A Century of Sea Travel: Personal Accounts from the Steamship Era

By Christopher Deakes and Tom Stanley

This “handsome volume” offers a “lavishly illustrated” journey back to the golden age of steam travel through first-hand accounts and images of the passengers (Bruce Peter, author of Ship Style).
 
A Century of Sea Travel is an eye-opening voyage through the golden years of the passenger steamship, a voyage described by the very travelers who sailed on these magnificent engineering marvels. In memoirs and letters home, diaries and the backs of postcards, the recorded experiences of every aspect of steamship travel are here relived: from details of the ships, the crew, and fellow passengers; to the food and entertainment on board; to tales of romance, accidents, and disasters; and of being dreadfully sick during storms at sea. The writers were emigrants or colonial rulers, men of letters, young men seeking their fortune, wives on their way to new homes abroad; some were rich, many were poor and escaping the hardship of downtrodden lives. All had in common the experience of voyaging at sea.
 
Vividly brought to life by full-color and black-and-white postcards, travel posters, promotional brochures, fine art, photographs, maps, luggage labels, health inspection certificates, and itineraries, the authors have woven together word and image into a page-turning narrative that evocatively describes an age (1840–1950) now lost to time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783468799

Christopher Deakes

Christopher Deakes worked for many years as a shipping agent in the Far East and in different parts of Africa. He has been an avid collector of shipping postcards and his first book, The Postcard History of the Passenger Liner, was published to great acclaim.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This book is a voyage through the life of the passenger steamship. It is a voyage described by the words of travellers who sailed on these vessels, carrying within it their thoughts and experiences, mirrored here in words and pictures reflecting their journeys of the past. The pictures are memories of ships and places in times gone by, glimpses of steamship travel through the years, while the words are those of the travellers themselves. They put pen to paper to record every aspect of their seagoing experiences: they wrote of their ship, its crew and their fellow passengers, of the food and entertainment on board, of romance, accidents and disasters, and of being dreadfully sick. They noted incidents on board that amused or angered them, described the ports at which their ship called, and the fear and excitement of storms at sea.

Centuries before the steamship, it was a storm at sea that engulfed perhaps the first recorded traveller to board a ship as a fare-paying passenger. That was Jonah. His voyage was certainly adventurous, though not in the way he might have wanted. But nobody travelling by sailing ship could look forward with certainty to a safe journey, and in his description of a voyage in the fifteenth century, Felix Fabri, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, making the reverse journey to Jonah’s through the Mediterranean, wrote that the sea ‘strikes terror into the soul; it causes headache, it provokes vomiting and nausea; it destroys appetite for food and drink; it excites the passions and produces many strange vices;… and often brings men to a most cruel death.’

Much later, all these experiences would be related by passengers on steamships, but at least they felt more confident about sea travel. Even quite early in the steamship era, in 1846 – a year after the Great Britain, Brunel’s famous Atlantic liner, came into service – the traveller Ida Pfeiffer wrote that ‘On board a steamer everything is agreeable and luxurious; the vessel pursues her rapid course independent of the wind, and the passengers enjoy good and fresh provisions, spacious cabins, and excellent society.’

At a time of rapid industrial evolution, the passenger steamship was perhaps the most outstanding development of the age. There was nothing to beat it for news coverage: the newspapers and magazines excitedly reported the latest launches as liner followed liner down the slipways, each an improvement on the last – larger, faster, with the latest innovations, better accommodation, more funnels. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the construction of steamships raced ahead: nearly fifty liners of 10,000 tons or more came into service in the five years leading up to 1900, where there had been just five constructed before that. And as the new century dawned, the number of steamships that had been built already exceeded 1,200.

‘On board a steamer everything is agreeable and luxurious:’ it is true that not everyone shared quite so rosy a view as this, especially in the early years of steamship travel. Charles Dickens, for example, crossing the Atlantic in 1842 on the Britannia, described his stateroom as ‘this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box’, while the saloon was ‘not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides.’ As for the food, Mrs E A Forbes, sailing on the Great Eastern in 1863, wrote that ‘the viands are badly furnished and worse cooked.’ The ‘excellent society’ that Ida Pfeiffer wrote of was not always in evidence: ‘On the whole a rough looking lot,’ noted Joseph Sams of his fellow passengers during his 1874 voyage to Australia on the Northumberland. But those were early days, when the message most eagerly awaited by loved ones left behind was ‘Have arrived safely.’

