by John Bailey
Today, climatologists attribute the cold weather that ravaged the Northern Hemisphere in the years following 1813 to a series of volcanic eruptions half a world away. The first was the destruction of the entire cone of La Soufrière on St. Vincent Island in the West Indies in April 1812. Just as this was clearing, Mount Mayon in the Philippines exploded in 1814, pushing an ash-laden vent seven miles into the atmosphere. Then the biggest of them all—Tambora, on Sumbawa in Indonesia, exploded in April 1815. With one blast the height of the mountain was reduced by 4,200 feet, leaving a caldera four miles wide. The explosion at Tambora was heard 800 miles away. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, commanding a British military force, reported that on Java, 300 miles distant, officers, believing they were under artillery attack, sent the navy to repel pirates. Five hundred miles to the northwest the island of Madura was enveloped in darkness for three days. In the initial explosion, 10,000 people were killed. Over the following months a fine dust circled the globe, filtering the sun’s rays and reflecting light back into the skies. An estimated 82,000 people died of starvation. Crops failed in China, and in Bengal ferocious storms flooded huge areas of the countryside.23
Nowhere in Europe was the weather as bad as in the middle and lower Rhine. It was the worst of times. After a decade of ravaging wars, reserves of food were thin. Potato, beets, and pumpkins, carefully stored in straw beds for the winter, had been seized by the army. Then, after the harvest of the following summer, the new stores had been seized as well. A generation of young men had been conscripted into the service of kings and emperors, never to return, leaving old men, widows, and children to work the fields as best they could. For three seasons the crops had failed and the people in Alsace, Württemberg, and Baden feared that, unless the summer of 1816 brought a bountiful harvest, there wouldn’t be enough food to see them through the winter.
As spring approached, they had reason to hope. Napoleon was confined to the rocky island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic and their kings were at peace. For the first time in several years there was warmth to the sun. They watched buds appear on the fruit trees and vines, and took it as a sign that the natural order of the seasons had returned, and it was time to plant. Then, one afternoon in May, thick, black clouds rolled down the valleys. They remained for a month, and every day it rained, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in a soft drizzle, and at times accompanied by hail and sleet, but never letting up. Fields on the side of hills turned to mud and slid down to the farmlands below. Rivers burst their banks and flooded across towns and villages to a height that had never been known before. When finally, in June, the clouds lifted, a peculiar haze hung in the air and each evening an orange-red sunset lit the horizon. The sun was pale, and in the evenings the temperature dropped below freezing point. On cold mornings the villagers looked in horror at the apricot, pear and peach trees, which should have been bearing fruit, shimmering with icicles. Dismayed farmers stood in soggy fields looking at the stalks of their spring plantings, shriveled to black as though they had been charred by fire. Wearily they cut the stalks, now only of use as animal fodder, and replanted, but hopes of a late harvest were dashed when, in the third week of August, swirling winds brought weather colder and more tempestuous than the oldest inhabitants could remember. Potatoes, parsnips, and carrots became rotten in the ground, and beans were nipped away by the frosts.
Winter approached and a desperate search for food began. On the hillsides, grapes, still green and as small as fingernails, were picked while frozen on the vine. Peasants walking across their fields at midday felt the crackle of frost beneath their feet as they searched for beets that might have survived. Gathering enough to eat became a battle with nature. Snails, mice, moss, thistles, and cats were placed in the stew pot. Children were sent into the forest to search for nuts and berries. Bakers without flour made loaves from oats and potatoes. When even that ran out, they saw no reason to light their ovens at all.
One bitterly cold evening in late 1816, Daniel Müller, a shoemaker from the village of Langensoultzbach in Alsace, in the lower Rhine, fell into conversation with a stranger who was setting up camp for his family in a field behind the churchyard. They were going to America, the man told Daniel. It had taken them a week to come this far, and as soon as they reached the Rhine they would sell their horse and wagon and buy passage down the river to the sea. From there they would take a sailing ship across the Atlantic. Never would they return to this wretched country.
The next morning, Daniel returned as the stranger was packing up. He offered the man half a loaf of potato bread and a bowl of cabbage and sorrel soup. The man passed the food to his wife. As he tucked his children between tea chests and pots and pans, on a wagon pulled by a horse with legs so spindly it seemed unlikely it could stand, he said he was sorry he couldn’t give Daniel something in return. Yet, after a moment’s hesitation, he said he did have something—something so valuable that it would provide for Daniel and his family for life. He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and pressed it into the shoemaker’s hand.
That evening, Daniel visited the house of his brother, Henry. The Müller brothers had married two sisters. Daniel had four children and his brother three, and all of them gathered in Henry’s kitchen and sat around the heat of the stove. Henry, aged thirty-eight, was two years older than his brother, and Daniel was anxious to ask him about the piece of paper the stranger had given him. Henry unfolded it and saw that it was an article torn from an illustrated magazine. He held up the page for everyone to see. A lithograph showed a man, his wife, and two children standing in ascending order beside a log cabin built on the plains of Missouri. There were flowers in the front garden, geese in a side yard, and cattle dotted on the pastures beyond. The caption underneath said the family was from Württemberg and that the blooms in the garden had been grown from seeds they had carried from their homeland. Henry then read out how the homesteaders had tamed the savage Indians and had brought them into Christianity, and now traded with them in peace. He read how black people worked the fields and how they were given much better food than any servant in Württemberg. The crops were always abundant and no one ever went to bed hungry. In America there was so much land that everyone could have some of their own.
