Even though Hans was the first born, he relinquished his claim to the farmstead to Charles when he entered his career in the navy. However, thanks to Charle’s career as a minister, their father Gustav still ran the farm with the help of their younger siblings. So when it came time to put the house and farm up for the sale, the onous fell on Gustav. He contacted the local auction house, and all the arrangements were made. While they had a large wagon and horses to pull it, the decision had been made to sell them with the farm as they commanded a better price than selling them seperately when they departed from Gothenburg. When it was time to finally say goodbye to their old life, they rented the wagon and team from one of their farmer neighbors. It worked out wel for the farmer because he needed to pick up some supplies in Gothenburg, so his trip their was paid for buy the Anderson family. It was a win-win situation for both parties.
The journey to Gothenburg was over 200 miles and took several days to get there. During their overland journey, they rented rooms in small lodges in the towns on the route. The wagon was heavily ladened their “America chest” and other belongings. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the advent of steam travel that traveled to the Americas became quick and safe. The journey was cut down from three months to 2-3 weeks. Due to the shortened time, it became more economical for shipping lines to outfit dedicated ships whose sole cargo were emigrants. A whole industry arose around the transport of emigrants. A network of emigration agents co-operated with shipping companies to recruit new settlers and organize the trips, which mainly started from Gothenburg. These agents were usually trusted people in the villages and small towns, such as the teacher or a shopkeeper. The shipping companies introduced a system of pre-paid tickets for emigrants to send home for younger family members or even a widowed mother. This was followed by a train journey from Hull, through the Huddersfield area, to Liverpool and then a crossing by the Inman Line or another company’s ship to New York. Conditions on board were often dire.Some emigrants from southern Sweden traveled by way of Denmark and/or Germany.
The following account was taken from the journal of an emigrant from Sweden.
Sillgatan (Herring Street) in Gothenburg, as it was renamed in 1895, was, during the emigration years, a lively street with cheap rooms and various agencies for those who were on their way to America. Those who arrived by train to Gothenburg were able to go directly from the train at Drottning Torget (Queen Square), along Sillgatan down to Packhusplatsen (warehouses), from which the boats departed. Until the departure, the emigrants were able to stay cheaply in overcrowded rented rooms at Sillgatan. They had booked their tickets in advance through agents around the country, but it was also good to buy it directly from the line agency at Sillgatan. Often, emigrants were met on arrival in Gothenburg by an agent to assist the mostly untrained traveler, not to get lost in the strange city. Officers saw that the emigrants had shelter and had their tickets in order. Emigration during the early days of sailing ships meant that departure had fully signed passenger lists. Later, steamers departed regularly to Hull. However, it was necessary to be in Gothenburg about one week before departure in order to cope with all formalities. Before departure, the emigrant were obliged to present his certificate of change of address from his home parish (Flyttbetyg), necessary for everyone who left their home parish. It was required not only when moving to America but also when someone moved to the neighboring parish or any parish in the country. It was written by the pastor in the home parish (hemförsamlingen). The certificate included the name, address, and profession, from which the emigrant moves and to which parish the emigrant is transferring to. Information on vaccinations and general social behavior were also included. The agencies, in turn, had to submit passenger lists. In addition, they had to cope with all the purchases necessary for the journey. Food, clothes, and mattresses for the boat trip were needed. Each emigrant had to obtain an “Utvandrare-kontrakt” (emigrant contract), which was really the ticket for their journey, and they always brought it with them. But in the port of departure they had to show it at the Police Chamber, to be checked that it was a genuine ticket and not a fraudulent one, which had happened before this law was instituted in 1869. At the Police Chamber they were recorded on a chronological list, and given a number on the list, and it is this number that is recorded as the Police Chamber emigrant contract number or “källkod” in Swedish. This was the “secure ticket” for an emigrant person with very little education and no language skills other than fourth grade Swedish.
Little was documented by the Anderson family during their trans-Atlantic journey, so Grandpa Gordon and I had to glean from various first-person accounts from other travelers.
