Atlantic (36 page)

Then, as his assistants remember it, Marconi’s stern and concentrated face suddenly creased into a smile. He beckoned to his assistant, and with a broad grin handed him the earphone. “See if you can hear anything, Mr. Kemp!” And the long-forgotten Mr. Kemp pressed the receiver to his own ear and supposedly heard, above the static and the rising gale and all the other sounds electric and mechanical, the faint—and repeated—three dots, three dots, three dots. The letter S, coming through the earphone, just at the very same moment as the men in faraway Cornwall were tapping it out on that key.

It was done. It was the signal. It was the culmination. The circle had been closed: people could now finally send messages—and one day even talk—and they could do so in perfect synchronicity across thousands of miles of storm-tossed ocean, just as they might converse across an alley in a city, or a meadow on a farm.

There was some dismissive bluster. The Atlantic Telegraph Company was furious and threatened an injunction, which they hoped would scare Marconi away. Others said that he and Mr. Kemp had imagined the whole thing, and that the sounds of dots were merely the traces of stray electrons hurtling through space. But then Thomas Edison weighed in from down in New Jersey, with all his influence and authority, and declared that he believed what Marconi had said; the
New York Times
said as much a day or so later; and then the radio messages were repeated for observers, more and more accurately, and all the remaining skepticism fell away like scales dropping from the eyes, forever.

The
Times
correspondent sent a long message to his newspaper in London from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, a year later, and had a reply from his foreign editor, in real time; and then in January 1903 a Marconi wireless station was opened on Cape Cod, near Wellfleet. Beside the stumps of one of his old aerials, there is today a bronze plaque, sheltered in a small gazebo set above the sand cliffs that overlook a typically wide Cape Cod beach, washed by the gray Atlantic rollers. The plaque says that from this place, in 1903, President Roosevelt and King Edward VII traded radio messages of congratulation; and from that moment on, wireless telegraphy, radio communication, radio telephony, and all the other present-day miracles of long-distance communication began their fantastic and improbably swift spasm of evolution.

6. THE PASSAGE OF PEOPLES

And all the while, the Atlantic’s ships grew grander and bigger and sleeker and more fleet. The sturdily practical packet boats evolved first into the graceful clippers, designed for speed, and later into the iron-hulled four-masted windjammers, built for their immense cargo-carrying capacity. For no more than fifteen years from the middle of the nineteenth century, the Atlantic seemed almost to be ripped apart by the passage of scores of these clippers, hurtling back and forth at speeds unimagined just a few years before. The best of all the designers, a Canadian named Donald McKay, built some of the fastest of these ocean greyhounds: the Yankee clippers, made in Boston, were two hundred feet long, no more than thirty wide, carried twelve thousand yards of sail on three masts, had a steep stem and a graceful extended transom, and bounded through the water with unparalleled stealth and beauty. The fastest, the legendary
Sovereign of the Seas
, once made twenty-two knots; the
Lightning
covered 436 miles in a single day; the
Flying Cloud
left New York, barreled around Cape Horn in a wicked storm, and then turned up into the Pacific, making San Francisco after a total nonstop passage of eighty-nine days; and the
James Baines
took just thirteen days and six hours to reach Liverpool from Boston, and then only 133 days to speed herself right around the world. McKay’s
Great Republic
was the longest clipper ship ever built, at 302 feet.

Truly, for the years that the Yankee clippers and their Baltimore cousins crossed the ocean, the vessels became objects of great awe. Parents brought their children down to the East River to gape at their stately comings and goings, and it became a contest to see who could first spot their white sails as they passed through the Verrazano Narrows. With hustlers everywhere deluging New York’s public with gaily colored cards that advertised their breakneck transatlantic service, these ships became both famous and beloved—American icons, of which the citizens of a still-new country could be intensely proud. In the same way the jumbo jet became a very visible symbol of American ability, so too did the Yankee clippers.

But only for a very short while. Competition was fast coming, in the form of cargo vessels powered by steam. Even the majestic iron-hulled windjammers, which sported as many as five masts and huge yardages of sail, and could carry five thousand tons of cargo at immense speeds, made little commercial sense once the steamship had been perfected.

As soon as players like Samuel Cunard, who started a steamship service running between Liverpool and Boston in 1814, entered the market, sail was on the way to being finished. Steamship crossings could be made in less than two weeks. The new vessels were suddenly freed from the vagaries of wind and storm. Reliability of schedules—which the packets strove for, but at great risk and seldom with total success—became the accepted norm. Cargo rates started to plummet. And though some windjammers did manage to cling to their business into the new century—for some vessels, until well after the Second World War, moving bulk cargoes such as guano from remote mid-Pacific islands, where there was no chance for a steam vessel to take on coal—all of the clippers had vanished from the commercial routes by the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The evolution from sail to steam had unintended consequences, too. The windjammers’ berths in New York had long been a feature specifically of the East River, which had offered an easier location for the turning of sailing craft. The steam vessels, however—and which in time would obliterate all the competition—almost all arrived and departed from the relatively uncluttered waters of the Hudson, on the west side of Manhattan, closer to the railheads that would take their cargoes and their passengers into the American hinterland. The change led inexorably to an alteration in aspect to the fast-growing New York that has its echoes still today: the finest city views are those that now look west, to where the liners dock.

