33. CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE SALT-DROGHERS, AND GERMAN EMIGRANT SHIPS.
Surrounded by its broad belt of masonry, each Liverpool
dock is a walled town, full of life and commotion; or rather,
it is a small archipelago, an epitome of the world, where all
the nations of Christendom, and even those of Heathendom,
are represented. For, in itself, each ship is an island, a
floating colony of the tribe to which it belongs.
Here are brought together the remotest limits of the earth;
and in the collective spars and timbers of these ships, all the
forests of the globe are represented, as in a grand parliament
of masts. Canada and New Zealand send their pines;
America her live oak; India her teak; Norway her spruce;
and the Right Honorable Mahogany, member for Honduras
and Campeachy, is seen at his post by the wheel. Here,
under the beneficent sway of the Genius of Commerce, all
climes and countries embrace; and yard-arm touches yard-arm
in brotherly love.
A Liverpool dock is a grand caravansary inn, and hotel,
on the spacious and liberal plan of the Astor House. Here
ships are lodged at a moderate charge, and payment is not
demanded till the time of departure. Here they are comfortably
housed and provided for; sheltered from all weathers
and secured from all calamities. For I can hardly credit
a story I have heard, that sometimes, in heavy gales, ships
lying in the very middle of the docks have lost their top-gallant-masts.
Whatever the toils and hardships encountered
on the voyage, whether they come from Iceland or the
coast of New Guinea, here their sufferings are ended, and
they take their ease in their watery inn.
I know not how many hours I spent in gazing at the
shipping in Prince's Dock, and speculating concerning their
past voyages and future prospects in life. Some had just
arrived from the most distant ports, worn, battered, and disabled;
others were all a-taunt-o—spruce, gay, and brilliant,
in readiness for sea.
Every day the Highlander had some new neighbor. A
black brig from Glasgow, with its crew of sober Scotch
caps, and its staid, thirty-looking skipper, would be replaced
by a jovial French hermaphrodite, its forecastle echoing with
songs, and its quarter-deck elastic from much dancing.
On the other side, perhaps, a magnificent New York
Liner, huge as a seventy-four, and suggesting the idea of a
Mivart's or Delmonico's afloat, would give way to a Sidney
emigrant ship, receiving on board its live freight of shepherds
from the Grampians, ere long to be tending their flocks
on the hills and downs of New Holland.
I was particularly pleased and tickled, with a multitude
of little salt-droghers, rigged like sloops, and not much bigger
than a pilot-boat, but with broad bows painted black, and
carrying red sails, which looked as if they had been pickled
and stained in a tan-yard. These little fellows were continually
coming in with their cargoes for ships bound to
America; and lying, five or six together, alongside of those
lofty Yankee hulls, resembled a parcel of red ants about the
carcass of a black buffalo.
When loaded, these comical little craft are about level
with the water; and frequently, when blowing fresh in the
river, I have seen them flying through the foam with nothing
visible but the mast and sail, and a man at the tiller;
their entire cargo being snugly secured under hatches.
It was diverting to observe the self-importance of the
skipper of any of these diminutive vessels. He would give
himself all the airs of an admiral on a three-decker's poop;
and no doubt, thought quite as much of himself. And why
not? What could Cæsar want more? Though his craft
was none of the largest, it was subject to
him; and though
his crew might only consist of himself; yet, if he governed
it well, he achieved a triumph, which the moralists of all
ages have set above the victories of Alexander.
These craft have each a little cabin, the prettiest, charmingest,
most delightful little dog-hole in the world; not much
bigger than an old fashioned alcove for a bed. It is lighted
by little round glasses placed in the deck; so that to the
insider, the ceiling is like a small firmament twinkling with
astral radiations. For tall men, nevertheless, the place is
but ill-adapted; a sitting, or recumbent position being indispensable
to an occupancy of the premises. Yet small, low,
and narrow as the cabin is, somehow, it affords accommodations
to the skipper and his family. Often, I used to watch
the tidy good-wife, seated at the open little scuttle, like a
woman at a cottage door, engaged in knitting socks for her
husband; or perhaps, cutting his hair, as he kneeled before
her. And once, while marveling how a couple like this
found room to turn in, below; I was amazed by a noisy
irruption of cherry-cheeked young tars from the scuttle,
whence they came rolling forth, like so many curly spaniels
from a kennel.
Upon one occasion, I had the curiosity to go on board a
salt-drogher, and fall into conversation with its skipper, a
bachelor, who kept house all alone. I found him a very
sociable, comfortable old fellow, who had an eye to having
things cozy around him. It was in the evening; and he
invited me down into his sanctum to supper; and there we
sat together like a couple in a box at an oyster-cellar.
“He, he,” he chuckled, kneeling down before a fat, moist,
little cask of beer, and holding a cocked-hat pitcher to the
faucet—“You see, Jack, I keep every thing down here;
and nice times I have by myself. Just before going to bed,
it ain't bad to take a nightcap, you know; eh! Jack?—
here now, smack your lips over that, my boy—have a pipe?