The Müller brothers and their wives talked about America for hours while their children fell asleep at their feet. Could there really be a place where no person went hungry? A place where there was enough land for whoever wanted it? Where ordinary people could vote for their own leaders and there were no kings or princes, popes or emperors? Where a man could work at whatever he chose, without seeking the say-so of the guilds? Where armies did not march through the country taking whatever they wanted?
Although they had lived for generations under French rule, the Müllers regarded themselves as Alsatian, rather than French or German. They spoke their own form of Germanic dialect, incomprehensible to most beyond both sides of the border. They cherished their own culture and traditions. They may have been foreigners in France, but Napoleon, hungry for troops, was unconcerned about where they came from—”Who cares if they don’t speak French? Their swords do,” he was reported as saying. The Emperor took his crop of young men into Egypt, then came back for a fresh harvest for the Russian campaign, and then another, young and ready to die for him at Waterloo.
Daniel was known as Schuster (or Shoemaker) Müller in the village and Henry as Schlosser (or Locksmith) Müller. They lived above their shops near each other in the village and their children were constantly in each other’s houses. It was never doubted that if a decision were made to migrate to the United States, both families would travel together.
In the following days, as they considered the idea of abandoning the village and their homes, they began to realize the difficulties they faced. To take such a journey would mean they would never return. To their relatives who remained behind, it would be an absence as permanent as death. The journey could never be made in winter, so they would have to leave at the fir
st sign of spring, in just a few months’ time, and Daniel’s wife, Dorothea, had just given birth to a boy. After her fourth child in eight years, Dorothea remained sickly and she wasn’t sure she was up to such a strenuous journey. She sought the advice of another of her sisters, Eva Kropp, who in turn spoke to her own husband. The Kropps had a fifteen-year-old daughter, also called Eva, and the three of them called around one afternoon and joined a long discussion with the Müller brothers and their wives. Toward the end of the meeting the Kropp family announced that they wanted to emigrate as well. Dorothea’s concerns were brushed aside. They could all travel together, they said, and care for her and her new son until she recovered her strength.
When the families met a week later at Henry’s house, also present was another of Dorothea’s sisters, Margaret, and her husband. There were now four families considering plans to emigrate and individual doubts dissolved in the enthusiasm of numbers. Everyone would look after one another’s children and share the cooking of their food. In America they would farm land next to one another; they would help to build one another’s houses and bring in one another’s crops, and the women would carry lunch to the men as they worked in the fields.
Word that the Müllers were emigrating to the New World spread quickly through the village and beyond. Mr. Koelhoffer, who lived an hour’s walk from Langensoultzbach, said that he would quit his farm tomorrow if the Müller brothers would let his family accompany them to America. Christoph Kirchner and his wife Salomé (a sister of the Müller brothers) asked to join in. Mistress Schultzeheimer, the midwife to the village, said she must come, because after everyone had left, there would be no children to deliver. A big meeting was held—they all would leave together: brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, friends, and neighbors.
Across Germany whole villages fell under the spell of an emigration fever (Auswanderungsfieber, as it was dubbed). Possessing little more than the clothes they stood in, they abandoned their shops, farms, and factories and began the long journey to America. A fantasy paradise awaited them, where fertile, watered pastures teemed with deer and buffalo, the forest trees were straight and strong, the rivers jumped with fish, and the lagoons were alive with all manner of fowl.
The villagers of Langensoultzbach were better off than many of the landless peasants making the journey. After they had sold all they owned, they had enough money for the fare to Holland, then for the crossing of the Atlantic, and a little to spare. They had every reason to be optimistic. They were skilled workers with much to offer the new world. The men were farmers, locksmiths, shoemakers, and storekeepers. The women were cooks, milliners, and midwives. They carried Bibles, food, precious musical instruments, and the tools of their trades.
At the first sign of spring, seven families, over forty souls, walked from Langensoultzbach to the Rhine, where a barge awaited them. Pushed along by a river in flood, they arrived in Holland in twenty-five days. From there, it was but a short distance on foot to Amsterdam.
No sooner had they set out than they became aware that they were walking the same roads as thousands of ragged, starving people. They had joined a torrent of refugees from half a dozen countries. Some had come from as far away as Switzerland and Saxony, all making toward a Dutch port and hopeful, somehow, of getting on a ship to America. A German nobleman, Baron von Fürstenwärther, taking the same route as the immigrants, wrote:
I have found the misery of the greatest part of the emigrants greater, and the condition of all of them more perplexing and helpless than I could imagine. Already on my journey to this place on all roads I met hordes of people who, destitute of everything begged their way. Indescribably large were the multitudes of these unfortunates.…24
After walking for two days, the people from Langensoultzbach entered Amsterdam. By the end of the Napoleonic war, Amsterdam’s glory days as a center of world trade were well behind it, and many of its population of 200,000 were living in deep poverty. The City Fathers, barely coping with the distress of their own citizens, were suddenly confronted by an influx of thousands of immigrants camping wherever they could in the city. It was a tragedy in the making, compounded by the shortage of vessels offering passage to America. Transporting impoverished immigrants was a business of low profitability and almost any other cargo would bring in more money. Over the years it had gained a reputation of attracting only the most brutal of captains and crew. Respectable shipowners wouldn’t even consider dealing in the trade. The only way to make it pay was to cram hundreds of passengers into an ill-prepared ship and then skimp on rations during the voyage.
