-brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy colouration, grays warming into brown, grays darkening towards black; and for sole sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes, here and there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running in a canyon. The plains have a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing but a contorted smallness. Except for the air, which was light and stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in that God-forsaken land. I had, as I must tell you, been suffering a good deal all the way, from what the gentleman at New York was pleased to call my liver. The hot weather and the fever put into my blood by so much continuous travel, had aggravated these symptoms till they were strangely difficult to bear. When the fit was on me, I grew almost light headed. I had to make a second cigarette before the first was smoked, for tobacco alone gave me self-command under these paroxysms of irritation. Fancy will give you no clew to what I endured; the basis was, as you might say, a mere annoyance; but when an annoyance is continued day and night and assumes by starts an absolute control upon your mind, not much remains to distinguish it from pain. I am obliged to touch upon this, but with a delicacy which the reader will appreciate, not only because it is a part of emigrant experience, but because it must stand as my excuse for many sins of omission in this chronicle. At least, whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside eating house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell sick outright. That was a night which I shall not readily forget. The lamps 105

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did not go out; each made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood; and the shadows were confounded together in the long hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay in uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like dead folk; there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his arm; there another half seated, with his head and shoulders on the bench. The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the movement of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out their arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in their sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping across the prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a half formed word, it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my window; for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have never longed for it more earnestly than I. And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird or a river. Only down the long, sterile canyons, the train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear an Emigrant for some twelve pounds from the Atlantic to the Golden Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up, and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in these uncouth places, pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed, hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the ‘bad medicine waggon,’ charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and subsequent visit to Paris; it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended and the most varied subject for an enduring literary 106

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work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this? But alas! it is not these things that are necessary; it is only Homer. Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils. Thirst, hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more feared, so lightly do we skim these horrible lands: as the gull, who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark. Yet we should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past; and to keep the balance true, since I have complained of the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps more than was enough, let me add an original document. It was not written by Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long since dead; and is dated only twenty years ago. I shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the spelling. ‘My dear Sister Mary, ‘I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when you read my letter. If Jerry’—the writer’s oldest brother—‘has not written to you before now, you will be surprised to heare that we are in California and that poor Thomas’—another brother, of fifteen—‘is dead. We started from  —— in July with pleanty of provisions and too yoke of oxen. We went along very well till we got within six or seven hundred miles of California, when the Indians attacked us. We found places where they had killed the emigrants. We had one passenger with us, too guns and one revolver; so we ran all the lead We had into bullets (and) hung the guns up in the wagon so that we could get at them in a minit. It was about too O’clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a little way; when a prairie chicken alited a little way from the wagon. Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom drive the oxen. Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and the passenger went on. Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught up with Jerry and the other man. Jerry stopped for Tom to come up; me and the man went on and sit down by a little stream. In a few minutes, we heard some noise; then three shots; (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose); then they gave the war hoop, and as many as twenty of the red skins came down on us. The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of the road in the bushes. ‘I thought that Tom and Jerry were shot; so I told the other man that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had better try to escape if possible. I had no shoes on; haveing a sore foot, I thought I would not put them on. The man and me run down the road, but We was soon stopt by an Indian on a pony. We then turend the other way, and run 107

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up the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar trees, and stayed there till dark. The Indians hunted all over after us, and verry close to us, so close that we could hear there tomyhawks Jingle. At dark the man and me started on, I stubing my toes against sticks and stones. We traveld on all night; and next morning, Just as it was getting gray, we saw something in the shape of a man. It layed Down in the grass. We went up to it, and it was Jerry. He thought we ware Indians. You can imagine how glad he was to see me. He thought we was all dead but him, and we thought him and Tom was dead. He had the gun that he took out of the wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load that was in it. ‘We traveld on till about eight O’clock, We Caught up with one wagon with too men with it. We had traveld with them before one day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that they was ahead of us, unless they had been killed to. My feet was so sore when we caught up with them that I had to ride—I could not step. We traveld on for too days, when the men that owned the cattle said they would (could) not drive them another inch. We unyoked the oxen; we had about seventy pounds of flour; we took it out and divided it into four packs. Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a blanket. I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and little quilt; I had in all about twelve pounds. We had one pint of flour a day for our alloyance. Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we (made) pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it that way. We traveld twelve or fourteen days. The time came at last when we should have to reach some place or starve. We saw fresh horse and cattle tracks. The morning come, we scraped all the flour out of the sack, mixed it up, and baked it into bread, and made some soup, and eat everything we had. We traveled on all day without anything to eat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep train of eight wagons. We traveld with them till we arrived at the settlements; and know that I am safe in California, and got to good home, and going to school. ‘Jerry is working in —— . It is a good country. You can get from 50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking. Tell me all about the affairs in the states and how all the folks get along.’ And so ends this artless narrative. The little man was at school again, God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon the deserts.

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Fellow Passengers At Ogden, we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific line of railroad. The change was doubly welcome; for first we had better cars on the new line; and second, those in which we had now been cooped for more than ninety hours, had begun to stink abominably. Several yards away, as we returned, let us say from dinner, our nostrils were assailed by rancid air. I have stood on a platform while the whole train was shunting; and as the dwelling cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure menagerie; only a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys. I think we are human only in virtue of open windows. Without fresh air, you only require a bad heart and a remarkable command of the Queen’s English, to become such another as Dean Swift: a kind of leering human goat, leaping and wagging your scut, on mountains of offense. I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the Emigrant train. But one thing I must say: the car of the Chinese was notably the least offensive, and that of the women and children by a good way the worst. A stroke of nature’s satire. The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished which gave us all a sense of cleanliness as though we had bathed; the seats drew out and joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for bed boards; and there was an upper tier of berths which could be closed by day and opened at night. Thus in every way the accommodation was more cheerful and comfortable, and every one might have a bed to lie on if he pleased. The company deserve our thanks. It was the first sign I could observe of any kindly purpose towards the emigrant. For myself it was, in some ways, a fatal change; for it fell to me to sleep in one of the lofts; and that I found to be impossible. The air was always bad enough at the level of the floor. But my bed was four feet higher, immediately under the roof, and shut into a kind of Saratoga trunk with one side partly open. And there, unless you were the Prince of Cambay, it were madness to attempt to sleep. Though the fumes were narcotic and weighed upon the eyelids, yet they so smartly irritated the lungs that I could only lie and cough. I spent the better part of one night walking to and fro and envying my neighbours. 109

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I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was among. They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants on board the ship. There was both less talent and less good manners; I believe I should add less good feeling, though that is implied. Kindness will out; and a man who is gentle will contrive to be a gentleman. These were mostly lumpish fellows; silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat sad, I should say; with an extraordinary poor taste in humour; and little interest in their fellow creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely external curiosity. If they heard a man’s name and business, they seemed to think they had the heart of that mystery; but they were as eager to know that much as they were indifferent to the rest. Some of them were on nettles till they learned your name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond that, whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce or friendly, was all one to them. Others, who were not so stupid, gossipped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly. A favourite witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of ‘All aboard,’ while the rest of us were dining; thus contributing his mite to the general discomfort. Such an one was always much applauded for his high spirits. When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was astonished, fresh from the eager humanity on board ship, to meet with little but laughter. One of the young men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill nature, but mere clod-like incapacity to think; for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so; but it was a phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits; and though of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his fellow passengers. ‘O! I hope he’s not going to die,’ cried a woman. ‘It would be terrible to have a dead body!’ And there was a very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station. This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived. I wish I could speak more favourably of the company. Doubtless there were excellent natures among the number. Pennsylvania, for instance, was a brisk, cheerful, manly fellow; Dubuque was as transparent as simplicity itself; and others were quiet and inoffensive. But the atmosphere was evil; it was a selfish, dull society; and kindness and mirth were hardly marketable, even had they been there. I am conscious, for my part, that I was a worse man in the train than on the ship; and I presume that others suffered equally from their surroundings. There was a good deal of story telling in some quarters; in others, little but silence. In this society more than any other that ever I was 110

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in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the narrative. It was rarely that any one listened for the listening; if he lent an ear to another man’s story, it was because he was in immediate want of a hearer for one of his own. Food and the progress of the train were the subjects most generally treated; many joined to discuss these, who otherwise would hold their peace all day. One small knot had no better employment, but to worm out of me my name. And the more they tried, the more obstinately 

fixed I grew to baffle them. They assailed me with artful questions and insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I was perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward laughter. I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for the secret. He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey. I met one of my fellow passengers months after, driving a street tramway car in San Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season, told him my name without subterfuge. You never saw a man more chapfallen. But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he had still been disappointed. There were no emigrants direct from Europe, save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners, who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel—that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home. The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every quarter of that continent. All the States of the North had sent out a fugitive to cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from Maine that borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves—some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and better wages. The talk in the train, like the talk I had heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope that moves ever westward. I thought of my shipful from Great Britain with a feeling of despair. They had come three thousand miles, and yet not far enough. Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to welcome them at Sandy Hook. 111

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Where were they to go? Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These were not places for immigration, but for emigration, it appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who had lifted up his heel and left it for an ungrateful country. And it was still westward that they ran. Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the east like the sun, and the evening was made of edible gold. And, meantime, in the car in front of me, were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter? Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in search of provender, had here come face to face. The two waves had met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had been prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home. Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more picturesque and more disheartening; for as we continued to steam westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these others were as crowded as our own. Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter? It would seem not, for whenever we met them the passengers ran on to the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of wailing chorus, to ‘Come back.’ On the plains of Nebraska, in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my heart, ‘Come back!’ That was what we heard by the way ‘about the good country we were going to.’ And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues. If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, how many thousands would regret the bargain! But wages, indeed, are only one consideration out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.

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Despised Races Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of them, but hated them a priori. The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money. They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. They declared them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when they beheld them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so like a large class of European women, that on raising my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do not say it is the most attractive class of our women, but for all that many a man’s wife is less pleasantly favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were clean, for that was impossible upon the journey; but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their feet—an act not dreamed of among ourselves—and going as far as decency permitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by the way, that the dirtier people are in their persons, the more delicate is their sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded boat-house; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese wagon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already that it was the exception, and notably the freshest of the three. These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America. The Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly acquainted with English. They are held to be base, because their dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that. They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman 113

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may each reflect before he bears the accusation. It comes amiss from John Bull, who the other day forced that unhappy Zazel, all bruised and tottering from a dangerous escape, to come forth again upon the theatre, and continue to risk her life for his amusement; or from Pat, who makes it his pastime to shoot down the compliant farmer from behind a wall in Europe, or to stone the solitary Chinaman in California. I am told, again, that they are of the race of river pirates, and belong to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial Empire. But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here! and what must be the virtues, the industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at home! Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese, that must go. Such is the cry. It seems, after all, that no country is bound to submit to immigration any more than to invasion: each is war to the knife, and resistance to either but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free tradition of the republic, which loved to depict herself with open arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man who believes that he loves freedom, I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention. It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for arms and butchery. ‘At the call of Abraham Lincoln,’ said the orator, ‘ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dhirty Mongolians?’ It exceeds the license of an Irishman to rebaptise our selfish interests by the name of virtue. Defend your bellies, if you must; I, who do not suffer, am no judge in your affairs; but let me defend language, which is the dialect and one of the ramparts of virtue. For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it seems they must be of a different clay. They hear the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands 114

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of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way; or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old, grey, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home. Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man of old story—he over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at way-stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking creature; but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our forefathers’ misconduct, as we continue to profit by ourselves. If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre—and even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget. These old, well-founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the independent. That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation. 115

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As for the Indians, there are of course many unteachable and wedded to war and their wild habits; but many also who, with fairer usage, might learn the virtues of the peaceful state. You will find a valley in the county of Monterey, drained by the river of Carmel: a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with chapparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. The roof has fallen; the ground squirrel scampers on the graves; the holy bell of St. Charles is long dismounted; yet one day in every year the church awakes from silence, and the Indians return to worship in the church of their converted fathers. I have seen them trooping thither, young and old, in their clean print dresses, with those strange, handsome, melancholy features, which seem predestined to a national calamity; and it was notable to hear the old Latin words and old Gregorian music sung, with nasal fervour, and in a swift, staccato style, by a trained chorus of Red Indian men and women. In the huts of the Rancherie they have ancient European Mass-books, in which they study together to be perfect. An old blind man was their leader. With his eyes bandaged, and leaning on a staff, he was led into his place in church by a little grandchild. He had seen changes in the world since first he sang that music sixty years ago, when there was no gold and no Yankees, and he and his people lived in plenty under the wing of the kind priests. The mission church is in ruins; the Rancherie, they tell me, encroached upon by Yankee newcomers; the little age of gold is over for the Indian; but he has had a breathing-space in Carmel valley before he goes down to the dust with his red fathers.

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To the Golden Gates A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular impressions on the mind. By an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-lying plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now entering. ‘You see,’ said he, ‘I tell you this because I come from your country.’ Hail, brither Scots! His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world. There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer exists— the bit, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount. But how about an odd bit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is short by a fifth. That, then, is called a short bit. If you have one, you lay it triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents. But if you have it not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is called a long bit, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by comparison with a short bit, five cents. In country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or taken, which vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case may be. You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to make it broader, with which I here endow the public. It is brief and simple—radiantly simple. There is one place where five cents are recognised, and that is the post-office. A quarter is only worth two bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have a quarter, go to the post-office and buy five cents’ worth of postage-stamps; you will receive in change two dimes, that is, two short bits. The purchasing power of your money is undiminished. You can go and have your two glasses of beer all the same; and you 117

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have made yourself a present of five cents’ worth of postage-stamps into the bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for this discovery. From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were standing, after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country. They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke our fast at Toano. These land stowaways play a great part over here in America, and I should have liked dearly to become acquainted with them. At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming out from supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others taller and ruddier than himself. ‘Ex-cuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but do you happen to be going on?’ I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist from that intention. He had a situation to offer me, and if we could come to terms, why, good and well. ‘You see,’ he continued, ‘I’m running a theatre here, and we’re a little short in the orchestra. You’re a musician, I guess?’ I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘The Wearing of the Green,’ I had no pretension whatever to that style. He seemed much put out of countenance; and one of his taller companions asked him, on the nail, for five dollars. ‘You see, sir,’ added the latter to me, ‘he bet you were a musician; I bet you weren’t. No offence, I hope?’ ‘None whatever,’ I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I presume the debt was liquidated. This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers, who thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-begging. But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide the bet. Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of my companions. It was in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we were in a new country, and I must come forth upon the platform and see with my own eyes. The train was then, 118

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in its patient way, standing halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in the nostrils—a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart. When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it were day or night, for the illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snow-shed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one’s wife. I had come home again—home from unsightly deserts, to the green and habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more dear to me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more happily than I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Canyon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went, not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, and thronged with shining eyes upon the platform, and became new creatures within and without. The sun no longer oppressed us with heat,—it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every turn we could see further into the land and our own happy futures. At every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and crowing for the new day and the new country. For this was indeed our destination; this was ‘the good country’ we had been going to so long. By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain of corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect—not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to awaken, and began to sparkle; 119

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and suddenly ‘The tall hills Titan discoverèd,’ and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit from end to end with summer daylight.

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Appendix ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1. SS Devonia passenger list, 18 August 1879. Fig. 2. Letter from Martin Mahoney to his sister, photostat, 1860. Fig. 3. Galley 19, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant. Fig. 4. Galley 36, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant. Fig. 5. SS Devonia, photograph, dated between 1877 and 1899. Fig. 6. Map of railroad routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1871. Fig. 7. Galley 33, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant. Fig. 8. Galley 25, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant. Fig. 9. Galley 27, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant. Fig. 10. Galley 34, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant.

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Fig. 1. SS Devonia passenger list, 18 August 1879.

Reproduced courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA M237, reel 419, list 915.

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Fig. 2. Letter from Martin Mahoney to his sister, photostat, 1860.

Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Beinecke 17, 422.

illustr ations

Fig. 3. Galley 19, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant.

Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS Vault Stevenson 65, General Collection.

Fig. 4. Galley 36, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant.

Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS Vault Stevenson 65, General Collection.

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Reproduced courtesy of University of Glasgow Archive Services. Anchor GB 248 UGD 255/1/35/37.

Fig. 5. SS Devonia, photograph, dated between 1877 and 1899.



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Reproduced courtesy of Duke University Libraries.

Fig. 6. Map of railroad routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from W. Fraser Rae, Westward by Rail: The New Route to the East (New York, 1871), verso facing title page.

appendix

Fig. 7. Galley 33, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant.

Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS Vault Stevenson 65, General Collection.

Fig. 8. Galley 25, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant.

Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Stevenson 7403, General Collection.

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Fig. 9. Galley 27, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant.

Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Stevenson 7403, General Collection.

Fig. 10. Galley 34, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant.

Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS Vault Stevenson 65, General Collection.

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Essay on the Text The Essay on the Text expands upon the textual history narrated in the Introduction, from Stevenson’s embarkation on the SS Devonia in August 1879 until the publication of the Edinburgh Edition text in 1895, and discusses the editorial choices that have produced the current text. The first three sections (Composition, Manuscript and 1880 Galley Proofs) cover the original creative period from August 1879 to June 1880, when Stevenson worked on The Amateur Emigrant with the most sustained concentration and effort; they describe and analyse the condition and contents of the surviving manuscript and proofs. The next four sections (Suppression and Partial Publication, Long­ man’s Magazine, Across the Plains and Edinburgh Edition) map the stages in the text’s early publication history and analyse the changes made to the original manuscript text in early printed versions of the text. The final section (The Present Text) accounts for the choice of the 1879–80 manuscript as principal copy text and the use of early published versions as supplementary copy texts to fill the gaps in the manuscript. It then considers the principles by which the copy texts have been emended. COMPOSITION

The Introduction offers a detailed account of the composition of The Amateur Emigrant during the original creative period from August 1879 until June 1880 (see xxviii–xxxvii). It explains that Stevenson seems to have planned to write a book about his experiences when he embarked on the steamship, and that he kept notes on board ship and on his transcontinental train journey. He worked on the manuscript of Part I, ‘The Emigrant Ship’, intermittently through the autumn of 1879, sending it to Sidney Colvin in December. The response of Stevenson’s friends, Colvin and W. E. Henley, was extremely negative, demonstrating a concern for his reputation, an anglocentric suspicion of Stevenson’s new California environment and a distaste for The Amateur Emigrant’s focus on the squalor of the emigrant experience. Despite their disapproval, however, Colvin and Henley pressed ahead with attempting to secure a publisher. When initial plans for serial publica131

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tion fell through, they placed it with Charles Kegan Paul for volume publication. Stevenson must have dispatched most of Part II of the manuscript, ‘America: The Emigrant Train’, sometime in late February or March 1880. At this point his health declined and he suffered a lung haemorrhage; he was not able to send the final few pages of Part II until June 1880, when he and Fanny, newly married, were on their honeymoon. MANUSCRIPT

There are ninety-six extant pages of the original manuscript, written in 1879 and 1880. Ninety-five pages are held by the Beinecke Library and one page was sold by Bonhams auction house to a private collector in 2012.1 The Beinecke manuscript pages are numbered 12, b, 15–76, 77a–c, 78–94, 96–8, 100–7, and the page in private hands is numbered 99. This page was evidently one of two manuscript pages which Colvin gave away in 1892, to his friend Margot Tennant (later Asquith): he tipped pages 95 and 99 into a first edition of Across the Plains, along with a note that ‘The MSS. inserted at pp. 31 and 40 are portions of the original autograph by R. L. S. in my possession | Sidney Colvin | Novr 9 | 1892’. (Page 95 is still missing.) The Beinecke manuscript consists of originally loose-leaf pages mounted on stubs and bound in a fine binding of full morocco, by Rivière & Son, probably in the early twentieth century. The manuscript paper is lined and machine-made. The dimensions of the paper are 204 x 319 mm, and each page has thirtyfour ruled lines. The verso of the paper is blank, though the versos of pages 71 and 107 are battered, no doubt as a result of transportation. The manuscript is in ink, in Stevenson’s hand, with deletions and insertions mostly by the author. There are some marginal annotations directed by Stevenson to Colvin. On page 57, for example, beside the words ‘Vénus tout entier’, a note in the margin reads: ‘(Colvin, get this right please from Racine’s gem[?] about Hippolite) Phèdre’. The extant pages of the manuscript appear to have been written sequentially, except for two pages, numbered 77a and 77b, from the chapter entitled ‘New York’. These pages were inserted retrospectively between 76 and 77 (the latter was renumbered as 77c). The new material, expanding on the relations between Britain and America, comprises four paragraphs of prose (opening with ‘It is possible that some people are always best at home’) and a three-stanza poem. It is not clear when Stevenson added these pages, but the similar quality of the ink sug132

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manuscr ipt

gests that he may have written them immediately upon finishing the chapter. Part I of the manuscript was the original sent to Colvin in December 1879, the verso of page 71 being soiled and folded (see Introduction, xxx). It was also evidently the version used for typesetting by C. Kegan Paul & Co. in 1880, as compositors’ names appear in pencil in the margin, marking off sections of copy. These annotations show that ‘Lawrence’, ‘Francis’, ‘Brown’ and ‘Robinson’ were some of the compositors involved in typesetting the manuscript. Sometimes numbers figure alongside the compositors’ names, indicating number of pages composed. Other than these typesetting marks, the manuscript is relatively clean, though there are some sums in the margin of 72, possibly in Stevenson’s hand, and on 73, in the margin beside ‘Vascon’s [sic] seamen’, a pencil annotation in an unknown hand reads ‘? Cortez in Keats’. The extant pages of manuscript include two pages of preliminary matter—the contents page and the dedication. The contents page, numbered 12, gives the title as ‘The Amateur Emigrant, With some first impressions of America’. It lists the chapters in Part I, ‘The Emigrant Ship’, as ‘The Second Cabin’, ‘Early Impressions’, ‘Steerage Scenes’, ‘Steerage Types’, ‘The Sick Man’, ‘The Stowaways’ and ‘Personal Experience and Review’. The chapters in Part II, ‘America: The Emigrant Train’, appear as ‘New York’, ‘Notes by the way to Council Bluffs’, ‘The Emigrant Train’, ‘The Plains of Nebraska’, ‘The Desert of Wyoming’, ‘Fellow Passengers’, ‘Despised Races’ and ‘To the shores of Sunset’. The final two chapter titles lack corresponding page numbers, and, in another hand, the words ‘Not written’ stand against these titles. The other page of preliminary matter, paginated as ‘b’, contains the dedication to Stevenson’s cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, known as ‘Bob’. The manuscript chapters correspond to those listed on the contents page. Some pages are missing, however, from Parts I and II. From Part I, neither ‘The Second Cabin’ nor the first two-thirds of ‘Early Impressions’ survive. The manuscript thus starts partway through ‘Early Impressions’, with a page, numbered 15, opening mid-sentence: ‘was still quiet and pure, when I awoke with something on my feet, which was heavy and kept violently moving and grinding down upon me’. In Part II, a page from ‘The Emigrant Train’ is missing (this is page 95, given away to Margot Tennant): 94 ends with the words ‘across the wide Missouri river to Omaha, westward bound.’, and the manuscript text resumes with 96, beginning ‘was my own nickname on the cars’. Additionally, the final half of ‘Fellow Passengers’ and the whole of ‘Despised Races’ and ‘To the shores of Sunset’ have not survived: the 133

