The Trek to America

It was a long and arduous undertaking from the first of May to the end of October, departing

from the Rhineland and ultimately arriving in Philadelphia. It would take four to six weeks

on the Rhine another six weeks from Holland to England and, finally three more months at sea

before finally achieving landfall in America.

The cost of such a venture-without any emergency-would require one's entire earnings for

several months. In their monetary terms, to reach England would necessitate at least forty

(40) florins and another sixty (60) florins, in passage and board, to finally reach

Philadelphia for each person over ten years of age. However, on the average, each immigrant

would spend at least two hundred (200) florins between Germany and Philadelphia.

On the journey aboard the ship, one would be forced to endure innumerable noxious odors and

fumes, nausea, fevers, dysentery, headaches, oppressive heat, constipation, boils, scurvy,

cancer, mouth-rot (caused by the age and highly salted state of the food), putrid water,

frost, continual dampness, fleas and so many lice that it was necessary for one to scrape

them from the body. Of course, the storms at sea served only to magnify the misery and hardship

endured by these immigrants. People often wished that they had never left their homeland, and

indeed, many were never to see any land again and were buried at sea. Children under the age

of seven appear to have fared the worst and seldom survived the sea voyage to America.

Merely reaching Pennsylvania did not necessarily guarantee good fortune for the new arrivals.

By the early Eighteenth Century, when immigrants were viewed less as settlers and more as a

labor commodity, a variation of indentured servitude came into use. On the continent, as the

Germans depleted their money supply and could no longer pay for their passage to America, the

immigrants would sign an agreement with the ship's captain to redeem their debt, for food and

passage, through their sale into servitude in America.

After the War of the Spanish Succession, 1707, destruction again fell upon the people on the

left bank of the Rhine. Again a great many of the people were homeless and this added to the

migration to America. First to leave was a small group under the leadership of the Lutheran

pastor, Joshua von Kochertal. They went by way of Holland to England where they were warmly

welcomed by Queen Anne who appropriated one shilling a day per German for their support. On

25 August 1708, they were naturalized as British citizens before they were sent to America

as colonists in the Hudson Valley and were joined by others led by Lord Lovelace who was to

become the new Governor of the Colony. When they reached America, Governor Lovelace granted

them a quantity of land on the west bank of the Hudson River where they founded the city of

Neuburg (Newburgh).

Word reached Germany of the good will that was shown to German immigrants by the British

Queen and the Lord Governor and soon an enormous number of people were flooding into London

wanting to emigrate to America. Another contributing factor to this exodus was a second

disastrous winter of 1708-9 in Germany in which huge portions of the crops, fruit trees and

vineyards were destroyed.

According to one account, 14,000 Germans descended onto London. The English people, at first,

continued to try and help them to survive by housing them in barns, vacant buildings, homes--

wherever they could place them--and to provide them with food. Because of the great numbers,

many died that winter which was almost as harsh as the preceding one had been. Then the

government felt compelled to take action and shipped thousands back to Holland and Germany,

especially those who refused to embrace the Protestant faith. Approximately 4,000 were sent

to work in the spinning mills of Ireland. A few hundred, quartered just outside London,

attempted to escape at night and were sent to Jamaica as slaves.

FONT SIZE=2>In the fall of 1709, 600 Swiss and German immigrants left under the leadership of Christoph

von Graffenreid and Luis Michel. They had purchased 10,000 acres of land in the Carolinas and

had reserved 100,000 acres more. In 1710, they landed in two ships and established the

settlement of Neu-Bern (New Bern). Sixty of these settlers died the next year in a massacre

by the Tuscorrara Indians. Also, they were cheated by Graffenreid and Michel, who had returned

to Europe where they deserted the settlers by selling their lands to their creditors. In 1714,

the immigrants petitioned the Carolinas Council for a grant of 400 acres per family and two

years in which to repay the debt. This was granted and quickly the German settler's prospects

brightened.

The first Rhinelanders began coming to America in 1683 in the hope of finding relief from the

oppression that they had suffered in Europe. Franz Daniel Pastorus, an agent for the Frankfurt

Land Company, obtained a grant of 6,000 acres east of Schuylkill and to the northwest of

Philadelphia. Pastorus led these German settlers to this area, now known as Germantown,

Pennsylvania.

Pastorus did this with the aide and encouragement of William Penn. Through German translations

of his pamphlets, Penn had urged various sects, such as the Pietists and Mennonites, to join

with him in his experiment. By 1727, so many people were entering the American port of

Philadelphia, that records of who entered, when, and their point of origin began to be recorded

by the government.

Approximately 12,000 Germans reached Philadelphia in 1749 and by the beginning of the War of

the Revolution, there were at least 110,000 people of German birth or ancestry--one third of

the total Pennsylvania population! They spoke German or "Deutsche." This sounded like "Dutch"

to the English speaking settlers, so these German people became known as the Pennsylvania Dutch.

It has been calculated that twenty-seven percent (27%) of the white American population is of

German descent, while some thirty percent (30%) is of English origin. After the War of the

Revolution, German--not English--was nearly selected as our national language because of the

great number of German people that made up the American population.