Atlantic Crossing

Born in 1875, the Belgian painter Eugeen Van Mieghem grew up in the old port of Antwerp at his parents’ inn across Montevideostraat from the offices of the Red Star Line. A native of the docks, Van Mieghem would make them and their people his subjects. Millions of emigrants, the flotsam left behind by Europe’s crises, would board ships here – Jews from Poland and Russia escaping pogroms, Italians from the Mezzogiorno escaping starvation, disease, and violence at the hands of the brigante, and northern Europeans from Germany, France, and Belgium itself looking for land and opportunity. Van Mieghem would sketch and paint what he saw on the docks, beginning with the great migrations of the last decade of the nineteenth century and continuing into the troubled start of the twentieth, when he documented the desperate flight of the refugees of the Great War.

His people were humbled and tired, holding on to each other, waiting on the docks with their few possessions in straw baskets or tied up in blankets. In one painting, a boy, a ship to the New World at anchor behind him, plays an organetto. In another, a mother holds her baby, her older child clutches her skirt, while her husband, with his back to us, looks out over the harbor and into the future. Beside him, sitting, an elderly woman – the grandmother, perhaps – looks into herself. Van Mieghem painted the plight of these people in somber tones, or he drew them with charcoal, hurriedly, with quick strokes.

Olive grove in the fields below Castel San Vincenzo.
Photograph by the author.

One of Europe’s crises was happening far to Antwerp’s south. In 1891, Southern Italy was still suffering effects from the world depression, sometimes known as The Long Depression, which had begun with the Panic of 1873 in Vienna and spread throughout Western Europe and North America. Beginning in 1888, agriculture was especially hard hit with wheat prices dropping steeply. In the Mezzogiorno, the landowners had compensated by raising rents, the government by increasing local taxes. The contadini, those like Carmine and Cristina, though they might have owned a small patch of land themselves, still would have rented additional fields from the larger landowners. Each day, Carmine and Cristina would have taken a simple lunch, probably no more than bread and a little wine, and walked with other family and friends from San Vincenzo down the slope of Mont Vallone to their fields. The walk might have taken an hour or more. The return to the village in the evening would have been the same. Certainly, they would have grown vegetables in their fields. Perhaps, a field of wheat. The youngest daughter of Carmine and Cristina, Angeline, remembered the orchard. In the fall there would be grapes to harvest. In early winter there would be olives. The family would work their fields until the light was going. Stone huts, mortarless piles of rock stacked in concentric circles in the shape of a beehive, were scattered about the fields for shelter from storms. In many cases these had been in use by generations of ancestors, both in the fields and on the tratturi, the trails used during the year to drive sheep between the alpine valleys of the Apennines across the Rocchetta plain to the winter pastures in Foggia.

It was back-breaking work for all the contadini, and with rising rents and dropping prices, what had been a subsistence living was now no living all. In the evenings, perhaps in the bar over a glass of wine, maybe during La Passeggiata, the stroll about town when the people met, gossiped, and planned their futures, the talk had turned more and more to l’America. Men stood in groups in the piazza recounting how many of their relatives had already left, that there were jobs and money to be made in l’America. The police registry in Antwerp, which kept records of the emigrants who passed through there, had recorded many residents of San Vincenzo. Someone brought up the agent who had been recruiting in the area. By 1891, emigration had become an important business. Agents recruited, booked passages, arranged transportation to the ports. Perhaps, they could all go together. Those who had gone before were in Chicago. They wrote home. They sent money. A great world’s fair was being built there in what had been a muddy swamp. It was to be better than the last one in Paris. There was much work to be done. Who would go? Antonio Carracillo would go, and Antonio Di Silvestro, both fifty-eight. Young Donato Carracillo at eighteen years old would go, and Carmine and Cristina with their three children. Carmine’s first cousin Giovanni Di Julio would go with his wife Rosa Notardonato and their three chidlren. Another young man, Domenico Di Michele, nineteen, would go, as would Donato Colella and Beradino Di Cristofano.

Piazza Umberto today.
Photograph by the author.

Others would decide to go, as well. Some would back out. Then on a day in early April those still resolved gathered in the cool morning air with their belongings in what is now Piazza Umberto, San Vincenzo’s main square. The wives, the mothers who were staying behind, dressed in black in long sleeves and long, black skirts, hugged their husbands or their children. They kissed them. Their faces were distorted by grief and worry, and they hid them behind their hands as they wept. For the elderly, they could not know if they would ever see their loved ones again in this life. For some it was too much, the despair too great. A grandmother collapsed to sit on one of the baskets, her hands to her mouth as she was supported by a granddaughter. A young boy, standing apart from the crowd, screamed for his father, his sadness beyond consolation. A young wife wept to herself as she held her husband, who was leaving her to an unknown future.