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manuscript breaks off midway through ‘Fellow Passengers’, at the end of 107, with the words ‘And the more they tried, the more obstinate[ly]’. 1880 GALLEY PROOFS

By the end of March 1880, negotiations with Kegan Paul were drawing to a close (see Introduction, xxxv). Kegan Paul & Co. began to have the work typeset, using the manuscript sent to Colvin, which has compositors’ names in the margins, and the surviving galley proofs were printed on 19 April. As the Introduction recounts, once Stevenson had the security of an annual allowance, he wanted to revise The Amateur Emigrant in response to his friends’ criticism. He instructed Colvin in mid-April: ‘Recover the sheets of the Emigrant, and post them registered to me. And now please give me all your venom against it; say your worst and most incisively’ (Letters 3: 75). He received and corrected proofs while he was on his honeymoon. As noted in the Introduction, Stevenson wrote to Colvin in late May 1880 to acknowledge receipt of ‘the first sheets’; and he described his own deletions in terms that suggest his loss of confidence in the work and his internalization of Colvin’s criticism: I have excised all you proposed and more on my own movement. But I have not yet been able to rewrite the two special pieces which, as you said, so badly wanted it; it is hard work to rewrite passages in proof. (Letters 3: 83) A later letter, written to Frances Sitwell in June 1880, mentions that he has received another batch of proofs, and again Stevenson sounds disheartened: ‘they are pretty bad, and I am sadly unfit to better them; they do not read to me as if I had written them’ (Letters 3: 86). The surviving galleys show that Kegan Paul & Co. made minimal revisions to Stevenson’s manuscript in the process of having it typeset: the text varies only in spelling, punctuation, grammar and the insertion or misreading of the odd word. However, the galleys are heavily marked, with deletions and annotations by Kegan Paul and Colvin demonstrating their desire to influence and control the author’s style and reputation. The galley proofs, printed by William Clowes & Sons, of Beccles in Suffolk, on 19 April 1880, are numbered 17–20, 25–8 and 33–40: they are for three portions of the work. The Beinecke Library holds facsimiles of the first portion (17–20) and originals of the second and third portions (25–28 and 33–40).2 These proofs are fragmen134

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tary, then, representing parts of only three chapters (‘Steerage Scenes’, ‘Steerage Types’ and ‘The Sick Man’), all from Part I of the manuscript. They total only some 9500 words of the work (compare this with the Edinburgh Edition of The Amateur Emigrant, which amounts to over 41,000 words). It is consequently difficult to draw conclusions about what the cancelled Kegan Paul edition would have looked like, had it made it into print in 1880. We cannot definitely know, moreover, which revisions indicated on the proofs would have been incorporated into the published text. However, some striking patterns emerge from the extensive deletions and annotations, and it is likely that the published text would have diverged considerably from the manuscript copy. It is not always possible to determine who has suggested each deletion, but often there is a pencil deletion with Colvin’s initials, and Stevenson goes over in ink marking his acceptance of either the whole or part of the deletion. Colvin’s and Kegan Paul’s editing was forceful and interventionist given that the work was already set in type (Stevenson had, though, asked Colvin for ‘all your venom’). Some of the proposed deletions were evidently intended to condense the narrative or cut reflective passages. The deletions in galleys 25–8 (253 words in total, from ‘Steerage Types’) are of this nature. In galley 20 (from ‘Steerage Scenes’), Colvin bluntly advises a deletion of 148 words which he no doubt considered wordy: ‘out! S. C’, reads the marginal annotation. In galley 33 (from ‘Steerage Types’), Colvin circles the opening sentence of the paragraph beginning ‘One more story I must relate’ and suggests the deletion of the final 399 words of this chapter: ‘out[.] The whole story seems to me dull and superfluous’ (see fig. 7). The deletion has been accepted, with the paragraphs crossed out in ink, probably by Stevenson. The deletions and annotations give an early sense of the attempt to control not just Stevenson’s writing but his reputation. In galley 25 (from ‘Steerage Types’), Kegan Paul queries the phrase ‘all his soundhearted pluck and varied accomplishments depressed and negatived’, objecting that ‘This and a sentence under lined on 27 seem newspaper like in style, and not worthy of [R.] L. S.’ (see fig. 8). Stevenson seems to have accepted that this phrase should be deleted. Indeed, faced with such forthright editing, and discouraged as he was, Stevenson usually consented to all or part of the deletion. But he was able, in places, to defend his prose. In an interesting exchange, Kegan Paul asks, in response to Stevenson’s description of a ‘so-called victim of the bottle’, ‘why “so called” if he was a victim of the bottle’, to which Stevenson 135

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replies, ‘because I think him, at bottom, victim of something else; see below’ (see fig. 9). Many of the deletions and annotations centre on descriptions of the filth and degradation which Stevenson shared with his workingclass fellow passengers. The suggested revisions for galleys 17–20 (from ‘Steerage Scenes’) reveal the provocative nature of Stevenson’s depictions of squalor. Kegan Paul has marked for deletion the words ‘all who here stewed together in their own exhalations, were uncompromisingly unclean’ and written ‘Is not this needlessly nasty? C. K. P’ (see fig. 3). Stevenson appears to have accepted part but not all of this deletion, excising just eight words and leaving the observation, ‘all were uncompromisingly unclean’. Galleys 33–40 (covering parts of ‘Steerage Types’ and ‘The Sick Man’) are heavily marked with deletions and annotations that demonstrate the forceful nature of Colvin’s and Kegan Paul’s editing and their disapproval of Stevenson’s focus on the degradations endured by his fellow passengers. In ‘The Sick Man’, both Kegan Paul and Colvin object to the portrayal of a steerage passenger’s physical sufferings and the emphasis on the man’s essential dignity. Kegan Paul marks the sentence ‘He had been sick and his head was in the vomit’, and writes in the margin, ‘Surely needless’ (see fig. 10). It appears, from the ink deletion, that Stevenson accepted this excision. Further on, there is an excision of 191 words from ‘ “Take care of your knee,” ’ to ‘friendly violence.’ Here, the text describes Stevenson’s bodily contact with the sick man’s vomit, and evokes the chivalric behaviour which the man displays even in extremis. In the margin, Colvin writes: ‘Intolerably nasty in itself and pompous and feeble in the commentary. Must come out at all costs S. C’ (see fig. 4). Finally, Kegan Paul suggests deleting the following words describing Stevenson’s visit to steerage quarters: ‘The stench was atrocious, heavy and sour and rancid; each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and’; Stevenson accepts most of this deletion, and substitutes the relatively innocuous ‘The air was atrocious; and’. SUPPRESSION AND PARTIAL PUBLICATION

By the time Stevenson returned to the United Kingdom in August 1880, the first or creative phase of his work on The Amateur Emigrant had already ended. The suppression of the work, described fully in the Introduction (xxxviii–xl), was a highly unusual development. As discussed, Stevenson presented the decision as a harmonious one, but Thomas Stevenson must have exerted a degree of pressure on his son. 136

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In the years following the suppression, Stevenson’s interest in publishing The Amateur Emigrant persisted. However, his confidence in the work was perhaps dented, and Colvin’s disapproval of Part I continued to shape his thinking about the options for publication. In March 1882, for example, Stevenson raised the possibility of publishing Part II, noting wryly that Colvin ‘passed the “Emigrant Train” ’, and that there would consequently be ‘nothing absolutely disgraceful’ (Letters 3: 308). Accordingly, the work was initially published only in truncated form, with the final seven chapters of Part II appearing, first in Longman’s Magazine (1883) and then in Across the Plains (1892). Even when Part I was eventually published alongside Part II, in the 1895 Edinburgh Edition, it was subject to further abridgement and cuts. LONGMAN’S MAGAZINE

Material from The Amateur Emigrant first saw the light of day in 1883, when the final seven chapters of Part II, retitled ‘Across the Plains’, appeared in the July and August issues of Longman’s Magazine. The impetus seems to have been financial hardship. In April, Stevenson informed Henley: ‘I found myself a bankrupt’ and ‘had to tackle games to meet my debts’ (Letters 4: 95). One of these ‘games’ was the Long­ man’s serialization (Letters 4: 95n). Stevenson received £45 for the magazine serialization of ‘Across the Plains’ (Letters 4: 104). Stevenson’s friend Andrew Lang probably brokered this. He was closely connected with the House of Longman, and had already reported Charles James Longman’s interest in Stevenson’s travel writing: in February 1880 Henley told Stevenson, ‘Lang writes me that Longman is delighted with the “Donkey,” & willing to take all you can give’ (Beinecke 14, 359). Lang also played an important role in shaping Longman’s, the monthly magazine that Longman founded in 1882. At his recommendation, Stevenson’s ‘A Gossip on Romance’ appeared in the first number, and the magazine was to become, in the mid-1880s, a prominent forum for the romance revival (Houghton, iv, 434). More recently, in April and May 1883, Longman’s had published Stevenson’s short story ‘The Treasure of Franchard’. Lang saw ‘Across the Plains’ through publication.3 The proof sheets for Parts I and II, held at the Beinecke Library, have a ticket attached to the front with the printed instruction, ‘Please return this proof, when corrected, to C. J. Longman’.4 On the ticket for Part I, an ink deletion replaces Longman’s name with Lang’s name and address. The corrections made on the proof sheets are limited to a few typographic errors; according to the Anderson Auction Company 137

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sale catalogue, the corrections are ‘probably in Lang’s handwriting’ (96). A few other errors in the proof sheets (principally misspellings) were corrected in the published serial text. The first part of ‘Across the Plains’ appeared in Volume 2.9 ( July 1883), and the second part in Volume 2.10 (Aug 1883). Priced at sixpence, Longman’s Magazine aimed to undercut the shilling monthlies, and sales figures were still at this point quite impressive, indicating a large readership: as Cyprian Blagden records, 36,225 copies of the June 1883 issue were printed (12).5 ‘Across the Plains’ resonates interestingly with the surrounding periodical articles. Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, for instance, imagines a middle-class ‘explorer’ attempting to penetrate and comprehend the world of the Dorsetshire labourer and charts new patterns of ‘migration’ including rural depopulation (253, 263, 269). The Longman’s serial text comprises the final seven chapters of Part II of The Amateur Emigrant, omitting the first chapter, ‘New York’. Part II of the manuscript had been entitled ‘America: The Emigrant Train’. The Longman’s serialization provides a new title: ‘Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant between New York and San Francisco’. Part I of the magazine serialization, in the July number, comprises the following chapters: ‘Notes by the Way to Council Bluffs’ (though this chapter is in fact untitled in the magazine text), ‘The Emigrant Train’ and ‘The Plains of Nebraska’. Part II of the magazine serialization, in the August number, comprises ‘The Desert of Wyoming’, ‘Fellow Passengers’, ‘Despised Races’ and ‘To the Golden Gates’. In manuscript, the final chapter had been entitled ‘To the shores of Sunset’, but Stevenson had evidently rethought this title, as a list of chapters for ‘The Emigrant Train’ which he compiled during his Silverado honeymoon gives the title as ‘To the Golden Gates’ (Silverado Journal, 89). The magazine text is fairly faithful to the manuscript copy, but there are some revisions, though we do not know whether Stevenson, Lang, or perhaps both, were responsible for these.6 It is not known what revisions were made to the sections missing from the manuscript (one page of ‘The Emigrant Train’ and the final two and a half chapters). Revisions are mostly corrections of spelling and punctuation or alterations to single words or phrases. Sentences and phrases relating to Part I of the manuscript are also emended as the final seven chapters must now stand alone: in ‘The Emigrant Train’, for example, ‘on which I have already remarked’ is changed to ‘which is perhaps their most bewildering character to one newly landed’; and, in ‘Fellow Passengers’, ‘the emigrants on board the ship’ is emended to ‘the emigrants I had 138

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met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic’. There are clear patterns to the divergences between manuscript and magazine text: the longest and most significant deletions concern the vulnerability and exploitation of the emigrants, the degradations of scabies and the insanitary nature of travelling conditions. Part I of ‘Across the Plains’ starts with the chapter entitled ‘Notes by the Way to Council Bluffs’, though as noted it omits this title. In this chapter, the most notable revision is the deletion of a passage of 210 words emphasizing the ‘nightmare’ quality of the passengers’ experience at the ferry depot and the uncaring nature of the ‘railway company’ and ‘officials’ (‘God knows they would get […] the greatest kindness in his reach’). Other sizeable deletions include the following: eighty-nine words (‘For we are creatures of the shore […] joyful and complete’); eighty-eight words (‘I sat, or rather lay […] unanimously decided that it was not’); and seventy-one words (‘Thus every difference of habit […] to be taken from the shell’). In ‘The Emigrant Train’, too, the longest deletion, of 125 words, concerns the railway company’s exploitative treatment of the vulnerable emigrants (‘I cannot suppose […] the profit of his reticence’). Other considerable excisions are of sixty-seven words (‘The meals, taken overhead, […] a state of Emigrancy’); fifty-four words (‘I conceive I had a right […] his violence or his silence’); and twenty-eight words (‘I hate myself now […] another word for selfishness’). In ‘The Plains of Nebraska’, there are sizeable deletions of 124 words (‘We exaggerate the difficulties […] in London or New York?’) and forty words (‘He would show him […] perhaps thirty inches’). Part II, in the next issue of Longman’s Magazine, opens with ‘The Desert of Wyoming’. This chapter’s most significant deletion, of 163 words, concerns Stevenson’s physical suffering, probably with scabies, a ‘delicate’ subject but one that is ‘a part of emigrant experience’, and the pharmacist’s reluctance to admit the cause of his symptoms (‘from what the gentleman at New York […] sins of omission in this chronicle’). In ‘Fellow Passengers’, all the sizeable deletions of which we know concern the squalid nature of emigrant experience and the unpleasantness of Stevenson’s fellow travellers. These deletions are as follows: eighteen words skewering the assumption that the women’s and children’s car would have been sweet-smelling (‘and that of the women and children […] nature’s satire’); 165 words describing the ‘fumes’ in the railroad cars (‘Thus in every way […] envying my nieghbours [sic]’); thirty-six words on his fellow travellers’ unkindness (‘There was both less talent […] contrive to be a gentleman’); 139

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and ninety-two words on the ‘selfish, dull society’ they composed (‘I wish I could speak more favourably […] suffered equally from their surroundings’). The mid-1880s saw continuing interest in Stevenson’s emigrant narrative. Writing to Chatto in November 1885, Stevenson discussed the possibility of bringing out a volume of essays, to include ‘Talk and Talkers’ and ‘Romance’, and mused: ‘I should make up, I think, with my papers as an emigrant, which are scarce in the same style but a deuced sight more entertaining’ (Letters 5: 156). The volume that resulted from this discussion, Memories and Portraits (1887), did not, however, contain any material from The Amateur Emigrant. In May 1885, Stevenson’s friend Fleeming Jenkin mentioned to Fanny his admiration for The Amateur Emigrant, so the work was evidently circulating privately (McKay, iv, 1449). In March 1886, C. W. Stoddard, who had spent time with Stevenson in California, asked him what had become of The Ama­ teur Emigrant (McKay, iv, 1647). ACROSS THE PLAINS

In 1892, the Longman’s serial text of ‘Across the Plains’ was reprinted as the first essay in Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays. The first mention of this volume of essays came in June 1890, in a letter from Chatto & Windus to Charles Baxter, who by this stage acted as Stevenson’s business representative, Stevenson himself being in the South Seas: ‘I should like to reprint his contributions to Scribners Magazine for 1888, in a similar volume to his “Memories and Portraits” ’ (CW Archive, A/24, 80). Colvin must have proposed the idea to Stevenson, who was completing The Wrecker, the novel he co-wrote with Lloyd Osbourne, and also reshaping material for his book The South Seas.7 Stevenson replied rather unenthusiastically in September 1891: ‘I do not feel inclined to make a volume of essays, but if I did, and perhaps the idea is good—and any idea is better than South Seas—here would be my choice’ (Letters 7: 154). After listing the essays that might be reprinted from Scribner’s, he gave a few additional suggestions including ‘ “The Emigrant Train” ’ (Letters 7: 154). This evidently met with Colvin’s approval, as ‘The Emigrant Train’, retaining its Longman’s Magazine title, ‘Across the Plains’, and like that text omitting the ‘New York’ chapter, formed the first part of Across the Plains. Disengagement continued to be the dominant note in Stevenson’s discussion of the volume. He told Edward Burlingame in late November 1891: 140

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Colvin has made a selection of twelve papers of mine […]; I may say it’s Colvin’s book not mine […]. He calls it (not I, I simply lounge against a wall and look on) Across the Plains and Other Memories and Essays; and he thinks it bully […]. I’m the more amused, as he has chosen one or two that he specially slated when they appeared. Cherry ripe! cherry ripe, ripe! I cry. Full and fair ones—all of Colvin’s growing. (Letters 7: 197) Writing to Colvin in November, Stevenson approved the ‘order’ of the essays, and pronounced ‘some of them up to dick, and no mistake’. He suggested that Colvin write a preface to Across the Plains: I should love a preface by you […]; the thing I should like is your name. And the excuse of my great distance seems sufficient. I shall return with this the sheets corrected as far as I have them: the rest I will leave, if you will, to you entirely; let it be your book, and disclaim what you dislike in the preface. You can say it was at my eager prayer. (Letters 7: 200–1) The book did, in due course, include a ‘Letter to the Author’, written by Colvin, and serving as a preface. Stevenson was keen for Chatto to publish the volume: ‘Chatto ought to have it, as he has all the other essays’ (Letters 7: 200). Following Stevenson’s instruction—‘let it be your book’—Colvin, along with Baxter, took responsibility for seeing the volume through publication. The contract for Across the Plains, signed on 19 January 1892 by Baxter (as Stevenson’s representative) and Chatto & Windus, stipulated a publishing price of 6s. for the standard edition, with a royalty of 1s. a copy, and for the limited large paper edition, a royalty of 2d. in the shilling.8 Colvin sent the copy for Across the Plains to Chatto, who undertook on 18 January to send it immediately to the printers, R. & R. Clark, and ‘urge them to let you have proofs as rapidly as possible’ (CW Archive, A/26, 202). Colvin evidently took care of the proof stage, telling Baxter on 12 February, ‘I have had, and sent back, ten sheets of “Across the Plains” ’ (Beinecke 11, 281). The corrected page proofs of Across the Plains, at the Beinecke Library, are inscribed, ‘To Edmund Gosse | from S. C | 12th March 1892’.9 In the page proofs, the text of ‘Across the Plains’ is barely marked, but the ‘Letter to the Author’ is heavily corrected in Colvin’s hand. For example, the typeset letter had ended with the hope that the ‘South Sea sirens’ would ‘spare you, at least once in a while in summer, to climates within our reach’; 141

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Colvin expands the final phrase to read ‘climates within reach of us who are task-bound for ten months in the year beside the Thames’. Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays was published by Chatto & Windus on 6 April 1892, and simultaneously in the States by Charles Scribner’s Sons. By the International Copyright Act of 1891 (the Chace Act), British and other foreign authors were afforded copyright protection in the United States, but only if publication were simultaneous, and if the American edition were manufactured in the States. Accordingly, Chatto had told Colvin in January: ‘as soon as your corrections are made [we] will furnish Messrs Scribners Sons with a set of early sheets and fix with them a date for simultaneous publication’ (CW Archive, A/26, 202). The standard edition of the Chatto volume was printed on crown octavo paper and issued in navy buckram binding with gold lettering on the spine. Preliminary pages include the Dedication, ‘To Paul Bourget’, signed ‘R. L. S.’, with his address as ‘vailima, | upolu, | samoa’, and the ‘letter to the author’, signed by Colvin and dated ‘February, 1892’ (Chatto, v, vii–viii). The text comprised twelve essays, all but three originally published in Scrib­ ner’s Magazine. In order, they are ‘Across the Plains’, ‘The Old Pacific Capital’, ‘Fontainebleau’, ‘Epilogue to “An Inland Voyage” ’, ‘Random Memories I.—The Coast of Fife’, ‘Random Memories II.—The Education of an Engineer’, ‘The Lantern-Bearers’, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, ‘Beggars’, ‘Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art’, ‘Pulvis et Umbra’ and ‘A Christmas Sermon’. Chatto & Windus also printed one hundred copies of a large paper edition, which was ‘issued in quarto, printed on handmade paper, and bound in white buckram’, with a ‘Certificate of Issue’, but otherwise ‘identical with the small paper issue’ (Prideaux, 75–6). The volume, as discussed in the Introduction (xlii), sold well, with both Stevenson and the publishers expressing pleasure with the sales. The text of ‘Across the Plains’ in the volume publication follows the Longman’s serial text, with only minimal revisions. It retains the Longman’s title, ‘Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant between New York and San Francisco’, and like the serial text omits the first chapter of Part II of the manuscript, ‘New York’, starting instead with the author at the ‘Ferry Depôt of the railroad’, about to embark on the transcontinental rail journey (Chatto, 1). The chapters are the same as in the serial text, though with no division into Parts I and II. The volume publication makes just a few changes to the serial text, principally matters of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation, supplying a missing word, deleting one or substituting 142

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one word for another. The only significant changes are in the penultimate chapter, ‘Despised Races’. Two deletions are of passages concerning anti-Chinese agitation: sixty-six words (‘It comes amiss from John Bull […] stone the solitary Chinaman in California’) and fifty words (‘It exceeds the license of an Irishman […] one of the ramparts of virtue’). These passages are perhaps deleted because it was felt that these topical references had become less relevant by 1892, or perhaps because the material was to some extent covered in the comments on the anti-Chinese agitator Denis Kearney in ‘The Old Pacific Capital’, first published in 1880 and reprinted as the next essay in Across the Plains (Chatto, 102–3). The most substantial deletion is of the final paragraph of the chapter, 362 words on the Native Americans of Carmel Valley (‘As for the Indians […] down to the dust with his red fathers’). As James Hart suggests, this excision was presumably made because ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ offered a more extended version of the same material (Hart, 142n; Chatto, 104–6). EDINBURGH EDITION