For several days, Daniel Müller called on the warehouses of the canals of Amsterdam asking for news of a vessel which might be sailing to America. Finally, he met a man who told him of a ship preparing to sail. He returned to the camp where the people of his village were staying and told the head of each family to follow him at once. They must purchase their tickets this very day before they were sold to others. Hurriedly they followed him to a warehouse overlooking the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal canal, where in an upstairs room they found the owner of a ship bound for Philadelphia. Gratefully they handed over the last of their savings and he wrote them a receipt and issued them with tickets. They were fortunate, he told them. He had just purchased a man-of-war from the Russian Navy. She was the Rudolph and would be sailing from Helder as soon as he filled her with passengers, and judging from the number of immigrants walking the streets, that shouldn’t take long.
The next day the people from Langensoultzbach packed up their belongings and sailed across the Zuiderzee to the deepwater port of Helder where, in a quiet backwater, their boat halted alongside the Rudolph. They looked at her in horror. She was a lumpy, antiquated hulk, badly in need of paint, with her sails stained with rot. If she had ever been in the service of the Russian Navy, it must have been many years ago. After climbing aboard they stood on a deck of splintered wood and smelled the foul air rising up from stairs leading to the hold. There was no crew to meet them. Instead, thirty or so immigrant families, who had taken over the best cabins, stared at them in open hostility.
The Müller families searched for space below to claim as their own. Of course, those who had arrived first would have to squeeze up, but there wasn’t anyone in charge to whom they could complain. No one on the vessel knew where the crew was. A caretaker came around every few days—an unshaven scarecrow of a man who slept in a shed on the wharf and was usually drunk—but he knew little, and grumbled that he hadn’t been paid for weeks.
A few days later a keelboat pulled alongside the Rudolph, and the passengers leaning over the bulwark watched more people clamber aboard. They told of how they had given the last of their money to a man in Amsterdam on a promise that the Rudolph would sail in just a few days. The newcomers were as poor and as weary as those already on the vessel, but where would they fit? In the bowels of the vessel was a space rank with fetid air and moist underfoot, which had so far been avoided by everyone who had seen it. Men and women with gray skins and dressed in rags descended below, and then returned to the upper deck and looked helplessly around.
Days passed, and still no preparations were made to sail. Then one morning they awoke to find that another fifty people had come aboard overnight. A meeting of the heads of families was held. Over 900 people were now crammed on the vessel and the fear was that the Rudolph’s owner intended to sell even more tickets. Surely he had collected enough money by now to hire a crew and have the vessel depart? The meeting elected Daniel and Henry Müller to go back to Amsterdam and demand that the vessel sail at once.
Sick with worry, the two brothers set off for the city. When they reached the canal, they strode up the stairs of the warehouse, only to find that the door to the office was bolted. After rattling the lock in frustration they went downstairs to speak to a man who ran a chandler’s shop at street level. Yes, he said with a wry smile, he also would like to know where the fellow had gone. He hadn’t paid the rent.
The brothers returned to
Helder. They carried news that could have hardly been worse. The master of the Rudolph had disappeared. Everyone’s money had gone with him. He hadn’t paid for the vessel, and the original owners were in the courts claiming ownership. Their ship wasn’t going anywhere.
A quarter of a century later, Madame Hemm told the First District Court of New Orleans of the time she spent on the Rudolph. Nine hundred people remained on the ship, rocking backwards and forwards against the wharf. They hadn’t the means either to continue their journey or to return home, and as a bitter winter descended upon them they were reduced to begging in the streets of Helder.
Madame Hemm was forty-five when she gave this evidence, which made her eighteen when she was on board the Rudolph. She told the court that although her family was from Württemberg, she had become friendly with Daniel Müller’s children. She had played with all of them, but it was with Salomé Müller, a dark, black-eyed child, that she had played the most—insisting to the judge that this explained why she instantly recognized Salomé when she walked through the door of the courtroom.
They waited in enforced idleness, hoping that somehow, by a godsend, the voyage to America could commence. Men who had worked all their lives—farmers, blacksmiths, coopers—were forced to spend their days in idleness as they watched, every few weeks, an immigrant ship, her decks crowded with passengers, slip past them, bound for America. It was cold and wet, and there wasn’t enough food. Several of the passengers died—of hunger, helplessness, disease? Who could tell? Every few weeks a representative of the unpaid owners came to make sure that the Rudolph hadn’t moved. He told them the matter was now before the courts. They showed him their tickets giving them passage to Philadelphia. He shrugged his shoulders. It had nothing to do with him.