For to Cross the Mighty Ocean

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 12

For to Cross the Mighty Ocean

OBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S "The Amateur Immigrant," read by Mr. Simmance the other night, took one suddenly into a world-of different dimensions. In these days one speaks, among the English-speaking peoples at least, of immigration as something that happens remotely, theoretically, statistically, rhetorically, in newspapers; but in

Stevenson’s time it was of everyday occurrence. Industrial expansion and the exploitation of the waste spaces of the earth were still leading to mass departures from the British Isles and Northwest Europe. When Stevenson sailed for Samoa, the great Irish and Germen exoduses were over and the Italian and Slav inundations were yet to come; but a steady tide still flowed from England, Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia. Stevenson’s essays, not among his char. acteristic-there is a certain melancholy give a memorable picture of what this emigration (he saw the "ex" of it rather than the "in") really involved. No longer the romantic extremes of hardship, with salt-beef and weevils and pre-Plimsoll shipbuilding; simply the soggy nadir of English cooking and an atmosphere of resigned and cheerful but utter depression that chills the spirits when we hear about it 50 years later. This was the last dying phase of the mass export of population as markerable goods that had marked the high industrial age. Stevenson depicts the whole phenomenon as chilly and grown old.