Towards the end of the century and into the next, ships rapidly improved, and the number of passengers increased as they filled the liners which transported them all over the globe. These travellers included emigrants to every corner of the world, who had taken the heavy decision to leave home in the hope of finding a better life for their families, whom they often had to leave behind. Then there were soldiers, posted to defend distant backwaters of the expanding empires, where they could remain for several years. The far-away new colonies needed visionaries and practical people of every kind, including planters, engineers and traders. They were accompanied by others with high ideals, such as missionaries and teachers, as well as some with baser aims, speculators and adventurers convinced they would make their fortunes. Yet other passengers boarded just for the voyage, sick in body or mind, hoping only that a sea voyage would cure them. And then there were the rich, who had the time and the money to sail the seas in leisurely fashion to wherever they felt inclined.

The Gateway To India – Arrival at Bombay was for thousands of passengers the crowning moment of their voyage.

Barely a dozen adventurous passengers set off on this 1899 sailing for little-known West African ports.

From young and old, the humblest to the grandest, from both wealthy and those down on their luck, there flowed over the years in diaries and letters their thoughts and experiences of the voyages on which they had embarked.

This book is a kaleidoscope of thoughts and colours – the observations of steamship passengers spanning many decades, accompanied by a rich array of illustrations from the different periods in which they travelled. It is fitting that these voices from the past should describe the experience of sea travel at a time when the passenger ship was queen in ‘the golden age of travel’. But the golden glow of nostalgia shines very thinly on some aspects of steamship life, and in these pages travellers sometimes shine a different light on how things really were. Yet the image of the passenger liner remains one of serene progress through deep blue seas to exotic lands far away; and from such splendid vessels the message those left behind expect to receive is ‘Having a lovely time.’

DEPARTURE

There Go the Ships

Young men so often left their sweethearts to go abroad to establish a new life for them both, and could be away for years.

Parents often consigned their children to boarding school when they sailed to the colonies – and were seldom back again ‘soon.’

We live in an age when travel by sea is for pleasure, so that we look forward happily to the prospect of sunlit days on a liner gliding through calm, sparkling seas while a bell melodiously calls us for yet another meal. But the abiding image of a shipside departure in the decades leading up to the First World War is of a weeping young wife, with a child clinging to her skirt, being separated from her husband who is emigrating in the hope of finding a better life for them all.

The deep apprehension of those who had bravely taken the decision to emigrate was further clouded by the uncertainty of the journey, which encompassed both the unknown shipmates with whom the emigrant would be berthed and the capriciousness of the sea itself. When the twenty-eight-year-old writer R L Stevenson prepared to sail for America in 1879 to be with his future wife in California, he booked his passage in the Anchor Line steamship Devonia, then barely two years old and built for the emigrant trade. ‘I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow,’ Stevenson wrote. ‘Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance on each other as on possible enemies … Among English speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme … and with the falling temperature the gloom among the passengers increased.’ The sadness of departure and fear about the future must have dominated their thoughts, but for many, emigration was a relief. The hardship of life in Britain was such that a fresh start in another country could only be better. There would have been many like young Harry Clark who wrote, as he prepared to leave his homeland in 1907, ‘This is my last day in Scotland and I for one am exceedingly glad.’ He and his younger brother embarked together on the new Donaldson liner Cassandra, built to help meet the Canadian immigration boom of the 1900s, and eventually he settled in British Columbia. Like so many who departed these shores and left their families behind, he was never to return.

‘As we left the quay people were given paper streamers to throw. With loud and hearty cries they threw them to the people on shore.’

