Steerage

Steerage is the lower deck of a ship, where the cargo was stored above the closed hold. During the early 1900s many immigrants were too poor to travel on the upper decks, with wealthy passengers, so they were stuffed in converted cargo spaces which provided the lowest cost and lowest class of travel. The living conditions on the steerage deck were often horrible, with no bathroom facilities besides pots and pans. These horrible conditions caused many deaths due to unsanitary and cramped quarters. Gradual improvements to steerage class after the arrival of ocean liners led to its replacement by Third Class cabins.

Traditionally, the steerage is "that part of the ship next below the quarter-deck, immediately before the bulkhead of the great cabin in most ships of war, also identified as the portion of the 'tween-decks just before the gun-room bulkhead. The name originates from the steering tackle which ran through this area to connect the rudder to the tiller or helm. In some ships the second-class passengers are called steerage passengers. The admiral's cabin on the middle deck of three-deckers has been called the steerage."

The steerage area of the ship was once used to accommodate passengers travelling on the cheapest class of ticket, and offered only the most basic amenities, typically with limited toilet use, no privacy, and poor food. Many immigrants to the United States in the late 18th and early 19th century traveled in this area of the ships.

The American photographer Alfred Stieglitz wrote in 1907 of conditions in steerage aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm II in the following terms:

...the 900 steerage passengers crowded into the hold of so elegant and roomy a steamer as the Kaiser Wilhelm II, of the North German Lloyd line, are positively packed like cattle, making a walk on deck when the weather is good, absolutely impossible, while to breathe clean air below in rough weather, when the hatches are down is an equal impossibility. The stenches become unbearable, and many of the emigrants have to be driven down; for they prefer the bitterness and danger of the storm to the pestilential air below. The division between the sexes is not carefully looked after, and the young women who are quartered among the married passengers have neither the privacy to which they are entitled nor are they much more protected than if they were living promiscuously.

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Wikipedia