Let’s say a British ship, call it Titanic, pulls into New York on a Wednesday morning in mid-April in 1912. The passengers and crew are a mix of British, Irish, and Americans, an Italian or two, a few Hatians, yada yada. A small number of the passengers are Americans returning home, the rest immigrants.
Would all of the Americans in those days have carried passports? If a poor American – say a Wisconsin boy who failed to make it as a painter in Paris – came in without a passport, would he have had to sweet-talk his way back into the country? Also, the passport-carrying, returning Americans – did they get off the ship in one place, the immigrants another (viz, Ellis Island)? Or did everyone go through Ellis Island?
BONUS QUESTION: How long would a passenger vessel like our fictitious example have been in port before returning back to, say, Southampton? Hours? Days?
From what I’ve seen in my ancestors, American citizens who left the country on a cruise were given a card before they left identifying them as citizens. When they boarded the ship to go back, they would present this card to the ship’s authorities and possibly again when debarking in the US.
I don’t know for sure, but they probably didn’t go through Ellis Island (or Castle Garden) since they had the documentation. They probably got off when the ship docked in Manhattan.
The Titanic was supposed to cross the Atlantic in seven days. According to this, its sailing dates were scheduled every 10 days, meaning a three-day layover between voyages.
in 1912 when a passenger ship arrived in port the turn around was a lot longer than today. Along with getting all the passengers off and their luggage, cargo and mail would also have to be unloaded. Then Sup[plies would have to be loaded along with any cargo. In those days there were no fork lifts or pallet jacks. No role on role off. It was manhandled to the dock. Then loaded with cargo booms and manhandled the same way. Plus the ship would need to take on bunkers. That was not pumped aboard but by coal shoots and hand shoveled in the bunkers until full. And another time consuming thing ships had to go through quarantine by the healt department before anyone could get off the ship.
Nice little radio documentary on the history of the passport, from the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Australian-oriented but internationally relevant.
There’s a good account of the process here. Basically, after a cursory inspection of the ship by doctors for contagious diseases, passengers would be divided into two categories, one for first and second class and the other for third class (steerage). First and second class passengers could disembark straightaway. Third class passengers would be ferried to Ellis Island. The process there would take a few hours, which consisted mostly of queuing and medical examinations, and only a small percentage of them would be denied entry.
So I suppose your hypothetical Wisconsin boy would, at first, end up at Ellis Island because third class passengers would be ferried there in bulks, but he would not have much trouble clearing the Ellis Island process, even without presenting a passport, by simply convincing an immigration inspector in a direct interview that he was born in Wisconsin.
I’ll provide a cite later, but one typical ship that I was reading about carried around 400 first class passengers, 350 second class and 1500 steerage. As @Schnitte says above, only steerage went through Ellis Island.
“Immigrants and Americans” doesn’t cover everyone on the ship; a fair number of the first and second class passengers would have been non-American non-immigrants: pleasure travelers (yes, tourism was already a thing in 1912), business people, skilled professionals, entertainers, students.
Some would have been “in transit”, going overland by train to a Pacific port for ships taking them to Hawaii, Japan, China.