You would probably arrive at Pier 14 sometime between fourthirty and five in the afternoon, just as the West Street traffic was thickest. You would enter the pier through the ticket office, an inexplicably dreary room with a dark tongue and groove dado along one side and on the other a wooden ticket counter of a sort where one might expect to be issued a dog license. Here you purchased your ticket, good only for the passage, not for a stateroom or meals, which were separate, and proceeded with caution out onto the huge covered wooden pier, which proved to bean extension of the confusion of West Street without even the benefit of traffic lanes to control it: big chain-driven Mack trucks competed with a variety of horse-drawn delivery wagons (still in fairly common use on the waterfront in the thirties) and with the many small handcarts and the half dozen or so electric loaders darting on and off the steamer through the freight doorways forward. While trying to adjust to the din, you would be relieved to find a row of smiling porters waiting outside the ticket office, one of whom would take your bags and guide you down the noisy pier to the steamer. You would not see the beautiful Priscilla itself, except perhaps for a few windows viewed through one of the open portals along the pier. The Priscilla, like virtually all of the Sound steamers, followed a design which was essentially a modification of that used on river steamers on the theory that the waters of Long Island Sound were relatively calm (although I can recall more than one harrowing night on which this was definitely not the case) and therefore did not require that steamers have higher ocean-type hulls. To achieve maximum speed, therefore, the hulls of the Sound steamers (usually iron or steel) were long and narrow; but to provide maximum capacity their superstructures (usually wood) were much wider, extending several feet outside the hull on both sides of the ship. On sidewheel steamers, such as the Priscilla, the two paddlewheels were located on either side of the ship, somewhat aft of midship, and dipped into the water in that space between the narrow hull and the wider superstructure. The line of the superstructure that extended out past the hull, known as the guard rail, was generally between eight and fifteen feet above the waterline, depending on the sheer of the hull, so that in a calm sea the wider superstructure rode easily over the water. But when the Sound kicked up, as it frequently did, the guards could take a severe pounding to the continuing discomfort of the passengers trying to sleep above them. The steamer's vast machinery occupied most of the space in the hull, though there were bunks in the forward section for crew members and two large bunk rooms aft, one for men and one for women, for passengers who chose not to pay for a private stateroom. On many of the steamers the dining saloon was also located aft in the hull section. The first deck of the wooden superstructure, known as the Main Deck (an inapt term left over from the early days when this was the only deck above the hull), was enclosed from the pointed bow almost to the stern and it was in this enclosed area that the freight was stowed. Then there was a short section of the Main Deck at the stern, called the Quarter Deck, which had open deckspace with railings and was used for passengers. As a rule there were two more decks above the Main Deck: the Saloon Deck first and the Gallery Deck above it, both with open deckspace all around them, which were devoted entirely to staterooms and to public rooms for passengers, except for the slightly raised pilot house located, on most steamers, at the forward end of the Gallery Deck. In the larger Fall River Line steamers, however, the pilot house sat alone one deck higher, while aft of it was still another section of staterooms known as the Dome Deck. You boarded the Priscilla by crossing a gangplank near the SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1981
You could parade down that formal stairway, or sit at ease in those overstuffed chairs in the Grand Saloon of the Fall River Line's Plymouth . Built in I 890, she was the first of the Sound steamers to have a tripleexpansion inclined engine, making her far more economical to operate than her walking-beam engined predecessors. Photo: author's collection.
Below, contrasting with the spacious opulence of the public rooms, passengers' staterooms tended toward the Spartan, as shown in this scene aboard a Colonial Line steamer. Photo by Morris Rosenfeld.
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