steerage

thumb|right|The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz. Taken in 1907 on the Kaiser Wilhelm II The middle-class passengers on the upper deck are looking down on steerage passengers below.

Steerage is a term for the lowest category of passenger accommodation in a ship. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, considerable numbers of persons travelled from their homeland to seek a new life elsewhere, in many cases the Americas and Australia. Many of those people were destitute in their homeland and had only the minimum of resources to procure transportation. The term later widened to imply the lowest category of accommodation on a passenger vessel.