About 58,000,000 dead in a little over 4 decades.
I hope you like brimstone, America...
Posted on 10/30/2015 1:54:11 AM PDT by Loud Mime
At the end of the seventeenth century approximately 200,000 people inhabited the British colonies in North America. The following century saw an explosion in numbers with the population doubling about every 25 years. The majority of these new immigrants were Scotch-Irish, Germans or African slaves. Between 1700 and the beginning of the American Revolution, approximately 250,000 Africans, 210,000 Europeans and 50,000 convicts had reached the colonial shores.
The passage to America was treacherous by any standard. Many of the immigrants were too poor to pay for the journey and therefore indentured themselves to wealthier colonialists - selling their services for a period of years in return for the price of the passage. Crammed into a small wooden ship, rolling and rocking at the mercy of the sea, the voyagers - men, women and children - endured hardships unimaginable to us today. Misery was the most common description of a journey that typically lasted seven weeks.
Not An Easy Journey
Gottleb Mittelberger was an organ master and schoolmaster who left one of the small German states in May 1750 to make his way to America. He arrived at the port of Philadelphia on October 10. He represents the thousands of Germans who settled in middle Pennsylvania during this period. He returned to his homeland in 1754. His diary was published in this country in 1898:
".during the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply-salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die miserably.
Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions and lamentations, together with other trouble, as e.g., the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body. The misery reaches a climax when a gale rages for two or three nights and days, so that every one believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously.
No one can have an idea of the sufferings which women in confinement have to bear with their innocent children on board these ships. Few of this class escape with their lives; many a mother is cast into the water with her child as soon as she is dead. One day, just as we had a heavy gale, a woman in our ship, who was to give birth and could not give birth under the circumstances, was pushed through a loophole (porthole) in the ship and dropped into the sea, because she was far in the rear of the ship and could not be brought forward.
Children from one to seven years rarely survive the voyage; and many a time parents are compelled to see their children miserably suffer and die from hunger, thirst, and sickness, and then to see them cast into the water. I witnessed such misery in no less than thirty-two children in our ship, all of whom were thrown into the sea. The parents grieve all the more since their children find no resting place in the earth, but are devoured by the monsters of the sea. It is a notable fact that children who have not yet had the measles or smallpox generally get them on board the ship, and mostly die of them.
When the ships have landed at Philadelphia after their long voyage, no one is permitted to leave them except those who pay for their passage or can give good security; the others, who cannot pay, must remain on board the ships till they are purchased and are released from the ships by their purchasers. The sick always fare the worst, for the healthy are naturally preferred and purchased first; and so the sick and wretched must often remain on board in front of the city for two or three weeks, and frequently die, whereas many a one, if he could pay his debt and were permitted to leave the ship immediately, might recover and remain alive.
The sale of human beings in the market on board the ship is carried on thus: Every day Englishmen, Dutchmen, and High German people come from the city of Philadelphia and other places, in part from a great distance, say twenty, thirty, or forty hours away, and go on board the newly-arrived ship that has brought and offers for sale passengers from Europe, and select among the healthy persons such as they deem suitable for their business, and bargain with them how long they will serve for their passage money, which most of them are still in debt for, When they have come to an agreement, it happens that adult persons bind themselves in writing to serve three, four, five, or six years for the amount due by them, according to their age and strength. But very young people, from ten to fifteen years, must serve till they are twenty-one years old.
Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle, for if their children take the debt upon them- selves, the parents can leave the ship free and unrestrained; but as the parents often do not know where and to what people their children are going, it often happens that such parents and children, after leaving the ship, do not see each other again for many years, perhaps no more in all their lives.
It often happens that whole families, husband, wife, and children, are separated by being sold to different purchasers, especially when they have not paid any part of their passage money.
When a husband or wife has died at sea, when the ship has made more than half of her trip, the survivor must pay or serve not only for himself or herself, but also for the deceased. When both parents have died over halfway at sea, their children, especially when they are young and have nothing to pawn or to pay, must stand for their own and their parents' passage, and serve till they are twenty-one years old. When one has served his or her term, he or she is entitled to a new suit of clothes at parting; and if it has been so stipulated, a man gets in addition a horse, a woman, a cow."
I didn’t realize the mortality rate was THAT high. Thanks. My ancestors came from England sometime before the Revolution to Virginia.
Thanks. Rather eye opening.
ping
Calm down. It was written by a German in 1750 or so. It’s from a journal. Things were different then.
As I read this I kept stopping to visualize what the writer conveyed. My god, it must have been horrible.
...but enough about my Navy career. (Some people complain about every little thing).
You had to really want to be here and be willing to endure that sort of hardship. Sometimes I want to strangle certain glib proggies who dismiss the lot of them as "illegal aliens". It's so far from the same thing it's scarcely worth considering, and there wasn't any welfare waiting for them at the destination. 130 years earlier the Mayflower brought a hundred or so people into New England in late November. The wonder is that anyone at all survived.
And this is why we Americans are who we are. We are these peoples descendents. People who pulled up stakes and undertook a perilous voyage for a chance to carve out a new life in a new land. To take advantage of all that the new world had to offer.
And for some, perhaps most, it was an expensive voyage in more ways than one.
My paternal ancestors were indentured Irish.
Textide, I was surprised to learn that it’s still incredibly risky. Following a professional mariners’ forum made me realize that. DH’s boss is a retired Navy Swimmer & recently told him (in a conversation about the El Faro) that ships sink all the time- you just don’t hear about it.
You wouldn’t think- considering the size, construction, & technology of modern shipping, that would be true. How these wooden ships made it is a wonder.
Thank you for the ping, SunkenCiv.
ps. One of the mariners on the forum has a tagline I like. It says something to the effect that if you find a man who doesn’t believe in God, send him to sea. I’d been thinking that there was a marked absence of atheists there.
About 58,000,000 dead in a little over 4 decades.
I hope you like brimstone, America...
Those are indeed vivid descriptions. History is a weird and wonderful thing to ponder.
To think we’re descended from the survivors of not just the crossing but the various plagues in Europe for the previous 1000 years not to mention the literally medieval medical practices before the 20th century. What our ancestors have seen....
The day will come when the barbaric practice of abortion will face history. It will not be kind. At least the Spartan society allowed a child to be born before determining if it was ‘weak’ and then left outside in the elements to die.
Relating to this thread, each farming family would usually have many children in the hope that some will live through childhood to become adults. Kids had a harder time in the long crossings as well, often dying first. Our success in reducing infant mortality along with the move out of the farming life has reduced the need to have so many children. Killing them in the womb has become preferable (and legal) to being ‘burdened’ with their care and support. Throw in many other societal and family changes over the years and those that came over on these crossings wouldn’t recognize or accept what we’ve become.
One of our ancestors was born at sea in the 1700s. It’s a wonder (and mercy!) that the poor baby and his mother survived. Well ... we know he survived ... hope she did, too.
Thanks KGeorge.
50,000 convicts had reached the colonial shores... Their descendants are members of the democrat party.
Ummmm...the man from the 1700’s wrote it in a journal. That is how they spoke then.
I contrast the character of the people who came to this country with that of the cell-phone absorbed drones walking around the University campus where I work.
Those dumb-asses will stride into a crosswalk without even a glance at the traffic. Their situational awareness is zero. All that matters to them is the presentations on that little device.
These people will be capitulants at the first sign of trouble.
I used to be a Democrat - - Kennedy style.
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