The Stowaway Craze
From The New Yorker Magazine by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
A lost tabloid spread for the seventeen-year-old Billy Gawronski, who dived into the Hudson River to stow away on Commander Richard Byrd’s 1928 expedition to Antarctica.Courtesy Gizela Gawronski / The Pilsudski Institute of America
In June of 1928, according to a breathless newspaper account, a restless Australian music teacher named Jeanne Day transformed herself into a stowaway of the “modern school.” She’d learned that two ships docked in Port Lincoln were about to race fourteen thousand miles to England. Day, a “brave bohemian,” furtively boarded one of the ships, a Finnish barque, after cutting her dark-brown hair short. Not long after the voyage began, she turned herself in, but the crew found her so charming that she was allowed to stay on board, as a cabin hand. Although Day’s story made international news, it was by no means an anomaly. In the late twenties, the world was in the grip of a stowaway craze.
As long as there has been transportation to faraway places, people have been sneaking on board. But the illicit act didn’t have a name in English until 1848, when “stowaway,” a derivative of “stow away,” entered the language. By the end of the nineteenth century, stowaways had become a regular feature of immigration to America’s Eastern Seaboard. Many American families have passed down stories of ancestors whose new life began with a jump at port and a swim to shore.
