ABSTRACT
Travel across the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century was a perilous venture. Adele Fielde’s first crossing had been a nightmare that ended in tragedy, and she fared no better on her second crossing. She sailed from San Francisco on September 19, 1885 on the steamship City of Peking, the carrier of over 1200 Chinese herded together in its fore-and midsections, while fifty Westerners occupied the afterpart. Unfortunately, when the wind was just right, it blew the foul air vented from the crowded Chinese section over the saloon and deck occupied by Fielde and the Westerners. Fielde complained that she could hardly breathe, and that the miasmic air, “supersaturated with the effluvia of present and past generations of Chinese,” gave her “malarial fever.”