But some booked passage knowing that they would return. ‘There were querulous people who predicted troublous times for the old country,’ wrote William Morris in 1874, and he decided to visit Canada and America ‘to see what the chances were there when the deluge should come, and drive us all out from the old country.’ Morris, founder of the Swindon Advertiser, was not yet forty when he paid for a cabin berth on the Allan Line’s Moravian with the aim of spending two months seeing ‘what the chances were.’ He travelled by train to Liverpool with men and women torn apart from their families, ‘those left behind telling more plainly than mere words could do that those from whom they were parting were starting on a journey never, in all human probability, to be repeated.’ And those who left, ‘how occasionally their eyes would meet, … and would pass off into a dreaming listlessness as their minds wandered to and fro, into the past and into the future.’ Once he reached Liverpool, Morris ‘found that the steerage passengers would be required to be on board by eleven o’clock in the morning, and the cabin passengers by four in the afternoon.’ The reason given for the different timings was that ‘the Government inspectors may see that every passenger is properly cared for, and has proper accommodation provided.’

It was wise to insure yourself against falling out of your bunk, or drowning when the ship sank. Or losing your luggage, of course.

Cunard White Star Line seat reservation.

‘On no.12 and 13 platforms’ – the Liverpool boat train was just one that served the country’s ports from London’s terminii.

The journey to the ship for embarkation was often not a particularly happy experience, even if one was rich. When Sir Frederick Treves, the well-known Surgeon to the Royal Household who had treated the Elephant Man and had saved King Edward VII’s life with a bold operation, travelled to Tilbury in November 1903 at the beginning of a round the world tour, he wrote of a ‘too-animated train filled with restless and disordered folk’ who ‘talk or laugh or weep in gusts,’ both those about to sail and those who had come to see them off filled with anxiety. ‘When the ship is reached,’ he observed, ‘they still find no peace,’ and scurry about ‘like ants in a disturbed ant-heap.’ It did not help that most ports had a dismal air about them – ‘The grey curtain hanging before the brilliant scenes of the play,’ was how Treves described Tilbury.

‘A pleasant and pretty sail in smooth water,’ was what Robert Roberts noted in his diary in 1897 as he and his family sailed in a tender down Southampton Water to reach their ship. Then editor of The Christadelphian, Roberts was en route to Australia, but at this juncture admitted to an uncertainty. ‘We did not know which of the steamers might be the Darmstadt,’ he wrote. ‘One had two funnels and the other one funnel. Judging by the two-funnelled illustration on the business circular of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, we considered ourselves justified in concluding in favour of the two-funneled boat.’ Well, no: it was the other, for as he then realised, ‘The picture on the circulars was no doubt the picture of the best steamer in the fleet; of course, whoever puts the worst sample in the window?’

In those days before the Great War, for those who had the money and had no need to emigrate, a long sea voyage was the ideal way to pass the time. Life was fine once you were in your state room or cabin, but getting there could be tiresome. ‘We left London in the salon carriage of the train to Tilbury Dock,’ wrote the Duchess of Buckingham & Chandos, on her way to board an Australia-bound P&O liner in 1892, ‘where friends and all were packed like herrings in a barrel on a small tug to go out to the Arcadia.’ The Duchess, in her forties and between husbands, had decided on a whim to sail around the world, and expected rather more than such an undignified departure, especially as she was travelling on one of the P&O’s finest ships. Her ‘manifold goods and chattels’ amounted to several trunks of clothes and she was swamped with presents, most of which she deemed to be useless and which probably ended up overboard.

Devonia was one of a continuous shuttle service of transatlantic liners that carried emigrants to their lands of hope in the late nineteenth century.

This 1931 brochure assured passengers on this ‘most popular and interesting route’ that the fare included meals, bedding, table requisites, and baths.

In the same year, Frederick Lort-Phillips, barely out of his teens and determined to become a great hunter and traveller – he later became vice-president of the Zoological Society of London – embarked with a friend on the White Star liner Majestic for the voyage to New York. ‘As we expected to mix with the inhabitants of the wild and woolly west,’ he wrote, ‘we had brought with us such weapons as we thought would help us in preserving our lives.’ He went about with two hunting knives and a revolver as well as a week’s growth of beard, which he hoped would frighten the baddies away. His fellow passengers, however, were ‘not favourably impressed.’

