Voyagers of the Titanic (19 page)

As with the voyagers from Cornwall and Guernsey in the second-class cabins, there were clusters of third-class passengers from the same vicinities—ill-starred as their destinies proved. There were twenty passengers from the village of Hardin in Lebanon and another twelve from Kfar Mishki; fourteen passengers from Addergoole in Ireland; eight passengers from Gumoshtnik in Bulgaria; and others from Keghi in Armenia.

Hardin was an isolated upland village reached by a single road, inland from the coastal town of Batroun. It stood 1,110 meters above sea level surrounded by thick woodland, mountainside terraces, and bleak snowy cliffs containing caverns, on a high rock platform. There was a temple to the god Mercury, supposedly erected in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, and a ruined medieval Christian chapel. Hardin’s inhabitants were persecuted Marronite Christians, who began leaving for the United States—many of them to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Often they were sojourners, intending to spend years in the
Mahjar,
or host society, but intent on returning periodically, and perhaps permanently, when they were old, to their homeland,
al-watan
.

A few years earlier Gertrude Bell had traveled south of Hardin to visit the ruins at Balbec. There she lodged with a woman named Kurunfuleh—meaning “Carnation Flower”—whose husband was “seeking his fortune in America,” where she wished to join him. Bell spent several hours talking with her, her son and daughter, and friendly relations who called to play their lutes. The Islamic majority of the Balbec population, called the Metawileh, were renowned for “fanaticism and ignorance,” Bell reported: when they heard of the Japanese victories over Russia in the war of 1905, they shook their fists at their Christian neighbors, saying, “The Christians are suffering defeat! See, now, we too will shortly drive you out and seize your goods.” Bell asked why she did not return to her own village, where she would be protected. “Oh lady,” Kurunfuleh replied, “I could not endure it. There no-one has any business but to watch his neighbour, and if you put on a new skirt the village will whisper together and mock at you.” Life pinched so tightly in Lebanon, Bell reported, that all upland Christians who could scrape together their passage money were leaving for the United States: “it is next to impossible to find labour to cultivate the corn, the mulberry and the vine . . . The Lebanon province is a cul de sac, without a port of its own and without commerce.”
13

Almost all the twenty voyagers from Hardin were heading for Wilkes-Barre, encircled by collieries producing anthracite coal, and misleadingly nicknamed “Diamond City.” We know their names, but little more of them. All embarked at Cherbourg, having traveled via Beirut and Marseille; almost all, except for the shoemaker Gerios Youssef, heading for Youngstown, were listed as farmhands or laborers. Borak Hannah, aged twenty-seven (also known as Hannah Assi Borah), was a farm laborer with relations in Wilkes-Barre but was heading for the home of a man named Hassey in Port Huron, Michigan. A few months later, in July, he married the man’s daughter, became a factory worker, then ran fruit stores in Marlette and Port Huron, and ended his days as a tavern keeper in Port Huron.

From Kfar Mishki—a Christian settlement in Lebanon’s lower Bekaa Valley—came a dozen third-class voyagers mostly aiming at Ottawa. Boulos Hanna, an eighteen-year-old laborer seeking work in the steel mills of Youngstown, was an exception. Mariona Assaf, aged forty-five, who had gone to work in Ottawa some five years earlier, first as a pedlar and then as a greengrocer, had returned to Kfar Mishki to see the two sons she had left behind. She was now heading back from Lebanon, via Cherbourg, to Ottawa with a young cousin and nephew. The travelers from Kfar Mishki spent three days on horseback to reach Beirut, with some of their kin walking with them for the first hours: not for them the railway journey between Beirut and the uplands. “There is no sense of any man having a private right in his own affairs,” reported an English clergyman who had lately made the trip and found that many of his fellow travelers could speak in broken French. “The gentleman on your left is a merchant, and before he has done with you, he will have ascertained the exact price you paid for your Kodak, your aneroid, watch, chain, hat and boots. The elderly and somewhat raw-boned person opposite, on whom his black velvet vest with great buttons sits badly, is consumed with the desire to know your name, and your friend’s name, and your country, and your religion . . . he volunteers the one fact—certainly a remarkable one—that he has himself been in Manchester, and found it ‘
très joli
.’”
14

The Metawileh who celebrated Japan’s victory at Port Arthur, the Kodak in the Bekaa Valley, the nosy old Syrian who enjoyed the bright lights of Manchester—they are all evidence of the globalization of news and rumor, of gimcrack novelties and shallow curiosity that characterized the
Titanic
world of 1912. In broken language, with gestures and smiles and scowls, some at least of the third-class passengers will have explored common ground, shown off their knowledge, and asked questions. Friendly, suspicious, overinquisitive, muddled: they were on the way to becoming Americans.

