Come sail away with me

For the next couple of weeks, we will depart from my family's ancestors and their link to the times they lived in and spend some time dealing solely in history. 

As previously noted many of our ancestors came to America as part of the original settlement of the country. They had exactly one choice of transportation for at least a couple of hundreds years for making the voyage -- sailing ships. 

Now, maybe you've taken a cruise at some point, or you've seen a movie or television show that involves cruise ships. Maybe you've seen one of the movies about the Titanic and are aware that the ships making the Atlantic crossing and carrying immigrant passengers were divided into classes, with the passengers who could least afford the trip placed in steerage. 

You might think that those sparse cabins that lacked any but the most basic of amenities might be somewhat similar to the conditions our ancestors faced when immigrating to the New World. If so, put those thoughts completely out of your mind. The steerage class accommodations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would have seemed like luxury digs to the people who traveled here in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

Let's look at an example. We're all familiar with the Mayflower, the ship that brought the first bunch of Pilgrims and Puritans to the shores of New England. The ship measured 106 feet overall and had a beam of 25.5 feet. Note that the beam is the widest part of the ship. The width tapers toward the forward and aft parts of the boat. It had three decks, the main deck, the gun deck and the cargo deck. 

The cargo deck would have held mostly the provisions necessary for making the trip. The gun deck served as the passenger area -- about 80 feet by 25 feet, at most, with the aft 15-20 feet reserved for the guns. Now if you're quickly trying to figure out how much space that is, it ain't much. Bigger than a modern tiny house, to be sure, but only about the square footage, if that much, of the modest house I live in, somewhere in the neighborhood of  1,300 odd square feet of living space.

This amount of space is fine for two people who occasionally have our children in for the holidays, though we can feel a bit cramped then. But the passengers for this trip numbered 102, men, women and children. Three of the women were pregnant. The crew size came to somewhere between 20 and 30, and they inhabited two areas on the main deck, the forecastle, or foc'sle, and the aft deck quarters for the officers. Also, the ship had three masts, which penetrated the ship, dividing the living area even more. 

For privacy, such as it was, passengers would hang blankets to create space, but with that many people, you can only take up so much room. 

The colony's most famous governor, William Bradford kept a log or diary of the trip and the early days of the colony that was later collected into a book and published called Of Plymouth Plantation. You can read it on Google Books, but be aware that it's written in pre-standardized English, so it's a bit of a slog. Spellings vary, sometimes in the same paragraph, and you will constantly stumble of the word "ye," which means "the," not "you." 

Now these travelers were supposed to be taking two ships, but one was leaky, and the ships had to turn back to England and cram everyone on board the Mayflower. The first half or so of the journey went fairly well, with relatively calm seas and good weather. But boats like the Mayflower weren't built for deep ocean travel and tended to bob around a bit. Many passengers were seasick, making the living area somewhat miserable. In foul weather, the ship would have tried the constitution of almost every civilian aboard.

Fresh-ish food ran out before long, and by the time the ship encountered bad weather, the primary form of sustenance was ship's biscuit, a nonleavened, dry, almost hard as a rock flour concoction, and dried meat. Yum

In good times, ship's biscuit was usually broken up and added to water as thickener for a soup or stew. After a few weeks on board, it tended to be insect-ridden and provided little nutritional value. And during storms cooking fires were not allowed -- it was a wooden boat after all. 

Bad weather and bad food made for more sickness and the accumulation of waste, as passengers could not go up top to dispose of the waste. They also didn't bathe. In storms, the joints between the planks would leak, and sea water would seep through the main deck, making the living area a moist nightmare. Water that passed on to the lower deck and bilge would stagnate, increasing the stench the passengers had to endure.

Speaking of water, the drinkable water on board became fetid, and the passengers tended to substitute beer, even for their children. Not sure how alcoholic 17th century beer was, but it still probably wasn't that great for growing boys and girls. 

At one point during the storm one of the sailors [Correction: It was actually one of the passengers] on deck fell overboard but managed to grab one of the lines that had come loose and hung over the side. He was dragged through the water until other crewmen could haul him in. 

And did I fail to mention the voyage took place from September to early November? It tends to be cold in the Atlantic then. 

Amazing only one passenger died, a boy traveling as an indentured servant to one of the Pilgrims. Also one of the pregnant women delivered her child, a boy who was named Oceanus. Sadly he died two years later. Another child born after the landing, Peregrine White, survived to adulthood and led a military life, participating in King Philip's War, which we have mentioned in other posts. The third pregnant woman had a girl, surviving her parents who died that first winter. She married John Allen and had several children.

Now, you may think that surely the conditions improved over the years, but next week we'll look at the account of an German immigrant who traveled to America about 130 years later. 

Image: The Mayflower II, a full-sized replica of the original. Taken from plimoth.org/