William Redstone, a Cornish shoesmith (farrier), had emigrated to New Zealand in 1879 with his young family, and in 1903 returned to England with his wife to visit relatives and make a round-the-world voyage of it. For the next leg of his trip, a special train took him from London for the Atlantic crossing on what was then the world’s largest liner. ‘The Oceanic train at Euston was on no. 12 and 13 platforms,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The long train comprised 28 bogey corridor carriages and left Euston in 2 sections with 2 heavy engines to each and went right through to Liverpool with only one stoppage covering the 200 odd miles in 4 hours. The train went right alongside the Oceanic and its human freight and luggage were soon on board.’

Southampton was favoured by continental lines to pick up British passengers such as Robert Roobrts.

Travelling alone in 1881, 2nd saloon to Adelaide, the ticket for Miss Emma Gibbs.

American Line wanted on voyage label

Lake Champlain about to leave Liverpool for Canada with her cargo of emigrants.

On the afternoon of February 25, the cables were taken on board, the ponderous shafts of the mighty engine began to move, the quivering, instant response of the vessel was felt, and the stately ship of 6,000 tons burden swung from her moorings.

LEONARD MORRISON

Steamer trunks and presents from well-wishers were part of the departure scene. Treves spoke of ‘a veritable ruin of flowers,’ but some gifts were not so obvious. J Drake, sending a postcard to Miss Kathy Foster from Tilbury in 1914, acknowledged her gift to ease his passage to the tropics on the Mooltan: ’Thank you for the butter and the nuts,’ he wrote, ‘It was a surprise.’ As for baggage, when the American businessman Robert Oxnard travelled with his wife in 1919 on a round the world trip, the ‘suit cases and trunk’ with which he started soon grew into ‘twelve pieces of baggage, large and small,’ which somehow he had to fit into their cabin. Nor was it just civilians who travelled well-equipped. Sub-lieutenant Charles Owen, RN, boarded the troopship Dunera in 1937 for the Far East with ‘a hefty wooden chest, a trunk, a large metal case, a couple of suitcases, a helmet box and a golf bag full of clubs, sword and walking sticks.’

Percy Etherton, not yet twenty, followed the path of the Duchess when he took his first steps as a traveller and explorer by being drawn by ‘the fascination of the Colonies’ to sail for Australia (rather than Canada, which was too cold), and also found ‘this unsentimental benumbing spot known as Tilbury’ rather a crush when he boarded the Orient liner Orizaba in 1898. ‘We reached the dock by a railway in keeping with the rest of the background,’ he wrote, referring to ‘the dreariness, the mud and the murky river.’ Nor was he impressed with the embarkation, with ‘the struggling passengers forcing their way on board. They were of all sorts and conditions, a dense and somewhat disorderly crowd, carrying their goods and bundles, hurrying along with what seemed to be unaccountable haste.’ It was not the ‘quiet, dignified embarkation’ that he had imagined would begin his adventure. Etherton’s passage was paid only as far as Australia: thereafter, he had to make his own way.

In spite of its rather negative reviews, Tilbury was a major port, although it had only been opened in 1886. The Orient Line’s Guide of 1888 described it ‘among the most colossal undertakings of the day.’ Here, passengers boarded liners for both colonial and transatlantic destinations, and it was inevitable that the mass of humans seeking transportation were not as orderly as Etherton or Treves had expected. The more leisurely kind of embarkation that he sought was found only in small ports, whose less imposing ships offered limited accommodation and the number of passengers on the quayside was far fewer. Such as at Fremantle, which Etherton reached some time later, and from where he decided to take a coaster to Sydney. ‘I strolled along the wharf, found a steamer called the Kalgoorlie, and joined her as the chief cook’s assistant,’ he wrote. It was that simple. Then he added, ‘I survived the voyage,’ though whether this was in spite of his cooking he did not say.

