The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (4 page)

“Follow, my dear boy, an honorable calling, which shall engross your time and give you position and fame, and besides enable you to benefit your fellow man,” Sumner lectured a younger brother in another letter. “Do not waste your time in driblets.”

The mothers and fathers of the voyagers, for whom such partings could be profoundly painful—and who in many cases were paying for it all— had their own advice on spending money wisely and looking after one’s health. With good reason, they worried much about health, and the terrifying threats of smallpox, typhoid, and cholera, not to mention syphilis, in highly populated foreign cities. What wrong turns might befall their beloved offspring untethered in such places? The young men were warned repeatedly of the perils of bad company. They must remember always who they were and return “untainted” by the affectations and immorality of the Old World.

The written “Instructions” of the eminent Boston physician John Collins Warren to his medical student son ran to forty pages and included everything from what he must study to how his notes should be organized, to what he should and should not eat and drink. Mason, as he was known, must choose his friends judiciously and avoid especially those “fond of theaters and dissipation.”

Emotions ran high on the eve of departure. Melancholy and second thoughts interspersed with intense excitement were the common thing. “And a sad time it was, full of anxious thoughts and doubts, with mingled gleams of glorious anticipations,” wrote Charles Sumner in his journal. Samuel Morse was so distraught about leaving his children and his country that he descended into “great depression, from which some have told me they feared for my health and even reason.”

But once the voyagers were on board and under way, nearly all experienced a tremendous lift of spirits, even as, for many, the unfamiliar motion of the ship began to take effect. “We have left the wharf, and with a steamer [tug boat] by our side,” Sumner wrote from on board the
Albany
departing from New York.

A smacking breeze has sprung up, and we shall part this company soon; and then for the Atlantic! Farewell then, my friends, my pursuits, my home, my country! Each bellying wave on its rough crest carries me away. The rocking vessel impedes my pen. And now, as my head begins slightly to reel, my imagination entertains the glorious prospects before me. …

Nathaniel Willis, departing from Philadelphia, described the grand spectacle of ten or fifteen vessels lying in the roads waiting for the pilot boat.

And as she came down the river, they all weighed anchor together and we got under way. It was a beautiful sight—so many sail in close company under a smart breeze …

“The dream of my lifetime was about to be realized,” Willis wrote. “I was bound for France.”

Not all pioneers went west.

They sailed from several different ports and in different years. When Samuel Morse embarked out of New York in November 1829, it was with what he thought “the fairest wind that ever blew.” Emma Willard sailed in the fall of 1830; James Jackson, Jr., the medical student, in the spring of 1831; Nathaniel Willis that fall; and Wendell Holmes in 1833. George Healy, the aspiring young painter, made his crossing in 1834; John Sanderson, the Philadelphia teacher, in 1835. Charles Sumner set forth on his scholarly quest in 1837.

At this juncture, as it happens, a young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, decided to brave the Atlantic in the opposite direction, sailing from Le Havre in 1831. He was twenty-five years old, short, and slightly built. Nothing about his appearance suggested any remarkable ability. His intention, he said, was to “inquire into everything” in America, “to see what a great republic is like.” He had never spoken to an American in his life. He had never been to sea.

Samuel Morse had comparatively little comment about his crossing, beyond that it took twenty-six days, including five days and nights of gale winds, during which the motion of the ship was such that no one slept. Nathaniel Willis, who sailed on the nearly new brig
Pacific
, commanded by a French captain, enjoyed days of fair winds and smooth seas, but only after what to him was an exceedingly rough week when the one thing he had to smile about was the achievement of dinner.

“In rough weather, it is as much as one person can do to keep his place at the table at all; and to guard the dishes, bottles and castors from a general slide in the direction of the lurch, requires a sleight and coolness reserved only for a sailor,” Willis wrote, in a picturesque account that was to delight readers of the
NewYork Mirror
.