Unfortunately for the Anderson’s their journey to the states was before all these advancements, and they were stuck with the three month journey. These early emigrants sailed “on top of the cargo”. They had makeshift and cramped sleeping quarters, on board a sailing bark or brig from a Swedish harbor such as Karlshamn or Karlskrona in Blekinge These vessels carried their regular cargo, such as pig iron, for this was a major export to the USA. It was as big as the exports to Teesside’s newly developing iron works in England. Temporary partitions were usually erected and used for steerage accommodation. To get down to the between-deck, the passengers often had to use ladders, and the passageway down between the hatches could be both narrow and steep. The manner in which the ships were equipped could vary since there were no set standards for this. It was necessary that the furnishings could be easily removed and not cost more than absolutely necessary. As soon as the ships had set the passengers on land, the furnishings were discarded, and the ship prepared for return cargo to Europe.
The ceiling height of the between-deck was usually 6 to 8 feet. The bunks, made of rough boards, were set up along both sides of the ship. The bunks were ordinarily positioned, so the passengers lay in the direction of the ship, from fore to aft, but on a few ships, the bunks were placed transversely or thwartships The latter caused passengers greater discomfort in rough seas. The larger ships might also have an additional row of bunks in the middle. On these ships, there was only a small corridor between the bunks. Each bunk was intended to hold from three to six persons, and these were often called family bunks. On the emigrant vessel Drafna, which sailed with emigrants in 1852, the bunks were large enough to hold five persons. The ship was not filled to capacity, however, so there were no more than three to four persons in each bunk. The passengers on that voyage felt they had ample space. The bunks were usually double-deck beds, i.e., there was one bunk on top of the other. Ads announced that on board the Bolivar, which sailed in 1852, there was enough headroom between the bunks that an adult could sit up in bed. The best place to have a bunk was amidships because the rocking of the boat was felt less there. The bunks had straw mattresses or mattresses stuffed with straw. The emigrants had to bring their own pillows, blankets, animal hides, and other necessary bedclothes. Contemporary sources report that lice and fleas thrived in this environment.
Cholera outbrakes were quite common during this time. There was no cure for it, and in many cases, it proved fatal. A ten to fifteen percent loss was considered acceptable by most ship captains, and was just the price of doing business. The financial outlay for the vessels was minimal. The only thing that they provided was straw for the beds, some type of privacy dividers, fresh water to drink, and fuel for the emigrants to use when they cooked their own food. Occasionally, the Captain might be able to spare some “medicine” if the emigants got sick, though it was quite rudementary and usually ineffective.
From a passenger traveling on the Anna Delius we have the following description of the conditions on the between deck: “When we had boarded the ship we were shown our berths, the only place where we could stay while we were between decks. There were two berths on top of each other, and in front of them, we had a little space where we could eat our food.” A passenger traveling on the Atalanta told this from his journey: “Now our place as emigrants was in the hold, on the between deck. Everyone had a chest of food, a keg of milk, and one of beer, all of what was stored in the mid of the deck, held in place by ropes.”
On the Laurvig the arrangements on board were very primitive and inadequate. On the beams between decks was laid a deck of planks with hatchways down into the hold, where all the baggage was stowed away on top of the cargo. Two rows of bunks of rough boards were built up, one above the other, the whole length of the ship from fore to aft. Between these open bunks, there were often put up special berths reserved for emigrants whose demands were greater. Everything else was used in common – no separate rooms for men and women. Light was admitted through open hatchways and partly through skylights in the deck. There was canvas in the hatchways, but during storms and rough seas these often had to be covered, and if this continued for any length of time the air in the room below occupied by the emigrants often became frightfully bad.
On the Norden sailing with 403 persons in the hold had been divided by a between deck, set up of planks. On the between deck, there was set up bins fitted with bunks. There was one row along each side and one along the middle of the ship. There was a narrow passage between the bunks. A primitive toilet on each side of the deck. Over the hatch, there had been built a hood with an entrance down to the passengers quarters. There was no other ventilation than this, and the only fresh air came through this entrance. When the weather was rough, the entrance had to be closed, and it became dark as in the night down in the hold.