The writer Maurice Baring was unlucky enough to arrive at Tilbury docks in the middle of a strike, in June 1912. ‘As soon as I get on board (the Orient ship) the lift-boy assures me that there are only eight old hands in the liner – all the rest have struck,’ he wrote. Most of the new stewards had never been to sea; nobody knew where anything was; worst of all, The steward in the smoking-room doesn’t know where the materials for liquid refreshments are concealed.’ For people travelling emigrant class, this was the least of their worries. The traveller and writer Stephen Graham, still in his twenties, embarked early in 1913 on a Cunarder at Liverpool with a mixed bag of a dozen nationalities who were hoping for a better life across the Atlantic. ‘There were fifteen hundred of us; each man and woman, still carrying handbags and baskets, filed past a doctor and two assistants, and was cursorily examined for diseases of the eye or skin.’ More examinations were to come.

Health inspection was mandatory for passengers leaving for North America – and again on arrival there.

‘Men Wanted‘ – advertisements tried to attract settlers to fill the wide open spaces of Canada.

This 1892 White Star Line notice confirms the rush for steerage berths in America.

Neither the somewhat disorderly scrimmage reported at Tilbury, nor the casual method of embarkation at Fremantle, were applicable when troops prepared to embark for war zones. ‘May 8th. March down to the station (at Cawnpore). Crowds arrive at 10am. Wish all Good Bye. Train leaves for Bombay 10.55am. May 9th. Arrive Bombay at 2.05pm. Put up at Salvation Army Home… Do not think much of Bombay. May 10th. Move down to the Alexandra Docks at 9am. Embark at 2pm on board the s.s. Pentakota.’ The staccato style of his diary reflects the brisk, orderly manner of the departure of twenty-year-old Private H Deakes, Maxim gunner, and his fellow Cawnpore volunteers for East Africa on this old British India Line ship. It was no less than one would expect of British soldiers in 1915. For these men, there was something comforting about going to war with the BI: the line was part of Indian life.

However, when the war ended, there were certainly some cases of disorderly scrimmage. The Russian American Line’s Kursk had been put under Cunard management after the 1917 Revolution, and when war ended the liner had to embark 1,500 Australian civilians at Liverpool. ‘They had been employed as munitions workers in England, and were being repatriated,’ wrote the chief steward, Mr Pimbly. ‘For our consort, sailing with us we had an Australian troopship laden with Digger Tommies. Before we sailed, the two rival groups had a pitched battle on the dock-side.’ The reason was the soldiers’ resentment that fellow Australians who had had a safer, better-paid war, were now sailing home in comparative luxury while the former returned in basic troopship accommodation. These two ships were to meet again on the long voyage home.

Some twenty years later, former newspaper reporter Corporal Vic Went, aged twenty-two, underwent a similar orderly experience, as had Private Deakes, when he embarked on 5 August 1940 for an unknown destination with a detachment of the Royal Army Pay Corps. ‘I had no idea where we were travelling that night – in the blackout – but at 0400 hrs the train came to a standstill and we found we were at Marsh Lane station, Bootle. On the platform waiting for us were a group of ladies with tea trolleys … What a wonderful send-off. Double decker buses left the station for the docks and by 0530 we were all installed in the Empress of Britain.’ It was all very regimented. But while the old Pentakota outlived her war, Canadian Pacific’s flagship survived just two months more before being sunk – the largest liner lost in the war. Rather surprisingly, in the First World War, soldiers often knew where they were going – as did Private Deakes before he had left Cawnpore – but in the second, there was a great deal more secrecy about both destinations and ships, as Vic Went experienced. However, this secrecy was somewhat selective. The child Susan Neaverson, about to travel with her mother from India to England at the end of 1944, said that while in the transit camp in Poona waiting for the homeward convoy to assemble at Bombay, ‘We had to paint a large E on our baggage as the name of ship was terribly secret in case the Germans got to know and tried to sink us.’ However, ‘The Italian prisoners of war at the camp told us we were going on the Strathaird.’ As indeed she did. And as soon as she scrambled up onto her bunk in the cabin, ‘I was sick all over it. My mother was furious as we had to use the ship’s precious water to clean it up.’