“
Prenez garde!
” shouts the captain as the sea strikes, and in the twinkling of an eye everything is seized and held up to wait for the lurch, in attitudes that would puzzle the pencil of [Samuel] Johnson to exaggerate. With his plate of soup in one hand, and the larboard end of the tureen in the other, the claret bottle between his teeth, and the crook of his elbow caught around the mounting corner of the table, the captain maintains his seat upon the transom, and with a look of most grave concern, keeps a wary eye on the shifting level of his vermicelli. The old weather-beaten mate, with the alacrity of a juggler, makes a long leg back to the cabin of panels at the same moment, and with his breast against the table, takes his own plate and the castors, and one or two of the smaller dishes under his charge; and the steward, if he can keep his legs, looks out for the vegetables, or if he fails, makes as wide a lap as possible to intercept the violent articles in their descent.

Once conditions improved, there was no happier man on board than Willis. He gloried in the sea air and smooth sailing. “It is a day to make one in love with life,” he wrote one brilliant morning. “Hundreds of sea birds are sailing around us … the sailors, barefoot and bareheaded, are scattered over the rigging, doing ‘fair-weather’ work. …”

Willis was the sole passenger on board his ship, in contrast to Wendell Holmes, who crossed on the packet
Philadelphia
, out of New York, with thirty other passengers in cabin class and fifteen in steerage. The
Philadelphia
was considered top-of-the-line. (“The accommodations for passengers are very elegant and extensive,” it was advertised. Beds, bedding, wine, and “stores of the best quality” were always provided.) The cabin passengers were mostly from Boston. Several were friends of Holmes’s, including a convivial fellow Harvard graduate, Thomas Gold Appleton, one of the Beacon Hill Appletons (and brother of Fanny), who was trying to make up his mind whether to become an artist or a writer, and having a thoroughly fine time in the meanwhile.

They sailed in April and enjoyed gentle seas nearly the whole way, the
kind travelers dreamed of. As Appleton’s journal attests, one unremarkable day followed another:

I felt nothing of that do-little drowsy
ennui
that I had expected. I varied my amusements, and found them all delightful. I talked sentiment with Dr. Holmes; then flirted in bad French with Victorine [a maid accompanying one of the women passengers]; soon joined with Mr. Curtis and our two doctors in a cannonade of puns.

Everyone was in high spirits. One dinner was followed by a night of singing made especially memorable when a “voice in the steerage gave us a succession of stirring ballads.”

The morning after, however, “the still-life of the day previous had undergone a sea change.” Struggling to get out of his bunk, Appleton was nearly pitched head-first through the window of his cabin. Having succeeded in dressing, “bruised and battered,” he went aloft. The live chickens and ducks on board were “chattering in terror,” the captain shouting “pithy orders” through a trumpet to sailors standing “at ridiculously acute angles with the deck.”

Few appeared for breakfast that morning, fewer still for dinner. But peace returned soon enough, and Appleton, his desire to paint stirring, studied the “deeply, darkly, beautifully blue” sea, “that blue which I had heard of, but never saw before. The water hissed and simmered as we clove its ridges, running off from the sides in long undulating sheets of foam, with partial breaks of the most exquisite beryl tint.”

“A most delightful evening,” he began another of his journal entries. “The moon showed but a lurid disk, and that was soon lost behind brown-black volumes of a long curtain of hanging cloud. It was glimmering darkness, and our sole spectacle was the water. How magnificent that was!”

What an odd, good-for-nothing life we lead! [he observed happily several days later] A prolonged morning nap, jokes … a turn on deck, a sluggish conversation, a book held in the hand for an hour or two, another turn on deck; the bell sounds—we
dash to dinner; three courses, laughter, candles, tea, and the moon …

Only when, at dinner the following night, the captain mentioned the possibility of “vast islands of ice” did the mood change. “This all frightened us pretty considerably,” Appleton wrote, “and I could not get to sleep for hearing, in fancy, the crushing of our ship on an iceberg. …” When, by morning, the danger had passed, life on board resumed its pleasant pattern.

