Emigrants Book

I love reading pioneer novels; books about hardy people going to a new land, building a home, making a living from the land with hard work and determination. In some cases, when emigrating to the new world from the old, it also meant leaving relatives and friends behind forever, learning a new language and new customs, and coping with unforseen circumstances with no help at all, just your own intelligence and ability to work.

This book gives us the story of Karl Oscar and his wife Kristina from the very beginning of their journey in 1850. We learn why they wanted to leave Sweden because of diminishing returns on their farm and no way to rise above it no matter how hard they worked. Others wanted to leave behind servitude, religious persecution, and in one case, a nagging wife. 16 people, including 7 children, set sail on an emigrant ship bound for New York harbor.

The second half of the book is about the sea voyage through the North Sea, the English Channel, and across the Atlantic Ocean. This was so graphic and real (seasickness, scurvy, death, bad food, boredom and fear, just to name a few) that I may never set foot on a boat again. The end of volume one sets these brave people once again on land, and left me in tears because of the hope in their hearts. North America! Where anything was possible! Where life would be better!

"But however shabby and weak they seemed, however wretched and poor they were--North America admitted them". That sentence filled me with pride, then sadness, as it doesn't seem we are that country any longer.

Volume Two "Unto a Good Land" follows our little group on their search for a place to settle, and I can't wait to get to it.