Going to America
J.W. Blake describes how, during the colonial period, just over half a million emigrants—English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, Dutch, Swedish and Finnish—are calculated to have left Europe for a new home in America. Often they reached their goal only at the cost of hideous suffering.
On an autumn October day in 1741 the sloop Seaflower from Belfast in Ireland dropped anchor in Boston harbour. She was destined for Philadelphia, and she carried 106 passengers, “most of them in a sickly and weak condition.” When Selectmen from the town boarded her, they were told of a long and storm-tossed crossing: that the half-starved emigrants had been reduced:
to such Miserable Circumstances that they were Obliged in Order to Sustain Life to feed upon the Bodies of Six Persons that Died in the Passage, that as they were cutting up the Seventh, they Espied the Success, Man of War, Capt Thompson Commander, who came up to them and supplied them with Men and Provisions sufficient to bring them into this Port, they having been out Sixteen Weeks, Forty-Six People having Died on the Passage.
This grim yet vivid record may serve to remind us that behind the wealth and sophistication of contemporary American society there lies an apprenticeship as arduous and tragic as any in the recorded history of mankind.
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