The Amateur Immigrant

In 1879, Stevenson took an immigrant-class berth in a steamship to America, one of only a few out of the several hundred below-deck passengers not intending to immigrate to America permanently. The title is partly a joke on that, and partly a bitter pun, since he found the experience hateful and not one to be undergone for the mere love of it. The second half recounts his trip on the immigrant train from New York to California, which went no better than the first half, except that it ends with his joy at the sight of California's forests and the Bay.

The foreword to this edition belongs to the very English school of captatio malevolentiae, having been given to someone who appears to loathe the author he has to introduce, on the thin excuse that the foreword-writer has written a book in the same genre. The problem with this line of thinking is that it gives full opportunity to scotch a competitor, which Raban does enthusiastically. Otherwise the foreword only contributes a highly overwrought symbolic reading of the book, featuring the deadly phrase rite de passage and the suggestion that Stevenson was "governed by it [the rite de passage pattern] more by instinct than by any conscious will to shape his writing to its demands." Which is a pretty nice way to stuff your own hokey theory into someone's work while denying him any praise.

In truth, Stevenson deserves a great deal of praise for so minutely recording and affectingly conveying the sensations of an immigrant, both material and social. The physical conditions are an education in themselves; I never would have guessed that below-decks passengers would be fed on the scrapings of the cabin passengers' plates, nor that even this sort of food was a privilege only of the better of the two below-decks classes, and a treat to relieve the grim (though first-run) food they got for other meals. His phrase for twice-run food is "broken meat," which was new to me and has been frustrating me with lack of opportunity to use it. It would be better to read this short book than to read my account of the physical details, but I have to quote this description of the nighttime air in steerage: "The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese."

I do want to write about his observations of the other immigrants, though. He found them not at all what he had imagined, both better and worse. The men play gambling games incessantly, but bet no money, an astounding instance of virtuous and beneficial self-control; the mothers affectionately watch their children swing around on the outer railing, apparently callous to the risk; the working class immigrants prove to have far pickier taste in food than Stevenson; there is frequent singing and dancing, especially when a fiddler shakes off his sea-sickness, but the men prove unable to shed their dignity for an eight-man quadrille; above all, the immigrants have a remarkable mildness, where he had expected adventurers:

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 disposition. 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.

Considering the immigrants in light of England's faltering economy, he finds that the economic battle was harder than he knew:

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 ship full of failures, the broken men of England.

Though in fact many of the immigrants were from mainland Europe. And again:

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 getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest means of a cure... Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good.

Yet that their mildness was not mere broken spirits is shown by their cheerfulness: "Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety."

He describes, on arrival in New York, the great crush of immigrants from the many steamships that had landed over just the last three days. If his steamship was representative, what change was worked on America by the introduction of so many cheerful, dim, orderly, drunken, silly, gentle refugees from sense? Contrary to general prejudice in America, foreigners often remark that kindness, mildness, and orderliness are the most striking characteristics of Americans, followed by ignorance, unrealistic thinking, and luxurious over-indulgence. Perhaps the immigrants passed on exactly what they brought, but somehow the country only became greater. There could hardly be greater praise for the power of freedom.