Between the wars, cruising came into its own, and shipping lines and travel agents advertised widely, while fashionable magazines extolled the attractions of exotic places where the sun seemed to shine all the time and everyone was happy. But not everyone was. ‘Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh, describing a Mediterranean voyage he made in 1929 a few years after he had left Oxford, on the Norwegian cruise liner Stella Polaris. ‘As I watched my luggage being lifted on to the Stella I knew that it was no use keeping up the pretence any longer. My fellow passengers and I were tourists.’ Indeed, tourist class had come into being in a large way since 1920. This was partly due to the great range of people who could now afford to travel by sea, and also to the fact that transatlantic liners in particular had to find new business now that immigration into the United States had been severely curtailed. Of course it sounded better to be a traveller rather than a tourist, but even travellers were not always happy about their departure. For example, the antiquarian and explorer Charles Luxmoore was not best pleased when he set off for Brazil in 1927 to look for his fellow Devonian Colonel Fawcett, who had disappeared two years earlier on an expedition to the Matto Grosso. ‘We are welcomed aboard with a gramophone and loudspeaker, a horrible row,’ he wrote, on boarding the Booth liner Hildebrand at Liverpool. And his journey was to get worse.

A horrible row was what also struck the photographer Cecil Beaton as he prepared to leave Southampton on the Queen Mary’s maiden voyage in 1936. ‘Aeroplanes roared above,’ he wrote, ships’ hoots ‘rent the very earth.’ On board, there was ‘a Hieronymous Bosch inferno of activity,’ with crowds ‘swarming like excited ants’ to inspect the liner. Some similarity of chaos afflicted the anthropologist F C C Egerton, sailing from Liverpool on the Elder Dempster liner Abosso for equatorial Africa around the same time. His wife and others had ensured that he was well prepared for his tropical adventure. ‘I found myself in a cabin littered with steel boxes and helmet cases, with twenty-four miscellaneous packages of all shapes and sizes scattered about the ship,’ he wrote. ‘I had hardly a notion what was inside them all… My wife insisted I should take an eiderdown’ and ‘plentiful supplies of Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade and Lux and Epsom Salts’ and ‘There was a magnificent pair of kid mosquito boots which I never put on, two cholera belts’ and ‘a cummerbund’ and ‘Palm-beach suits I had in plenty.’ Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade stabilised many a distant settler or traveller after a wretched night of heat, bites and fearsome noises, while London employers and outfitters recommended Palm Beach suits for the tropics until well into the 1960s.

Shipping lines vied with each other through advertisements like this (in a 1935 Australian magazine) to capture the returning colonial trade.

Again war came, and travel was not much fun. Celia Davies, sailing on the Canadian Pacific’s Duchess of Richmond in 1940 with her two young sons to be with her husband on military duty in the USA, found that on arrival at Liverpool ‘all the passengers had been hustled off the platform and into a huge, iron shed on the quayside. There were no porters to help us… I staggered along, weighed down by numerous pieces of hand baggage. In the shed we were herded together like cattle, not knowing why we were there or how long we should have to wait. After an interminable delay we began to move at the rate of one pace every five minutes.’

In the grim years following the Second World War, travel from Britain was severely curtailed by financial and other restrictions, The American humorist S J Perelman, writing about his 1947 voyage round the world, watched his fellow travellers as he waited at Waterloo Station to catch the boat train to Southampton. ‘The English passengers were dewy-eyed with anticipation of the victuals awaiting them on the Queen Mary,’ he wrote, pinpointing what was probably a stark

Reviews for A Century of Sea Travel

[cathyskye · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A Century of Sea Travel is a beautifully illustrated narrative that evocatively describes an age of travel (1840 to 1950) that is now lost to time. Since I've been stuck at home, I'm finding myself wanting to read about far-flung lands, and this book was exactly what I needed.From one exotic port of call to the next, I learned all about this type of travel: details of the ships, the crews, the passengers, food, entertainment-- even shipboard romances, accidents, disasters, and terrible seasickness during storms at sea. (Beware of some of those seasickness cures!)The authors have searched through memoirs, letters, diaries, even the backs of postcards for all the information contained in this book. We hear from authors like Rudyard Kipling, Elspeth Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as many travelers we've never heard of (my favorite being a woman named Delight Sweetser).A Century of Sea Travel brought this period to life. It's entertaining, informative, and contains many wonderful illustrations. If you feel the need for some vicarious travel, this is a book I strongly recommend.