The publication of The Amateur Emigrant in 1895, in the Edinburgh Edition, marked the first publication of Part I and the first chapter of Part II of the manuscript. Until that point, only the final seven chapters had been published. Nonetheless, the Edinburgh Edition text deviated in important ways from the work as originally conceived. It relocated the first chapter of Part II of the manuscript, ‘New York’, to Part I (presumably seeking to preserve the integrity of ‘Across the Plains’), and retitled Part I ‘From the Clyde to Sandy Hook’. And, at a distance of about fifteen years from the period of composition, major cuts and abridgements were made to the previously unpublished chapters (the Edinburgh Edition Part I), with Colvin’s and Stevenson’s respective contributions to these deletions hard to disentangle. Baxter evolved the idea of issuing a limited edition of Stevenson’s collected works, as Andrew Nash explains, ‘mainly in the hope of raising […] immediate funds’ for Stevenson, who was beset by financial worries (113). Stevenson, who was working intermittently on St Ives and Weir of Hermiston and writing letters to The Times and the Pall Mall Gazette about Samoan affairs, received Baxter’s proposal with enthusiasm. ‘I am delighted with your idea’, he wrote on 1 January 1894 (Letters 8: 225). Stevenson was initially involved in the organization of material. He suggested to Baxter an ‘amended plan’ which included three volumes of ‘Prose Works’, the first comprising ‘Inland Voyage, 143

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Donkey, Silverado, and the first paper from Across the Plains’, and the second ‘Virginibus Puerisque, Memories and Portraits, and the other papers from Across the Plains’ (Letters 8: 225). As this indicates, Stevenson already envisaged that the texts making up Across the Plains were to be divided. At this stage, Colvin, perhaps surprisingly given his previous hostility to Part I of The Amateur Emigrant, proposed the inclusion of ‘The Emigrant Ship’. He suggested to Baxter on 7 February that the first volume of travel writing should comprise only An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey, arguing that Stevenson’s ‘own suggestion for this section seems to me to crowd the matter far too much’ (Beinecke 11, 281). Colvin recommended that ‘a second volume’ should comprise ‘the “Amateur Emigrant” and the “Silverado Squatters” ’, the former to ‘include the suppressed ocean passage, which would need some recasting, &c (I have sent him out my old proofs in case he catches on to the idea) as well as “Across the Plains”’. The collected edition, to be called The Edinburgh Edition, was a major venture. It involved cooperation from all the publishers who had interests in Stevenson’s work: Chatto & Windus; Longmans, Green; Cassell; Seeley; and Scribner’s. The volumes would be published on commission by Chatto & Windus.10 The Edinburgh Edition was, Nash observes, an attempt to ‘canonize Stevenson’ (113). The press notice announced that the binding of the books would ‘resembl[e] in ruddy hue the celebrated 48-volume Edition of the Waverley Novels’.11 Ironically, given Colvin’s early guarding of Stevenson’s reputation from the damage that might be inflicted by The Amateur Emigrant, now the same work became part of his pitch for the Edinburgh Edition’s originality. In their proposal, sent to Stevenson’s publishers on 2 April 1894, Baxter and Colvin wrote: ‘In order to make this Edition thorough distinctive and complete, it is intended to include in it articles not hitherto published in collected form: among others, the suppressed “Amateur Emigrant,” written in 1880’.12 After the agreement was signed with Chatto & Windus on 12 May, Colvin and Baxter issued a press notice which again proclaimed the probable inclusion of ‘part of the suppressed “Amateur Emigrant,” written in 1880, giving Mr. Stevenson’s experiences as a steerage passenger on an American Liner’.13 Colvin had apparently sent his ‘old proofs’ out to Stevenson sometime before 7 February 1894, but to his frustration he did not hear back from him for some months. On 19 April, he complained that he was still waiting to learn whether Stevenson was ‘willing to reprint the first part of the Amateur Emigrant: as to which his answer should come next week’, adding sarcastically, ‘unless he is too much taken up with 144

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native wars & policies’ (Beinecke 11, 281). Writing to Stevenson the next day, he commented that the two volumes of Travels and Excur­ sions now planned ‘(supposing you willing to re-cast & include the Emigrant Ship) would make two charming & symmetrical volumes’ (Beinecke 11, 284). The following month, on 18 May, he complained to Stevenson about his silence: were you too busy, I wonder, with wars and island policies, also with St Ives & (I hope) revision of Amateur Emigrant etc? […] The point I am most anxious about is whether you see your way to straighten up the first part of the Amateur Emigrant into harmony with Across the Plains; so as to make a good symmetrical second volume to the Travels and Excursions section, with the Silverado Squatters. (Beinecke 11, 284) Stevenson eventually replied on 18 May, writing in response to Colvin’s 20 April letter: Your proposals for the E. E. are entirely to my mind. About The Amateur Emigrant, it shall go to you by this mail well slashed. If you like to slash it some more on your own account I give you permission. ’Tis not a great work; but since it goes to make up the two first volumes as proposed, I presume it has not been written in vain. […] I am going on every day a little, till I get sick of it, with the attempt to get the Emigrant compressed into life; I know I can—or you can after me—do it. It is only a question of time and prayer and ink, and should leave something, no, not good, but not all bad—a very genuine appreciation of these folks. (Letters 8: 287–8) Between them, Stevenson and Colvin made substantial excisions to Part I of The Amateur Emigrant (Part II was not significantly revised, being derived from the Across the Plains text). As Stevenson’s letter suggests, though, we cannot be sure who was responsible for particular omissions: Stevenson sent the text to Colvin ‘well slashed’, but he also gave Colvin ‘permission’ to ‘slash it some more on your own account’. At any rate, Stevenson’s letter cedes authorial responsibility and control to Colvin as editor, and also expresses his lack of confidence in the work, perhaps influenced by his memory of his friends’ reaction in 1880. 145

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On 10 June 1894, Colvin had evidently not yet received Stevenson’s letter (mail usually took a month to reach Britain), and he reiterated his anxiety to hear Stevenson’s ‘views as to my editorial proposals for the Edinburgh edition’ and especially ‘The Emigrant Ship’. This letter is interesting for Colvin’s ruthless focus on the financial rewards of Stevenson’s canonization and his desire to control his friend’s writing: I suppose you may count on the assured receipt […] of £5000 in the course of the next two years, and that without a stroke of your pen, except perhaps the aforesaid licking into shape of the amateur emigrant.—This ought to save you from all necessity of anything like pot-boilers: and brings me again to the re-iteration of my advice, henceforward don’t write so much […]. Both for fame & reputation not to say health, it will be far better than overproduction […].—I do hope St. Ives’ [sic] isn’t much in the nature of a pot-boiler; after proclaiming you a classic with this Edinburgh edition, we want succeeding things to be up to classic standard. (Beinecke 11, 284) By 22 June, Colvin had received Stevenson’s letter, and he proceeded to make further cuts and revisions to Part I of The Amateur Emigrant. He reported to Baxter that Stevenson ‘quite agrees about the first part of the Amateur Emigrant, and sends it to me cut down for the purpose: so that we can go ahead with printing these two “travel and excursion” volumes whenever we like’ (Beinecke 11, 281). Roger Swearingen states that ‘Colvin made no additional changes and the work as published in the Edinburgh Edition represents Stevenson’s final revision of it made in the spring of 1894’ (45). However, Colvin’s 13 July letter indicates that he took up Stevenson’s invitation to ‘slash it some more’, and that he both cut and condensed the text on his own account: I have carried farther your excisions and compressions of the A. E. (especially in passages of reflection & social speculation— some of which I liked, but it seemed absolutely necessary to keep the thing in the narrative Key, and also to prevent the first part being disproportionately long in relation to the second) until it now reads, I think, quite vivid & interesting, though doubtless not among your best works. (Beinecke 11, 284)

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That Colvin ‘carried farther’ Stevenson’s ‘excisions and compressions’ makes it impossible to know for certain which cuts were made by the author and which by the editor. The letter indicates, at any rate, that Colvin was particularly keen to cut reflective and speculative passages which, in his view, impeded the narrative. Stevenson had given him carte blanche, and Colvin felt few constraints in exercising his editorial judgment. The same letter, praising Stevenson’s essay ‘The Day after Tomorrow’ (1887), revealingly comments that it goes in quite without scissors. Indeed I have had a hankering to augment it, by sticking in that passage about the habitual idleness of the working classes from the Amateur Emigrant: there is an appropriate point where this might be done, but I’m not sure that it would quite fit. (Beinecke 11, 284) Here, in Colvin’s ‘hankering’ to interpolate a passage from The Ama­ teur Emigrant in the course of an unconnected essay, we see his interventionist editorial inclinations. At this stage, two further pieces of Stevenson’s American travel writing were added to Volume ii of Travels and Excursions. Writing to Stevenson on 13 July, Colvin proposed to ‘sandwich’ the essay ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ (first published in 1880 and reprinted in Across the Plains) between The Amateur Emigrant and The Silverado Squatters, ‘as it really belongs to the same journey’ (Beinecke 11, 284). Replying in August 1894, Stevenson appeared satisfied (‘Glad to get so good an account of The Amateur Emigrant’) and suggested including, too, his essay on San Francisco, ‘A Modern Cosmopolis’, published in 1883 (Let­ ters 8: 344). He recommended retitling it ‘The New Pacific Capital’ to match ‘The Old Pacific Capital’, and then the volume would ‘give all my works on the States; and though it ain’t very good, it’s not so very bad’ (Letters 8: 344–5). Stevenson had given Colvin, as editor, considerable authority over the arrangement and revision of his texts. By June 1894, Nash notes, Colvin and Baxter had ‘a complete free hand over the arrangement of the edition’ as Stevenson’s distance from the United Kingdom had ‘made his role impossible’ (114). The Edinburgh Edition cannot, Nash continues, be considered ‘an authorial edition’ (115). Indeed, when, a month before his death, Stevenson learned that the Edinburgh Edition volumes would include a slip stating that all ‘additions, omissions, and corrections’ had ‘the sanction and approval of the author’, he was outraged.14 He protested to Baxter on 4 November, 147

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I have nothing to do with the Edition; no proofs have ever reached me; so far as I can hear no attempts are being made that any should reach me; Colvin writes me by this mail that he has been cutting and carving on my immortal text. (Letters 8: 389–90) When Stevenson died on 3 December 1894, Baxter was already travelling to visit him in Samoa, bringing copies of the first two volumes of the Edinburgh Edition. The twenty-seven volumes of the Edinburgh Edition, bound in dark crimson buckram, and of demy octavo size, were priced at £16 17s. 6d. Volume iii, The Amateur Emigrant, The Old and New Pacific Capitals, The Silverado Squatters, was published in mid-January 1895.15 The volume was accompanied by a notice of Stevenson’s death, observing that ‘Since the issue of the last volume, Mr. Stevenson’s readers throughout the world had to deplore the tidings of his untimely death’, and assuring readers that the volumes would continue as projected (Prideaux, 220). The book was the second of the ‘Travels and Excursions’ volumes. As the work was part of a limited edition, the preliminary matter testified: ‘This Edinburgh Edition consists of | one thousand and thirty-five copies | all numbered | No. […]. | wbb | Vol. iii. of issue: Jan. 1895’ (the initials are those of Walter Biggar Blaikie, the chairman of T. & A. Constable). The volume reproduced Stevenson’s stepson-in-law Joe Strong’s frontispiece to The Silverado Squatters, though the illustration was modified and the signature removed. The title page reads as follows: ‘the works of | robert louis | stevenson | travels and excursions | volume ii | [printer’s device] | edinburgh | printed by t. and a. constable for | longmans green and co: cassell and co. | seeley and co: chas. scribner’s sons | and sold by chatto and windus | piccadilly: london | 1895’. The contents page lists the works composing the volume: ‘The Amateur Emigrant’, divided into two parts, ‘From the Clyde to Sandy Hook’ and ‘Across the Plains’; ‘The Old and New Pacific Capitals’, in two parts, ‘Monterey’ and ‘San Francisco’; and ‘The Silverado Squatters’. The Amateur Emigrant starts with a separate contents page. There follows the dedication, entitled ‘to robert alan mowbray steven­ son’. The dedication was written in 1879, and in 1880 its delay was already vexing Stevenson; it now appeared for the first time. The dedication to Paul Bourget which had prefaced Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays found no place in this volume, Colvin having sug148

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gested in July 1894 that they should dispense with the dedication to ‘Across the Plains—the contents of the volume being in this case split’ and ‘Bourget having shown no sign of acknowledgment’ (Beinecke 11, 284). Part I of The Amateur Emigrant was published for the first time in 1895, having been extensively edited in 1894 by Stevenson and Colvin; Part II, ‘Across the Plains’, follows the text of the 1892 volume, Across the Plains, with only minimal changes. Part I, entitled ‘The Emigrant Train’ in the manuscript, was renamed ‘From the Clyde to Sandy Hook’, and extended to include the first chapter of Part II of the manuscript, ‘New York’ (presumably, as noted, to preserve the integrity of ‘Across the Plains’). The chapters were: ‘The Second Cabin’, ‘Early Impressions’, ‘Steerage Scenes’, ‘Steerage Types’, ‘The Sick Man’, ‘The Stowaways’, ‘Personal Experience and Review’ and ‘New York’. Between them, Stevenson and Colvin made extensive revisions to these chapters in 1894: changes of spelling, punctuation, alteration or substitution of the odd word, but most importantly the ‘slashing’ of substantial portions of the text. The most significant deletions include description and analysis of steerage squalor, the vexed relations between classes, stowaways, English labourers and the Anglo-American relationship. For the most part, the excised material is of the reflective or speculative nature that Colvin disliked, but there are also deletions of narrative. Some of the most significant excisions are discussed below. As explained, Colvin sent his ‘old proofs’ to Stevenson in 1894. Swearingen judges that the Edinburgh Edition text derives from a fresh set of proofs, rather than the 1880 corrected proofs, and that the ‘two acts of revision’, in 1880 and 1894, ‘are separate and independent’.16 This is likely, though the evidence provided by the 1880 proofs is fragmentary. For the three chapters for which fragments of the corrected 1880 proofs survive (‘Steerage Scenes’, ‘Steerage Types’ and ‘The Sick Man’), it is evident that sometimes the changes and deletions proposed in 1880 were made in 1894, sometimes they were not, and sometimes revisions were made in 1894 which had not been proposed in 1880. Overall, however, whether or not Colvin and Stevenson consulted the 1880 corrected proofs, the 1894 deletions were larger in scale. We do not know what revisions were made to the first chapter, ‘The Second Cabin’, or the first two-thirds of ‘Early Impressions’, as the manuscript pages have not survived. ‘Early Impressions’ omits at least 308 words describing Stevenson being awoken from his slumbers on deck by a passenger suffering from cramps (‘was still quiet and pure […] destined to be the last’). Other sizeable deletions in this chapter 149

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include 170 words (‘This was the first fusion […] upon the seas of space’). The most significant deletions from ‘Steerage Scenes’ concern squalor and the relations between the classes. The chapter omits 505 words about the degradations of steerage passengers, including provocative descriptions of the ‘pen’ of ‘sixteen live human animals’ and an allusion to ‘M. Zola’ (‘Even by day much […] “back there wi’ the Germans.” ’). This material had also, in 1880, attracted Kegan Paul’s censure: his query, ‘Is not this needlessly nasty?’, prompted Stevenson to delete the eight-word phrase, ‘who here stewed together in their own exhalations’ (fig. 3; see also discussion above, 136). It is notable that in 1894 the deletion is not of eight words but of 505. Elsewhere in the galleys for this chapter, though, the proposed deletions correspond exactly with those made in 1894: the 149 words which Colvin had forcefully ordered ‘out!’ in 1880 are cut in 1894 (‘The more I study […] his wife and children’). The second longest deletion in this chapter, 178 words, is a discussion of uncomfortable cross-class relations (‘We had been made to feel […] intrusion in the steerage’). In ‘Steerage Types’, the most interesting deletions are 351 words expressing ambivalence about ‘Workingman and master’ (‘I feel there is some mistake […] adopted as a principle by others’) and 317 words comparing English and Scottish labourers, much to the detriment of the former (‘I was already a young man […] not materialistic’). While these omissions are of reflective material, the longest deletion in this chapter, 1337 words, is of narrative about the Irishman Barney (‘His love for music […] disappear from these pages’). Galleys 25–8 and 33–4 cover portions of this chapter, and a comparison between the cuts proposed on those proofs and those made in 1894 supports Swearingen’s contention that in 1894 Colvin and Stevenson used a fresh set of proofs. Some deletions that had been made in 1880 were not made in 1894: the description of ‘sound-hearted pluck and varied accomplishments depressed and negatived’ which Kegan Paul had found ‘newspaper like in style, and not worthy of [R.] L. S.’, for example, was printed in 1895 (fig. 8; see also discussion above, 135). Often, cuts that had been proposed in 1880 were made at much more length in 1894: where 242 words were deleted in 1894 (‘I should say, to finish this sketch […] mass of fresh details’), for example, only the final fiftysix words had been cut in 1880. Similarly, the Edinburgh Edition omitted 1337 words about Barney, but in 1880 Colvin had proposed to cut only the final 399 words of this passage, which he had criticized as ‘dull and superfluous’ (fig. 7; see also discussion above, 135). Sometimes the 1880 and 1895 cuts exactly coincided but overall, certainly for the 150

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passages for which the 1880 proofs survive, much more material was cut in 1894. In ‘The Sick Man’, the most important excisions are of passages evoking squalor and voicing a democratic belief in human dignity amid degradation: eleven words (‘He had been sick and his head was in the vomit’), and 191 words (‘ “Take care of your knee,” […] friendly violence’). The same excisions had been made in 1880, with Kegan Paul and Colvin finding the passages offensive (figs 10 and 4; see also discussion above, 136). Galleys 33–40 cover most of this chapter, and the deletions for both editions follow similar patterns. The Edinburgh Edition omits forty words on the sick man’s essential gentlemanliness (‘This was choice courtesy […] by heart’), where the 1880 proofs had only deleted six words from the middle of the sentence (‘I write with all measure, and’). But, on the other hand, while in 1880 Stevenson had accepted most of Kegan Paul’s suggested deletion of ‘The stench was atrocious, heavy and sour and rancid; each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese’, in 1894 only five words (‘heavy and sour and rancid’) were excised. Another significant deletion to the 1895 text (for a section of text with no extant proofs from 1880) is 119 words casting Stevenson’s fellow emigrants as ‘waifs and beggars’ (‘I thought of the Bo’swain […] well deserved reverses’). The final three chapters of Part I see significant deletions on stowing away, class, poverty and Anglo-American relations. In ‘The Stowaways’, the most important deletions are of provocative discussion of stowing away: 220 words, containing the observation that ‘the line on which I sailed, was said to be particularly favoured by stowaways’ (‘On Jones’s last passage […] at the harbour of New York’) and 270 words including Stevenson’s recommendation that his readers should travel as stowaways (‘It was perhaps because […] own conduct for himself ’). Thomas Stevenson was no longer alive in 1894 to object to this depiction of the Anchor Line of steamships, but the passages are omitted nonetheless. ‘Personal Experience and Review’ sees the deletion of 536 words concerning Stevenson’s ambiguous class status (‘Judge, then, of my delight […] tithes exacted by domestic servants’); 304 words expressing his disapproval of many of the steerage women (‘The women, in particular […] not one from England’); and 305 words exploring, in challenging ways, the causes of poverty (‘What have the colliers […] without the virtues of the state’). Other significant deletions include: forty-six words (‘There is nothing strange […] eloquent and personal’); 161 words (‘It was odd […] forms its literary diet’); and sixty-four words (‘Of Barney and the old fisher […] for the 151

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future’). The final chapter of Part I, ‘New York’, makes the longest deletion of all: 1457 words musing upon the fraught relationship between Britain and the United States (‘Even the shot-gun […] England and yesterday!’). Two other notable deletions concern Stevenson’s sufferings from scabies: thirty-nine words (‘Some of this wakefulness […] of which more anon’); and 596 words (‘I returned to Mitchell’s […] hence these tears’). Part II of The Amateur Emigrant, of course, retained the title, ‘Across the Plains’, and omitted the first chapter of Part II of the manuscript, starting with ‘Notes by the Way to Council Bluffs’ (and restoring this title, which was omitted in the Longman’s Magazine and Across the Plains texts). The 1895 text of ‘Across the Plains’ follows the text in Across the Plains (1892), with a very small number of revisions, mostly matters of hyphenation, capitalization and punctuation, and none of them significant. In line with the 1891 Chace Act, Chatto & Windus arranged with the Chicago firm Stone & Kimball for a simultaneous publication in the United Kingdom and United States, in order for Stevenson to acquire copyright protection in the States. On 5 December 1894, Chatto & Windus sent the American company ‘a complete set of proofs’ of the ‘first and unpublished portion’ of The Amateur Emigrant, and informed them that the Edinburgh Edition volume containing this work would be published in the United Kingdom on 15 January 1895, requesting that they ‘take all the necessary steps by setting the type’ and making a ‘pro forma publication in the United States on that date to secure the American Copyright’ (CW Archive, A/30, 552). The publication date presumably slipped by a few days, and on 18 January Stone & Kimball published The Amateur Emigrant: From the Clyde to Sandy Hook, which, like Part I of the Edinburgh Edition, contained ‘New York’. As Stone & Kimball used proofs supplied by Chatto & Windus but set their own type, the text is close to but not identical with the Edinburgh Edition text, the differences consisting mainly of spelling, punctuation, and pagination and layout. THE PRESENT TEXT

The present edition seeks to return as far as possible to Stevenson’s original conception of the work, though the work as written in 1879 and 1880 is not now fully recoverable, neither the full manuscript nor the full galley proofs having survived. The versions of the work published in 1883 and 1892, as discussed above (137–43), distort it by print152

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ing only the final seven chapters, and even when Part I was eventually published in 1895, major cuts were made. The present edition therefore tries to get as close as possible to the work as conceived in 1879 and 1880. The edition uses the 1879–80 manuscript as principal copy text, supplementing this, where pages are missing, with the relevant passages from the first published version. The New Edinburgh Edition policy, as stated in the General Editors’ Preface, is, generally, to take as copy text the ‘most authoritative early edition—that is, the edition corresponding to the period in which Stevenson worked with greatest concentration and most sustained effort on the piece in question’ (xv). However, the general editors note some ‘flexibility’ because of the ‘varying conditions of production that obtained at different moments in Stevenson’s career’. The circumstances surrounding The Amateur Emigrant’s production and publication are clearly exceptional. The months from August 1879 to June 1880 represent the period when Stevenson worked ‘with greatest concentration and most sustained effort’ on The Amateur Emigrant. The 1880 edition, had it been published, might have represented the ‘authoritative early edition’, although substantial revisions were made at proof stage, with Stevenson clearly under some pressure to accept changes, and perhaps willing to tone down his own work (see 134–6). If all the 1880 galley proofs had survived, they would have constituted a possible copy text, but the extant proofs are fragmentary. The subsequent publication of ‘Across the Plains’ in Longman’s Magazine does not offer a sound choice of copy text, as the arbitrary printing of just seven chapters, reflecting Colvin’s dislike of Part I, destroyed the integrity of the work; and while Stevenson may have been responsible for at least some of the revisions, they took place nearly three years after the period of concentrated creative effort (see above, 137–40). The text in Across the Plains preserved the serial text’s distortions of Stevenson’s original work. Moreover, Stevenson stood to one side during the preparation of Across the Plains, describing it as ‘Colvin’s book not mine’. The Edinburgh Edition, finally, is problematic, as discussed above (143–52). It deviates from the manuscript in altering the division between Parts I and II, and in making swingeing cuts to Part I. At a distance of about fifteen years from the original composition, Stevenson ‘slashed’ a text in which he expressed little confidence, and Colvin took up the invitation to ‘slash it some more on your own account’. In these circumstances, the 1879–80 manuscript offers the best choice of copy text. It dates from the period when Stevenson was creatively engaged in the work and is clearly the 153