A stagecoach at the Stelvio Pass in Northern Italy, 1881.
Public Domain.

Emiddio had just turned seven at the time. At the age of eighty, he would write that in his life he had “traveled by foot, by buggy and horse, by local trains, even by dinghy . . . by fast mail trains – by Southern two side wheels steamboats. By excursion boats [on] the lakes, by ships in the ocean.” According to nineteenth-century road maps of Italy, the roads in Molise were few. The nearest road to San Vincenzo appearing on these maps travelled through Alfedena, twenty kilometers to the north, which then connected up with a main road south to Isernia. From Isernia, another main road went by way of Venafro and Cassino and on through the Liri Valley to Frosinone. A railroad map from 1875 shows a rail line passing through there on its way to Rome. I can’t know exactly how they covered these distances. Probably, when they left San Vincenzo some were on foot, some in a wagon, perhaps, provided by friends or family and trailing behind a mule or a pair of donkeys laden down with the bundles and baskets. When they reached a road, they might then have connected with a diligenza, or stagecoach, the public conveyance of the time, which would have taken them on to Isernia and from there one-hundred kilometers further out of the mountains to Frosinone.

A valley on the way to Frosinone through which
the family would have travelled.
Photo taken by the author from Montecassino.

Once in Rome, another train would have taken them along Italy’s west coast to Genoa. From Genoa, they either went north to Lucerne or west to Nice. If they went north, once they traversed the Alps and arrived in Lucerne, they could have taken different paths to Antwerp – perhaps, to Dijon and on to Nancy, then through the deep, green forests of the Argonne and the Ardennes to Belgium. If they went west, they would have travelled across the foot of the Alps along the Mediterranean through Nice to Marseille. From there the line to Nancy would have taken them north through Provence to Avignon and then Grenoble and then across the wheat fields and vineyards of Champagne to Lorraine. Once in Antwerp, they would have found their way as all the emigrants in Antwerp did at this time to the Red Star Line warehouse in the oldest of Antwerp’s harbors, the Eilandje, on the Scheldt River.

Red Star Line ships alongside Rijn Quay, Antwerp.
Public Domain

Van Mieghem painted the scenes on Montevideostraat, where the emigrants gathered at the Red Star Line offices. He saw them cluttering the sidewalk, standing in groups, leaning on the red brick walls of the Red Star buildings, or sitting on their bundles. He painted the light muted here at this latitude on the North Sea. The emigrants occupied the entire length of the street, which still exists and still dead-ends on the Rijn Quay, where the ships were moored. From these sidewalks, from the cobblestones, the emigrants could see the masts of the ships and believe they had one foot in America. In 1893, the Red Star Line would create a dormitory in its warehouse to shelter the emigrants until their ships sailed, but in 1891, the emigrants stayed in crowded, airless guest houses around the quay. During good weather, they would stay outside as much as possible, even sleeping on the grassy Scheldt dike, as Van Mieghem captured. A medical exam would be conducted on the quay, no matter the weather. A doctor examined each passenger, looking for weakness or lameness, signs of mental illness, signs of infection. Any passenger rejected in New York by the American authorities would be returned at the Red Star Line’s expense. So, this was a careful inspection. There are records of family members failing this inspection and being left behind, cared for by one of the many agencies in Antwerp established to aid the emigrants. In some cases, they might wait for as long as five years before being released to join their families in America.

The SS Rhynland at sea.
From the collection of the author.

The SS Rhynland was built in England in 1879. Part sailing ship, part steamer, it was four hundred feet long and forty feet wide. On this crossing, it had eighteen saloon or first-class passengers, forty-one second-class, and seven hundred, forty-three steerage. The mass of those in steerage would be held behind barriers on the quay until the first- and then the second-class passengers had boarded. The emigrants would then be allowed to board, herded over the gangway on to the ship and directed down steep, almost perpendicular steps to “in-between” decks, as it was called, where a steward directed them to their compartments. They would be struck immediately by the smell of oil and tar, of the sawdust on the floor and the sour dampness of previous voyages. Simple wood partitions running the length of each side of the ship formed the compartments, each with a door identified by a letter of the alphabet – compartments “A” through “N” were forward, “O” through “Z” were aft. Within each compartment were two dozen or so berths in two tiers with their straw mattresses. If there were those who had made the voyage before, they would hurry to claim the upper berths. No one wanted to be in a lower berth beneath a fellow passenger who was seasick.

During the height of the emigration from Europe to America, numerous firsthand exposés were written by journalists posing as steerage passengers. In newspapers both in the United States and abroad, the details of life aboard ship were documented. The ships were often at capacity or near-capacity. As “in-between” decks filled up, the odors accumulated – the onions and garlic packed in the baggage, the salted fish, the cured meats and cheeses brought from home, all these smells mingled with those of the ship and of the unwashed passengers, who in some cases had not been out of their clothes since leaving home.