While it is true that we don’t have any first-hand accounts from the Anderson’s on this voyage, we do know the name of the ship, the Charlotta. We also know the name of the captain, Lorentz, and thanks to the ship’s manifest and other official documents, we know quite a lot about their journey. The Charlotta sailed from Gothenburg April 14, 1850, to New York. The ship’s capacity was 160 lasts (Swedish term equal to 2 tons), her length was 124 feet, and her width was 20 feet. She had a crew of fifteen: 2 mates ( the 2nd mate was responsible for the well-being of the passengers), 1 bosun (a petty officer on a merchant ship having charge of hull maintenance and related work), 1 carpenter, 1 sailmaker, 1 cook (for crew only), 4 able-bodied seamen (skilled in a variety of vessel operations, maintenace and safety), 2 ordinary seamen (not a complete sailor, basically unskilled), and 3 deckhands (a member of a ship’s crew whose duties include maintenance of hull, decks, and superstructure and mooring and cargo handling). As was common in the day, her cargo was pig iron and other sundries.
The Charlotta on this voyage carried 78 passengers, all emigrating to North America. This was Charlotta’s seventh voyage dedicated to emigrants. It was a goodly ship, though it had become a little leaky over the years and was, as a result, nearing its end. As was common in all wooden sailing vessels of the era, it had rats, though they had tried their best to reduce their numbers by smoking them out, more sophisticated methods involving sulphuric acd gas wouldn’t be developed until the late 1800s. The Charlotta also had several cats on board to aid in kiling the rats that were left.
While some ships had wooden partitions to separate the passengers, the Charlotta utilized canvas to maintain privacy. There were three compartments: one for unmarried men, one for married couples and children, and one for unmarried women. Beds were made on the deck of the hold with mattresses and loose straw. The unmarried passengers slept in bunks, strung between the stanchions (an upright bar, post, or frame forming a support or barrier). There were one – and two-man bunks. Tables and work areas were created by the trunks the passengers brought.
For calls of nature, toilets were placed in the bow (front of ship) somewhat above the water line with vents or slots cut near the floor level allowing normal wave action to wash out the facility. Only the captain had a private toilet near his quarters, at the stern of the ship in the quarter gallery. Toilet paper had not been invented yet, so the sailors and passengers something called a ‘tow rag‘. A tow rag was a long piece of frayed rope that dangled in the water. This may sound barbaric, but settlers used corn cobs because they were abundant, soft, and easy to handle. Thank God for good old-fashioned TP.
Everything about life up to our modern times was about survival of the fittest. These voyages were no different. The weakest, oldest, and frailest simply did not survive the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Life in general was hard, and only the strongest and hardiest survived. Luckily for the Andersons, life in Sweden had been hard, so they were prepared for the hardships on board the Charlotta. While several of the passengers died on the voyage to New York harbor, none of the Andersons succumbed to these privations.
With frugality and parsimonious behavior, the food brought by the passengers sufficed to maintain a subsistence level diet. While some weight loss was common, none of the surviving passengers suffered from any irreversible forms of malnutrition.
Cholera has always proved to be the main scourge on these voyages. It is an infection of the small intestine caused by some strains of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. It can spread through contaminated food or water. The symptoms insidious and the onset of diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting were rapid and resulted in dehydration from fluid loss, lethargy, erratic heartbeat, sunand dry and shrivelled skin with a characteristic bluish tinge. It can also be quite painful as muscle cramps can result from the rapid loss of salts such as sodium, chloride, and potassium. A rapid heart rate or tachycardia can also occur due to the depletion of potassium and other electrolytes.
For those that did not surrive the voyage, burial at sea was simple and just involved the deceased being wrapped in canvas, weighted with in the case of the Charlotta, scrap pieces of pig iron. A quick ceremony was provided by some minister that was always among the passenger list, or if not present by the Captain of the ship.
The passengers were lucky in that the weather was mild on this voyage and proceeded without any major mishaps. Like I said previously, a 10 to 15 percent mortality rate was not considered out of the ordinary and was, in fact, expected.
Finally, after a full three months, the voyage ended as the Charlotta sailed into the harbor of New York.
