by John Bailey
Five months passed. Then a port official came aboard one day and told them that a court had ruled that the owners had a right to have their ship returned to them. They must leave the Rudolph immediately. The 900 were to be ferried back to Amsterdam, where they would be looked after, so it was promised, by charities and the city authorities.
There were so many refugees in Amsterdam during those desperate days of 1817 that a quarter of the population was in need of assistance. Charities provided bread, peat for fuel and, occasionally, clothes, blankets, and Bibles. The municipality distributed some food and ran a workhouse. Charities attached to the Catholic Church spoke of their assistance as naked alms, frankly admitting that it was “never so much as to cover half of the elementary needs.”25 To survive, the homeless (which now included the people from Langensoultzbach) did what the homeless always do to survive. They rummaged through garbage, they thieved, they begged, and they went on foraging expeditions to the countryside. But mainly they walked; a shambling, endless journey through the streets of the city and beyond, searching for something to eat. And when the rains came, they began to die. One or two each night, and the municipal authorities came to view the bodies, to satisfy themselves that it wasn’t the plague.
The presence of so many ragged immigrants on the streets of Amsterdam eventually forced the government to announce that it would pay thirty thousand guilders to any ship’s master who would transport them to America. Given the number of passengers involved, thirty thousand guilders was hardly a generous offer and for a time no one came forward. Eventually, however, the immigrants, including the villagers from Langensoultzbach, were told to return to Helder, for a ship was now ready. When they saw her, their hearts sank, for she was another former Russian man-of-war and in even worse condition than the Rudolph. In a cruel irony, the owners had renamed her The New Sea Air.
Crammed into every available space on board a lumbering, rotten ship, the immigrants entered the North Sea at the time of the winter gales. Shortly after they left port, a violent storm fell upon them. The mainmast, rotten to the core, snapped and tumbled in a tangle of rigging and sails to the deck. During a night and a day of dreadful terror, the ship wallowed in mountainous seas. But then, when finally calm seas returned, they “saw the western sun set clear … astern of the ship. Her captain had put her about and was steering for Amsterdam.”26
Dispirited and weary, the passengers waited for what next might befall them. But few peoples are so impoverished that there isn’t some means of taking advantage of them. Mr. Krahnstover, a merchant of Amsterdam, announced that he had three ships at his disposal to take the unfortunate Germans to America. These were no old, converted hulks he was offering, but full-rigged sailing ships: the Emanuel, the brig juffer Johanna, and a brigantine, Johanna Maria. He knew the immigrants had no money to pay for their passage, but there was a way around this. America was truly a land of opportunities. They do things differently there. He gave the head of each family a document and asked him to sign it.
It was a redemption agreement. Its terms allowed the immigrants to travel to America without paying their fares, but when they got there, a frightful cost would be exacted—Krahnstover could sell them and their families into servitude.
Baron von Fürstenwärther, who traveled to America by way of Amsterdam in 1817, obtained a copy of a redemption agreement, similar to, if not the very one, the Müller brothers were required to sign.27
An Amsterdam Ship Contract for Passage to America
We, the undersigned,… hereby assume and obligate ourselves as people of honor.
In the first place, we passengers accept with the above mentioned Captain … (insert name)… our journey from here to … (insert destination) … North America, to behave ourselves quietly during the journey, as good passengers are bound to do, and to be satisfied perfectly with the food specified below and agreed upon by the captain and us, and as regards water and other provisions, if necessity should demand it on account of contrary wind or long journey, to submit to the measures which the captain shall deem necessary.
There followed a schedule of the food to be provided and the cost of passage. For those who could pay in Amsterdam, the price was one hundred and seventy guilders for an adult and eighty-five guilders for a child. For those who couldn’t pay, the adult fare was one hundred and ninety guilders and ninety-five guilders for a child. Then this paragraph:
No passenger shall be permitted without the knowledge of the captain to leave the ship in America, and especially those who have not paid their fare. Should any of the passengers depart in death during the journey the family of such, if he dies beyond half of the way from here shall be required to pay his fare; if he dies this side of half of the way, the loss shall go to the account of the captain.