Carmine and Cristina along with their children were assigned to Compartment V in the aft of the ship. Also assigned to this compartment were Giovanni Di Julio’s wife and children. He, however, was assigned to Compartment B forward. It was not unusual to break up families between compartments. Single women could go into the compartments with families so space had to be made available for them. Single men were in the forward compartments. There were other families in Compartment V. Other Italians were there from regions foreign to the Molisani, also Hungarians, Germans, Austrians. The occupation of most of the single women was listed as “servant,” and there were several of these women in Compartment V – Mary Galinski, for instance, from Austria, and Julianna Ivan and Erszebeth Pörök from Hungary. Cristina would have difficulty with the sounds of these names and the sounds of the languages. Even Mattea Mattiotti, though from Italy, was not Molisani and her dialect was strange.

The Rhynland would cast off into the Scheldt on a day of a waxing moon. Tugs would accompany the ship through the bends of the narrow river. Finally, the river makes a last bend to the west into the broad Western Scheldt. The ship would keep the Dutch coast on its starboard side as it made its way to the mouth of the river and to the North Sea. Continuing west, the Rhynland would now follow the French coast through the English Channel. Perhaps, they came close enough to land to see the port of Calais. They also would have passed close to Cherbourg, which was perhaps the last sight of land for those who were on deck to see it.

Painting of the SS Rhynland under full sail by Antonio Jacobsen, 1890.

The open ocean would bring with it the routines of the crossing – the breakfasts of soup and bread, the dinners of stewed beef and potatoes, all served from kettles and eaten on the long wooden tables between the compartments in the twilight of “in-between” decks, in the light filtering through the portholes. In the beginning, there were not enough places at the tables. People would hurry to be at the front of the line to ensure getting a seat. Those who didn’t make it stood holding their plates and eating the best they could. Later, as seasickness affected more and more, there were always seats available.

There were periods of flat seas and warm afternoons when those from steerage would enjoy their time on the main deck. There they could take in the sunlight and watch the work of the sailors who climbed the shrouds to the yardarms to work the sails. They could find the shade from these sails if it was especially warm. They could play cards with others or sleep in the pure air or just daydream of their future. Often, some passengers would play their musical instruments, their tunes as varied as their languages. Sometimes there would be dancing, which all seemed to understand. Amidships, the second class and saloon cabins stood above the main deck. Off-limits to the emigrants, this area had its own decks for the promenades of the wealthy. The two groups would observe one another, but seldom was there contact, although there is one account in which a few saloon passengers gathered together and for amusement tried to guess the ethnicity of some of those in steerage. The single funnel, gold with a black cap and with a red star on each side, rose above all, trailing black smoke from the coal fires.

At times, the sea was heavy, the swells creating misery for those below decks, especially those who were all the way aft or forward. To the Molisani, seasickness was la miseria. Different cultures had their own remedies. Some tried apples or hard candy. Some had a patent medicine. Some believed in raw onions. Emiddio said that Cristina gave him white vinegar by the spoonsful and that they tried to stay amidships where the ship’s travel from wave crest to trough was less pronounced. The smell below became unbearable. Some would sleep on deck, but by policy the women were not allowed there after dark. The watchmen whose lot it was to enforce this policy sometimes had to chase the women from side to side of the ship before they could corner them. But for the men, they could lie on their backs and look up at the sky. April 24th, halfway through the voyage, the moon was full, its bright light glinting on the crests of waves, washing out the dimmer stars, its face the same here as it was in Germany or Russia or Hungary or high in the Apennines of Molise. I sometimes think of Emiddio lying there on the deck next to Carmine. Hands behind their heads, they contemplate this moon and, each in his own way, the future. For Carmine there must have been great excitement but also great fear. For Emiddio, the great city awaiting them offered adventure. The moon would not set this night until nearly dawn. In my mind, they lay here together, father and son, throughout the night, bathed in this moonlight, each with his own dreams.

In the early morning hours of May 1st, the passengers on deck would sense a change. As the ship sailed to the south of Long Island, though they could not see the land, they could smell it, or rather smell where the land meets the sea. The color of the water had changed subtly, now tinged with green. The emigrants leaned over the bulwarks at the front of the ship, leaning toward the horizon, leaning toward Sandy Hook, the narrow peninsula which forms an extension of the New Jersey coast into New York Bay. This was their first sight of land, their first sight of the New World. For the emigrants, Sandy Hook was the gateway to their new country. Geographically, this was true. But the “Golden Door” had not opened for them yet. It lay at the southern tip of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River near the abandoned Castle Garden. It was known as the Barge Office.