So sweet and benign a crossing was the exception. For nearly all the rest of the voyagers came days of howling winds and monstrous seas when death seemed imminent. For Emma Willard, who sailed from New York on the
Charlemagne
, it was “a rough crossing” indeed. She had come aboard with her health much on her mind. What exactly her troubles were she never explained. There was repeated talk of weather. “Some of the older passengers play a covert game to frighten those who are fresh and timid,” she wrote. She paid them no mind. Then heavy weather struck. Worse than the raging winds of day were the seas after the winds abated. “Then the waters rise up in unequal masses, sometimes lifting the vessel as if to the heavens, and again plunging her as if to the depths below; and sometimes they come foaming and dashing and breaking over the ship, striking the deck with a startling force.” Most terrifying was a night of mountainous seas breaking over the ship.

Thus with the raging element above, beneath, and around us; with nothing to divide us from it, but a bark whose masts were shaking, whose timbers were creaking and cracking, as they were about to divide; the feeling of the moment was, a ship was a vain thing for safety; that help was in God alone. Thoughts of ocean caverns—of what would be the consequence of one’s death, naturally rise in the mind at such a time.

To Mrs. Willard’s amazement, she was never seasick. Rather, the violence of the weather, “the rocking and rolling and tossing,” the holding on for dear life to “some fixed object … to keep from being shot across the
cabin, and grasping the side of my berth at night for fear of being rolled over the side,” seemed to benefit her health.

All the same, she seriously contemplated whether, if she survived the voyage, it might be the better part of wisdom to remain in France.

Reflecting on his experience aboard ship, John Sanderson wrote, “If any lady of your village has a disobedient husband, or a son who has beaten his mother, bid her send him to sea.”

So wretchedly sick was Charles Sumner during his first days out he could not bear even the thought of food, let alone drag himself to the dining table. “Literally ‘cabined, cuffed and confined’ in my berth, I ate nothing, did nothing. …” Until the fourth day, he was too weak even to hold a book. (To be unable to read was for Sumner the ultimate measure of wretchedness.) Then, astonishingly, his appetite returned “like a Bay of Fundy tide,” and he was both back at the table and back to his books.

On Christmas Day in the English Channel, the long voyage nearly over, Sumner expressed in the privacy of his journal what so many felt.

In going abroad at my present age, and situated as I am, I feel that I take a bold, almost rash step. … But I go for purposes of education, and to gratify longings that prey upon my mind and time. … The temptations of Europe I have been warned against … I can only pray that I may be able to pass through them in safety. … May I return with an undiminished love for my friends and country, with a heart and mind untainted by the immoralities of the Old World, manners untouched by its affectations, and a willingness to resume my labors with an unabated determination to devote myself faithfully to the duties of an American!

They would stand by the hour on deck, watching the emerging shapes and details on land growing slowly, steadily larger and more distinct. At home it was known as the Old World. To them it was all new.

Whether they arrived at Le Havre, the great port of Paris at the mouth of the Seine, or crossed from England to land at Calais or Boulogne-sur-Mer, the first hours ashore were such a mélange of feelings of relief and exhilaration, and inevitably, such confusion coping with so much that was new and unfamiliar, as to leave most of them extremely unsettled.

No sooner were they ashore than their American passports were taken by French authorities to be sent on to Paris. Their passports, they were told, would be returned to them in Paris in exchange for a ticket that they had to ask for at a nearby police office. In the meantime, swarms of pushing, shouting, unintelligible porters, coachmen, and draymen vied for attention, while trunks and bags were carried off to the Custom House to be gone through. All personal effects, except clothing, were subject to duties and delays. Any sealed letters in their possession were subject to fine. They themselves could be subjected to examination, if thought suspicious-looking. Many had difficulty acquiescing to the “impertinence” of authorities searching their bags or, worse, having their own person inspected. Desperate to shut off his porter’s “cataract of French postulation,” Nathaniel Willis, like others, wound up paying the man three times what he should have.