Addergoole lies above the shores of Lough Conn—the Lake of the Hound—and beneath the bleak slopes of Nephin Mór in County Mayo. Mayo is a county in the west of Ireland, its wild shores hammered by Atlantic winds and rain, with few shelter belts of trees, although Addergoole lies on the protected inland side of Nephin Mór. The soil is as barren as the weather is bleak. Nearby at Erris is the largest bog in Ireland. Potatoes were the chief crop: pigs, sheep, cattle, and poultry were the other staples of Mayo’s subsistence farming. There had been turbulent relations between Protestant landlords and Catholic tenants in the recent past: Addergoole was not far from the localities where Lord Leitrim, Lord Mountmorres, and the bailiff of Lord Ardilaun had been assassinated. White Star’s local agent, Thomas Durcan of Castlebar, one of a family known as the Fighting Durcans, had sold tickets to ten of the fourteen Addergoole voyagers.

Every place name in Ireland is like a tune, Marianne Moore thought. The hamlets and farms dispersed about the parish of Addergoole made a medley of tunes: Carrowskeheen, Cuilmullagh, Cuilnakillew, Cum, Derrymartin, Knockfarnaught, Terryduff, Tonacrick. From Cuilmullagh came Annie Kelly, who was going to join female cousins in Chicago and destined to become a nun in Adrian, Michigan. She was a cousin of two young men, James Flynn, from Cuilnakillew, who was joining his brother in New York, and Pat Canavan, from Knockmaria, who was heading for Philadelphia.

Two weeks later, a Chicago journalist spoke to Annie Kelly and Annie McGowan, the sole survivors of the Addergoole voyagers. Several of the party were “Yanks,” “Irish lads and lassies who have been to America and come back to Ireland for a look at the old place and the blessing of the old father and mother, before they go back to America to stay for good and all.” The Yanks included Kate Bourke, formerly McHugh, and Kate McGowan, who had both left Mayo for Chicago when they were young girls. Kate McHugh had returned to Addergoole, where she married John Bourke, who had never thought of going to America. However, when her old Yank friend Kate McGowan came for a short visit to Terryduff, her family’s corner of Addergoole, the Bourkes decided to sell his farm at Carrowskeheen and accompany her back to Chicago. The Bourkes were accompanied by his sister Mary; also traveling with them were Honora (“Nora”) Fleming, in her early twenties, and Mary Mangan, who had lived for some years with a sister in the States and, having got engaged to an Irishman there, had returned for a visit to Ireland before her marriage. The Bourkes’ friend Kate McGowan left Terryduff for the last time with her young teenage niece Annie McGowan, who had relations already settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. On board the
Titanic,
John and Kate Bourke “sat apart most of the day by themselves, talking and talking. There was no end of their talking about . . . what he would do in America with all the money he was taking with him from selling the farm. He was for taking a long time what to do with it, but Kate would be always telling him that America was not Ireland, and that a man must decide quickly what to do, for money would run just as fast away from you in America as toward you, if a man was not looking out.” John Bourke thought of buying horses and becoming a teamster. For the rest of the Addergoole voyagers the voyage was like a picnic outing. “The fun they had coming out, the games and quadrilles, the story-telling and the fortune-telling! It was grand.” There were Addergoole girls going to America for the first time: from Cum, Bridget Donahue, aged twenty-one; from Derrymartin, Delia Mahon, aged twenty; from Knockfarnaught, Bridget Delia McDermott, who was heading for cousins in Saint Louis, Missouri; and another cousin of Annie Kelly’s, Mary Canavan, aged twenty-two, from Tonacrick. “The young girls would talk about what they would do in America before they were married. That is, they would talk about it when they were not scurrying around the deck laughing and making friends here and there with everybody, and it’s a God’s mercy that Annie Kelly did joke with one of the stewards and he take notice of the girl, or she would not have been alive this moment.”
15