Swedish emigration to the United States was well organized. At New York Harbour, the ship was likely to be met by a representative of the Bethel Ship Mission, an organization that helped arrange people to travel west.
The business of the harbor, with its’ mass of ships and forest of masts and spread of buildings, must have been an overwhelming experience for the mainly country folk. Strange languages and the activities of the “runners” bidding for their services will have been bewildering and nerve-racking. Often, these “runners” were earlier immigrants and earned their money by helping the new immigrants through their problems with officials and with first housing.
These runners or other agents were contracted to plan, arrange the transport, and then accompany the immigrant groups on a major stage of their journey inland.
A typical contract is set out in Moberg’s “Unto a Good Land”.
Contract for Transportation of Immigrants.
The undersigned agrees to carry the immigrants, who have arrived on the brig Charlotta of Gothenberg, from New York to Chicago, on the following conditions:
1. From New York to Albany by steamer, from Albany to Buffalo by steam wagon, and from Buffalo to Chicago by steamer.
2. For every adult person the fare is 8 dollars, children under 3 years free, children between 3 years and 12 years half fare.
3. The same fare entitles the traveler to 100 lbs. Baggage free and 150 lbs. On the steam wagon.
4. The baggage of the passengers is transferred free of charge from the vessel in New York to the steamer, and likewise in Albany and Buffalo, the whole way through to Chicago.
New York, June 26, 1850.
Under the contractual agreement, the sea captain was responsible for exchanging the emigrants cash (Swedish Daler) to the American dollar. Of course, it was understood that he would obtain the best exchange rate possible.
I would be most remiss if I didn’t mention one road block that faced the Anderson family and al the rest of the passengers aboard the Charlotta. Captain Lorentz, being a God-fearing man and law-abiding citizen, was morall obligated to tell the authorities Castle Garden that there had been a death by Cholera aboard during the transit across the Atlantic. So, by law, they were required to remain on board the leaking hulk for three days to ensure that there were no more cases. Once the quarantine period was up, the passengers were then free to leave the ship. Captain Lorentz, of course, was free to leave and was able to exchange their funds so that their appropriate currencies were all available for the passengers.
Castle Garden
Although many people believe their ancestors came to America through Ellis Island, from 1855 to 1890, Castle Garden, located on the waterfront tip of Manhattan, was America’s first and only official immigration center. It served as the primary immigration processing station in the United States. During those years, 8 million immigrants were processed there.
Charles and his younger brother Agron accompanied by their “runner” made rounds around the markets of Battery Park to replennish their food supplies and to get fresh fruit and vegetables to stave off the beginning signs of scurvy that had started to appear in the family. They also found a clean place to stay for the family so that they could rest up as they waited for arrangements to me made for the next stage of their odyssey.
Since scurvy played such a major role in oceanic voyages and especially in the transatlantic voyages in the early 1800s, I will include a brief history and discussion on the subject. You can thank me later.
Scurvy killed more than two million sailors between the time of Columbus’s transatlantic voyage and the rise of steam engines in the mid-19th century. The problem was so common that shipowners and governments assumed a 50% death rate from scurvy for their sailors on any major voyage. According to historian Stephen Bown, scurvy was responsible for more deaths at sea than storms, shipwrecks, combat, and all other diseases combined. In fact, scurvy was so devastating that the search for a cure became what Bown describes as “a vital factor determining the destiny of nations.”
None of the potential fates awaiting sailors was pleasant, but scurvy exacted a particularly gruesome death. The earliest symptom—lethargy so intense that people once believed laziness was a cause of the disease—is debilitating. Your body feels weak. Your joints ache. Your arms and legs swell, and your skin bruises at the slightest touch. As the disease progresses, your gums become spongy, and your breath fetid, your teeth loosen, and internal hemorrhaging make splotches on your skin. Old wounds open; mucous membranes bleed. Left untreated, you will die, likely from a sudden hemorrhage near your heart or brain.