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final version used for typesetting by C. Kegan Paul & Co. Indeed, the 1880 proofs indicate that few changes were made to the manuscript during typesetting (though, as noted, the proof markings suggest that there would have been extensive revisions before publication). Some pages of the manuscript, as observed, have been lost; the present edition therefore uses the first published version as copy text for passages where the manuscript has not survived. For the missing material from the beginning of Part I (the whole of ‘The Second Cabin’ and the first two-thirds of ‘Early Impressions’), this volume uses the Edinburgh Edition as copy text. For the missing material from Part II (a page from ‘The Emigrant Train’, the final half of ‘Fellow Passengers’ and the whole of ‘Despised Races’ and ‘To the Golden Gates’), it uses the Longman’s Magazine serial text as copy text. The points of transition between copy texts are indicated by stars, as explained in the headnote to the main text. The volume starts with the manuscript copy text. The star on page 5 marks the point of transition to the Edinburgh Edition copy text. The next star (16) marks the end of the Edinburgh Edition copy text and the reversion to the manuscript. The next point of transition is on 97, where the star indicates the switch to Longman’s Magazine copy text for the missing page of the manuscript. The star on 98 marks the reversion to the manuscript copy text. The final star (111) marks the point at which the manuscript ends and the present text switches to the Longman’s Magazine copy text. In order to make clear the point where one copy text ends and another begins, the new copy text always starts on a new line. All five transition points are glossed in detail in the Explanatory Notes. The New Edinburgh Edition of The Amateur Emigrant emends its copy texts conservatively, only correcting forms that a contemporary printer would almost certainly have changed. Emendations to the manuscript copy text have necessarily been more extensive than emendations to the printed copy texts. When an emendation agrees with the reading of one or more early printed versions of The Amateur Emigrant, the Emendation List notes that this is so, using the form ‘as’ to refer to the earliest printed text that supplies this reading (‘as LM’, ‘as Chatto’ or ‘as EdEd’). This edition does not simply offer a facsimile or unmodified transcription of the manuscript copy text. All Stevenson’s own corrections to his manuscript are silently implemented. All emendations, however, are listed with one exception: reflecting New Edinburgh Edition conventions, double speech marks and quotation marks have been silently changed to single speech marks, and single speech marks for speech154

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within-speech have been changed to double speech marks (see 161). In all other cases, emendations are recorded in the Emendation List. The edition corrects accidental imperfections such as clear slips of the pen, omissions and inadvertent repetitions or omissions of words coinciding with the beginning of a new page. It supplies missing full stops and speech marks and regularizes a small number of typographical features which Stevenson would have considered a printer’s responsibility. Song titles are standardized, using quotation marks rather than italics (the manuscript is inconsistent in this, using italics marginally more often than quotation marks). Ship names are italicized. In line with the New Edinburgh Edition policy, the edition prints ‘No.’, ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ thus (the manuscript has ‘No’, ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’). The first page of the manuscript for ‘Early Impressions’ begins midsentence, so it is necessary to supply two words to make the transition from EdEd to manuscript copy text coherent. The last paragraph of the Edinburgh Edition copy text portrays Stevenson settling down for a night on deck, ending with the words ‘in the darkness of a night at sea’. At that point, EdEd omits at least 308 words from the manuscript (‘was still quiet and pure […] not destined to be the last’), which describe Stevenson being awoken from his slumbers on deck by a passenger suffering from cramps, and moves straight to a paragraph opening ‘The day dawned fairly enough’. The present edition publishes these 308 words for the first time, supplying the missing subject of the sentence (the Emendation List gives the source of these words). Where Stevenson has imperfectly implemented his own revision to the manuscript, this has been corrected and the change duly noted in the Emendation List. There is some ambiguity surrounding Stevenson’s wishes for the penultimate paragraph of the manuscript (‘I wish I could speak more favourably of the company […] others suffered equally from their surroundings’). The markings and marginal annotations suggest that Stevenson considered moving the paragraph but eventually decided against this. It is possible that he intended to delete it, but the present edition has included it, while discussing the uncertainty in detail in the Explanatory Notes. The present edition takes a conservative approach to the manuscript spelling, only emending when the word in question represents an obvious error that a respectful contemporary printer would have corrected. The edition emends spellings that were not valid variants or had fallen out of use. Stevenson characteristically confuses ‘ei’ and ‘ie’, resulting in spellings such as ‘handkercheif ’ and ‘niether’, which have been emended. He also frequently confounds ‘l’ and ‘ll’ (‘knellt’, 155

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‘smellt’, ‘quarreling’, ‘befel’); the present edition emends such idiosyncratic errors. Orthographic emendations are made conservatively, however, accepting neologisms such as ‘indeflexibly’ and preserving variant forms which were rare but did find their way into print with some regularity. Examples of these unusual but valid spellings include ‘humourous’, ‘peddler’, ‘hooping cough’, ‘aint’ and ‘musn’t’. The edition also retains minor inconsistencies such as the variation between ‘-ise’ and ‘-ize’ endings. Caution is also observed in emending Stevenson’s characteristic punctuational system. Stevenson was frustrated by publishers who ‘corrected’ his writing in this respect, writing to one printer in 1887: If I receive another proof of this sort, I shall return it at once with the general direction: ‘See MS.’ I must suppose my system of punctuation to be very bad; but it is mine; and it shall be adhered to with punctual exactness, by every created printer who shall print for me. (Letters 6: 51) The current edition seeks to complete rather than override Stevenson’s own system of punctuation. For example, the manuscript almost invariably places semicolons outside but commas and full stops inside closing quotation marks; this edition consequently emends as oversights the three cases which reverse this system (‘ “[…] the stormy deep”. ’, ‘ “[…] the devil he mixed ’em”. ’ and ‘growing “like a seed”. ’). The edition avoids making ‘corrections’ to the punctuation on the grounds of grammatical accuracy, except where punctuation is missing, misleading or jarring. It supplies missing apostrophes where a contemporary printer would almost certainly have done so (‘carpenters bench’, ‘ten minutes talk’), but leaves, for example, the expression ‘pro’s and con’s’. Stevenson characteristically uses commas to indicate pauses, in the tradition of rhetorical rather than grammatical punctuation. These commas work on rhythmic rather than strictly syntactical principles. When a comma separates subject and predicate, it often provides a pause after a long and complex subject (for example, a noun and defining relative clause or adjectival phrase), as in the observation that ‘A man who prides himself upon persuasion, should learn the persuasive faculty of silence, above all as to his own misdeeds’ or the comment that ‘The offer of a little jelly from a passenger more provident than myself, caused a marked elevation in my spirits’. The present edition emends such punctuation only where the comma may mislead or distract the reader (for example, ‘the visit of a cabin passenger, will be re156

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garded as an intrusion in the steerage’ and ‘the less literary class, show always better in narration’). It deletes potentially confusing commas (such as the commas in ‘a man, who is paid for an hour’s work, gives half an hour’, which suggest a non-defining relative clause). Stevenson frequently uses only one of a pair of bracketing commas, and this has only been emended where the reader may stumble (as in ‘constantly, if not always cheerfully supported’). Commas have been introduced before direct speech, and in a few cases have been inserted to guide the reader (thus, ‘And so greatly comforted’ becomes ‘And so, greatly comforted’, and ‘touching looking’ becomes ‘touching, looking’). The present text takes a cautious approach to emending the manuscript treatment of compound words. The Edinburgh Edition printers made copious changes to Stevenson’s text, emending ‘bar room’ to ‘bar-room’, ‘passkey’ to ‘pass-key’ and so forth. The present edition does not emend compound words, either by supplying or deleting hyphens, or by separating or joining words, unless the manuscript usage is never found in contemporary texts. It does, for example, change ‘night fall’ to ‘nightfall’; ‘five-bells’ to ‘five bells’; ‘God forsaken land’ to ‘God-forsaken land’; ‘self command’ to ‘self-command’; ‘sun down’ to ‘sundown’; and ‘home bound’ to ‘home-bound’. In these cases, the manuscript forms were not used in the period. Where both forms were permissible (‘deck house’ and ‘deckhouse’, or ‘today’ and ‘to day’), the variation is preserved, as such small roughnesses are a natural part of a manuscript copy text. The manuscript usage of both ‘some one’ and ‘someone’ is not emended, as both were possible forms, with ‘someone’ only becoming more frequent after 1920. Similarly, the present edition retains the variation between ‘any one’ and ‘anyone’: the ‘open’ form was still the norm at this period, but the ‘closed’ form was increasingly popular (and, as evidence of this fluidity, the Longman’s text changed ‘any one’ to ‘anyone’, and then Chatto changed it back again). Stevenson’s capitalization is idiosyncratic and often inconsistent. This edition retains the variation, except where proper nouns require initial capitals (‘american’, ‘catholic’ and ‘homeric’, for example, have been capitalized). It does not capitalize words or phrases which are not clear-cut cases of proper nouns (for example, ‘lords and church and army’). Stevenson typically capitalizes occupations, and this idio­ syncratic style is retained (so we have ‘Brakesman’, ‘Emigrant’ and ‘Engineers’). Minor inconsistencies are not emended (‘Captain’ and ‘captain’, or ‘Steerage’ and ‘steerage’). The edition preserves inconsistencies in Stevenson’s rendering of the seasons (the manuscript has ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ but ‘summer’ and ‘winter’). Stevenson’s unusual 157

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initial capitalization extends to establishments and locations; the initial capital is allowed to stand where it indicates a particular establishment (‘a French Restaurant’) but emended where there is no such specific designation (‘New York Streets’). Unusual initial capitalization is preserved where there is a particular reason (‘the Ocean’ conveying, for example, a sense of its magnitude and power). The New Edinburgh Edition thus follows the manuscript copy text of The Amateur Emigrant very closely. It only tidies up Stevenson’s text to the limited extent that he would have expected of a printer, respecting the existing punctuation of the manuscript by completing rather than overriding it. The resulting text offers a clearer representation of Stevenson’s original conception of the work than editions derived from the Longman’s Magazine, Chatto or Edinburgh Edition texts. Emendations to the printed copy texts are minimal. The present edition does not seek to undo the changes made in 1883 or 1894 and thus speculatively ‘recover’ the manuscript text in passages for which the manuscript has been lost; instead, it accepts that there are inevitable inconsistencies between manuscript and printed copy texts. The present edition, as an assembly of copy texts, allows readers to get as close as possible to the original work as Stevenson composed it in 1879 and 1880. NOTES 1. Beinecke 24, 591; ‘Lot 145: stevenson (robert louis), Across the Plains, with leaf of autograph manuscript inserted, [c. 1879]’, sold at auction by Bonhams auction house, June 2012. 2. Proofs 17–20 (copies) and 33–40 (originals) are catalogued as MS Vault Stevenson 65, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; proofs 25–8 (originals) are catalogued as Stevenson 7403, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Galleys 25–8 are on one undivided sheet; galleys 17–20 and 33–40 have been divided and each galley cut into two portions, and then mounted and bound in morocco. 3. According to Swearingen, Stevenson ‘returned corrected proofs [of ‘Across the Plains’] to Edmund Gosse in London on 20 May 1883’ (45). However, the proofs that Stevenson sent Gosse on that date were in fact for the Century Magazine’s serialization of ‘The Silverado Squatters’: Stevenson to Gosse, 20 May 1883, Letters 4: 125. 4. ‘Across the Plains’, page proofs for Longman’s Magazine serialization, GEN MSS 684, Robert Louis Stevenson Collection, box 1, folder 25, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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wor ks cited 5. Blagden supplies printing numbers for the June issues of Longman’s. 6. Swearingen says Stevenson alone made these revisions, and that he may have ‘submitted a fresh copy of the Kegan Paul proofs with his own deletions’: personal communication. 7. The South Seas only appeared serially during Stevenson’s lifetime: Swearingen, 134–43. 8. Across the Plains contract, 19 Jan 1892, Rushden. 9. Across the Plains page proofs are catalogued as MS Vault Stevenson 545, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 10. 12 May 1894, signed agreement for Collected Edition, Rushden. 11. 28 May 1894, press notice, ‘The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson’, Rushden. 12. Baxter and Colvin, 2 Apr 1894, proposal for Collected Edition, Rushden. 13. 28 May 1894, press notice, ‘The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson’, Rushden. 14. The slip, included in Volume i of the Edinburgh Edition, is quoted by Mehew in Letters 8: 384n. See also Stevenson to Colvin, 15 Oct–5 Nov 1894, Letters 8: 383–4. 15. The volume was scheduled for publication on 15 January 1895. Chatto & Windus wrote to the printers, T. & A. Constable, on 2 January to check that this was still possible, but no reply survives (CW Archive, A/30, 627). As Stone & Kimball published on 18 January, this was probably also the publication date for Volume iii of the Edinburgh Edition. 16. Swearingen, personal communication. WORKS CITED [Anderson Auction Company]. Autograph Letters, Original Manuscripts, Books, Portraits, and Curios from the Late Robert Louis Stevenson, Con­ signed by the Present Owner, Mrs Isobel Strong (New York, 1914). Blagden, Cyprian. ‘Longman’s Magazine’, A Review of English Literature, 4.2 (Apr 1963), 9–22. Hardy, Thomas. ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, Longman’s Magazine, 2.9 ( July 1883), 252–69. Hart, James D. ‘Introduction’ and ‘Notes’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, From Scotland to Silverado, ed. Hart (Cambridge ma, 1966). Houghton, Walter E., et al. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824– 1900, 5 vols (Toronto, 1966–89).

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essay on the text McKay, George L. A Stevenson Library: Catalogue of a Collection of Writings by and about Robert Louis Stevenson Formed by Edwin J. Beinecke, 6 vols (New Haven, 1951–64). Nash, Andrew. ‘ “The Dead Should Be Protected from Their Own Carelessness”: the Collected Editions of Robert Louis Stevenson’, in The Culture of Collected Editions, ed. Andrew Nash (Basingstoke, 2003), 111–27. Prideaux, William F. A Bibliography of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (London, 1903). Stevenson, Robert Louis. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Silverado Journal, ed. John E. Jordan (San Francisco, 1954). Swearingen, Roger. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (Hamden ct, 1980).

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Emendation List The following list gives the emendations made to the copy texts to produce this volume’s text of The Amateur Emigrant. The chief copy text is the manuscript written by Stevenson in 1879 and 1880. All but one of the extant pages are in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Beinecke 24, 591); page 99 is in private hands, having been sold at auction by Bonhams in 2012. The supplementary copy texts, used to fill the gaps in the manuscript, are the first one and two-thirds chapters of the Edinburgh Edition of The Amateur Emi­ grant; and two sections from the Longman’s Magazine serial text of ‘Across the Plains’ (a short passage from ‘The Emigrant Train’ and the final two and a half chapters). All Stevenson’s own corrections to his manuscript have been silently implemented, but all emendations are listed with the following exception: throughout the present text of The Amateur Emigrant the double speech marks and quotation marks of the manuscript have been changed to single speech marks to suit the presentational conventions of the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and in the same way single speech marks for speech-withinspeech have been changed to double speech marks throughout. Where references to Stevenson’s own corrections or revisions to his manuscript are necessary, deletions are represented and insertions ↑thus↓. When an emendation agrees with the reading of one or more early printed versions of The Amateur Emigrant, the Emendation List notes that this is so, using the form ‘as’ to refer to the earliest printed text that supplies this reading (‘as LM’, ‘as Chatto’ or ‘as EdEd’). The reading of the present text is given first, by page and line number (line numbers including part and chapter headings): this is followed, as appropriate, by a note of the earliest printed text that supplies this reading. Following a square bracket, the reading which it replaces in the copy text is then given (the copy text being identified, in brackets, as ‘MS’, ‘EdEd’ or ‘LM’). Any further explanation follows the entry. The abbreviations eop and eol signal, respectively, the end of a page and the end of a line in the copy text. 3.8

Neither (as EdEd) ] Niether (MS) 161

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emendation list

5.3

The Emigrant Ship ] from the clyde to sandy hook (EdEd)



‘The Emigrant Ship’ is the original title for Part I, appearing on the manuscript contents page; it forms a pair with the Part II title, ‘America: The Emigrant Train’. ‘From the Clyde to Sandy Hook’ appeared as the title of Part I for the first time in 1895, by which time the Part II title had already been changed to ‘Across the Plains’ as a result of the 1883 Longman’s serialization. See Essay on the Text, 137, 143, 149.

7.1 9.10

The Second Cabin ] the second cabin (EdEd) with a look at that brass plate ] with a look of that brass plate (EdEd) Early Impressions ] early impressions (EdEd) The air was still quiet and pure ] was still quiet and pure (MS)

13.1 16.40

The manuscript copy text begins mid-sentence, at the top of page 15, so it is necessary for the present edition to supply two words to make the transition from EdEd to manuscript copy text coherent. The last paragraph of the Edinburgh Edition copy text portrays Stevenson settling down for a night on deck, ending with the words ‘in the darkness of a night at sea’. It describes him having ‘the night so quietly to myself ’ and mentions the ‘dry but chilly’ wind. This suggests that the missing subject of the sentence is ‘The air’. It could possibly be ‘The night’, but the fact that the manuscript paragraph following the cramping episode begins in the pluperfect tense (‘The day had dawned fairly enough’) indicates that it is no longer night-time. The EdEd text omitted the 308 extant words describing the cramping episode (starting ‘was still quiet and pure’), as well as material from the preceding page of the manuscript, which has not survived: see Essay on the Text, 155.

17.26 18.23

towards nightfall (as EdEd) ] towards night fall (MS) observed a Platt-Deutsch (as EdEd) ] observed, a PlattDeutsch (MS)



18.33–4

Imperfectly executed deletion. Full transcription reads: ‘I observed , a

↑P↓latt-↑D↓eutsch mason’.

‘Rocked on the bosom of the stormy deep.’ (as EdEd) ] ‘Rocked on the bosom of the stormy deep’. (MS)



Punctuational oversight: Stevenson’s usual system is to place the full stop inside the closing punctuation (see Essay on the Text, 156).

18.37 20.2 20.8

‘Auld Lang Syne,’ ] Auld Lang Syne, (MS) No. 2 and 3 (as EdEd) ] No 2 and 3 (MS) indefatigable (as EdEd) ] indefatiguable (MS) 162

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emendation list

20.10 20.13 20.23 20.32

five bells (as EdEd) ] five-bells (MS) No. 1 (as EdEd) ] No 1 (MS) Mr. (as EdEd) ] Mr (MS) ‘Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife’ ] Merrily danced the Quakers wife (MS) 20.33 No. 4 and 5 (as EdEd) ] No 4 and 5 (MS) 21.18–19 “Auld Robin Gray” (as EdEd) ] Auld Robin Gray (MS) 21.25–6 ‘His master was a Music Hall man.’ Indeed the music hall man ] ‘His master was a Music Hall man’ Indeed the music hall man (MS)

Retained capitals in the brother’s speech (removed in EdEd) as they perhaps suggest pride.

21.27–8 22.14 22.17 22.18 22.18

‘Logie o’ Buchan,’ (as EdEd) ] Logie o’ Buchan, (MS) No. 1 (as EdEd) ] No 1 (MS) Mr. (as EdEd) ] Mr (MS) No. 1 (as EdEd) ] No 1 (MS) isosceles triangle ] Isoceles triange (MS)



‘Isosceles’ is not a proper adjective.

22.23 23.25–6 23.26 24.13

apartments ] appartments (MS) neighbours ] nieghbours (MS) No. 1 ] No 1 (MS) verses of the ‘Death of Nelson’ (as EdEd) ] verses of the Death of Nelson (MS) combated ] combatted (MS) neither ] niether (MS) C and P stood for (as EdEd) ] C and P. stood for (MS) old cry came back, ‘The (as EdEd) ] old cry came back ‘The (MS) rent (as EdEd) ] wrent (MS) exercises ] excercises (MS) his reels and jigs and ballads ] his Reels and jigs and ballads (MS)

24.19 24.25 25.8 25.35 26.1 26.16 26.39

27.9–10 27.25

Stevenson’s own correction to his manuscript was incorrectly implemented. ‘Reels’ was originally the beginning of the sentence, and in adding material Stevenson probably forgot to correct the word. The full transcription reads: ‘down sat the fiddler in our midst ↑and began to discourse his↓ Reels and jigs and ballads’. Elsewhere the manuscript has ‘jigs and reels and hornpipes’.

in our hearing (as EdEd) ] in our heard (MS) privilege ] priviledge (MS) 163

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emendation list

27.31

visit of a cabin passenger will be ] visit of a cabin passenger, will be (MS) 29.1 looked on them without resolution. (as EdEd) ] looked on them without resolution (MS) 29.11–12 embarrassment ] embarassment (MS) 29.20 ideas, ‘wie ein feines Violin,’ were (as EdEd) ] ideas, ‘wie ein feines violin’ were (MS)

The correct German usage capitalizes the noun ‘Violin’; comma deleted to help sense.

29.25 29.33

the ‘Death of Nelson’ ] the Death of Nelson (MS) ‘Tom Bowling’ with ‘Around her splendid form.’ (as EdEd) ] Tom Bowling with ‘Around her splendid form.’ (MS) the devil he mixed ’em.’ (as EdEd) ] the devil he mixed ’em’. (MS)

30.1

30.5 30.7–8

Punctuational oversight: Stevenson’s usual system is to place the full stop inside the closing punctuation.

ill-paid jobs (as EdEd) ] ill paid jobs (MS) for weeks on end; ] for weeks on end; ; (MS)

Imperfectly executed deletion. Full transcription reads: ‘for weeks on end; ; it was’.

30.34 31.3 31.3 31.3 31.16

indefatigable hearer ] indefatiguable hearer (MS) enlarged (as EdEd) ] inlarged (MS) invigorated ] invigigorated (MS) yet remains ] yets remain (MS) his disastrous neighbourhood ] his disastrous nieghbourhood (MS) 31.32 touching, looking (as EdEd) ] touching looking (MS) 32.4 why not now and where you stand? ] why not now and where you stand. (MS) 32.18 teetotal pledge (as EdEd) ] tea total pledge (MS) 33.2 gases (as EdEd) ] gasses (MS) 33.12 so-called victim (as EdEd) ] so called victim (MS) 33.12 bottle. But Mackay ] bottle But Mackay (MS) 34.6 leisure ] liesure (MS) 34.21–2 all sort of poor human creatures ] all sort of poor, human creatures (MS) 34.22 neither ] niether (MS) 35.7 tipplers; I am far more ] tipplers I am far more (MS)

Imperfectly executed correction. Stevenson has deleted the semicolon, but failed to supply substitute punctuation: the

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emendation list manuscript reads: ‘of many tipplers I am’. The present edition reinserts the semicolon to make sense of the sentence.