Just above where the immigrants were required to sign, appeared the words:
We promise to abide by all the above and to this end pledge our persons and our goods, as per right.
This was the essence of a redemption agreement—the power given to the shipowner to sell the immigrants’ persons at journey’s end for a term of years or, if no purchaser could be found, to rifle through their possessions in the search for items of value.
Still a further disappointment awaited the immigrants. Krahnstover’s ships weren’t going to Philadelphia. They were bound for the port of New Orleans in Louisiana. It was a much longer journey, and half a continent away for those who had relatives on the east coast—but it made sense to Krahnstover: in New Orleans, his vessels were assured of an immediate and lucrative return cargo of cotton and sugar.
The immigrants had little choice but to sign. They were refugees trapped in a city weary of their presence, and in the months since leaving home, they had been stripped of their dignity and worn down by defeat and hardship. The few doubters among them were hushed. What did it matter if they were no longer going to Philadelphia? They looked at maps and saw that they were heading further west—to the mouth of the Mississippi fed by a network of inland waterways, deep in the heart of their beloved destination. There they could choose all the land they wanted in an area the size of Europe. And Krahnstover had promised them three ships, instead of one.
But there were more passengers. With new arrivals, their numbers had now swollen to 200 families, 1100 people in all. To accommodate so many, Krahnstover hired workmen to build wooden floors between the upper deck and the hold. He then announced that his ships wouldn’t be sailing together, but one after another, as the carpentry was completed. It took endless discussion and argument among the immigrants to decide who would sail on the first departing ship. The members of the extended Müller clan insisted on remaining together, which meant they would be on the last ship, the Juffer Johanna.
The first to leave was the brigantine Johanna Maria, her deck black with over 250 passengers. Mrs. Fleikener and Madame Hemm were on board. They were young women at the time. Years later, in court, they would recall their sadness at leaving the people they had met on the Rudolph. They had helped each other through sickness, shared their food, and consoled each other during periods of hopelessness and loss.
The next to leave, a week later, was the Emanuel, a fully rigged ship of 300 tons with 350 passengers. Mr. Wagner from Württemberg, then a youngster, and another witness at the trial of Salomé Müller, was on this ship.
Several weeks later, the Juffer Johanna was ready to sail. She was a brig of 370 tons with 500 passengers. On board were the families of Daniel and Henry Müller, the Kropp family, Francis Schuber, the Koelhoffer family, Christoph Kirchner and his wife and daughter, and Madame Carl with her parents. Although emaciated, most were in good health. If anyone was cause for concern, it was Shoemaker Müller’s wife. Dorothea had been ill when she left her home in Alsace, and had been weakened further by the months of worry and hunger. To her, this seemed to be a journey without end, when all she sought was a place where she could rest.
Krahnstover traveled on the Juffer Johanna. Captain Bleek
er skippered her, although from the outset it was clear that the man in charge was Krahnstover. Within a day of leaving port he ordered the crew to conduct a search of the immigrants’ luggage, removing firearms and anything else that might conceivably be used as a weapon. No sooner was that done than the crew appeared wearing guns and cudgels. His next announcement was that all food was to be placed in a central store and private stocks wouldn’t be tolerated. He stood on the bridge and watched as his men broke open trunks and upended bags. Little was found—a few sacks of cereal and strips of dried meats—but it was taken just the same.
Bleeker appointed Francis Schuber, a young butcher from Strasburg, as a trustee to dole out the rations to the head of each family. Once a day they lined up and received flour, rice, dried peas, and salted bacon. It was less than had been promised and of the poorest quality, but complaints were brushed aside. The passengers were told that if anyone wanted extra food, it could be purchased from the ship’s store. The same applied to water, which was also in short supply.
