Emigrants

FORTY PACES LONG AND EIGHT PACES WIDE

- - - - - X I V - - - - FORTY PACES LONG AND EIGHT PACES WIDE -1IN THE HOLD enormous pieces of canvas had been hung to separate the space into three compartments: one for married couples and children, one for unmarried men, and one for unmarried women. The family bunks were toward the stern, partitioned off by bulkheads of rough boards nailed together. The small cells looked like cattle pens or horses' stalls. Beds were made on the deck of the hold with mattresses and loose straw. Unmarried passengers slept in bunks, strung longships between the stanchions. There were one-man and two-man bunks, "upper and lower berths." Dust rose from unaired mattresses, blankets, and skins as the emigrants spread their bedding and made up their bunks in the hold of the Charlotta-berths for seventy-eight people. Each passenger kept· his belongings at the foot of his bunk. The overhead was low, and the air thick and choking. The three small compartments with canvas bulkheads seemed even smaller than they were, with this cargo of knapsacks , food baskets, bedding, and bundles. Here and there stood crude little tables or food boards, where people could sit and eat. These also were crowded with baskets and tubs, which must be put somewhere. At last there was hardly a spot left for the people to step on. Only through the main hatch did light filter into the hold. After dark a few weak, smoking, kerosene lanterns were lit and hung along the sides of the ship. As there was no room for Karl Oskar in the family pen, he must share a two-man bunk with his brother Robert, in the unmarried men's compartment . Above the two brothers slept Jonas Petter, and Arvid had his bunk next, on the same side. The men here had about as much space 208 FORTY PACES LONG AND EIGHT PACES WIDE as pieces of kindling stacked in a woodpile: there was hardly a foot's width per person. "They must have meant us to sleep on our sides," said Karl Oskar. "There isn't room for a man to sleep on his back." Jonas Petter held his nose: "It smells of pissl" Robert too thought the hold smelled of night-old urine. "The air is so foul," he said to Arvid, "let's go above." The hold was dark as a cellar. He felt as if he were in a sack. By using their elbows the two boys were able to force a way between fellow passengers and their mattresses and sacks and bundles, through the narrow passageway along the ship's side, to where they could struggle out through the hatch. Robert looked more closely at the hatch covering, which was pierced through by a number of small holes, like a milk strainer. The only entry for fresh air was through these pitifully small openings. No wonder the atmosphere below was thick and stifling. "Why don't they make bigger air holes in this ship?" wondered Arvid. On deck they breathed clear, fresh, spring-cool Baltic air. It was calm at sea, and the ship rocked with a slow roll which they hardly noticed. The water purled softly against the hull, like water from a slow-running spring. Robert wanted to walk about and inspect this ship which was to be his home for a long time. At the embarkation yesterday there had been such hurry and disorder he had been unable to see anything of it. Their sleeping places had had to be found, chests and knapsacks, boxes and kegs, tubs and baskets carried into the hold. Wherever he had turned he had been in the way of someone. Today he was more at home. Only he was a little afraid to get too close to the captain. In Suneson's chandlery in Karlshamn one of the clerks had shown him the newspaper Karlshamns Allchanda; there was a notice about their ship under "Arrived Ship Masters." At first he had thought it must be a misprint in the paper; it actually said "Ship Masters," not "Ships." It was the ship masters who arrived in harbor, not the ships themselves. Then the little man whom he saw yesterday, back aft among the crew, was more important than the whole ship. It would not do to get in his way. The boys looked cautiously around. Arvid inspected the ropes, thick as a man's arms, coiled here and there on deck like giant snakes. He had seen the same...