35.19 35.25 36.26 36.34 37.16 37.25

light-hearted sentiment ] light hearted sentiment (MS) books and leisure ] books and liesure (MS) whole fields of (as EdEd) ] whole fields to (MS) indefatigable ] indefatiguable (MS) ‘Billy Keogh,’ (as EdEd) ] Billy Keogh, (MS) a conscientious Catholic (as EdEd) ] a conscientious catholic (MS)



Proper noun.

38.1 38.3–4 38.24

à propos ] àpropos (MS) young Jack-of-all-Trades ] young Jack-of-all-Trades, (MS) rightly knew. ] rightly knew (MS)



Stevenson evidently forgot to supply punctuation after making a deletion. The full transcription reads: ‘I never rightly knew↑I↓t appears’.

39.17 39.37 40.16 40.25

drawing-room songs ] drawing room songs (MS) companion No. 2 and 3 ] companion No 2 and 3 (MS) his career as a semi-official ] his career as a semi official (MS) And so, greatly comforted ] And so greatly comforted (MS)



Emended to help guide reader: ‘so’ does not modify ‘greatly’.

41.3–4

rung; a head wind ] rung; A head wind (MS)

42.16 42.23 42.30–1 43.15 43.22–3 43.23 43.31 43.38

No. 2 and 3 (as EdEd) ] No 2 and 3 (MS) carpenter’s bench (as EdEd) ] carpenters bench (MS) can’t find the Doctor.’ ] can’t find the Doctor. (MS) neither an easy ] niether an easy (MS) imagine what he was at ] imagine what we was at (MS) handkerchief ] handkercheif (MS) handkerchief ] handkercheif (MS) ‘O, why left I my hame?’ ] O, why left I my hame? (MS)





Imperfectly executed correction. It appears that Stevenson changed a full stop to a semicolon but forgot to correct the subsequent capital letter. The full transcription reads: ‘Six bells [eol] had rung; A head wind blew’.

Quotation marks supplied as this is a song title.

44.9 ‘It’s only a passenger!’ (as EdEd) ] ‘It’s only a passenger!’ (MS) 44.21 aft in person. (as EdEd) ] aft in person (MS) 44.25 Two of his neighbours (as EdEd) ] Two of his nieghbours (MS) 44.36 No. 1 (as EdEd) ] No 1 (MS) 44.36 the den allotted him (as EdEd) ] the den alotted him (MS) 165

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emendation list

45.18 Alabama (as EdEd) ] Alabama (MS) 45.27–8 in the army.’ Among nations (as EdEd) ] in the army. Among nations (MS) 45.39 elisions (as EdEd) ] ellisions (MS) 46.1–2 To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an adventure ] To descend on an empty stomach, into Steerage No 1, was an adventure (MS)

First comma deleted as it misleadingly suggests that the clause ‘into Steerage No. 1’ is non-essential. The comma probably reflects an imperfectly executed deletion. The full transcription reads: ‘To descend on an empty stomach , into Steerage [eol] No 1, was an adventure’. The second comma has been retained as it forms part of Stevenson’s characteristic punctuational style.

46.10 47.2

47.29 47.39

stertorous ] sterthorous (MS) fifty hours’ unsleeping vigilance (as EdEd) ] fifty hours unsleeping vigilance (MS) another edition of the steerage. ] another edition of the steerage (MS) two months’ pleasure visit (as EdEd) ] two months pleasure visit (MS) Liberton Hill (as EdEd) ] Libberton Hill (MS) downfalling ] down-falling (MS)

48.18

growing ‘like a seed.’ (as EdEd) ] growing ‘like a seed’. (MS)

48.25 49.3 49.34 51.7

rend (as EdEd) ] wrend (MS) steerage No. 2 and 3 ] steerage No 2 and 3 (MS) a Homeric talker (as EdEd) ] a homeric talker (MS) neighbourhood of Wakefield Jail (as EdEd) ] nieghbourhood of Wakefield Jail (MS) ex-Royal Engineer (as EdEd) ] ex-Royal-Engineer (MS) been to sea before the mast (as EdEd) ] been to the sea before the mast (MS)

47.13 47.25





51.36 52.2–3

Removed end-of-line hyphen as the adjective ‘downfalling’ was not usually hyphenated. Full transcription reads: ‘accurst, down-[eop] falling England’. Standardization of Stevenson’s own system which places full stops and commas inside the closing quotation marks (see Essay on the Text, 156).

Imperfectly executed correction. Initially, the manuscript sentence ended ‘followed the sea.’ Stevenson emended it, deleting ‘followed’ and substituting ‘been to’, and inserting ‘before the

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emendation list mast’. He evidently forgot to delete the word ‘the’ (the expression is ‘to go to sea before the mast’). The full transcription reads: ‘had ↑been to↓ the sea ↑before the mast↓. ’.

52.29 52.35 54.13 55.19 55.37 56.23–4 57.1 57.24

Mrs. (as EdEd) ] Mrs (MS) No. 1 (as EdEd) ] No 1 (MS) neither ] niether (MS) Sailors’ Home (as EdEd) ] Sailor’s Home (MS) he remarked. (as EdEd) ] He remarked (MS) a whole evening recounting ] a whole evening, recounting (MS) accommodating eye ] accomodating eye (MS) Montyon prize ] Monthyon prize (MS)

Emended misspelt proper name. For the Baron de Montyon, see Explanatory Notes.

58.3 ‘C’est Vénus tout entière.’ ] ‘C’est Vénus tout entier.’ (MS)

Stevenson slightly misquotes from Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677), and provides a marginal annotation: ‘(Colvin, get this right please from Racine’s gem[?] about Hippolite) Phèdre.’ See Explanatory Notes.

58.3–4 58.10 58.19 58.40 59.36 60.35 61.21 61.25 61.30 62.24 62.26 64.10 66.13 68.6–7 68.10 68.20–1

exercise a fascination (as EdEd) ] excercise a fascination (MS) ten minutes’ talk (as EdEd) ] ten minutes talk (MS) she said, stopping (as EdEd) ] she said stopping (MS) steerage No. 1 ] steerage No 1 (MS) neither ] niether (MS) our neighbours (as EdEd) ] our nieghbours (MS) addition of speech (as EdEd) ] adition of speech (MS) seizure ] siezure (MS) began to discover ] begand to discover (MS) eccentricity (as EdEd) ] excentricity (MS) embarrassing (as EdEd) ] embarassing (MS) embarrassment (as EdEd) ] embarassment (MS) yesterday’s (as EdEd) ] yesterdays (MS) he had been overworked (as EdEd) ] he been overworked (MS) the twenty-four (as EdEd) ] the twenty four (MS) and was brought into hospital (as EdEd) ] and brought into hospital (MS) neighbourhood ] nieghbourhood (MS) child’s play ] childsplay (MS)

68.28 68.32

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emendation list

69.1

a man who is paid for an hour’s work gives (as EdEd) ] a man, who is paid for an hour’s work, gives (MS)



Deleted commas, which misleadingly suggest that the enclosed relative clause is a non-defining one.

69.7 69.17

73.9

career of toil (as EdEd) ] carreer of toil (MS) the less literary class show always better (as EdEd) ] the less literary class, show always better (MS) leisure ] liesure (MS) PART II ] Part II (MS) America: The Emigrant Train ] America: The Emigrant Train. (MS) befell (as EdEd) ] befel (MS)

73.14 73.22

far-away rumour (as EdEd) ] far away rumour (MS) M‘Naughten (as EdEd) ] M’Naughten (MS)

70.5 71.1 71.2



73.23

73.24

Idiosyncratic misspelling, reflecting Stevenson’s persistent difficulties with ‘l’/‘ll’ (see Essay on the Text, 155–6).

Corrected to turned-apostrophe.

comrade, seeking (as EdEd) ] comrade seeking (MS)

Comma clarifies that the verb applies to both M‘Naughten and the comrade.

blades; and (as EdEd) ] blades , ; and (MS)



Imperfectly executed deletion. Full transcription reads: ‘They were a pair of rattling blades, ; and leaving their baggage’.

73.32 74.5

accommodation (as EdEd) ] accomodation (MS) on the inside; and (as EdEd) ] on the inside , ; and (MS)



74.10

74.17

74.23

Imperfectly executed deletion. Full transcription reads: ‘the door did not [eol] lock on the inside, ; and [eol] the only sign of adornment’.

M‘Naughten (as EdEd) ] M’Naughten (MS)

Corrected to turned-apostrophe.

Vasco’s seamen ] Vascon’s seamen (MS)

Emended as Stevenson meant Vasco Núňez de Balboa. See Explanatory Notes.

M‘Naughten (as EdEd) ] M’Naughten (MS)



Corrected to turned-apostrophe.

74.30 74.39 75.2 75.6

Mr. (as EdEd) ] Mr (MS) smelt (as EdEd) ] smellt (MS) No. 10 West Street (as EdEd) ] No 10 West Street (MS) guaranteed (as EdEd) ] guarranteed (MS) 168

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75.17

to his bar, ‘to have a good time ] to his bar. ‘to have a good time (MS) 75.22 Mr. (as EdEd) ] Mr (MS) 75.27 career on the wrong foot ] carreer on the wrong foot (MS) 76.10 as if it had not yet been (as EdEd) ] as if had not yet been (MS) 76.12 forms of procedure (as EdEd) ] froms of procedure (MS) 76.31 kaleidoscopic (as EdEd) ] kaleidescopic (MS) 76.32 seized ] siezed (MS) 77.1–2 romantic attraction exercised ] romantic attraction excercised (MS) 77.15 Mr. ] Mr (MS) 77.22 Alabama ] Alabama (MS) 77.26–7 Alabama claims. He has not been the last ] Alabama claims He has not been the last (MS)

Imperfectly executed correction. Stevenson originally wrote ‘Alabama claims; he has not been’; he then deleted the semicolon, changed ‘he’ to ‘He’, but forgot to supply a full stop. Full transcription reads: ‘Alabama claims↑H↓e has not been’.

77.31 77.40 79.11–12 79.15

Mr. ] Mr (MS) Neither ] Niether (MS) a noble career ] a noble carreer (MS) into these States ] into these states (MS)



Proper noun: the [United] States.

79.19 79.34–5 80.2 80.6 80.9 80.20–1

three-decker ] three decker (MS) upon New York streets (as EdEd) ] upon New York Streets (MS) neither of them ] niether of them (MS) expense (as EdEd) ] expence (MS) gastronomical looking ] gastromical looking (MS) Reunion House (as EdEd) ] Reunion house (MS)



Capitalized initial letter of a proper name, title of an establishment.

80.24 81.16 81.21

apartment (as EdEd) ] appartment (MS) booksellers (as EdEd) ] booksellerers (MS) cross-questioned (as EdEd) ] cross questioned (MS)

81.39

nor even then did he seem (as EdEd) ] nor even then, did he seem (MS) Notes by the Way to Council Bluffs ] Notes by the way to Council Bluffs (MS) Mr. ] Mr (MS) neither (as LM) ] niether (MS)



84.1 84.18 85.13

Hyphenated to guide reader through potentially confusing syntax.

169

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85.20 86.19 86.31

neither (as LM) ] niether (MS) neighbours (as LM) ] nieghbours (MS) constantly, if not always cheerfully, supported ] constantly, if not always cheerfully supported (MS)

Comma added to prevent reader stumbling: comma clarifies that ‘constantly’ modifies ‘supported’.

87.6 87.6–7

neighbour ] nieghbour (MS) whom I lent my brush (as LM) ] I leant my brush (MS)

87.14 87.18 87.38 88.2 88.3 88.7 88.11 88.20 88.21

caravan (as LM) ] carvan (MS) neither ] niether (MS) paid (as LM) ] payed (MS) elbow my way (as LM) ] ebow my way (MS) summer’s day (as LM) ] summers day (MS) smelt (as LM) ] smellt (MS) cockcrows (as LM) ] cock crows (MS) sundown ] sun down (MS) home-bound vessels ] home bound vessels (MS)

88.37 88.40 89.11

Mississippi (as LM) ] Mississipi (MS) Please pronounce (as LM) ] please pronounce (MS) providentially (as LM) ] provi- providentially (MS)





Stevenson forgot to repeat catchword ‘whom’ at the top of the next manuscript page. Full transcription reads: ‘to [eop] I leant my brush’.

Hyphenated to help reader with potentially confusing syntax; the ‘open’ or two-word form of this compound adjective was not used in the period.



Stevenson repeated the first part of the word from the bottom of the previous page. Full transcription reads: ‘to watch over provi[eop] providentially’.

89.19 90.10 90.11 90.31 91.16 91.17

Mrs. (as LM) ] Mrs (MS) unbreeched (as LM) ] unbreached (MS) Cassell’s Family Paper ] Cassel’s Family Paper (MS) measurable (as LM) ] meausarble (MS) like Mr. Z. (as LM) ] like Mr Z. (MS) with this Mr. Z. (as LM) ] with this Mr Z (MS)

92.11 92.36

weighed (as LM) ] wieghed (MS) The little German gentleman (as LM) ] the little German gentleman (MS)



Standardized this name: ‘Z.’ is given with a full stop earlier in the sentence.

170

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Imperfectly executed deletion. Full transcription reads: ‘ the little German gentleman’.

93.3 93.11 93.13 93.33

Poor little gentleman! (as LM) ] Poor, little gentleman! (MS) Mississippi ] Mississipi (MS) aggressively (as LM) ] agressively (MS) Pacific Transfer Station (as Chatto) ] Pacific Transfer station (MS)



Capitalized initial letter of ‘Station’ as this is a proper name; the manuscript has it capitalized at the beginning of the next chapter.

94.17–18 American manner (as LM) ] american manner (MS)

Proper adjective.

94.18 94.28

unpalatable (as LM) ] unpalateable (MS) Jack-in-office (as LM) ] Jack-in-Office (MS)



The initial letter of ‘Office’ is probably upper-case but is not entirely clear. Emended as the expression recurs in ‘The Emigrant Train’, this time with lower-case ‘o’.

95.10 95.36 96.2 96.4–5 96.8 96.18 98.23 98.25 99.5

command (as LM) ] comand (MS) accommodation (as LM) ] accomodation (MS) conductor’s (as LM) ] conductors (MS) Neither can it (as LM) ] Niether can it (MS) guaranteeing (as LM) ] guarranteeing (MS) white-haired leech ] white-haired leach (MS) tin dish (as LM) ] din dish (MS) knelt (as LM) ] knellt (MS) should there be a block (as LM) ] should there be a lock (MS)

99.7 99.9

palatable ] palateable (MS) dining in the same room with express passengers ] dining in the same room, with express passengers (MS) Cassino ] Cascino (MS)



99.40

The word ‘lock’ was probably a slip of the pen: a ‘block’ or ‘block signalling system’ was a fairly common technical term.

Cassino is a card game, sometimes spelt ‘Casino’ but never ‘Cascino’ (see Explanatory Notes).

100.11 neither be left behind (as LM) ] niether be left behind (MS) 100.40 lent ] leant (MS) 102.25–6 but a step of the horizon. Even (as LM) ] but a step of the horizon. . Even (MS)

Imperfectly executed deletion. Full transcription reads: ‘but a step of the horizon. . Even’.

171

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103.15–16 104.21 105.19 105.26 106.1 106.9 106.21 106.32

settler (as LM) ] setler (MS) vehemence of tone: (as LM) ] vehemence of tone (MS) God-forsaken land (as LM) ] God forsaken land (MS) self-command ] self command (MS) neighbourhood (as LM) ] nieghbourhood (MS) passed to and fro (as LM) ] passed two and fro (MS) train was the one (as LM) ] train was the once (MS) quarrelling (as LM) ] quarreling (MS)



Corrected the spelling: ‘quarreling’ was a very rare variant spelling in the UK by 1880, and elsewhere the manuscript spells ‘quarrelled’ thus. See discussion of Stevenson’s difficulties with ‘l’/‘ll’, in Essay on the Text, 155–6.

107.9 107.35 108.10

balance (as LM) ] ballance (MS) in the bushes. (as LM) ] in the bushes (MS) the prairie Chicken (as LM) ] prairie Chicken (MS)



Stevenson forgot to repeat the catchword ‘the’ from the previous page. The full transcription reads: ‘to shoot [eop] prairie Chicken’.

109.24 109.32 109.32

accommodation ] accomodation (MS) partly open. And ] partly open, And (MS) Prince of Cambay ] Prince of Camby (MS)



Misspelt proper name. See Explanatory Notes.

109.34 109.36 110.14

weighed ] wieghed (MS) neighbours ] nieghbours (MS) Catholic or Mormon (as LM) ] catholic or mormon (MS)



Proper adjectives.

110.16 111.2 111.8

witticism (as LM) ] witicism (MS) lent an ear (as LM) ] leant an ear (MS) the more obstinately ] the more obstinate (MS)



The catchword at the bottom of the manuscript page is ‘ly’, so we know that Stevenson intended the adverb. Emendation made so that the present text does not switch copy texts mid-word.

112.30

travel for themselves. [eop] (as EdEd) ] travel for themselves. (LM) Despised Races ] despised races. (LM) hated them a priori (as Chatto) ] hated them à priori (LM) down to the dust with his red fathers. [eop] ] down to the dust with his red fathers. (LM) To the Golden Gates ] to the golden gates. (LM) everything was waiting (as Chatto) ] exerything was waiting (LM) 172

113.1 113.5 116.29 117.1 119.39

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End-of-Line Hyphens Listed below are ‘hard’ end-of-line hyphens, not produced accidentally by typesetting, but intended to be retained whatever the format in which the text is typeset and therefore to be retained also in making quotations. The entries are listed by page and line number. 7.16 deck-houses 9.28 good-will 16.29 fire-hole 24.2 heavy-eyed 33.31 over-payment 49.27 thumb-nail 55.33 fine-gentlemanly 73.36 ill-looking 76.12 self-denial 96.38 white-haired

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Explanatory Notes The notes offer a comprehensive attempt to identify Stevenson’s sources, in addition to quotations, references, historical events and personages, proverbial phrases and obscure or specialist language. They supply information rather than critical analysis or expository discussion. References are to first editions, standard editions or editions Stevenson himself used or with which he would have been familiar. For a list of abbreviations of frequently cited works see xvii–xviii. Biblical references are to the Authorized Version; references to plays by Shakespeare are to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 2nd edn (New York, 2008); and references to Latin sources are to the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge ma, 1911–present). The notes are greatly indebted to the following standard works: Oxford Diction­ ary of National Biography, Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopaedia Britannica. Where a quotation or allusion has not been identified, this is stated: the editor welcomes any new information from readers. Reference is by page and line number in the text, the line count including chapter titles. 3.1  TO ROBERT ALAN STEVENSON  Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847–1900), painter and distinguished art critic. Known as ‘Bob’, he was Stevenson’s cousin and childhood playmate. Stevenson describes how they enlivened their meals with make-believe, in ‘Child’s Play’, Cornhill Magazine, 38 (1878), 356–7. Bob was Stevenson’s confidant when Stevenson lost his faith: indeed, Stevenson’s father blamed Bob for corrupting his son (Letters 1: 295). Bob also helped Stevenson to escape from the stifling conformity of his Edinburgh upbringing. In 1875, he introduced Stevenson to the artists’ colony at Barbizon, and in 1876 Stevenson met Fanny Osbourne at the nearby village of Grez-sur-Loing; unlike Stevenson’s other friends, Bob responded sympathetically to his cousin’s journey to America to marry Fanny. Stevenson was disappointed that the suppression of The Ama­ teur Emigrant meant that Bob did not receive his dedication (see Introduction, xxxix). Instead, he dedicated New Arabian Nights to Bob, ‘in grateful remembrance of their youth | and their already old affection’.—New Arabian Nights (London, 1882), n.p. 174

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3.7–8  memory … behind the horseman  an allusion to Horace’s ode, ‘Simplicity’: ‘black care takes her seat behind the horseman’ (‘post equitem sedet atra Cura’) (Odes, iii. 1). 5.1    This star marks the transition from the manuscript copy text, used for the Dedication, to the Edinburgh Edition copy text, used for the first chapter and two-thirds of The Amateur Emigrant (see Essay on the Text, 154). 7.2 Broomielaw The Broomielaw, a major thoroughfare on the River Clyde, was the site of Glasgow’s main steamboat quays, which had been redesigned by Thomas Telford in the first half of the 19th century. By 1879, steamship passengers were carried by riverboat from the Broomielaw quays to Greenock, where transatlantic steamships were anchored in the deeper water. 7.3  the Clyde  The River Clyde, an important centre of shipbuilding and trade, flows through Glasgow. 7.15–16  the tail of the Bank  ‘The Tail of the Bank’ was an anchorage in the Firth of Clyde, just north of Greenock harbour, where passengers embarked on the ocean steamships. 7.26 abaft towards the stern of the ship. 7.26 companion staircase leading to a lower deck. 7.28 aft behind; towards the stern of the ship. 8.20  salt junk  salt meat used as food on long voyages. 8.23 duff a flour pudding boiled in a bag. 9.11–12  Six guineas … second cabin  A guinea was a gold coin worth £1 1s. (or 21s.). The Anchor Line fares from Glasgow to New York in 1879 were six guineas for steerage, eight guineas for second cabin and between twelve and sixteen guineas for saloon. 9.29–30  a mixed group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen  The passenger list for Stevenson’s crossing on the Devonia records, among the second cabin passengers, one Swede, four Norwegians and one Dane. The first page of the passenger list, in which Stevenson appears, his identity thinly veiled, as a clerk named ‘Robert Stephenson’, is reproduced as fig. 1. 10.3  Henry the Third of France  Henry III (1551–89), of the House of Valois, ruled France from 1574 until his murder. The portrait by 175

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François Quesnel at the Musée du Louvre in Paris shows him with a long nose, hooded eyes and rather melancholy expression. 11.9  on the moles and in the feluccas  A mole is a pier or breakwater; a felucca is a small sailing or rowing vessel, chiefly used in the Mediterranean. 11.14 forecastle the forward part of a ship, under the deck: where the sailors live. 13.3  Lough Foyle  Lough Foyle forms the estuary of the River Foyle, separating the Irish counties of Donegal and Derry. In 1879, Anchor Line steamships called at Moville, a town on the banks of Lough Foyle, to pick up additional emigrants on the passage from Glasgow to New York. 13.15–28  Emigration … new empires are domesticated to the service of man  For a discussion of how Stevenson critically scrutinizes the heroic pioneer myth of emigration and the concept of the United States’ Manifest Destiny to people the West, see Introduction, xlviii–li. 13.22 self-help ‘Self-help’ had become a catch-phrase with the publication, in 1859, of Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct, by the biographer Samuel Smiles. 14.7  Marmion, ‘in the lost battle, borne down by the flying.’  Marmion, the eponymous protagonist of Walter Scott’s epic poem, dies in the battle of Flodden Field (1513), when Scotland was routed by English forces. The quotation is from a song that appears in Canto iii. 11. 5–8.—Walter Scott, Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field (1808; Edinburgh, 1835), 101. 14.8–14  Labouring mankind … useless strikes, and starving girls  The British economy entered a major downturn in the 1870s: the beginning of the Long Depression of 1873–96 which affected economies from the United States to Europe. British unemployment rates rose sharply in 1878–9, the period immediately before Stevenson’s departure, and commentators were increasingly anxious about urban poverty and joblessness. From the late 1860s, British society saw the growth of a ‘mass’ unionism, as unskilled and semi-skilled workers, railwaymen, dockers, and building and agricultural workers joined trades unions. Industrial action became increasingly common, with major strikes in the 1870s in Glasgow, for example, by ironworkers, shipbuilders and glassworkers. 176

