HOGG SCRAPBOOK #8 from Janice Brooks-Headrick 12/26/2000

SAILING TO AMERICA

Space forbids my referring to many things I saw and learned while we lived in Arran, but one thing I should like to mention, the impression made on my mind by looking at a storm on the rocky southwest coast of the Island. I have been there when the tide was coming and the west wind in a fury sweeping round the coast of Ireland, in view, and hemmed in by Ailsey Craige in the middle of the Firth of Clyde. It seemed to me to concentrate all its force and dash it on the rocks on the coast of Arran. I have sat and looked at it till overwhelmed with the thought of Omnipotence and the smallness of man.

In the summer of 1833 we started for America; father, mother and five children, Margaret, Robert, David, John and Betsy. What a change from the still uneventful shepherd’s life; it was to entertain the thoughts of such a change and mix in the thoroughfare of trade and commerce, wonder and amusement call forth at every turn.

A little steam boat from Lamlash took us to Greenock, a shipping port on the Clyde, where the ship Romulus was lying at her dock, waiting the time of sailing. We got there on Saturday, time enough to get our luggage in place and our bunks ready for the first night on board.

A large East Indiaman ship was unloading sugar where our ship lay and we got our first glimpse of the roar and tear of the commercial current. Six men turned a windlass and drew up hhds. (Jan: hogsheads? barrels) from somewhere down in the hold. They were rolled on to the dock, a stave was bored and about two teacupfuls of sugar extracted with a scoop which was tied up and written on, the hole plugged, tinned over and away it went on a kind of a low drag, (Jan: Whatsis?) made no doubt on purpose for one man and a horse, probably to some warehouse.

How all this did interest us ! We took a stroll up the main street of the town; the shops, the hawkers with their several cries, and, in fact, everything we saw and heard was new, and looking from it now it was on a small scale, yet it will never be forgotten.

Before we started and incident occurred that is still on my mind. On the next day, Sunday, we left the shipping and took a street leading out of the town and went into a field; it was quite steep and in a pasture and we all sat down. Before long a man came at a quick pace, and charged us with trespassing. He said he paid a very high rent and if he permitted people to come on his premises, they would be made entirely worthless to him. My father explained his situation and apologized, speaking of his love his native hills and his regret for leaving, and judging from what he said and his whole deportment, even a stranger could feel that he was undergoing the most tremendous ordeal of his life. The whole family were in tears. The landlord shook his and all our hands and actually apologized for even thinking that we were injuring him and told us to roll or run to our hearts’ content. They sat and talked together till time for us to return to the ship, and thus ended the last time our feet ever trod the hills of Scotland.

We were what was then called steerage passengers; the ship supplied two bunks, one above the other, six feet square. When the ship was on a larboard tack an changed to a starboard, we had to change the pillows to the up hill side. The water supply was per capita, and scant at that. Everyone did their own cooking in the galley, a long iron box on deck, say eight or ten feet long, a foot deep and twenty inches wide, with a coal fire the whole length of it. Some part of the time cooks were pretty thick, but I never saw any trouble; the police force was the golden rule.

In a short time after we sailed, the measles broke out in the steerage, and a great many were taken down about the same time, my father among the rest. (Robert Hogg, b. 1776)

He had a very light attack, but being all his life used to breathing fresh air, the conditions under which he was placed seemed insufferable. He went out on deck too soon, took cold, died very suddenly and was buried at sea, leaving my mother (Elizabeth Oliver)

and five children in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, unprotected and unacquainted with the ways of the world.

It was truly a sad situation, and to tell of the incidents and suffering in a six weeks’ and three days’ voyage would far exceed the limits I had set for myself, and probably exhaust the patience of the reader. If desirable would give it on future occasion.

 

End part #8