There they slept, cooked, passed the time. Their fare—150 francs—did not include food. They brought their own. The ship provided only wood and water. The air was so foul in the steerage that a visitor was forced away in a hurry—though he noted that all the Germans seemed healthy enough.
Comforts were greater for Purcell and his people. The captain seated them at his own table, to honor their calling and to spare them the company of ordinary passengers, most of whom appeared to be wanting in manners. The captain’s guests had “everything of the best which one might find at a Parisian hotel”—fresh mutton, fowl, imported wines, oranges in abundance, bread baked fresh daily, milk, butter; and potatoes with every meal, a serving which the missioners enjoyed most of all. The chef was a Negro, “very clever at his profession.” His supplies included enough fresh fruit and vegetables for the first eight days of the voyage, which was expected to take four or five weeks. Below decks, in addition to storerooms for provisions, were pens for sheep and cows.
The Sylvie de Grasse presented unexpected style. Mahogany panelling, with pilasters whose bases and capitals were finished in gold leaf, lined the dining saloon, the ladies’ saloon, and the sleeping cabins. The staterooms were only six feet square, and though ordinarily they accommodated two passengers, the missioners were assigned six to a room, in three levels of two bunks each. With Lamy, Machebeuf, and their Auvergnat companions, a Bavarian Franciscan was quartered. The stateroom looked like a “fruitstand with its many shelves.” If she was typical of the ships of her time, she was under two hundred feet in length, and of about a thousand tons gross weight—a three-masted, full-rigged veteran of the North Atlantic run.
Several of the party felt the sea at first and spent their days in their bunks. Lamy was among them—his seasickness lasted three weeks. Another missioner was resigned to die until Machebeuf took him up on deck, where he rapidly recovered. The marvel of the voyage was old Bishop Flaget, who kept everyone in spirits with his nimble gaiety and his edifying example of long daily devotions. He was always the first one every morning to say his orisons in the little deckhouse. Even when a heavy timber rolled loose across the deck and struck the old man in the leg he dismissed the pain with a word. Machebeuf, too, was in danger one day while studying English on deck—Lamy and the rest also worked on the new language they would need—when a piece of rigging broke aloft, a heavy iron-bound block fell nearby and a thick rope, falling forty feet, struck Machebeuf’s leg, which swelled and gave pain for two days. A passenger who saw the accident said, “a few feet closer, and Machebeuf’s mission would have ended.”
On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, Low Masses were quietly said by the two bishops and the Bavarian friar—these in place of the traditional ten o’clock High Mass which Purcell decided not to sing out of recognition of the views of the surrounding Protestants, who did not hold with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and who would have thought the Catholics absurdly deranged in their practices. But that evening the travelling clergy privately sang the litany of the Virgin Mary and other holy canticles as the ship leaned her way on westward.
Sunrise and sunset at sea were the great events of the day. Imaginations worked to find celestial mountains and castles in the clouds, and flocks of sheep, bands of great horses, parades of soldiers; and then the light would change and there would remain only sea and sky, day on day, for forty-three days.
But on the forty-third day, they heard the captain cry out, “Land, land!” and all strained to see. Those without spy-glasses saw nothing at first, not having the eyes of mariners; but when at last they saw Long Island, in the evening of 20 August, they rejoiced in the sight of houses, farms, forts, woods, lighthouses, telegraph pylons, and knew that by the next morning they would disembark at the port of New York after a voyage of forty-four days.
As they came up the bay, which was “magnificent,” they began to see the spires of the city. At the quarantine station in the Narrows, the Sylvie de Grasse anchored offshore. A steam lighter came to take passengers off—all but the steerage Germans, who must remain on board for two days to fulfill quarantine requirements—and brought them to the docks of South street, where the bowsprits of moored ships extended like a lattice roof above the clamorous traffic on the cobblestones below.
Purcell and his party, all in good health, were conducted across town by two friends from Cincinnati to pay a call upon Bishop Dubois of New York. After more than six weeks of inaction at sea, the travellers felt animation and purpose. They would leave the very next day on their journey inland. Purcell was not one to waste time, and there were still three hundred leagues to go until they should come to Cincinnati, nineteen days later. Their first duty on the inland journey was to pay respects to Archbishop Eccleston at Baltimore.
Going by canal, they found themselves in a cabined flatboat which resembled Noah’s ark in a child’s drawing. The barge was drawn by horse teams on the tow paths, the movement was at the pace of a horse’s walk, and the passengers from France had their first view of farther America as it went slowly past the narrow windows of the cabin. The barges of the day combined flourishes with discomforts. Some of them contained small musical organs on which itinerant “professors” played concerts. In 1842 Charles Dickens travelled in a barge in whose common cabin men and women were separated only by a drawn curtain. The sleeping bunks were let down from the wall, were sixteen inches wide “exactly,” and had to be vacated soon after daybreak to serve as seating benches. Dickens was obliged to wash in dirty canal water poured into a tin basin which was chained to the wall for the use of all passengers, and to dry himself must use the single roller towel provided for all. If the weather was mild, passengers rode on top of the cabin, and on moonlit nights, passing through hills or gorges—for the canal boats went along by day and night—saw how the wilderness scenery held every gleam and shadow of dreamlike strangeness, in the manner of romantic painting.
At Baltimore, the party transferred to stage coaches pulled by four horses at a fast sustained trot. There were three ranks of seats within, the sides of the coach were open except in rain when leather curtains were buttoned to wooden window frames, and the coach rocked on unimpeded. The coach was slung on leather straps instead of springs, and many occupants found the motion distressing.
Heading for Wheeling [West Virginia] the missioners crossed the Alleghenies and at a cost of one dollar for every sixteen miles followed the rude roads through continuous forests and woods, with only an occasional village to reassure them with the sight of boulder and log houses by day, and a lighted window or two by night. At Wheeling they took passage on the steam packet down-bound from Pittsburgh, which would carry them with many twists and turns of the Ohio River in a generally southwestward course to Cincinnati.
As they voyaged downriver, Purcell prepared the newcomers for what they would see at the journey’s end. Cincinnati was a cathedral city—but like none they had ever seen at home. It was embraced by a great curve of the Ohio River, whose banks rose away to the north with only a few streets, and on those, only scattered buildings. The waterfront where the steamers tied up presented a row of shops, chandleries, and warehouses. Here and there the hillsides on which the city spread showed a few sizable houses, some of brick or masonry, but most of wood. There was much open land, with trees, within the town. The first church—a barn-like affair—had been built of logs outside the town limits because of a local ordinance prohibiting the erection of a Catholic church within the town proper. Bishop Flaget had built it, for Cincinnati had then belonged to his see of Bardstown, Kentucky. He had later managed to have the ordinance repealed and the log church brought into the town on rollers and resituated there.
Cincinnati had grown in response to river traffic—people still believed in 1839 that it was destined to become the greatest inland city of America—though a skeptical early settler, according to a family legend, when offered the entire site of Cincinnati “in exchange for his whiskey and molasses,… turned it down on the grounds that it was a hog wallow, and went up the Licking River and raised strawberries.” In 1821 the outlandish riverside town was declared a bishopric. Its first bishop was the Dominican Edward Fenwick, whom Flaget consecrated in