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14.11  the Tyne  The River Tyne flows through ne England into the North Sea; the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, an important centre of shipbuilding in the 19th century, lies upon its north bank. 14.16  the French retreat from Moscow  In 1812, Napoleon’s empire was at its greatest extent, and Napoleon occupied Moscow. Retreat was soon necessary, and the bitter early winter made it disastrous; Napoleon’s forces were routed, and the calamity emboldened France’s enemies to fight against Napoleon. 14.35  mither … Mawmaw  the names given to their mothers by children of different social classes, from the lower-class ‘mither’ to the upper- or upper-middle-class ‘Mama’, whose distinctive pronunciation Stevenson attempts to render. 15.5  Co’ ’way doon to yon dyke  (Scots) Come away down to that wall. 15.7 shrouds a set of ropes, leading from the top of the mast, and forming part of the ship’s rigging. 15.21  unbreeched child of three  Until the early 20th century, young boys in Western Europe and North America wore dresses for the first years of their life. At between three and six years of age, they were put into breeches or short trousers. 15.37-8  all seemed for the best in the best of possible steamers  a reference to the work of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). In Théodicée (1710), Leibniz addressed the problem of evil by proposing that the existing world was the ‘best’ of all the possible worlds that God might have created. The French writer Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) famously satirized this view in his novel Candide (1759). 16.21  seven bells  On board ship, each day was divided into seven ‘watches’, with a system of bells marking the end of each half-hour: the bell was struck between one and eight times. In the night-time watch, ‘seven bells’ was struck at 11.30 pm. 16.22–3  list their doors  fix ‘list’ (a border, edging or strip) along the edge of their doors. 16.39    This star denotes the transition from the EdEd copy text, used for the first chapter and two-thirds of The Amateur Emigrant, to the manuscript copy text. See Essay on the Text, 154. 177

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17.7 somerset alternative form of ‘somersault’. 17.22 affection abnormal bodily state, disease, medical complaint. 17.37 quadrille a square dance, usually performed by four couples. 18.19–20  Around her splendid form, I weaved the magic circle  These lines are from a comic broadside ballad, ‘The Marble Arch’: the chorus begins, ‘While around her splendid form | I drew the magic circle, | I press’d her, caress’d her, | My brain was in a whirl’. 18.20–1  We don’t want to fight but, by Jingo, if we do  This song, also known as ‘Macdermott’s War Song’, was written by G. W. Hunt in 1877 and performed by G. H. Macdermott against the backdrop of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, when it looked as if Russia might take Constantinople from Turkey. It became an emblem of music-hall patriotism and is said to have led to the coinage of the word ‘jingoism’. The Chorus proclaims that ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, | We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too. | We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true, | The Russians shall not have Constantinople’. 18.23 Platt-Deutsch Platt-Deutsch is the collective term for Low German dialects or languages. By the 19th century, as High German consolidated its cultural hold, Platt-Deutsch was increasingly associated with a lack of education. 18.28–9  the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan  The AngloZulu War ( Jan–July 1879) resulted in a British victory over the Zulus, but the British defeat at Isandlwana early in the war was one of the greatest dents to British military prestige in the century. The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) was launched by Britain in an attempt to counteract Russian influence in the region. A treaty in May 1879 secured Britain control over Afghan foreign policy, though the war was to resume in September 1879, with British victory only confirmed in September 1880. 18.32–3  The Anchor’s Weighed  a sea ballad by the singer John Braham, with lyrics by Samuel James Arnold, probably written in the first decade of the 19th century. Its verses end with the emigrant’s plaintive address to his sweetheart: ‘The anchor’s weigh’d, the anchor’s weigh’d, | Farewell! farewell! remember me’. 18.33–4  Rocked on the bosom of the stormy deep  This is probably a quotation from ‘Prayer at Sea During a Violent Storm’ (1845), a 178

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poem by Amanda M. Edmond. Edmond’s poem describes the sailors turning to their faith during the storm: ‘Rocked on the bosom of the deep, | To ocean’s God we prayed’. 18.35  I’m lonely tonight, love, without you  The romantic ballad ‘Nora O’Neal’ (1866), by the American songwriter William Shakespeare Hays, opens with the lines, ‘Oh! I’m lonely to-night, love, without you, | And I sigh for one glance of your eye’. 18.35–6  Go someone and tell them … a letter from home!  The ballad ‘Write me a letter from home’ (1867), by William Shakespeare Hays, includes the homesick speaker’s plaintive request, ‘O! some one go and tell them for me, | To write me a letter from home!’. 18.37–19.1  Auld Lang Syne … a cup of kindness  Robert Burns’s ‘Auld Lang Syne’, first published in 1796, is a celebration of old friends and times long past (the Scots title means ‘times long ago’). Opening with the poignant question, ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot, | And never brought to min’?’, it evokes old acquaintances now divided by oceans (‘But seas between us braid hae roar’d, | Sin auld lang syne’) and looks forward to a reunion, promising that ‘We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, | For auld lang syne’.­—The Works of Robert Burns, ed. James Hogg and William Motherwell, 5 vols (Glasgow, 1834–6), iii, 137–8. 18.41  the sanded inn  The floors of old-fashioned country inns were often strewn with sand. 19.2  Burns contemplated emigration  In his essay on Burns, written just before he left for the States, Stevenson wrote about the poet’s plan to emigrate to the West Indies, noting that ‘he was under an engagement for Jamaica’, and ‘his chest was already on the road to Greenock’, and Burns had already written ‘verses of farewell’ before his circumstances demanded a change of plan.—‘Some Aspects of Robert Burns’ (1879), in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London, 1882), 58. 19.8  old Christian Agapes  in early Christian times, meals of fellowship to which the poor were invited. ‘Agape’ is the Ancient Greek term for brotherly love or Christian charity. 19.19–20  The Sabbath was observed strictly  The belief that Sunday should be observed strictly derives from the Fourth Commandment, ‘Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy’ (Exodus 20. 8). Scottish Presbyterians (especially John Knox, about whom Stevenson had written an essay, ‘John Knox and his Relations to Women’, in 1874) 179

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and English Puritans were among the strictest advocates of Sabbatarianism. 19.21  the ship didnae gae doon  (Scots) the ship did not go down. 19.26  six bells  ‘By night at six bells’ corresponds to 11 pm. See note to 16.21. 19.27 wracked overthrown; ruined. 19.29–31  Venus burning … upon the summer woods  Venus, the second planet from the sun, is only visible around sunset and sunrise. The planet was named after the Roman goddess of love, and may serve as a symbol of Stevenson’s lover, Fanny. His previous book, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), had also connected starlit woods with the absent Fanny: in the chapter entitled ‘A Night among the Pines’, Stevenson describes how ‘I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight’, and claims that ‘to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free’ (Travels, 58). 19.33  lee scuppers  The scuppers is an opening in the side of the ship, at deck level, to allow water to drain; this one is on the lee—or sheltered—side of the ship. 20.10  five bells  At night-time, ‘five bells’ corresponds to 10.30 pm. See note to 16.21. 20.15  Strathspey time  slow Scottish dance in 4/4 time, originating around 1700 in the Spey valley in Scotland. 20.15 Orpheus in Ancient Greek legend, the hero who is able to charm animals—and even rocks and trees—with the music of his lyre. 20.23 Darwin Charles Darwin (1809–82), British naturalist, whose theory of evolution by ‘natural selection’ was to be immensely influential in biology and other scientific fields. 20.32  Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife  ‘Merrilie danc’d the Quaker’s Wife’ is a traditional Scottish folksong, sung to the tune called ‘The Quaker’s Wife’. 21.16  the sand dance  a dance featuring shuffling and sliding moves, performed on a sandy floor. 21.18–19  Auld Robin Gray  ‘Auld Robin Gray’ is a ballad written in 1771 by Lady Anne Lindsay; the music for this song was composed in 1772 by William Leeves. 180

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21.27–8  Logie o’ Buchan  The tune, ‘Logie o’ Buchan’, is a jig in 6/8 time. The song, ‘O Logie o’ Buchan’, was written in 1736 by George Halkett. 21.29 quadrilles See note to 17.37. 22.4 hornpipe piece of music for a lively and vigorous dance of the same name, often associated with sailors’ merrymaking. 22.33  some cleansing process  The ventilation and fumigation of steerage quarters was a vexed subject, with complaints about steerage conditions intensifying in this period. The Henderson Brothers, partners of the Anchor Line, issued a Manual of Instructions for their officers which decreed that steerage passengers should be on deck ‘for an hour or two every day, and the compartments thoroughly ventilated and, if necessary, fumigated’­­­.—Manual of Instructions for the Use of Captains and Officers of ‘Anchor’ Line Steamers (1876), rev. edn (Glasgow, 1884), 130–1, Anchor GB 248 UGD 255/1/5/18. 23.18  M. Zola  Émile Zola (1840–1902), French author known for his naturalism. Stevenson was ambivalent about Zola, at times admiring his ‘pertinent ugliness and pessimism’, but at other times deploring what he called his ‘rancidness’—see letter to Henry James, June 1893 (Letters 8: 107). 24.9  O, why left I my hame?  This is the opening line of ‘The Exile’s Song’ (1835), by Robert Gilfillan. 24.13–15  Death of Nelson … This day has done his dooty  ‘The Death of Nelson’, composed by John Braham, with the words by Samuel James Arnold, was first performed in 1811, as part of an opera by Braham, The Americans. The first verse of ‘The Death of Nelson’ gives the famous signal which Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson sent from his ship as the Battle of Trafalgar was about to commence: ‘England expects that ev’ry man | This day will do his duty!’, and the song ends with the observation that ‘England confessed that ev’ry man, | That day had done his duty’. 24.19 Theseus in Ancient Greek legend, the Athenian hero. He is now best remembered for defeating the Cretan minotaur, and thus freeing Athens from the regular tribute of seven youths and seven maidens. He was also, as founder of the city-state of Athens, revered as a demi-god by Athenian citizens in Ancient Greece. 181

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24.35–25.4  C and P … C and P  In this scriptural riddle about Jesus’s crucifixion, ‘C and P’ stands for Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate; ‘C’ in the third line is Christ; and ‘G’ is God. Caiaphas was the Jewish high priest of Jerusalem who arrested Jesus in c. ad 30 and accused him of blasphemy; Pontius Pilate (died c. ad 36) was the Roman prefect of Judaea who heard Caiaphas’s accusations and ordered Jesus’s execution. In the galley proofs of the cancelled 1880 edition, Kegan Paul’s marginal annotations offer a different version of the riddle, featuring Herod instead of Caiaphas; Paul records that he heard this version from his ‘old nurse’ and that it ‘seems to me better’.—Galley 20, 1880 proofs of The Amateur Emigrant, MS Vault Stevenson 65, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 24.5  Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo!  In Roman religion, Mercury is the god of commerce and messages, also associated with trickery; in Greek religion, Apollo is the god of religious law, light and prophecy, and, through his lyre, of poetry, music and dance. The final lines of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost observe that ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of | Apollo’ (v. 2. 903–4). 24.8–9  Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate  See note to 24.35–25.4. 24.14  memoria technica  (Latin) artificial aid to the memory, mnemonic. 24.29 reaching (Scots) retching. 26.11  fox and goose and cabbage  a puzzle, dating back to medieval times, in which a farmer must convey a fox, goose and cabbage across a river, one at a time, and without leaving the fox alone with the goose or the goose alone with the cabbage. 26.15  hop-step-and-jump or push-the-stick  Hop, step and jump is the event in athletics which is now usually known as the triple jump; push-the-stick was evidently another athletic game. 26.20  From the Clyde to Sandy Hook  For the River Clyde, see note to 7.3. Sandy Hook is a large sand spit along the coast of New Jersey, enclosing the southern entrance to Lower New York Bay. 26.22  Puss in the Corner  a children’s game for five players, in which four of the players occupy corners equidistant from the centre, where the fifth player, called the ‘Puss’, is situated, and the players in 182

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the corner attempt to exchange corners without the ‘Puss’ gaining one of these places. 27.2  Lady-Bountiful air  Lady Bountiful is a wealthy philanthropist in the comedy The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707), by George Farquhar. Lady Bountiful’s name has become a byword for ostentatious or patronising charity. 28.8  a beggar in a print by Callot  Jacques Callot (c. 1592–1635), a baroque printmaker and draftsman from Lorraine, was best known for etchings that chronicled contemporary life, featuring soldiers, clowns, drunkards, beggars and courtiers. 28.10  aye, ages long ago  an allusion to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by John Keats (stanza 42, ll. 1–2): ‘And they are gone: ay, ages long ago | These lovers fled away into the storm’.—Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems (London, 1820), 104. 28.17 Congress the bi-cameral legislature of the US, consisting of the Senate and House of Representatives. 28.17 sawder compliments, flattery (colloquial). 28.21  a half educated Irish Tigg  Montague Tigg is the fictional swindler in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4). 28.24 Nihilist a follower of Nihilism, a philosophy of scepticism and rebellion against the established order, which originated in Russia in the early years of Alexander II’s reign. Popularized by Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), it came to be associated with the political movement against absolutism and with revolutionary terrorism. 29.13  Kalmuck head  Kalmuck (or Kalmyk and other variants) is the name given to Oirats (western Mongolic people) in Russia. 29.14–15  White Sea  Southern inlet of the Barents Sea, on the nw coast of Russia. 29.18–20  Russia … the Neva was softening under the sun of civilisation  Alexander II, emperor of Russia from 1855 to 1881, undertook a programme of modernization and westernization, including the 1861 emancipation of the serfs. The Neva is the river flowing through St Petersburg. Stevenson’s fellow passenger was to prove unduly optimistic: alongside liberalization, Alexander’s reign saw a repeated pattern of revolutionary terrorism and state repression, and ended with the emperor’s assassination by anarchists. 183

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29.20  wie ein feines Violin  (German) like a fine violin. 29.21  the big, empty drum-notes of Imperial diplomacy  Under Alexander II, Russia expanded its empire, especially in Asia, and was involved in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8. 29.24 Jack-of-all-Trades The proverbial saying is: ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’. 29.25  Death of Nelson  See note to 24.13–15. 29.33  Tom Bowling  a sea song, written by Charles Dibdin in 1789 on the death of his brother, Captain Thomas Dibdin. The name Tom Bowling refers to the virtuous sailor in Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Ran­ dom (1748). 29.33  Around her splendid form  See note to 18.19–20. 31.36 Abudah Abudah, a merchant of Baghdad, is haunted every night by an old hag; he finds at last that the way to rid himself of this torment is to keep God’s commandments. See Charles Morell, Tales of the Genii: or, the Delightful Lessons of Horam, the Son of Asmar (London, 1764). Stevenson also mentions the merchant Abudah in ‘Some College Memories’, in Memories and Portraits (London, 1887), 37. 31.41 colported carried, as if by a colporteur (the term for a bookpedlar, especially one employed by a society to distribute Bibles). 32.4  Cœlum non animam  (Latin) an allusion—slightly misspelt— to Horace’s observation that ‘Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt’ (Those who hurry across the sea change the sky, not their souls).—Epistles, i. 11. 27. 32.5  Glenlivet … Bourbon  Glenlivet is single malt Scotch whisky from Glenlivet Distillery, Moray, Scotland; Bourbon is American whiskey made mainly from corn. 32.5 whiskey The two spellings—‘whisky’ and ‘whiskey’—were interchangeable in the Victorian period, though now trade convention is that ‘whisky’ is Scottish, and ‘whiskey’ is Irish; additionally, the latter spelling is now more of an American usage. 32.18  teetotal pledge  pledge to abstain from alcohol, first introduced by the Irish temperance reformer, Theobald Mathew (1790– 1856), in 1838. 32.29 corporation jocular term for a large abdomen. 184

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33.24  cheap, school-book materialism  Materialism, the philosophical view that all facts are dependent on physical processes, has a long lineage, from Ancient Greek atomists to 19th-century thinkers including Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, and beyond. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its insistence on scientific law rather than Design, was widely taken to strengthen the materialist view of the world. 33.36  Hoppus’s Measurer  The lengthily titled Hoppus’s Practical Measurer; or, Measuring Made Easy to the Meanest Capacity, by a New Set of Tables, which Shew, at Sight, the Solid Content of Any Piece of Tim­ ber, Stone, &c. either Square, Round, or Unequal-Sided, and the Value of any Price per Foot Cube was first published in 1736, when Edward Hoppus was surveyor to the London Assurance Corporation. It was used widely by builders, carpenters and surveyors, and editions were published throughout the 19th century. 33.39–40  Juan Fernandez  The Juan Fernández Islands, located in the South Pacific Ocean, have strong literary connections. The castaway Alexander Selkirk’s four-year residence there may have inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). The islands were the subject of more recent works: Richard Henry Dana, Jr’s Two Years before the Mast (1840) and John Coulter’s Adventures in the Pacific (1845). 34.17  the staff of life  a proverbial expression for bread. 35.28–30  I was already a young man … Suffolk  Stevenson refers to his sojourn at Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of his cousin Maud Babington and her husband, in the summer of 1873. 36.2  he has aye something ayont  (Scots) he always has something beyond (in other words, he has an intellectual hinterland to sustain him). 36.5–6  A sound, sometimes even an ambitious education  In the 19th century, Scots were proud of their school system, especially the literacy that it fostered among working-class men, though the social reality often fell short of the myth of a democratic educational tradition. 36.6–7  the metaphysical and sentimental turn of the race  The latter decades of the 19th century saw a Gaelic Revival, influenced by work on the ‘Celtic genius’ by thinkers including Ernest Renan (1823– 92) and Matthew Arnold (1822–88). Stevenson’s words echo Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), which characterized the Celtic race as pre-eminently sentimental. Arnold’s sensitive and mercurial 185

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Celts, however, do not share the theoretical or metaphysical bent that Stevenson describes in the Scottish field labourers. 36.8–9 the Shorter Catechism  Catechisms, manuals of religious instruction in the form of questions and answers, were and are used to teach the Christian faith. The standard Presbyterian catechisms used in Scotland are the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms, completed by the Westminster Assembly in 1647. 36.24–8  the Puritan school … New England  In its broadest terms, Puritanism connotes a strict code of moral and religious purity and a mistrust of sensual pleasure. Stevenson primarily evokes this meaning. However, his pairing of Scotland and New England points to the original meaning of the phrase. Puritanism was a Protestant religious reform movement that originated in 16th-century England and spread to New England through emigration. Puritans, who shared many beliefs (including Calvinism) with Scottish Presbyterians, felt that the Reformation had not gone far enough. 37.5  from Lough Foyle to Sandy Hook  For Lough Foyle, see note to 13.3; this was evidently where Barney boarded the steamer. For Sandy Hook, see note to 26.20. 37.16  Billy Keogh  William Keogh (1817–78) was an Irish judge and politician much reviled for his comments on Roman Catholic bishops and priests. The song, ‘Billy Keogh’, printed in Dublin in 1878, was probably about the judge’s death. 37.18 daffing (Scots) sportive behaviour; frolicking. 37.24  no fish on Friday … a conscientious Catholic  Catholic tradition required Roman Catholics to abstain from eating meat on Fridays. 38.1  Oxford Music Hall  The Oxford Music Hall, opened in 1861, was situated on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, in London. 39.24–5  Captain Burnaby … Cockle’s pills  Cockle’s Pills were anti-bilious pills. They received an enthusiastic endorsement from the soldier, traveller and writer Frederick Burnaby (1842–85). Burnaby described Cockle’s pills as ‘a most invaluable medicine, and one which I have used on the natives of Central Africa with the greatest possible success’, and cited ‘the marvellous effects produced upon the mind and body of an Arab Sheik, who was impervious to all native 186

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medicines, when I administered to him five Cockle’s pills’.—A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (1876; Oxford, 1997), 13. 41.3  Six bells  During the night-time watch, six bells corresponds to 11 pm. See note to 16.21. 43.25–6  Sir Philip Sidney … a Roland for his Oliver  Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), English statesman, soldier and author, was seen as the embodiment of the ideal gentleman. Stevenson refers specifically to Sidney’s death from wounds received on the battlefield: according to legend, as he lay wounded, Sidney was offered water but gave it to an injured comrade, declaring that ‘Thy necessity is greater than mine’. In medieval European legend, Roland was the nephew of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, and the hero of the 12th-century romance the Chanson de Roland; he duelled with Oliver, another of Charlemagne’s famed warriors, but the combat was so finely balanced that neither man could prevail. The popular expression ‘a Roland for an Oliver’ hence signifies an effective rejoinder, a quid pro quo. 44.31 bieldy (Scots) sheltered. 44.41  indeflexibly steady  steady in a manner incapable of being deflected. 45.16–17 Sebastopol Russian city and seaport on the Crimean peninsula; main naval base of the Russian Black Sea fleet. During the Crimean War (1853–6), Anglo-French forces laid siege to Sebastopol, finally captured in September 1855 after an eleven-month siege. 45.17–18 the Alabama  The Alabama was a Confederate ship built in England. During the American Civil War (1861–5), the Alabama was used by the southern states to attack northern merchant ships; she was sunk by a Union ship in 1864. 45.18  a high Tory  ‘Tory’ is a colloquial term for the Conservative party in the UK; a ‘high Tory’ is a traditionalist Conservative who puts a high value on the established Church and State, an uncompromising supporter of empire and a resolute opponent of social and political change. 45.27 hazed harassed with overwork (nautical). 45.32  frightened for  (Scots) frightened by.

