The Martins of the Dresden

On the cold winter's night of 23rd January 1889, the docks of Southampton were shaken by a momentous farewell. Hundreds of people gathered to say goodbye to the relatives travelling on the maiden voyage of the steamship SS Dresden, under this new migratory scheme of subsidised passages, bound for Buenos Aires—with a stop at Queenstown (now Cobh)—in search of a future that the agents' promises painted as prosperous and bright.

Among those travellers were two families who shared a surname and a story that, more than a century later, I shall begin to reconstruct with the information within my reach. These were the Martins.

Albert Martin, a carpenter and joiner aged thirty-nine, boarded the ship with his wife Eliza Jane and their four young children: Frederick, Edith, Jessie, and Eliza Rose. He was accompanied by his elder brother, Reuben Barker Martin, a bricklayer of forty-two, who travelled with his wife Sarah Ann and their six children, among them Charles William—Charlie, as he was called—a lad of seventeen who would soon share both roof and trade with his uncle Albert in the Argentine capital.

The Martin family's roots stretch back to the heart of Hampshire. Albert was born in 1851 in Brockenhurst, a small village nestled in the New Forest, and was baptised on 30th November of that year in the historic church of St Mary's, Southampton. His parents, Joseph and Mercy Martin, gave him a name that was fashionable in Victorian England. Reuben, the elder brother, was also born in Brockenhurst, in 1847.

By 1881, the English census provides a revealing snapshot of the lives of both brothers. Albert was residing in the district of Southampton St Mary, a dense and bustling area, and worked as a House Carpenter And Joiner 1st Class Army Reserve—that is, a first-class carpenter and joiner in the Army Reserve. This detail, seemingly minor, is significant: Albert was no mere civilian tradesman; he had received military training as an army carpenter, a distinction that undoubtedly conferred a higher status upon his craft. In this census he was already married to Eliza Jane, a native of Shirley, and they had two small children: Frederick A., aged one, and the newborn Edith F.

His brother Reuben, for his part, had achieved an even more prosperous position. In the 1881 census he is recorded as residing in South Stoneham, Hampshire, with the occupation Master Bricklayer & Grocer Employing 9 men & 4 boys. Reuben had diversified his business and become a small entrepreneur in the local construction and retail trade. He was married to Sarah Ann and they already had five children: Charles W., Amy C., William H., Emily E., and Jessie S. The 1871 census, a decade earlier, had placed them in Ashford, Middlesex, on the outskirts of London, where Reuben, then twenty-four, worked as a simple bricklayer.

The decision to emigrate to Argentina in 1889, despite the economic stability they had achieved, remains something of a puzzle. Perhaps the promises of land and railway contracts in South America, spread by immigration agents and the press, led them to believe they might expand their horizons on an even grander scale. What is certain is that, in early 1889, both families sold what they possessed and embarked upon the adventure.

The Letter

The SS Dresden arrived in the River Plate on 15th February 1889, after nineteen days at sea. What followed the disembarkation comes to us thanks to the letter that Albert Martin wrote on 10th March 1889 to a lady friend in Southampton, which was published some weeks later in the local newspaper, the Southampton Observer and Hampshire News.

Albert's account is one of the most vivid and unsparing descriptions of the immigrant experience in Argentina. The so-called Immigrants' Hotel, in the port of Buenos Aires, was "the most filthy, miserable place it has ever been my lot to live in". Upon their arrival, the premises were crammed with four thousand Italians who had landed in the previous two days. "There was no provision made for us, and no accommodation of any sort. They managed to get us some food about six in the evening, and that is about all the attention we received." Hundreds of men, women, and children spent the night in the open air, on the pavement of the courtyard or the tables of the dining shed. "Everybody was hungry, wretched, but fortunately not cold."

The following day, upon occupying the vacant berths left by the departing Italians, they encountered "rats, mice, bugs, fleas, and those other most unmentionable abominations with grey backs, and a wonderful liking for human bodies". On the fifth day, everyone was turned out of the hotel, whether they had anywhere to go or not.

Despite the chaos, Albert quickly found work in a large carpenter's workshop with modern machinery, and his wage of three dollars a day (about seven shillings and sixpence at the exchange rate of the time) was among the best an English tradesman could hope for. Yet the real ordeal was finding lodgings for a family. After two days of fruitless searching, he came upon "two little rooms, a small charcoal stove cooking-place, and a back yard about eight feet by eight feet", for which he paid thirty-four dollars a month, in advance, and without a single shelf, cupboard, or nail upon which to hang his hat.

His brother Reuben, meanwhile, had obtained a post as foreman bricklayer on the construction of a new railway in Córdoba, about a thousand miles from the capital, thanks to the recommendation of Viscount de Bondy, the French ambassador. One of Reuben's daughters went to live with the diplomat's family, and his son Charlie, aged seventeen, remained in Buenos Aires, working and living with his uncle Albert.

Albert's letter is also a settling of accounts with the official propaganda that had driven them to emigrate: "The papers on which most of us founded our hopes, at Southampton and other places, and the plausible tales told us, are nothing but a tissue of falsehoods, and a mean, contemptible, and a cruel fraud, as hundreds of these poor people (both English and Irish) have found to their cost."

And yet his practical spirit prevails at the end: "With perseverance, and a determination to overcome obstacles, I really think that the fortune I am to return to Southampton to find, though still in the far distant future, is not altogether unattainable."

