Chapter 52 - Page 2

did a single day pass, but
scores of the poor people got no chance whatever to do their cooking.

This was bad enough; but it was a still more miserable thing, to see
these poor emigrants wrangling and fighting together for the want of the
most ordinary accommodations. But thus it is, that the very hardships to
which such beings are subjected, instead of uniting them, only tends, by
imbittering their tempers, to set them against each other; and thus they
themselves drive the strongest rivet into the chain, by which their
social superiors hold them subject.

It was with a most reluctant hand, that every evening in the second
dog-watch, at the mate's command, I would march up to the fire, and
giving notice to the assembled crowd, that the time was come to
extinguish it, would dash it out with my bucket of salt water; though
many, who had long waited for a chance to cook, had now to go away
disappointed.

The staple food of the Irish emigrants was oatmeal and water, boiled
into what is sometimes called mush; by the Dutch is known as supaan; by
sailors burgoo; by the New Englanders hasty-pudding; in which
hasty-pudding, by the way, the poet Barlow found the materials for a
sort of epic.

Some of the steerage passengers, however, were provided with
sea-biscuit, and other perennial food, that was eatable all the year
round, fire or no fire.

There were several, moreover, who seemed better to do in the world than
the rest; who were well furnished with hams, cheese, Bologna sausages,
Dutch herrings, alewives, and other delicacies adapted to the
contingencies of a voyager in the steerage.

There was a little old Englishman on board, who had been a grocer
ashore, whose greasy trunks seemed all pantries; and he was constantly
using himself for a cupboard, by transferring their contents into his
own interior. He was a little light of head, I always thought. He
particularly doated on his long strings of sausages; and would sometimes
take them out, and play with them, wreathing them round him, like an
Indian juggler with charmed snakes. What with this diversion, and eating
his cheese, and helping himself from an inexhaustible junk bottle, and
smoking his pipe, and meditating, this crack-pated grocer made time jog
along with him at a tolerably easy pace.

But by far the most considerable man in the steerage, in point of
pecuniary circumstances at least, was a slender little pale-faced
English tailor, who it seemed had engaged a passage for himself and wife
in some imaginary section of the ship, called the second cabin, which
was feigned to combine the comforts of the first cabin with the
cheapness of the steerage. But it turned out that this second cabin was
comprised in the