—but stop, let's to supper first.”
So he went to a little locker, a fixture against the side,
and groping in it awhile, and addressing it with—“What
cheer here, what cheer?” at last produced a loaf, a small
cheese, a bit of ham, and a jar of butter. And then placing
a board on his lap, spread the table, the pitcher of beer in
the center.
“Why that's but a two legged table,” said I, “let's
make it four.”
So we divided the burthen, and supped merrily together
on our knees.
He was an old ruby of a fellow, his cheeks toasted brown;
and it did my soul good, to see the froth of the beer bubbling
at his mouth, and sparkling on his nut-brown beard. He
looked so like a great mug of ale, that I almost felt like
taking him by the neck and pouring him out.
“Now Jack,” said he, when supper was over, “now
Jack, my boy, do you smoke?—Well then, load away.”
And he handed me a seal-skin pouch of tobacco and a pipe.
We sat smoking together in this little sea-cabinet of his, till
it began to look much like a state-room in Tophet; and
notwithstanding my host's rubicund nose, I could hardly see
him for the fog.
“He, he, my boy,” then said he—“I don't never have
any bugs here, I tell ye: I smokes 'em all out every night
before going to bed.”
“And where may you sleep?” said I, looking round, and
seeing no sign of a bed.
“Sleep?” says he, “why I sleep in my jacket, that's the
best counterpane; and I use my head for a pillow. He-he,
funny, ain't it?”
“Very funny,” says I.
“Have some more ale?” says he; “plenty more.”
“No more, thank you,” says I; “I guess I'll go;” for
what with the tobacco-smoke and the ale, I began to feel
like breathing fresh air. Besides, my conscience smote me
for thus freely indulging in the pleasures of the table.
“Now, don't go,” said he; “don't go, my boy; don't go
out into the damp; take an old Christian's advice,” laying
his hand on my shoulder; “it won't do. You see, by going
out now, you'll shake off the ale, and get broad awake again;
but if you stay here, you'll soon be dropping off for a nice
little nap.”
But notwithstanding these inducements, I shook my host's
hand and departed.
There was hardly any thing I witnessed in the docks that
interested me more than the German emigrants who come
on board the large New York ships several days before their
sailing, to make every thing comfortable ere starting. Old
men, tottering with age, and little infants in arms; laughing
girls in bright-buttoned bodices, and astute, middle-aged
men with pictured pipes in their mouths, would be seen
mingling together in crowds of five, six, and seven or eight
hundred in one ship.
Every evening these countrymen of Luther and Melancthon
gathered on the forecastle to sing and pray. And it
was exalting to listen to their fine ringing anthems, reverberating
among the crowded shipping, and rebounding from
the lofty walls of the docks. Shut your eyes, and you would
think you were in a cathedral.
They keep up this custom at sea; and every night, in the
dog-watch, sing the songs of Zion to the roll of the great
ocean-organ: a pious custom of a devout race, who thus send
over their hallelujahs before them, as they hie to the land of
the stranger.
And among these sober Germans, my country counts the
most orderly and valuable of her foreign population. It is
they who have swelled the census of her Northwestern
States; and transferring their ploughs from the hills of Transylvania
to the prairies of Wisconsin; and sowing the wheat
of the Rhine on the banks of the Ohio, raise the grain, that,
a hundred fold increased, may return to their kinsmen in
Europe.
There is something in the contemplation of the mode in
which America has been settled, that, in a noble breast,
should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes.
Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may claim
her for their own. You can not spill a drop of American
blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. Be he
Englishman, Frenchman, German, Dane, or Scot; the European
who scoffs at an American, calls his own brother Raca,
and stands in danger of the judgment. We are not a narrow
tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality—
whose blood has been debased in the attempt to ennoble it,
by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves.
No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a
thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not
a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may claim all
the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without
father or mother.
For who was our father and our mother? Or can we
point to any Romulus and Remus for our founders? Our
ancestry is lost in the universal paternity; and Cæsar and
Alfred, St. Paul and Luther, and Homer and Shakspeare
are as much ours as Washington, who is as much the world's
as our own. We are the heirs of all time, and with all
nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere
all tribes and people are forming into one federated
whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged
children of Adam restored as to the old hearth-stone in Eden.
The other world beyond this, which was longed for by
the devout before Columbus' time, was found in the New;
and the deep-sea-lead, that first struck these soundings,
brought up the soil of Earth's Paradise. Not a Paradise
then, or now; but to be made so, at God's good pleasure,
and in the fullness and mellowness of time. The seed is
sown, and the harvest must come; and our childrens' children,
on the world's jubilee morning, shall all go with their
sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be
revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they shall
speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and
Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of the
Mediterranean, and in the regions round about; Italians,
and Indians, and Moors; there shall appear unto them
cloven tongues as of fire.