Until now, Albert Martin's letter was merely an anonymous testimony, a tale of despair without a face. But the combination of the SS Dresden passenger list with the Argentine National Census of 1895 has allowed us to identify the family and to reconstruct their daily life in the country.

The Argentine census shows the Martins scattered across Cuartel 04, the rural population of the district of Morón, to the west of Greater Buenos Aires. Albert, his name Hispanicised as "Alberto", is listed as single—a likely census error, given that he was working away from home—and worked as a carpenter. His wife Eliza, aged forty, and their youngest daughter Eliza Rose, aged just nine, were employed as cooks in the home of an English family, the Bournes.

The head of that household was Arthur Mason Bourne, an English mining engineer who had arrived in Argentina around 1887 and who, in 1895, would publish an adventure novel entitled A Mystery of the Cordillera: A Tale of Adventure in the Andes. Working alongside the Bournes was Mary Fitzpatrick, a young Irishwoman of twenty-three who had travelled on the same voyage of the Dresden as the Martins. Her presence confirms the existence of a dense network of British and Irish immigrants who supported one another in the Morón area.

Albert's eldest son, Frederick, aged fifteen, worked as a labourer on the estate of the Balfour family, in the same rural area of Morón. The Balfours—Nelly, aged twenty-six, and her young children Frank and Dolly—were a family of Scottish origin who owned land in what would become the heart of the prestigious Hurlingham Club, founded in 1888 on the initiative of John Ravenscroft and supported by families such as the Robsons, the Campbells, and the Drysdales.

The dispersal of the Martin family—Albert working as a carpenter on rural building projects, Eliza and little Eliza Rose as cooks, and Frederick as a labourer on an estate—reveals a survival strategy typical of immigrants: every member, even the children, contributed whatever they could to keep the household afloat.

Despite having managed to integrate themselves into the British community of Morón, the Argentine adventure of the Martins did not prosper. Without knowing the exact date or how they obtained the means or managed the journey home, I did find in the United Kingdom census records that by 1901, Albert, Eliza, and their daughters were already back in England.

The census of that year places them in Shirley, Hampshire, the very village where Eliza Jane had been born. If I close my eyes, I can imagine her father giving them a helping hand and welcoming them back. I picture an immense emotional blow, given that what they had envisioned in Buenos Aires had not worked out. Lost years. Frustration. Sorrow. Returning with their heads hung low. That is only my imagining.

Albert, now fifty, had resumed his trade of Carpenter & Joiner. His daughter Eliza Rose, fifteen, was working as a dressmaker's apprentice. Little Jessie, who in 1889 had been five years old, now appears as Elsie L. Martin, aged seventeen. The elder children, Frederick and Edith, are not listed in the household: they had probably already become independent or were working as servants in other homes.

Also living in the house was a widow of eighty-two, Sarah Ballard, as a boarder, which suggests the Martins were renting out a room to earn extra income.

Might Sarah have been the lady who received Albert's letter?

Reuben, the elder brother, also returned to England. The 1911 census shows him at sixty-four in Milton, Hampshire, together with his wife Sarah Ann, to whom he had been married for forty-four years. His occupation was given as Builder, and they lived alone, a sign that their children had already set up homes of their own. The American adventure was definitively behind them.

One of the more curious findings of this investigation was the existence of two contradictory records for Albert Martin in the Argentine immigration database. In one, he appears as Albert Martin, aged thirty-nine, married, carpenter, embarked at Southampton. In the other, he appears as Albert Martin, aged twenty-six, single, labourer, embarked at Queenstown.

This duplication, far from casting doubt, confirms the administrative error we suspected. The SS Dresden had sailed from Southampton on 25th January and made a stop at Queenstown, Ireland, the following day to collect hundreds of Irish passengers. Upon disembarkation in Buenos Aires, Argentine officials often recorded the last European port of call rather than the passenger's actual port of origin. The first record, the one indicating Southampton and carpenter, is the correct one. The second is a bureaucratic error, likely committed when processing a group of passengers en masse.

This administrative detail, which might otherwise have gone unnoticed, serves as further proof of the reliability of the investigation as a whole and of the identification of Albert Martin as the author of the letter.

The story of the Martin brothers is a microcosm of the great European migratory epic to Argentina in the nineteenth century. Albert and Reuben represent those thousands of British tradesmen who, lured by promises of prosperity, left behind a modest but stable life to seek their fortune on the pampas.

Unlike many others, the Martins had the opportunity to return, and they did not let it slip away. By 1901, Albert was back in Hampshire, taking up his carpenter's trade once more and watching his daughter begin her apprenticeship as a dressmaker. Reuben, the prosperous master bricklayer who had once employed nine men and four boys before his departure, also returned and continued to work as a builder well into his old age.

Their story is a reminder that emigration was not always a one-way journey with no return. For many, the "American dream" turned into a nightmare of overcrowding, low wages, and disease. And for others, like the Martins, the solution was to pack their bags and go back home, bearing with them the scars of an adventure that, despite everything, left an indelible mark upon their family history.

Albert Martin's letter, rescued from the pages of the Southampton Observer, still resonates today, more than a century later, as a living testimony of that experience. And thanks to the cross-referencing of censuses, immigration records, and newspapers of the period, I have been able to imagine a face and to weave theories and thoughts about one of the protagonists.

The truth is that this story requires the descendants of the Martins of the Dresden to shed light upon these unknowns. While these matters fall within the private sphere of the family, being able to understand the reality of those days through letters containing first-hand accounts of impressions, thoughts, sorrows, and so forth, makes it possible to construct history from the authority of the testimony of the ship's own descendants.