The packets and the clippers had been people movers as well as shifters of cargoes. The sailing vessels in the closing years of their careers, and steamships through all the years of theirs, and until the planes came, carried scores millions of people westward, overwhelmingly westward, and in doing so they played an essential role in the populating—indeed, in the making—of the Americas. And particularly of the United States and Canada, since both of these hitherto little-populated countries, as acts of deliberate policy, decided they needed for a good long while a steady flow of immigrants
⁷⁰
from the Old World to the New.

Much of this migration, the shameful side of a vastly complex story, and mentioned already, was of the involuntary kind, with slaves swept up from Africa, sent under appalling conditions across the ocean, and then padlocked into humiliating servitude. Many of the others who came out at their own behest were early colonials, from the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the settlers of Jamestown to those who built cottages in such faraway places as Puerto Madryn (the Welsh), Rio de Janeiro (the Portuguese), and Halifax (many Basques, among others). Many of these were skilled and technically able men who were invited to help build the growing industrial revolution, to spin and weave or puddle iron, fish or mine coal; most of those who came to America were either from England—the young America was overwhelmingly Anglophone, after all—or from Germany or Holland; they and their like saw the populating of all the colonial possessions, which ranged along the entire American coastline from Labrador to Patagonia, as part of their own personal manifest destinies.

But by far the greatest proportion of newcomers were those who came after these colonies had one by one thrown off their foreign rulers, and who came across the sea because they saw the newly formed nations as beacons of hope and possibility. These were the now famously engraved
huddled masses
, people who yearned for some respite from the grinding difficulties of Europe—and it is the passage of these, the millions upon millions of men and women and children who came westward with little but a collective and an individual sense of optimism and determination to make something of the chances that were said to be on offer in the New World, that dominate the story.

Their crossings did much to alter once again the world’s perception of the Atlantic Ocean. Hitherto it had been to most an immense barrier of discouragement; now, with the payment of a modest sum for passage in bearable discomfort and the indignities of processing on the other side, the ocean was transformed into an immensely long bridge—long, to be sure, but a bridge just the same—that would take anyone bold enough to venture across into a brand-new life. In becoming the prime passageway for all these migrant journeys, the ocean became itself an integral part of a whole new world of possibility. The figures are quite staggering. While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in—most of them northern Europeans, particularly Britons and Irish, in the years of the first great wave that lasted until 1890; and then many Italians, Germans, and Scandinavians in the half century that followed. Much the same was happening south of the equator, too: some ten million Europeans migrated to Latin America in the fifty years before the Great War, and the populations of Brazil and Argentina, which accepted particularly large numbers of migrants from Portugal, Spain, and Italy, increased massively—by tenfold in Brazil, by fifteenfold in Argentina.

And so the people came in their millions, pouring up the gangways and brought by lighters, then settling themselves uncomfortably in the ships that waited patiently at the quaysides or out in the roads. The migrants paid low “emigrant” fares for passage in the steerage—three pounds was the going rate to America for many years, though Argentina offered free passage from 1888 and handed out prepaid tickets to anyone fit and able who wished to come (a decision that Argentina was later to rue, some contend, since it brought in many less well educated migrants than the country truly needed, and proportionately fewer of the more technically able).

Atlantic Ocean: Commerce and Communication

The migrants began their new lives at quays in Liverpool (which handled nearly five million America-bound passengers on one-way tickets between 1860 and 1914) and Glasgow, in Havre, Bordeaux and Nantes, Modano and Marseilles, Naples and Genoa, Hamburg and Bremen, and the long-forgotten port of Fiume, now Rijeka in Croatia, whence came so many of the Slavs who are inhabitants of present-day Chicago.

Conditions on the emigrant ships could be decidedly unpleasant—while the swells lived and dined pleasantly in the upper decks, those on the verge of momentous change had to put up with steerage decks that were crowded, dark, with poor sanitation and limited water, had either bunk beds with straw mattresses or hammocks, offered almost no cooking facilities, the sexes harshly segregated to lessen the temptations of turpitude, and with constant reminders from unhelpful and often hostile crew members that a ticket gave steerage passengers merely the right to passage, and perhaps a handout of bread, salted meat, and occasional chunks of pemmican or ship’s biscuit, and very little else. The ship’s hatches would be closed in poor weather, and so to the passengers’ general misery would be added the terrible fear occasioned by being tossed around violently for days on end in often fetid near darkness—an experience quite foreign to most of the travelers, because few would ever have been near a ship, and even fewer out in the open sea. Morale invariably suffered as the passage groaned on—in bad weather, especially, good cheer could be sustained in the lower decks only by the travelers telling and retelling to themselves their imagined vision of what might lie ahead, in the promised land.

Of the numberless accountings of emigrant voyages, that of Robert Louis Stevenson, who traveled from Glasgow to New York in 1879 in a threadbare class just one level above the lowest steerage of them all, is perhaps the most famous and eye-opening. Stevenson’s family was horrified and tried to delay it, but in the end
The
Amateur Emigrant
was published a year after his death, in 1895, and was deemed so graphic a description of migrant misery as to be barely credible. The event that threw even more light on their situation occurred seventeen years later, with the sinking of the RMS
Titanic
, in April 1912.

For one harsh reality came to dominate the saga of that tragedy: that the lives of those in the great ship’s steerage—few of whom even knew where the ship’s lifeboats were—meant evidently less to the White Star Line than those of their premium passengers. It was a shocking revelation, but undeniable, for the statistics displayed a cruel truth: that while the majority of first-class passengers survived the accident, more than three-quarters of those pinned below the waterline on the steerage decks died, unrescued either because they were physically unrescuable or because few were willing to try to save them.