Tuesday, 14 September 1886: “And the mighty vessel moves quietly”

New York Times, 12 Sept 1886

So tired was Helen that the loading of cotton, iced beef, and all sorts of other freight outside her porthole throughout the night did not disturb her. She had arisen, prepared herself for the day, and arrived on deck at 5:30 a.m. When Frederick joined her eventually, he was impressed to learn that, “like a true Yankee,” she had already met the pilot and seen the captain. Then, with a shriek of the whistle, the “mighty vessel” got underway.

For the next three hours, tug boats pulled the great ship out of port and harbor, sending her off to sea. Helen marveled that” the ocean is as smooth as any river, and about 4 hours out takes on the dark, exceedingly dark blue hue that have never before seen.” Frederick noted “little wind and a remarkably Smooth Sea, less ruffled than I ever saw the sea before.” Helen, the less experienced, gazed out for an hour. “It has an anxious mottled appearance that for some time I study in vain,” she puzzled over the surface, “but finally conclude to be due to millions of little waves or ripples receiving the sunlight at different angles.”

“I had thought to cross the ocean quietly and without being recognized by any body I ever saw before,” Frederick confided to his diary, “but this notion was soon dispelled.”

As they strolled about deck and gained their sea legs, a tall man of about sixty, “totally without appearance of affectation” and wearing “a dark blue woolen suit including cap” according to Helen, approached them along with his younger companion. The tall man introduced himself as the Reverend Heman Wayland, son of the former president of Brown University (and brother to a former lieutenant governor of Connecticut, but he left that part out), and his younger companion as – well, Helen and Frederick never could spell his name in the same way twice, but it was George Blelock or Brelock or something sounding like that. Frederick had met both before, although George Blelock Brelock Bullock or Whatever had been a child at the time. He had his own daughter along on the trip now. At breakfast, a young couple, George and Izora Chandler – “she very pretty and gentle in appearance and he low in voice but with an air of quiet authority that commends him as a man not to be trifled with,” Helen observed – sat across from them. George let Frederick know that he had never forgotten hearing him speak after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination now two decades earlier.

As it turned out, Frederick was glad of the Reverend’s company for he proved to be “a remarkable clever talker, and a man very free from pretenses.” Helen listened in on their chats and determined that Wayland had “the smell of mugwumpery on his mental garments,” adding “but it might have been ship smell.” Frederick thought the same, but nonetheless admitted “I like him."

Page from Helen Douglass's Diary

As the hours passed, the couple retired to the saloon to write in their travel diaries. Another tourist, travelling over twenty years earlier, observed his fellow passengers writing in their journals for hours upon hours at the start of their trips. “Alas that journals so voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as most of them did!” he lamented. “I doubt if there is a single pilgrim of all that host but can how a hundred fair pages of journal concerning the firth twenty days voyaging in the Quaker City, and I am morally certain that not ten of the party can show twenty pages of journal for the succeeding twenty thousand miles of voyaging!”

So it shall be with Helen and Frederick.

She describes the saloon with its oak paneling and columns, its portholes and long writing table, her fellow travelers scribbling in their own journals, the plush green upholstery, the near-empty tables, the organ (where, Frederick complains, “a young man is persistently boring our ears”), the piano in the drawing room, the hanging plants, the canaries, the rails, the sties, the carpet, and so on and so forth.

Frederick seems pleased with the meals and worried about the possibility of seasickness, hoping that the smooth sailing of the ship will persist even if they run into foul weather. He observes the few ladies on the ship relaxing in steamer chairs with books lying open on their laps “more as ornaments than for use,” and men solemnly walking the deck as they “smoke, smoke, and smoke.” He notes the reserve of the passengers toward one another at this stage of the voyage, and that “everything between officers and men seems to go on very smoothly.”

What else is there to do but read and await landfall?

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Sources:

Helen Pitts Douglass Diary, 14 September 1886, and Frederick Douglass Diary, 15 September 1886, Family Papers, Frederick Douglass Paper, Library of Congress.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869; New York: Signet Classics, 2007), 22.