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46.22  Fisherrow to Whitby  Fisherrow is a harbour and fishing village in East Lothian, in Scotland. Whitby is a port and seaside town in Yorkshire, ne England. 47.29  Liberton Hill  Liberton is an old town on the southern outskirts of Edinburgh, on the edge of the Braid Hills. 47.32  the Atlantic cable  The first durable transatlantic telegraph cable, for the transmission of telegraph signals, was laid in 1866. The cable reduced the time for transatlantic communications from ten days to a matter of minutes. Stevenson was to avail himself of this new technology, sending and receiving telegrams when he reached America. 48.10–11  the Union delegates  The legal standing of trades unions had improved over the 1870s, with trade unionists and delegates afforded increasing, if limited, recognition. The 1871 Trade Union Act established the legal status of trades unions, and the 1875 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act allowed trade unionists to engage in peaceful picketing. 48.14 Nemesis in Greek religion, the goddess who personifies divine censure and chastisement of human presumption. 49.4  smoking cap  a cap worn by gentlemen to prevent their hair from smelling of tobacco smoke. 49.24  P. and O. Company  The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company was a shipping company founded in 1837. 49.24  the East Indies  This may mean the Dutch East Indies, islands in se Asia including Sumatra, Java and Celebes: until 1949 these islands were an overseas territory of the Netherlands; they now form the Republic of Indonesia. More generally, ‘East Indies’ may designate the islands in the Malay Archipelago. 49.26  the Royal Engineers  The Corps of Royal Engineers is a British Army corps, providing military engineering and other technical support services. 49.34 Homeric grand, large-scale (shaped, that is, after the Ancient Greek poet Homer’s epic poetry). 49.34 taking appealing, engaging, pleasing. 50.1 rhodomontade extravagant boasting. 188

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50.2  Burns … Duchesses and Hostlers  Stevenson had discussed this aspect of Robert Burns’s conversation more fully in an 1879 essay, noting that ‘the Duchess of Gordon declared that he “carried her off her feet;” and, when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear him talk’—‘Some Aspects of Robert Burns’, in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London, 1882), 45. 50.12 Woolwich At this time, Woolwich was a metropolitan borough in London and the site of the Royal Arsenal and a naval dockyard. 50.14–15  Westminster Bridge  The first Westminster Bridge, which crosses the Thames near the Houses of Parliament, opened in 1750. This was replaced by a wrought-iron arch bridge, designed by Thomas Page and Charles Barry, which opened in 1862. 50.27–28  We gentlemen of England who live at home at ease  Stevenson refers to the sea-song, ‘You gentlemen of England’, lyrics by Martin Parker in the mid-17th century (adapted by Thomas Campbell, c. 1800), and music by J. W. Callcott in the 1790s. The song opens with the lines, ‘You gentlemen of England, | That live at home at ease, | How little do you think upon | The dangers of the seas’. 50.32  coal gas  This mixture of gases was highly toxic, containing carbon monoxide; it was used for heating, lighting and cooking. 51.5–7  Prison Discipline Act … Wakefield Jail  The Prisons Act of 1877 completed the transfer of prisons from the control of county magistrates to that of the Home Office; it also made the prison environment tougher, to strengthen its deterrent effects. Stevenson implies that, before the Act eliminated local variation in prison conditions, ‘indigent persons’ sought out accommodation in particularly lenient prisons. Wakefield Jail, a prison in Yorkshire, pioneered various developments in penal reform, including paid employment for the inmates. 51.11  the line on which I sailed  Stevenson sailed with the Anchor Line of steamships, based in Glasgow: see Introduction, xxxix–xl, l. 51.30 the Circassia  another Anchor Line ship, built in 1878, a year after the Devonia, the ship on which Stevenson sailed. 52.8  finger glasses  glass vessels to hold water, used for rinsing the fingers after pudding (signifying Alec’s former prosperity). 52.10–11  the West Park  Kelvingrove Park, in Glasgow, was opened in 1852 and originally known as the West End Park or the West Park. 189

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52.18  Sauchiehall Street  one of the main, and busiest, thoroughfares in central Glasgow. 52.37  the ship’s yeoman  an inferior officer, in charge of the stores in a particular department. 54.24 Weymouth port on the English Channel, in the county of Dorset, in England. 54.27  a trading dandy  a small sailing boat. 54.27–8  the Bristol Channel  inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by the shores of sw England and South Wales. At the eastern end of the inlet is the River Severn estuary and the city of Bristol. 54.32–3  the Irish Sea  The Irish Sea lies between the islands of Ireland and Great Britain. 54.34 Belfast At this time, Belfast was a busy port and ship-building town in Ireland. 55.14  Glasgow Green  the oldest park in Glasgow, situated in the east end of the city, on the northern bank of the River Clyde. 55.19  the Sailors’ Home  Sailors’ homes were charitable homes built to accommodate seamen in need. The Glasgow Sailors’ Home was located at 150 Broomielaw, close to where Stevenson boarded the riverboat for Greenock. 56.29 Scapin Named after one of the stock characters in the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition, Scapin was the inventive trickster in the 1671 comedy Les Fourberies de Scapin (The Deceptions of Scapin), by the French playwright Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin). 57.24  the Montyon prize for virtue  The French philanthropist Jean-Baptiste Antoine Robert Auget, Baron de Montyon (1733–1820), endowed a series of prizes, awarded annually by the Académie Française, including the ‘prix de vertu’ for the most commendable act performed by a Frenchman. 58.3  C’est Vénus tout entière  The quotation is from Phèdre (1677) by the French playwright Jean Racine (1639–99). In Act i scene 3, Phèdre describes her love for Hippolyte: ‘C’est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée’ (it is Venus wholly attached to her prey).—Jean Racine, Phèdre, Tragédie, in Œuvres dramatiques, 6th edn (Paris, 1844), ii, 321. See Emendation List. 190

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59.26–30  Amadis of Gaul … this Scotch girl serving her Orson  Amadís of Gaul was a chivalric prose romance circulating in medieval Europe: the first known version was written in Spanish in the early 16th century. Amadís himself was an idealized knightly hero. There are two possible sources for Stevenson’s reference to ‘Orson’. Valentine and Orson was an old French romance about the adventures of eponymous twins. Orson is abducted by a bear and becomes a wild man of the woods. Alternatively, Stevenson may have had in mind the 1798 verse tale Orson and Ellen: A Legendary Tale by Peter Pindar (the pseudonym of John Wolcott), in which the heroine Ellen faithfully waits for the philandering Orson, who has deserted her; years later, she serves him as a waiting-maid at a country inn for some time before they recognize each other. 60.3–4  ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’ sings the old poet  Stevenson cites a hitherto unidentified quotation from ‘On Going a Journey’ (1822) by William Hazlitt. Hazlitt declares that, when travelling abroad, ‘We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings, “Out of my country and myself I go.” ’—Table-Talk: or, Original Essays, 2 vols (London, 1822), ii, 53. The allusion is to Miguel de Cervantes’s poem Viaje del Parnasso (1614). An English translation was not published until 1870, as Voyage to Parnassus, but Hazlitt may have been drawing on Tobias Smollett’s translation of the line, in his ‘Life of Cervantes’. Smollett remarks that Cervantes ‘describes his departure from Madrid in these words, “Out of my country and myself I go!”’ .—‘Life of Cervantes’, in The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, trans. Smollett, 4 vols (Dublin, 1796), iv, n.p. Hazlitt’s essay was a touchstone for Stevenson (see Introduction, xlv–xlvi). In ‘Walking Tours’, he claimed that the essay ‘is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it’.—‘Walking Tours’, Cornhill Magazine, 33 (1876), 687. A year before he wrote The Amateur Emigrant, Stevenson had already used Hazlitt’s quotation from Cervantes’s poem, observing, ‘ “Out of my country and myself I go.” I wish to take a dive among new conditions for awhile, as into another element’.—An In­ land Voyage (London, 1878), 187. 60.12–13  In a former book … taken for a peddler  A humorously related episode in An Inland Voyage sees Stevenson and his companion so persistently taken for pedlars that ‘We began to think we might be pedlars after all’­(57). 191

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60.36–61.1  the transformed monarch in the story  This may be a reference to James V of Scotland’s ploy of travelling in disguise through his country as the Goodman of Ballengiech.—see Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather (Edinburgh, 1836), ii, 21–5. 61.3–5  I had already experimented … in a sleeve-waistcoat  Graham Balfour observes that Stevenson conducted this trial around December 1878: ‘It was probably at this time that he made the social experiment recorded in The Amateur Emigrant of practising upon the public by “going abroad through a suburban part of London simply attired in a sleeve-waistcoat.” ’­—Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Ste­ venson, 2 vols (London, 1901), i, 192. 61.37–62.8  the purser … copy out the list of passengers  The purser is the officer on board the ship who is responsible for provisioning the vessel and keeping the accounts. Stevenson evidently declined the offer to copy out the passenger list, as it is not in his handwriting (see fig. 1). 62.14  Tom Holt’s Log … its literary diet  Tom Holt’s Log: A Tale of the Deep Sea (1868) was a novel by William Stephens Hayward. Stevenson’s later essay ‘Popular Authors’ (1888) relates the same encounter with the sailor: ‘The scene is the deck of an Atlantic liner, close by the doors of the ashpit, where it is warm: the time, night: the persons, an emigrant of an inquiring turn of mind and a deck hand’. Recalling his own assumption that Tom Holt’s Log would either be ‘admirable’ or ‘mere ink and banditti’, he then admits, ‘Well, the emigrant was wrong: it was something more curious than either’. The essay analyses popular fiction’s appeal to readers’ dreams and its ability to supplant reality, reflecting that the sailor perhaps ‘still believes that he is leading—the life of Tom Holt’. See ‘Popular Authors’, Scribner’s Magazine, 4 (1888), 122–8. 63.2  chipped fruit  (Scots) blemished or bruised fruit. 63.30–1  the famous pin … the merchant’s window  presumably a folktale relating a change in fortune; unidentified. 63.40  Barmecide feasts  illusory banquets. In ‘The Barber’s Story of His Sixth Brother’, in The Arabian Nights, a prince of the Barmecide family in Baghdad invites a beggar to a sham feast, in which the plates are empty.

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64.2  Eden and the glades of Arcady  The Garden of Eden is described in the Old Testament book of Genesis; Arcadia is a region of Ancient Greece represented as a pastoral paradise in classical and Renaissance literature. 66.28  Lord Beaconsfield … war and taxes  Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, Conservative politician and twice Prime Minister of Britain. He was Prime Minister for the second time from 1874 to 1880, leading Britain into wars including the Anglo-Zulu War and the Second Anglo-Afghan War (see note to 18.28–9). Disraeli was defeated in the 1880 election chiefly on account of the state of the economy, with his great opponent, W. E. Gladstone, alleging that the government’s predilection for foreign conflict had exacerbated the country’s financial position. 66.29 adminicles pieces of supporting evidence which help to prove a point but do not themselves furnish complete proof. 68.20 Aberdeen city on Scotland’s North Sea coast. 69.11  good talkers  This was a topic of enduring interest to Stevenson. In 1881–2 he wrote two papers on the subject: ‘Talk and Talkers’ and ‘Talk and Talkers (a Sequel)’, in Cornhill Magazine, 45 (1882), 410–18, and 46 (1882), 151–8. 69.40  a weariness to the flesh  an allusion to Ecclesiastes 12. 12: ‘of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh’. 70.12 Crœsus In Ancient Greece, Crœsus, King of Lydia (died c. 546 bc), was famous for his great wealth. 70.16  Von Moltke  Helmuth von Moltke (1800–91). Chief of the Prussian and German General Staff from 1858 to 1888, he presided over successful wars against Denmark, Austria and France. 70.22  Robinson Crusoe  Robinson Crusoe (1719), by Daniel Defoe, was an inspiration to Stevenson throughout his writing life. He often invoked the novel in examining the appeal of the romance novel, observing, for example, that ‘Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic; both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers’.—‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), in Memories and Portraits (London, 1887), 264. 73.6 rooked cheated; swindled. 193

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73.8  a lone forked radish  an allusion to Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV: ‘When a was naked, he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife’ (iii. 2. 282–4). The term ‘forked radish’ refers to the mandrake root. 73.12–14  I was warned … the theatre of the events  Stevenson alludes to his journey through the Cévennes region in the south of France, narrated in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. The source of all the warnings is evidently the folk memory of the ‘ever-memorable Beast, the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves’, whose exploits are recounted to Stevenson at the hillside town of Pradelles (Travels, 23). 73.23 Boston capital city of the state of Massachusetts, in the ne United States. 74.16–17  stared at each other, like Vasco’s seamen, ‘with a wild surmise’  Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475–1519) was the Spanish explorer who led an expedition across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and became the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean; he claimed it and all its shores for Spain. Stevenson quotes from John Keats’s sonnet, ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816), in which the poet confuses Balboa with the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés: ‘Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes | He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men | Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— | Silent, upon a peak in Darien’.—Poems (London, 1817), 89. 74.32–5  Castle Garden … West Street  Castle Garden, in the Battery, at the tip of Manhattan, was formerly a fort, and from 1855 till 1890 was used as a receiving depot for immigrants. West Street runs northwards from Castle Garden, parallel to the Hudson River. 75.15  black care  See note to 3.7–8. 75.31–2  westward the march of empire holds its way  Stevenson quotes from a poem by the Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). Berkeley’s poem ‘On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America’ (1752) originated in his plan to raise money for a college in Bermuda that would teach Native Americans and missionaries. Stevenson would have been familiar with this poem. It was reprinted in the 1876 edition of George Bancroft’s His­ tory of the United States, which he carried with him on his journey to California (see note to 84.23–4). Contrasting a decaying Europe with the New World, Berkeley’s poem prophesies that ‘There shall be sung another golden age,— | The rise of empire and of arts’. The final stanza, 194

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looking forward to a new age of epic poetry, proclaims that ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way’, and that ‘Time’s noblest offspring is the last’.—rptd in George Bancroft, History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the American Continent, 6 vols (Boston, 1876), ii, 536. By the time Stevenson invoked it, the line ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way’ was harnessed to the concept of Manifest Destiny. In 1860, the German–American painter Emanuel Leutze (1816–68) painted a large mural for the Capitol Building in Washington, dc. Entitled ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, the painting represented heroic pioneers on an epic and divinely ordained mission to settle the Far West. The Introduction to the present volume discusses Stevenson’s critical scrutiny of the concept of Manifest Destiny (xlviii–xlix, l–li). 75.32–3  the race is … to the young  See Ecclesiastes 9. 11: ‘the race is not to the swift’. 75.38  she has lost the States  Stevenson refers to the American Revolutionary War of 1775–83, when thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies achieved political independence as the United States of America. 76.15  stalled ox  an ox fattened in a stall for killing. The allusion is to the biblical verse, ‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith’ (Proverbs 15. 17). 76.18  the Maine laws  In 1846, the Maine state legislature passed a law restricting the sale of alcoholic spirits; the Maine Law of 1851 went further, enacting an outright ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquor except for medicinal or mechanical purposes. Over the next few years, many other states and territories joined Maine in passing prohibition laws. 76.18–19  the Puritan sourness  See note to 36.24–8. 76.30  the Sierras  The Sierra Nevada is a mountain range running along the eastern side of California; discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada goldfields triggered the California Gold Rush (1848–55). 76.31–2  Walt Whitman  Walt Whitman (1819–92), American poet, whose masterpiece was Leaves of Grass (1855–92). For Stevenson’s interest in Whitman, see Introduction, xlviii. In an 1878 essay, Stevenson called Whitman a ‘prophet’, whose work was remarkable for articulating a new ‘democratic idea of humanity’ and an ‘intense Americanism’. 195

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See ‘Walt Whitman’ (1878), in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London, 1882), 92, 94, 117. In a later essay, ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’ (1887), Stevenson proclaimed Leaves of Grass ‘a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues’—Essays of Travel and in the Art of Writing (New York, 1905), 320. 76.33  the bowie knife  large knife, with curved blade, first used by the early 19th-century American fighter and frontiersman, Jim Bowie, and soon associated with life in the wilder parts of the United States. 76.35  Chicago was burned  The Great Chicago Fire, in 1871, destroyed about one-third of the city and left about 100,000 homeless. The rebuilding of the city was notable for its speed and its architectural importance. 77.7–8  Uncle Sam  popular symbol of the United States, possibly deriving from the businessman Samuel Wilson (1766–1854). 77.15–16  Mr. Lowell … ‘a certain condescension in foreigners,’  The American writer James Russell Lowell (1819–91) complained of European superciliousness towards Americans in the essay ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’, Atlantic Monthly, 23.135 ( Jan 1869), 82–95. 77.22  Alabama claims  For the Alabama, see note to 45.17–18. After the Civil War, the States pursued claims for damages against Britain, and this led to the evolution of the international arbitration process and to recognition of neutral powers’ obligations towards belligerent powers. In 1872, the tribunal ruled Britain liable for the losses inflicted by the Alabama and other ships; the United States was awarded damages of $15.5 million. 77.31–4  Mr. Charles Reade’s Woman Hater … ‘What does that matter? We are abroad.’  In the novel A Woman-Hater (New York, 1877) by the British author Charles Reade, the heroine Zoe Vizard asks this question in chapter 7 (58). The novel also touches on the Sabbatarian abroad: in chapter 5, when another character is reluctant to do business on a Sunday, Vizard’s brother asks, ‘What is that to you, a fellow who has been years abroad?’ (37)

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77.35  non omnia sua secum  Stevenson alludes to the Latin proverb, ‘Sapiens omnia sua secum portat’ (A wise man takes everything he owns with himself), which derives from M. Tullius Cicero’s dictum ‘omnia mecum porto mea’ (I carry all my belongings with me)— ‘Paradoxa Stoicorum’, in De Oratore, iii, 260. 77.41  Portman Square  Portman Square, in Marylebone, central London, was a very fashionable address, known for its elegant Georgian architecture. 78.4 Sabbatarian a Christian who adheres to Sabbatarianism (the strict observance of Sunday as the day of rest). See note to 19.19–20. 78.35  parable of the Prodigal Son  In this parable, told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, the prodigal son leaves his father and wastes his inheritance; he soon returns, desperately poor. His older brother, who had faithfully stayed at home, bitterly resents his father’s welcome of the erring son (Luke 15. 11–32). 79.1–4  Benjamin Franklin … you have so heavily injured  Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), printer and publisher, author, scientist and statesman; one of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. The quotation is from a letter written by Franklin on 20 July 1776, to the British naval officer Lord Howe (1726–99). By this date, Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, but as late as September Franklin and Howe were still trying to find a means of reconciling British and American differences. 79.17  to refuse me copyright  Until the International Copyright Act of 1891 (the Chace Act), British and other foreign authors received no copyright protection in the United States. This had long been a complaint of European writers. See, for example, Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842), in American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London, 1997), 246. 79.18–19  turret ship … the old three-decker  A turret-ship was a ship of war with a low, flat, armour-plated tower, which contained a gun and gunners and usually revolved; a three-decker was an olderstyle battleship carrying guns on three decks. 79.22–33  With half a heart … England and yesterday!  Stevenson included this poem, which he entitled ‘In the States’, in Underwoods (London, 1887), 62. 197

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80.31–2  a certain distressing malady … more anon  The malady was probably scabies. In a letter to W. E. Henley of 18 August 1879, Stevenson complains that he is suffering from ‘the itch—or at least an unparallelled skin irritation’ (Letters 3: 7). He describes his sufferings more fully at the end of the present chapter. See also Introduction, xxix, and—for the deletion of Stevenson’s references to scabies in LM and EdEd—the Essay on the Text, 139, 152. 81.21  a French commissary  a rank of police officer in France. 82.10–20  She was a slip of a girl … I gave her a volume of my own  The book was Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. Stevenson describes this incident in a letter to Henley, written on 18 August 1879 (Letters 3: 7). 82.28–9  Broadway … the Post Office  Broadway was the main business thoroughfare in New York. The new Post Office, occupied in 1875, was on Broadway at Park Row. 82.34  a stoic or an Indian Gymnosophist  The Stoic school, founded by the Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium (c. 308 bc), taught that virtue was the highest good and that bodily appetites should be restrained. The Greek word ‘gymnosophist’ means ‘naked sage’, and the Indian Gymnosophists, as described in the Greek biographer Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, were held to be a sect of ascetic philosophers. 82.38  a seidlitz powder  a kind of laxative containing a saline purgative. Stevenson discusses his constipation in a letter to Henley written on 18 August 1879 (Letters 3: 6–7). 82.40–1  Johnson’s dictionary  Samuel Johnson (1709–84), English writer and lexicographer, published the groundbreaking work, A Dictionary of the English Language, in two volumes in 1755. 83.12  red sublimate  a pharmaceutical treatment for the skin, probably precipitated sulphur, which kills the scabies mite. 83.13–14  hence these tears  a translation of the Latin phrase ‘hinc illae lacrimae’, used literally in Terence’s Andria (i. 126), and thereafter proverbially, as in Horace’s Epistles (i. 19. 41). 84.1  Council Bluffs  Council Bluffs, Iowa, lay on the east bank of the Missouri River, across the river from Omaha, Nebraska. The town had been an important point on the Mormon Trail and other migra198

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tion routes to the west, and now formed the eastern terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad. 84.3  Ferry Depot of the Railroad  On West Street, the Ferry Depot took passengers by riverboat across the Hudson River to Jersey City. 84.23–4 Bancroft’s History of the United States in six fat volumes  The American historian George Bancroft (1800–91) published his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent in ten volumes between 1834 and 1874. Stevenson had evidently acquired the revised centenary edition of six volumes (Boston, 1876). Bancroft’s history offered a triumphalist narrative of US progress, promoting the belief in Manifest Destiny. For discussion of Stevenson’s engagement with heroic myths of American exceptionalism, see Introduction, xlviii–xlix, l–li. 85.26  Jersey City  Jersey City, in New Jersey, was situated on a peninsula opposite Manhattan. 85.41 embarcations archaic spelling of ‘embarkations’, which is here used in the obsolescent sense of ‘vessels’. 86.11  kept him by her  kept himself by her (archaic). 86.37  the railway company  The company in question was the Pennsylvania Railroad, which took Stevenson from Jersey City to Pittsburgh. 86.40  all hands are piped  an expression of nautical origin. It alludes to the boatswain’s call or pipe, ‘all hands on deck’, summoning on deck all the seamen aboard the ship. 87.8 Philadelphia city in the east of Pennsylvania. 87.16–17  Locust trees … Indian corn  Locust trees are leguminous trees of the North American genus Robinia; Indian corn is another term for maize. 87.28 Aurora dawn; the Roman goddess of the dawn. 88.23  the Brakesman  the man in charge of the railroad car’s braking system. 88.24–5 the Susquehanna  river that runs through Pennsylvania, flowing into Chesapeake Bay.

