Series 1 - Anonymous voyage on the ship Glasgow, Liverpool-New York, 1833

43pp

PRONI provided a transcript of the journal to Kerby A. Miller. The original manuscript is held in PRONI [reference number D280].

Transcripts and extracts from the anonymous journal of a passenger aboard the ship Glasgow which sailed from Liverpool to New York during the final three months of 1833. Also included are Kerby A. Miller's notes on the journal. Per Miller: 'The writer was a young man, going to America in search of "a situation." His home seems to have been in Belfast. He wrote the journal for his mother, and was lonesome for her... ...Certainly, the people on board this vessel were extremely disagreeable. The Captain, an American, had a violent temper, cursed and flogged his crew for the slightest trifles, a cruel SOB, frequently drunken. The author's fellow cabin passengers, a mixture of Irish, Irish-American, and English, were drunkards and boors, but considered themselves superior and remained aloof from the second cabin and steerage passengers. The "second cabin" on this ship was no more than a canvas sheet separating the hold into two compartments. The steerage passengers were poor Irish. The major theme of the voyage was tedium, boredom, and countless small irritations, magnified by their situation; "there is no such thing as incident among us .... we all just eat and drink and sleep." They all had a great deal of trouble about food.'