Bown quotes a survival story written by an unknown surgeon on a 16th-century English voyage that reveals the horror of the disease:
It rotted all my gums, which gave out a black and putrid blood. My thighs and lower legs were black and gangrenous, and I was forced to use my knife each day to cut into the flesh in order to release this black and foul blood. I also used my knife on my gums, which were livid and growing over my teeth. . . . When I had cut away this dead flesh and caused much black blood to flow, I rinsed my mouth and teeth with my urine, rubbing them very hard. . . . And the unfortunate thing was that I could not eat, desiring more to swallow than to chew. . . . Many of our people died of it every day, and we saw bodies thrown into the sea constantly, three or four at a time.
Scurvy affected many of the explorers we learned about in grade school: Vasco da Gama lost his brother to it; Ferdinand Magellan watched it kill many of his men, who had nothing to eat, he wrote, but “old biscuit reduced to powder, and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit.” The most famous scurvy-related disaster, however—and the one that fully captures the enduring importance of the tart substance we call vitamin C—was the ill-fated voyage of George Anson, whose 1740–1744 circumnavigation of the globe was the scene of one of the worst medical disasters at sea.
In late 1739, England and Spain declared war to determine control of the Caribbean. Anson, a British captain who had recently returned from the West Indies, was put in charge of a six-ship mission to the Pacific coast of South America, an area important to Spanish trade. In an official portrait Anson’s round face, pursed lips, and feminine curls make him look more like a grandmother than a ship’s captain. But if Anson’s countenance was placid, the task that lay ahead of him was far from pleasant. First, he was to aggravate the Spaniards as much as possible by attacking vulnerable Spanish towns and destroying or capturing any Spanish ships he could find. Second, he was to track down and capture one of the Spanish treasure galleons that transported silver from Acapulco to Manila in the Philippines. Such a ship was so valuable it was known as the “Prize of all the Oceans.”
Anson began his preparations in February 1740, and problems arose from the start. The ships assigned to Anson needed to be repaired and refitted for his mission, a task that would take months. The bigger challenge, however, was finding sailors since the Royal Navy was snatching up for military service. All the able-bodied men it could find—often through press gangs like the one Thomas Urquhart encountered in 1808.
Anson’s mission was low on the navy’s priority list, and even the press gangs couldn’t supply him with a sufficient crew: he was supposed to sail with 2,000 men, but by July 1740 he was still a couple hundred short.
The Royal Navy, eager to make room for wounded sailors from the war, eventually came up with both a clever and horrifying solution: it emptied out a hospital, Chelsea Hospital to be exact, which was home to war veterans who were so old, wounded, crippled, or mentally unsound they could no longer serve in marching regiments. Making things worse, those recruits who were relatively healthy did something quite rational: on their release from the hospital, they simply walked away. As Anson’s chaplain, Richard Walter, later wrote in the voyage’s official account, this left behind “only such as were literally invalids, most of them being sixty years of age, and some of them upwards of seventy.” To make up for the 240-odd quasicompetent invalids (out of an initial 500) who had limped off, the navy supplied Anson with 210 young marines, so inexperienced and untrained, wrote Walter, that they had never even been permitted to fire their guns.
The six ships and their ragtag crews finally set sail in September after some six months of preparation and—since they’d survived on ship rations while waiting to depart—months without access to fresh fruits and vegetables Already weakened by some combination of age, sickness, war wounds, and malnourishment, Anson’s crew was likely terrified of what lay ahead: years at sea, deliberately seeking out conflict wherever they could find it. But what they should have feared the most was not Spanish warships but what sailors at the time called “the Scurvy.”
Aware of that risk, the navy issued Anson’s crew several of the most popular treatments of the day: vinegar, “elixir of vitriol” (a mixture of sulfuric acid and alcohol), and a patent medicine called Ward’s Drop and Pill, which was known less for its curative abilities than for its laxative effects. While all the treatments were universally unpleasant, none did a thing to prevent scurvy. As the months wore on, the men’s vulnerability increased.
The disease hit at the worst possible time, while the ships were rounding Cape Horn, a turbulent stretch of ocean at the tip of South America. On March 7, 1741, once the squadron passed successfully through the straits that were considered the boundary between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Walter optimistically reported that “we could not help flattering ourselves that the greatest difficulty of our passage was now at an end.” The sky was clear; the weather was calm; the men’s spirits were high. But their optimism was unfounded. March 7 was, says Walter, “the last cheerful day that the greatest part of us would ever live to enjoy.”