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88.26 Adam Adam, the first man in the biblical creation narrative, was responsible for naming the animals (Genesis 2. 19–20). 88.30  the sound of names  One of the poems which Stevenson wrote on board the train played on the appealing sound of American names, including the refrain, ‘Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware’. See letter to Colvin, 20 Aug 1879, in Letters 3: 8. 88.33–4  Pekin … Euclid … Bellefontaine … Sandusky  These settlements are all in the state of Ohio. 88.34–5  Chelsea … Sloane Square … King’s Road  Chelsea, an affluent district in sw London, includes Sloane Square, designed in the 18th century, and King’s Road. It was also a district within Memphis, Tennessee. 88.36–7  Memphis … Tennessee and Arkansas  Memphis (its name a tribute to the Ancient Egyptian city) is a city in Tennessee, lying on the east bank of the Mississippi: on the other side of the river is the state of Arkansas. 88.39  a plague  A yellow fever epidemic broke out in Memphis in 1879 (as it had done even more seriously the previous year), and a travel quarantine was imposed on the city. 88.39  Old, red Manhattan  The Lenape people, also known as the Delaware, inhabited Manhattan before the arrival of European settlers. 89.3–4  Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota and the Carolinas  These were all states by 1879, except Dakota and Wyoming Territories (which would become states in 1889 and 1890, respectively). 89.6 Homer Ancient Greek poet, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. 89.9 Pittsburg Pittsburgh, often spelled as ‘Pittsburg’ in the 19th century, is in sw Pennsylvania. There, Stevenson changed trains, taking the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad across Ohio and Indiana to Chicago, Illinois. 89.19  Mrs. Beecher Stowe  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96), American author, whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–2) was wildly successful but also perpetuated and helped to consolidate condescending stereotypes of African Americans, such as the longsuffering but faithful enslaved servant. 200

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89.20  the Christy Minstrels  blackface minstrels. The name derives from the American group, E. P. Christy’s Minstrels, which visited London in 1857; one British troupe, the Moore and Burgess Minstrels, also styled themselves ‘Christy Minstrels’, and the term was used more generally to denote any blackface minstrels. 89.29–30  Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff  In Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV, Sir John Falstaff and Edward Poins are drinking companions of Henry, Prince of Wales, the future King Henry V of England. 90.10  my person being still unbreeched  See note to 15.21. 90.11–13  Cassell’s Family Paper … Custaloga, an Indian Brave  The reference is to the scene at the end of Percy B. St John’s novel Amy Moss; or, the Banks of the Ohio (London, 1860), in which Custaloga reveals himself as Reginald Morton (281–5). The novel was serialized in Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, 1 (1854), before being published as a volume in 1860. 90.17–18  Robinson Crusoe  See note to 70.22. 90.21  the Rocky Mountains  mountain range in western North America. Stevenson reached the eastern edge of the Rockies in Wyoming. 90.23  Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa  Stevenson crossed Ohio and Indiana on the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad. Writing to Colvin on 20 August 1879, he noted that Indiana was Fanny’s ‘native state: perhaps that is why but I like it best of all I’ve seen’ (Letters 3: 8). After changing trains at Chicago, he crossed Illinois and Iowa on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. 90.37–8 marasmus a wasting disorder. The word ‘marasmus’ is clearly written, but the sense suggests that Stevenson may have intended to write ‘miasmas’ (noxious vapours rising from the ground, which were believed to pollute and cause disease). LM, Chatto and EdEd substitute the word ‘malaria’. 91.30 Chicago city in Illinois, situated at the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Stevenson changed trains there, travelling on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad across Illinois and Iowa to Council Bluffs. 91.34  at the period of the fire  See note to 76.35. 92.37  dîner fin  (French) fine dinner. 201

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93.11–16  Burlington upon the Mississippi … Creston … Cromwell  Burlington is a town in Iowa, situated on the western bank of the Mississippi River; Creston and Cromwell were both subsequent stations on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. 93.32–7  the Pacific Transfer station near Council Bluffs … the Union Pacific Hotel  The Union Pacific Railroad built a new transfer depot in 1878 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Council Bluffs formed the eastern terminus of the railroad, and the words ‘Where the West begins’ stood over the threshold leading to west-bound trains. On the second floor of the transfer depot was the lavish Union Pacific Hotel. 93.38  the boots  name given to the hotel servant who cleans the boots. 95.2–5  mixed trains … put apart with my fellows  Stevenson travelled by ‘mixed trains’ to Council Bluffs, and then by ‘emigrant train’ on the Union Pacific Railroad from Council Bluffs to Ogden, Utah. ‘Emigrant trains’, which were attached to slow local freight trains, travelled much more slowly than express passenger trains and their timing was more unpredictable; they were also much more uncomfortable. 95.6  the Emigrant House  Emigrant House, which was also built by the Union Pacific Railroad in 1878, was less luxurious than the Union Pacific Hotel. It stood a little west of the transfer depot, in Council Bluffs. 95.14  the third to the Chinese  See Stevenson’s discussion of the anti-Chinese prejudice which underlay this segregation in the penultimate chapter, ‘Despised Races’ (115–16). 95.21  Noah’s ark  In the biblical book of Genesis, Noah is commanded by God to build an ark to escape the destruction of life on earth (Genesis 6–9). 95.29  the Company  Union Pacific Railroad. 96.27  Yankee land  the northern states of the United States or, more specifically, the New England states. 96.35–6  Pennsylvania Dutchman  descendant of the 17th- and 18th-century German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania. 97.9–10  across the wide Missouri river to Omaha  Council Bluffs, Iowa, was on the eastern bank of the Missouri River, across the river from Omaha, Nebraska. Until 1873, when the first bridge connecting 202

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Council Bluffs and Omaha opened, railway passengers had crossed the Missouri River by steamboat. 97.11    This star denotes the transition from the manuscript copy text to the Longman’s Magazine text, which is used to fill the lacuna in the text caused by the loss of page 95 of the manuscript. See Essay on the Text, 154. 97.15  Home, sweet home  sentimental ballad, composed by Henry Rowley Bishop, words by John Howard Payne and first performed in 1823. 97.31 Timotheus  a famous musician from Thebes, whose music supposedly moved and inspired Alexander the Great. In John Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music (1697), Timotheus’ music plays powerfully on Alexander’s emotions. 97.34  North Platte  railway town in Nebraska, established in 1868. 97.35  The Sweet By-and-bye  Christian hymn written in 1868, music composed by Joseph Webster, words by S. Fillmore Bennett. 98.14    This star denotes the reversion to manuscript copy text. See Essay on the Text, 154. 99.7 overhead (Scots) overall, for the most part. 99.40  Seven-up or Cassino  Seven-up is a trick-taking card game, also known as ‘All Fours’; Cassino or Casino is another card game, its aim being to capture cards from the table. 100.6–7  Ogden to Sacramento  Ogden, a city in Utah, was where the Union Pacific Railroad ended, and passengers changed to the Central Pacific Railroad; Sacramento, in California, was the original western terminus of the Central Pacific Railroad, though it was soon extended to Oakland. 100.11–12  who live at home at ease  See note to 50.27–8. 100.34  Obstruction in person  possibly a reference to Vritra, a demon who, in early Vedic religion, appears as a serpent or dragon and prevents the monsoon rains from breaking. 102.30–1  those who passed … at the foot’s pace of oxen  Until the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, emigrants on the Oregon, Mormon and California Trails and other emigrant routes travelled by ox- or mule-pulled wagon. Stevenson discusses those emi203

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grants’ hardships in more detail in the following chapter, ‘The Desert of Wyoming’. 104.17  North Platte  See note to 97.34. 105.1  Wyoming  A territory in 1879, Wyoming would become a state in 1890. 105.3  the Black Hills of Wyoming  The Black Hills are a mountain region in western South Dakota and ne Wyoming. 105.6  over the main ridge of the Rockies  The Union Pacific Railroad crossed the Rocky Mountains at South Pass, Wyoming. 105.12 sage-brush the collective name given to several woody and herbaceous species of plants in the Artemisia genus, native to western North America. 105.20–1  suffering … pleased to call my liver  Stevenson discusses his sufferings, and his visit to the chemist, in more detail in ‘New York’. 105.35 Laramie railroad town in se Wyoming. 106.25–6  bear an Emigrant for some twelve pounds from the Atlantic to the Golden Gates  Contemporary sources bear out this account of ticket prices: in 1880, an emigrant-class ticket from New York to California cost $65, or just over £12. The Golden Gate, misspelt as ‘Golden Gates’ by Stevenson throughout the work, is the strait connecting San Francisco Bay with the Pacific Ocean. 106.29–34  pig-tailed Chinese pirates … bad medicine waggon  Recent immigrants, many of them from China, undertook much of the construction work for the transatlantic railroad. ‘Bad medicine wagon’ was a Native American term for the trains that had invaded their territory. 107.2–3  Troy town … Homer  Troy was an ancient city in western Anatolia, attacked by the Greeks in the legendary Trojan War (later dated to the 12th or 13th century bc), the subject of Homer’s Iliad. For Homer, see note to 89.6. 107.6  the sleight and ferocity of Indians  In the 1850s, as the Native Americans living on the Great Plains came under increasing pressure from settlers and emigrants, attacks on emigrant wagons became more frequent. Army reprisals, too, intensified, and warfare frequently erupted between Native American peoples and the US Army. 204

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107.6–108.36  an original document … so ends this artless narrative  Stevenson’s landlady in San Francisco, Mary Carson, gave him the letter which he prints here (see Introduction, xxxv, and fig. 2, a facsimile of the first two pages of the original letter). The letter, written by Mary Carson’s brother in 1860, describes the boy’s journey from Pike’s Peak, Colorado, to Marysville, California. He probably joined the California Emigrant Trail, which crossed the Rocky Mountains at South Pass, in Wyoming, and traversed Idaho and Utah Territories and Nevada to California. 107.27  prairie chicken  large North American grouse, found mainly on prairies and in sage-brush. 109.2–3 Ogden … the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific  At Ogden, the Union Pacific Railroad ended and Stevenson changed trains, taking the Central Pacific Railroad to Oakland (see note to 100.6–7). 109.13–16  Dean Swift … Yahoo-like business  Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Anglo-Irish author and Anglican priest. In his satirical work Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Gulliver visits the Land of the Houyhnhnms, a rational and virtuous race of horses who contrast with the vicious and savage Yahoos, an embodiment of all that is repellent about humankind. 109.31  Saratoga trunk  a large trunk with a domed lid, named after Saratoga Springs, a holiday resort in New York State. 109.32  the Prince of Cambay  The reference is to the satiric poem Hudibras (1663–78), by Samuel Butler: ‘The Prince of Cambay’s daily food | Is asp, and basilisk, and toad, | Which makes him have so strong a breath, | Each night he stinks a queen to death’ (i. 753–6). See Butler, Hudibras: In Three Parts, Written in the Time of the Late Wars (London, 1806), i, 403. 110.32–9  I wish I could speak … from their surroundings  Stevenson’s wishes for this paragraph are unclear. He has circled the paragraph and connected it to a marginal instruction which reads ‘take in [illegible: possibly an insertion symbol] from p. 108’. This instruction, however, has then been scored out. It is possible that Stevenson intended the paragraph to be deleted: the diagonal line linking it to the marginal instruction does cut across a corner of the paragraph. However, Stevenson’s other long deletions are more clearly deleted: they are marked with a cross right through the centre or each line is struck 205

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through. On balance, it is likely that Stevenson originally wanted to move the paragraph to page 108 (for which there is no extant manuscript) or to replace it with material from that page, but then decided not to move it after all. The present edition leaves it where it is. The paragraph has not, as far as it is known, been published previously. 111.9    This star marks the point at which the manuscript ends and the present text switches to the Longman’s Magazine copy text for the final chapter and a half of the work. See Essay on the Text, 154. 111.16  San Francisco  Stevenson lived in San Francisco from December 1879 until March 1880. 111.18–19 Demogorgon a terrible deity, first mentioned in the 4th century ad. Demogorgon appears in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–6), John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), among other works. 111.21–4  Cornish miners … Lady Hester Stanhope  Many Cornish miners emigrated overseas in the 19th century, as employment opportunities in Cornwall were scarce for the large population of skilled miners. Lady Hester Stanhope (1776–1839) was a notable traveller and eccentric. Stevenson’s impression of her views on the Cornish must derive from Alexander Kinglake’s Eōthen (1844). In chapter 8, Kinglake described his meeting with Stanhope: One great subject of discourse was that of ‘race,’ upon which she was very diffuse, and yet rather mysterious […]. She had a vast idea of the Cornish miners on account of their race, and said, if she chose, she could give me the means of rousing them to the most tremendous enthusiasm. —Kinglake, Eōthen: Or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (1844; New York, 1858), 77. 111.26 Babel In the biblical book of Genesis, the ‘whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’, until the tower of Babel was built, whereupon God ‘did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth’ (Genesis 11. 1, 9). 111.33–5  Virginia … Pennsylvania … New York… Iowa … Kansas … Maine … the Canadas  There was westward movement from all the US states listed by Stevenson. By ‘the Canadas’, Stevenson means the two British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (although these 206

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had ceased to exist in 1841, when they were united in the Province of Canada, and in 1867 this colony was in turn united with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to form the Dominion of Canada). 111.38  short commons  insufficient rations. 112.8  Hungry Europe and hungry China  Europe was experiencing the Long Depression in these years; most of the immigrants came from the impoverished region of Guangdong (traditionally anglicized as Canton) in se China. 112.11  El Dorado  Spanish for ‘the gilded one’. ‘El Dorado’ was originally the name given to a legendary, fabulously wealthy king in South America: Spain and England dispatched expeditions to find this king in the 16th century. The term came to mean the ‘golden city’ and, metaphorically, any place where wealth might be quickly and easily acquired. 112.24–6  the Sand-lot of San Francisco … the rant of demagogues  The ‘sand-lot’ was an empty building site situated outside the City Hall in San Francisco. There, crowds numbering in the thousands gathered in these years to listen to Denis Kearney (1847–1907), an Irish-born labour leader who harnessed and stoked anti-Chinese sentiment, complaining about the use of Chinese labour to drive down wages. Stevenson wrote in more detail about Kearney in his 1880 essay, ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ (Chatto, 102–3). 112.30  love change and travel for themselves  Stevenson echoes his sentiments in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes: ‘I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints’ (Travels, 35). 113.2–3  the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians … the Chinese car  Anti-Chinese prejudice and agitation were rife in the postbellum United States, and found legislative expression in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. While this was a national act, tensions were particularly high in California, the destination for most of the Chinese immigrants who arrived in the States in the second half of the 19th century. 113.5 Mongols Correctly used, the term denotes a Central Asian ethnographic group of closely related tribal peoples who live mainly 207

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on the Central Mongolian Plateau. The term was used more widely in the 19th century, however, to include various East and Central Asian populations, and in the present context it denotes the Chinese. 114.2  John Bull … unhappy Zazel  John Bull is the popular personification of England or English character. Rosa Richter (1862–1922), known as ‘Zazel’, achieved fame as one of the first human cannon-balls. The protegée of William Leonard Hunt (the ‘Great Farini’), she was launched, as a fourteen-year-old, in 1877, at the Royal Aquarium in London. 114.4–6  Pat … compliant farmer … solitary Chinaman  ‘Pat’, an abbreviation of Patrick (the patron saint of Ireland and a common Irish forename), is a slang term—usually derogatory—for an Irish person. Stevenson alludes to the Land League, an agrarian organization formed in 1879 which campaigned for the reform of Ireland’s landlord system. The Land League discouraged violence, relying on peaceful methods such as boycotting, but a minority of supporters threatened or attacked those who opposed the Land League’s objectives, including ‘compliant’ farmers who accepted tenancies from landlords who had unfairly evicted their previous tenants. The description of ‘Pat […] ston[ing] the solitary Chinaman in California’ is a reference to the Irishman Denis Kearney’s role in fomenting anti-Chinese violence (see note to 112.24–6). 114.8  the Celestial Empire  translation of a native name for China. 114.12  Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese, that must go  ‘The Chinese must go’ was the slogan adopted by Denis Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party of California in the late 1870s (see note to 112.24–6). The Irish had long been subject to nativist prejudice and anti-Catholic discrimination. Now, as the Irish-born Kearney’s own story illustrates, some Irish Americans sought to claim full American status by defining themselves against non-Caucasians. 114.15–16  the free tradition of the republic  the idea that the United States provided an asylum for the oppressed, articulated most eloquently in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776). George Bancroft’s History of the United States, which Stevenson carried with him across the continent (see note to 84.23–4), observed the ‘immense concourse of emigrants […] perpetually crowding to our shores’ and celebrated the republic for ‘fearlessly open[ing] an asylum to the virtuous, the unfortunate, and the oppressed of every nation.’—History of the Unit­ 208

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ed States of America from the Discovery of the American Continent, 6 vols (Boston, 1876), i, 2–3. 114.20  a vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot  a reference to Denis Kearney. For his biography, and for the ‘Sand-lot’, see note to 112.24–6. 114.21  Abraham Lincoln  Abraham Lincoln (1809–65), president of the United States from 1861 to 1865, opposed the extension of slavery into the West, and led the Union during the American Civil War (1861–5). Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863; slavery was abolished with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. 114.23 Mongolians See note to 113.5. 114.34–5  They hear the clock … a different epoch  Belief in the antiquity of Chinese culture was central to 19th-century racial stereotypes. Thomas De Quincey, for example, reflected on the ‘mere antiquity of Asiatic things’, observing that ‘A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed’—Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), 3rd edn (London, 1823), 101. 114.37–9  the Great Wall … hamlets round Pekin  The Great Wall of China is a defensive system erected in ancient China. The Chinese capital, Beijing, was known as Peking (or the alternative Pekin) in the 19th century. 115.6–8  that old, grey, castled city … the red-coat sentry  the city of Edinburgh, situated on the Firth of Forth; and Edinburgh Castle, which was patrolled by British Army soldiers. 115.9 junks flat-bottomed sailing vessels used in the Chinese seas. 115.12–13  the noble red man of old story  The idea of the Native American as ‘noble savage’ circulated widely in 19th-century literature, being most influentially set forth in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather­stocking Tales. Stevenson mentions having read Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) in November 1868, in a letter to his cousin Bob (Letters 1: 170). 115.21  cockney baseness  ‘Cockney’ was a slang term for a workingclass central Londoner; here, it connotes boorish and vulgar behaviour. 115.28–31  as the States extended westward … eviction of the Cherokees  After the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), the victorious US government forced defeated Native American peoples 209

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to cede their land; this pattern was repeated after the War of 1812. As the westward drive of Euro-American settlement gathered pace, Native Americans were evicted from their land. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 provided funds for removing the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee) and Seminole peoples. In 1838–9, the US Army forced 18,000 Cherokee men, women and children to travel from Georgia to present-day Oklahoma; at least one-quarter died that winter on what came to be known as the Trail of Tears. By 1840, Native Americans had been driven from nearly all land east of the Mississippi, and throughout the rest of the century the federal government continued to harass and oppress them, forcing them onto reservations, and pursuing assimilationist policies in conjunction with military action. 115.32  extortion of Indian agents  First established by the 1793 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, the position of Indian agent was part of Congress’s assimilationist policy. Indian agents, who were responsible for enforcing federal policies and power at a local level, represented the federal government’s ongoing exploitation and oppression of Native American peoples. 116.4  the county of Monterey … the river of Carmel  Monterey is a county in western California, situated on the Pacific coast. The River Carmel runs through Carmel Valley into the Pacific, just south of the town of Monterey, where Stevenson lived from the end of August until mid-December 1879. 116.5 chapparal a thicket of low evergreen oaks; more generally, dense, tangled brushwood and shrubs. 116.7 kine cattle. 116.8  a ruined mission on a hill  The Spanish Franciscan missionary Father Junípero Serra (1713–84) founded the Mission San Carlos Borroméo del Río Carmelo in 1770, at Monterey, as the Spaniards attempted to colonize the area; he moved it to the Carmel area the following year. In 1821, Alta California passed from Spanish colonial to Mexican rule, and financial support for the missions dwindled; in 1834, the mission was closed and fell into ruin. 116.12–13  one day in every year … the Indians return to worship  The day, 4 November, was the feast day of San Carlos Borroméo. In 1879, Stevenson attended the service, which was led by Father Angelo Casanova, the priest at the Old Presidio chapel in Monterey. 210

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Stevenson describes the experience in more detail in his 1880 essay, ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ (Chatto, 105–6). 116.17–18 Gregorian music … ancient European Massbooks  Gregorian music, also known as ‘plainchant’ or ‘plainsong’, was the unaccompanied sacred song of the western Roman Catholic Church. The mass-book contains the service for the Eucharist, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, for the whole year. 116.25–6  he and his people lived in plenty under the wing of the kind priests  Stevenson presents a romanticized picture of the lives of Native Americans at the missions during Spanish colonial rule, neglecting the realities of forced labour and disease. 116.26 Rancherie small Native American settlement. 117.1  Golden Gates  See note to 106.25–6. 117.2 A little corner of Utah  From Ogden, the Central Pacific Railroad crossed the nw corner of Utah. Utah was still at this time a territory; it would achieve statehood in 1896. 117.4–5  Toano … Nevada  Toano was a railroad town in eastern Nevada. A contemporary guidebook describes the country around Toano as ‘barren and desolate in appearance—not very inviting to the traveler or settler’­—Henry T. Williams (ed.), The Pacific Tourist: Wil­ liams’ Illustrated Trans-Continental Guide of Travel (New York, 1877), 173. Nevada, a mountainous state, had recently been admitted to statehood (in 1864). 117.8  Hail, brither Scots!  ‘Brither’ is the Scots form of ‘brother’. The phrase ‘Hail, brither Scots!’ and variants upon it were staples of emigrant verse and other texts produced by expatriate Scots who sought to build ethnic networks. 117.16 the bit, or old Mexican real  This was a former Spanish coin, more fully the ‘real of plate’ or (in Spanish) ‘real de plata’, equal to an eighth of a dollar. It was widely circulated in the United States until around 1850 and in Mexico until 1897. 118.2  Benjamin Franklin  See note to 79.1–4. 118.14 Elko railroad town in eastern Nevada. 118.23–4  Auld Lang Syne … The Wearing of the Green  For ‘Auld Lang Syne’, see note to 18.37–19.1. ‘The Wearing of the Green’ was an 211

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Irish ballad lamenting the persecution of nationalists for ‘the wearing of the Green’. The earliest version is a 1798 street ballad entitled ‘Green Upon the Cape’, and later versions included ‘The Wearing of the Green’, adapted by Dion Boucicault for his play Arrah-na-Pogue (1864). 119.17  It was like meeting one’s wife  Stevenson’s relief in reaching a familiar landscape is expressed in terms that intimate that he is nearing Fanny’s presence. In a book which makes no mention of Fanny, the simile is significant. 119.22  Blue Canyon, Alta, Dutch Flat  Blue Canyon, Alta and Dutch Flat are small towns on the railroad line between the Sierra Nevada and Sacramento. 119.34–40  Sacramento … the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay … Tamalpais  Sacramento, from 1879 the permanent state capital of California, was the original western terminus of the Central Pacific Railroad, but the line was soon extended to the city of Oakland, which lies on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. Mount Tamalpais lies across the Golden Gate from the city of San Francisco. 120.2  The tall hills Titan discoverèd  The quotation is from The Faerie Queen (1590–6) by Edmund Spenser. Spenser’s line, ‘And the high hils Titan discovered’, describes the coming of the dawn (Book i, Canto ii. 7. 4). Stevenson slightly misremembers the line, but his addition of the grave accent helps the reader to scan the verse. See H. J. Todd (ed.), The Works of Edmund Spenser, 8 vols (London, 1805), ii, 55.

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