Within a week the passengers settled into a routine of daily life. In fine weather, a milling crowd of several hundred shuffled across the decks, avoiding, as best they could, cooking pots, scampering children, and lines of tattered washing. At night, families bedded down in their allotted space below decks, packed so closely together that fleas could jump easily from one body to the next. Ventilation came from an occasional wind gust down the stairs. There was no privacy for the sexes or places of isolation for the sick. During storms the hatches were dropped, and the passengers lay in darkness listening to the waves pounding on the hull and the oak beams groaning.
Some of the drinking water turned foul and had to be tipped overboard. The remaining water, sitting in kegs in the sun, became tainted, but still the passengers thought of little else than the small scoop poured into their cup each morning and in the evenings. Once again it seemed that God was cursing them. Floods and lashing storms had driven them from their lands, and now they were tormented by thirst.
The youngest child of Daniel Müller died two weeks out of Helder, and the very next day Dorothea died—of nothing in particular, it seemed: melancholy, exhaustion, hopelessness. Daniel tucked his son into the crook of his wife’s arm and carried them both onto the deck. He stood there, stone-faced with anger, as the others, fearful of catching whatever mysterious disease had killed his wife and child, peered from behind the mast and only dared to creep closer after he had wrapped them in a canvas sheet. He draped the bundle over his shoulder and, with tears pouring down his cheeks, staggered over to the bulwark and slid it into the sea.
The days turned to weeks, and a second month passed by. Then the third. Water reserves began to run out and rations of food were cut. Little by little the crew extracted the few coins held by the immigrants in exchange for extra supplies. They counted the days. Forty, fifty, sixty. To people who had never seen the sea before, much less ventured to cross it, it seemed endless. Many were weak when they came aboard and their bodies lacked reserves of strength. The ill and the weak began to die, and once the deaths commenced, they continued at the rate of one or two each day. Several passengers, crazed by thirst and despair, jumped overboard. Henry Müller’s wife died.
Children grew up on that voyage. They comforted men and women twice their age. They saw their fathers in tears, as they bellowed out their rage at life, at God, at themselves for taking their families on this journey. Eva Schuber told how, after the death of Dorothea Müller, she, at the age of fifteen, bathed and dressed Dorothea’s three children. Koroline Thomas, who was aged eight, later told the story of how she saved the life of her father, who was dying of thirst, when she discovered that at the back of one of the water casks a drop of water fell every few hours. She placed a small vial under it and twice a day took it to him.28 Husbands nursed mothers whose milk had dried up, and mothers nursed children who became languid in the morning and were dead by nightfall. Even as the hymns were being sung for one, another was preparing to die.
A lawyer, much involved with the welfare of the German community, spoke in court of the horrors faced by the people on that voyage:
I see them now, scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route, and now driven in fury before the raging tempest on the high and giddy waves. I see her people in the solemn burial service, day by day, one after another, committing the worn and wasted forms of their companions to the ocean’s deep, until one half their number is all that is left. There was the burial of a mother, and she left young and helpless orphans.29
It was the might of the Mississippi they saw first, miles out to the sea, advancing like a tawny-colored canal through the blue-green of the ocean. The Juffer Johanna headed toward it, while overhead, gulls, terns, and skimmers circled and swooped. Away in the distance, they saw a line of gray as the cry of “Land, land, America!” came from aloft. If it was America, it was as flat as the Friesland coast. They had expected something grander—a serrated mountain range, perhaps, or a cliff acting as a battlement against invaders. But it was America, they were told. This was America! Their ship, buffeted by the churning foam of the river, headed upstream, following a twisting course marked by buoys through islands of mud and sandbars. At last, at last—they had arrived. They had survived.
Then, after not sighting any other vessels for weeks, those on board the Juffer Johanna were suddenly surrounded by half a dozen ships, all in full sail, making their way to the mouth of the Mississippi. A call went up from some of the passengers that the ship alongside was the Johanna Maria. Mrs. Fleikener and Madame Hemm were on the deck, so close it was possible to shout to them. In joy, they called to each other. Then, in a quite miraculous coincidence, the Emanuel hove into view. The immigrants shouted one to another, across the muddy waters, inquiring how each had fared. The answers cried back were dreadfully similar. They had been becalmed and run out of food and water. Many, many had died. All afternoon, as they passed by vast swamps of shoulder-high grasses, teeming with flocks of geese, more and more names were added to the list of the dead.