Suddenly, the sky blackened, and the winds shifted. As the ships were pushed off course, the water began to churn with waves so mountainous that if one had broken over a ship, wrote Walter, it would “in all probability have sent us to the bottom.” The southern hemisphere’s autumn storms had begun—and once they started, they raged for months. It rained. It snowed. It hailed. Men got frostbite. In a moment that haunted witnesses for years, one of Anson’s best sailors was tossed into the water and continued to swim strongly alongside the ship, his comrades watching helplessly, until he was finally lost in the waves. Much of the mainsail of Anson’s ship, the Centurion, was blown overboard; the ship itself was so damaged by the buffeting waves that it leaked water at every seam.
These storms lasted for an inconceivable three months. By the time the weather finally broke in late May, two of Anson’s ships had given up and turned back, and the remainder had been separated, unaware of whether the other ships had survived. The hospital pensioners and most of the young marines were dead.
The storms were a horrific challenge, but scurvy proved even more destructive than the gales. “At the latter end of April, there were but a few on board who were not in some degree afflicted with it,” wrote Walter, “and in that month no less than forty-three died of it on board the Centurion.” In May, that number doubled. As the number of men above deck dwindled, the scene below grew ever worse: sick men with open sores and rotting wounds swaying in tightly packed hammocks above a sloshing, rat-infested floor. Victims developed discolored spots all over their bodies, their legs swelled, and if they exerted themselves in even the tiniest degree—or were simply moved by someone else—they were apt to swoon and die immediately. When they did, they often remained right where they were since the remaining crew was too weak to throw their bodies overboard.
“This disease so frequently attending long voyages, and so particularly destructive to us, is surely the most singular and unaccountable of any that afflicts the human body,” Walter later wrote. It did things that he admitted sound “scarcely credible.” One dying sailor who had been wounded 50 years earlier watched in horror as his wounds “broke out afresh and appeared as if they had never been healed.” Later, “the callous of a broken bone, which had been completely formed for a long time, was found to be hereby dissolved, and the fracture seemed as if it had never been consolidated.”
Anson and his subordinates had agreed that in case they were separated, they would rendezvous at Juan Fernández Island, a buccaneer hideout located several hundred miles off the Chdue west of Santiago. Despite sickness and storms, the Centurion finally reached the island in June and was eventually joined by the expedition’s two remaining ships: the Gloucester and the appropriately named Tryal. By that point, the Centurion had only 70 men who were well enough to sail; the Gloucester and the Tryal had each lost more than half of their crews, mostly to scurvy. Out of the 1,200 or so men who would have originally been on the three ships, only 335 had survived.
Recovery took time. “To our great mortification,” wrote Walter, “it was near twenty days after their landing, before the mortality was tolerably ceased; and for the first ten or twelve days, we buried rarely less than six each day, and many of those who survived recovered by very slow and insensible degrees.” Luckily, Juan Fernández Island turned out to be a veritable paradise, with acres of oats and clover, turnips and radishes, wild cresses, and sorrel, many of which are high in vitamin C. They also found a multitude of fish, including sea crayfish, that Walter insisted weighed up to eight or nine pounds apiece. Anson was so giddy over the abundance of fresh food and crayfish dinners that he unpacked a stash of seeds he’d brought from home and planted them for future visitors to enjoy: lettuces, carrots, and the pits from peaches, apricots, and plums. The men stayed on the island for three months.
We now know that scurvy is caused by Vitamin C deficiency. During the 1800s, the concept of metabolism, enzymes, and vitamins were whilly unknown to science. It was by hook or crook that they figured out that fresh fruits contained some element that kept people from developing scurvy. The British navy, beginning in the 1800s, started supplying its sailors with limes because they were readily available in their oversea colonies. Unfortunately, the shelf live of limes is not that long, and voyages that lasted much more than a month, the sailors were SOL. Not until that advent of refrigeration was this problem eliminated.
This concludes chapter five. Chapter Six will immediately pick up with the Anderson’s Journey inland.