Addergoole with its boggy fields, wide lake, and wet winds was very different from the terrain of ravines and echoing gorges where the luckless Bulgarians originated. Gumoshtnik was a small, huddled village reached by one road and several mountain tracks, five miles from Troyan, a small town standing on a mountain torrent, the Balabanska. It was different, too, from the boomtowns clanging with streetcars and earsplitting factory whistles, crowded with grim and angry industrial workers, where they were heading. A party of eight voyagers from Gumoshtnik boarded at Southampton. They were all laborers or potters: Marin Markov and Peju Colchev in their midthirties were the oldest; at nineteen, Nedialco Petrov and Ilia Stoytchev were the youngest. As backwoodsmen, some perhaps wore the
kalpak,
a lambskin cap; wide breeches (
poturi
); red sash (
poyas
); shoes with long laces (
opinak
). Revealingly, the Bulgarian word
patilo,
meaning “misfortune,” was also a synonym for “experience.” “All classes practice thrift bordering on parsimony and resent any display of wealth,” reported an English visitor. “The peasants are industrious, provident, peaceable, and orderly; they are high-spirited without being bad-tempered, the vendetta and the use of the knife in quarrels being unknown.”
16

The spaciousness of the
Titanic
may have seemed wondrous or disorientating to the party of Armenians who embarked at Cherbourg. Many of them, such as Ortin and Mapriedereder Zakarian, were hardy men in their early twenties from the Keghi district, with its soaring mountains and sweeping gorges, “a region of danger and violence,” where small farmers eked out a bare existence while fending off Kurdish brigands, avaricious semi-feudal Moslem landowners, and extortionate Turkish officials. Previously the voyagers from Keghi had known only traditional households (
tuns
) where father, mother, bachelor and married sons with their families, unmarried daughters, and single or elderly relations lived together. Each
tun
was attached to or above a stable. Its occupants lived in one room, in which they ate, sat, and slept, rolling out their mattresses at night around the fireplace. Fifteen people might live in a space that was twelve feet by twenty-five. Some households had a cubbyhole with a brick-lined, cone-shaped bread oven dug into the floor. Usually kin lived in labyrinthine warrens of buildings in which they could hide with their valuables during attacks (there was a history of extortion, pillage, rape and abduction, forced conversions to Islam, forced quartering of unruly troops, and land confiscation). For the Keghetsis, the
Titanic,
with its public corridors, communal rooms, private sleeping cabins, and invisible kitchens must have been eye-opening, seeming more opulent, even, than the houses of the
beys
(Turkish feudal chiefs) who extorted and oppressed them.
17

The influx of Armenians into America served as a thermometer measuring their misfortunes under Turkish rule. In 1909 thirty thousand Armenians had been massacred, and in 1911–1912 the ultranationalists among the Young Turks who had deposed the sultan were promulgating a ruthless campaign of Turkification of Armenians. Young men left in droves: the Keghetsi on the
Titanic
were all in their twenties; all but one were married, for parents customarily arranged for their sons to marry before departing abroad, as a way of ensuring that they would one day return. Few survived to leave accounts of their thoughts and activities, and the survivors have left only exiguous hints, but we know that for Armenians going to the United States (9,350 arrived in 1912 alone), New York, Illinois, and Michigan were the chief destination states.
18
Some two thousand Armenians entered Canada in the quarter century before 1914, primarily settling in two industrial towns of southern Ontario, Brantford and Hamilton. The Keghetsis Neshan Krikorian, David Vartanian, and Orsen Sirayanian were all heading for Hamilton, and Sarkis Mardirosian for Brantford. Neshan Krikorian gave both Hamilton and Brantford as his destination and ended up in Saint Catherine’s, Ontario, working on a General Motors automobile assembly line. Several Armenians gave a Brantford factory address: the Cockshutt Plow Company or the Pratt & Letchworth malleable iron foundry—the “Mybil,” Armenians called it—rather than a private residence as their destination on their embarkation papers. Others gave the name and address in Hamilton of John Bertram, the demotic name of the Canada Tool Works.
19
David Vartanian, aged twenty-two when he embarked at Cherbourg, had left his new bride behind—probably as a token to his parents that he would return. She survived the horrors of 1915, when 1.5 million Armenians were massacred in the first genocide of the twentieth century, but it was over a decade before (after frightening difficulties and formidable planning) the couple were reunited and had a grateful, fulfilled life together in Meadeville, Pennyslvania, and Detroit.