Writers give wildly differing estimates of the numbers who died aboard Krahnstover’s vessels. Wheelock S. Upton, writing in 1845, said that there were 800 passengers on the three ships and of them, 450 died. Cable put the total number of passengers at 1,800, of whom 1,200 died. Deiler estimated that 1,100 passengers left Helder and, after consulting maritime records in Louisiana, concluded that 597 arrived in New Orleans, the survivors being: on the Emanuel 200, on the Juffer Johanna 250, and on the Johanna Maria 147.30 It was a rare family who hadn’t experienced death; many had lost several members. Daniel Müller had lost his wife and his youngest child; his brother Henry had lost his wife—an existence so anonymous that no record was kept of her name.
The cause of the tragedy was obvious enough. Given favorable winds the passage from Helder to New Orleans should have taken fifty to sixty days. Krahnstover had hired the dregs of the Amsterdam waterfront as crew and incompetents as captains, and when the wind fell out of the sails, they didn’t know what to do. According to Upton, the “voyage was of the extraordinary duration of four months.” Deiler wrote that the journey took five months. Madame Hemm, a passenger on the Johanna Maria, recalled that it took ninety days.31 The apparent discrepancy arises because three vessels were involved. Krahnstover’s ships barely had provisions for sixty days, and when they ran out of food and water, the immigrants, already in a weakened state when they came aboard, began to die.
It took the three vessels sixteen days to sail the 100 miles up the winding Mississippi to New Orleans. The passengers watched keelboats and steamers making their way downstream to the Gulf of Mexico. They saw whole trees, roots, and branches float past in the muddy waters. At times the ships moved so close to the levee of the river, they could have jumped ashore. They passed through lush meadows, dotted with neat red-roofed cottages. They saw orange and peach trees in blossom and cattle
grazing in green pastures. Here was America, just as they imagined it to be. They sailed by large plantation houses set amid fields of sugarcane and saw for the first time people with black skins—a line of them working in a cane field, while a man sitting on a horse watched over them.
They awoke on the morning of March 6,1818, to see a dusky smear hovering in the sky to the north, and were told it was caused by wood fires burning in the kitchens of New Orleans. An hour later, the three ships rounded a bend and there before them was a grand city sitting flush on the banks of the river, the buildings pinked in the warmth of the morning sun. They saw warehouses, smoking factory chimneys, a line of brick terraces and a tiered cathedral with three spires pointing to the heavens. Tied up alongside the banks of the levee, as far as they could see, were hundreds of ships, while busy little ferries crossed backward and forward to a village on the opposite bank.
From the mouth of the Mississippi, Krahnstover had mailed news of his ships’ expected arrival in New Orleans, and for several days an item ran in the Louisiana Gazette advertising the cargo he carried:
Mr. Krahnstover, supercargo of the ship Juffer Johanna, lately arrived from Amsterdam, begs leave to inform the inhabitants of Louisiana who may want Servants of different ages and sexes, laborers, farmers, gardeners, mechanics, etc., that he has brought several Swiss and German passengers who wished to emigrate to the country, which may prove to be very serviceable in their respective capacities. For particulars apply on board or at the store of Mr. T. W. Am Ende, Toulouse St.32
It had been the dream of those accompanying Daniel and Henry Müller that everyone from Langensoultzbach would own adjoining farms and assist each other as neighbors, but now the awful reality struck home: they would be scattered like leaves in the wind to wherever their new masters took them. They would own nothing. They would be servants. Daniel and Henry now prayed for something far less ambitious—only that they would be able to stay together, two widowers with six children between them. A wealthy farmer, perhaps someone with a large estate, might take them as a whole.