The Amateur Emigrant E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Robert Louis Stevenson
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

"The amateur emigrant", written by Robert Louis Stevenson between 1879 and 1880, is an account of the trip that the writer do ' from Scotland to California to visit his Californian future wife seriously ill. Stevenson went by ship from Glasgow and decided to travel third class, to see how he lived and moved the working class. The Scottish writer, in this account, he described his weeks in steerage crowded with poor, sick and clandestine and his initial impressions in New York, where he spent two days. This story is full of insightful observations that Stevenson had on migrants, America and Americans of the era. The work also from a detailed account of what life was like in a typical 19th-century immigrant. Shows details such as the type of underwear worn, the daily amount and type of food rations, relationships with the crew and travellers of higher social class, relations with passengers of other nationalities, with kids, etc, etc. The opera has a rich and colorful painting of life aboard the ship.

Leseprobe

The Amateur Emigrant

by

Robert Louis Stevenson

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The Second Cabin

Early Impressions

Steerage Scenes

Steerage Types

The Sick Man

The Stowaways

Personal Experience and Review

New York

The Second Cabin

I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow. Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and voluble over their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening estuary; and with the falling temperature the gloom among the passengers increased. Two of the women wept. Any one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all absconding from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged, and no common sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard now announced that our ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in mid-river, at the Tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of spars, larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an incorporated town in the land to which she was to bear us.