gers’ main occupation throughout the voyage. And, bad as the inability to
ever get clean must have been, defecating was not only messy but danger-
ous. Toilets were either buckets, which must often have overturned in
rough seas, or openings in the railings where, as waves slammed into the
ship’s hull, the brave or desperate precariously perched, fearing to be
washed overboard and getting frequent baths of seawater while they were
relieving themselves.
Even on relatively calm days, everything loose—boxes, bedding, uten-
sils, and people—skidded unceasingly, like a pendulum or a metronome,
back and forth, port to starboard, starboard to port, across the deck, slam-
ming into other bales and boxes, upending people, overturning buckets of
slops. There was no escape, since every inch of ’tween-decks was packed
with people, goods, and animals. The stench of excrement and vomit, the
bellows of the terrified animals, the moaning of the sick, the screams of the
children, the creaking of the ship’s timbers, and the crash of the sea can
scarcely be imagined. This bedlam was enveloped in an almost pitch-black
gloom. No candles or lanterns could be allowed between decks because a
fire at sea was too frightening to contemplate. Passengers and crew alike
thought of ’tween-decks as a dungeon and spoke of the inhabitants getting
what some of them, probably from their English penal days, called jail fever.
Jail fever was probably typhus. Other diseases were just as lethal.
Scurvy was the most frightening. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Europe, no one understood its cause or prevention. Any traveler who had
read the already popular accounts of Richard Hakluyt, the intellectual
father of colonization in British America, would know its terrible symp-
toms—“swolne euery ioint withall.” With scurvy, people were lamed, their
teeth fell out, and bleeding sores erupted. It was not until 1753, when pas-
sengers were advised to provide themselves with prunes and “Juyce of
Limons,” that Europeans caught up with the Arabs and the Indians, who
had long understood scurvy. Smallpox also was dreaded as a killer both
ashore and at sea, but at sea there could be no quarantine—which was the
only way then known to contain it. Of the 100 passengers on William
Penn’s Welcomein 1682, thirty died of smallpox.
In addition to storms, starvation, and sickness, passengers and crew
had to reckon with the Atlantic as a sort of “no man’s sea,” contested
36 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA