A Game on the High Seas

On July 30, 1870, the Cunard Royal Mail steamer Palmyra left Liverpool for New York City. Only five years earlier, the American Civil War, with a loss of over six hundred thousand lives, had profoundly changed the United States. It had put an end to that tragic crossing called the Middle Passage, a few thousand nautical miles to the south of the Palmyra’s route, and abolished the brutal institution of slavery. Embers of scorched cities in the wake of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s marching army had long cooled off, but the South remained bitter, defiant, mired in a slow and painful reconstruction. Meanwhile the North and the rest of the country were hurtling along with almost unchecked speed toward the future. No one seemed to heed the backwoodsman Henry David Thoreau’s contrarian wisdom: “Why the hurry?” America was in a hurry, with the iron horse—the train—leading the way of economic expansion. The completion in 1869 of the Transcontinental Railroad, built on the backs and lives of Chinese and Irish coolie laborers, had brought the country together spatially. New towns sprouted along newly laid railroad tracks like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Chicago emerged as the center of the meatpacking industry. Cattle kingdoms rose in Texas and the Plains states. The dizzying pace of urban expansion and frenetic economic development had ushered in a new era in America: the Gilded Age. The Palmyra, built in 1866 to keep pace with the exponential increase in transatlantic traffic, was a medium-sized steamship—2,044 in tonnage, 260 in nominal horsepower, and a passenger capacity of 46 in cabin and 650 in steerage.1 On this trip, the Palmyra, under the command of Captain William Watson, carried 29 passengers in cabin and 377 in steerage.2 A steamer was a major improvement on a sailing ship, cutting the length of a transatlantic journey from an almost-insufferable eight weeks down to two. However, these were the early days of cruise voyage; conditions on board were still crude and primitive. Cabins were as small as a cat’s ear, badly lit by a single candle. Passengers had to wash their own dishes. To get fresh milk—before the age of electricity and refrigeration—the company brought live cows on the ship. To control rats, cats were taken along for the cruise.3 Charles Dickens, who, in 1842, crossed