USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 1 > Part 11
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The Peace of Westphalia in 1649 did not bring an end to this tragic waste, at least not in the Rhineland from which the great mass of our forebears came. Conflicts, petty and local, con- tinued to flare up, checking recovery in the areas afflicted. The climax of trouble was reached in 1688, when Louis XIV, who had long cast a covetous eye on the Rhine Provinces, turned his armies loose upon them. What followed here exceeded the devilishness of the Thirty Years War. The full force of this blow fell on the home of our ancestors, the Palatinate, but the goal of the French monarch was never realized, for the rapid rise of William III, Prince of Orange, and joint sovereign with Mary II of Great Britain and Ireland, brought about a realignment in European politics which forced Louis to modify his foreign policy and to relinquish his prey. He bowed out with a vengeance, issuing orders to his troops to devastate the country in order to shatter it eco- nomically and thus eliminate competition with French industries. For weeks and months a veritable saturnalia of arson, carnage, and looting followed. The populated areas around many Rhine cities were harried, pillaged, and burned. Heidelberg was sacked in March 1689, and Mannheim, Speier, and Worms soon met the same fate. Ladenburg and Oppenheim were burned, and the whole Palatinate and large areas of the Electorate of Trier and of the Margraviate of Baden were laid waste. The Rhine districts re- mained the scene of battles and of a pillaging soldiery until the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in the spring of 1713.
This, in brief summary, is the background which explains the early German migrations to America, to the Carolinas, Penn- sylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and to Frankfort (Dresden) and Broad Bay here in Maine. Our forefathers who settled these
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Early Migrations
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MIGRATIONS
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
masters. The Palatinate was at different times in these years ruled by a Lutheran, a Prince of the Reformed Church, and a Catholic. At each change the people had to conform to the religion of their master or suffer persecution. Apart from this, their very living was meager and uncertain. Death in the form of violence, famine, or pestilence had stalked up and down the land. They could not look forward with certainty to an economic future. Theirs was an existence brightened by little hope. Despite the known hardship of friends and relatives in the New World, America was the beacon lighting their way to a new hope. And so from 1685 down to the Revolution an unending stream of them poured across the Atlantic to find in a new land suffering and death as well as riches and security.
This stream of emigrants, to be exact, started in 1682, and at first was a tiny brooklet made up largely of the persecuted splinter sects who sought asylum in Pennsylvania under the kindly protection of Penn's Quakers. When Anne became Queen in England in 1702, the brooklet broadened into a steady stream. Her ministers took the view that to conserve England's power her own people should remain at home and that the colonies could well be populated by Germans and other unfortunate folk from the con- tinent, provided they were Protestants and unfriendly to France and Spain. Consequently government propaganda literature was circulated in the Rhineland. Some of these pamphlets bore a pic- ture of the Queen and a title page in gold letters. Among the Germans they were long remembered as the Golden Books of Queen Anne, and they were filled with somewhat deceptive ac- counts of life in the New World. Their effect upon a people long suffering and insecure was to start a steady surge of emigrating humanity across the Atlantic. In the years 1708 and 1709, 30,000 Germans entered England, there to re-embark for America. This initial influx into England led the ministry to a revision of pro- cedure, involving direct shipment to the Colonies usually from a Dutch port, the ships merely touching in England to have their cargoes cleared under the authority of the Crown, a pattern adhered to for the next seventy years. Under this new arrange- ment first Rotterdam and then Amsterdam became the great ship- ping centers of this human traffic. Ships were chartered to pro- ceed to these ports to load Palatines for America, just as they were chartered for cargoes of expendable goods such as rum and molasses. As this traffic assumed highly profitable proportions it became vigorously competitive, and the owners and captains engaged in this trade developed techniques for handling it which rather closely resembled the practices on slave ships engaged in the trade of the middle passage.
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Early Migrations
In this trade all types of vessels were used, brigs, snows, pinks, packets, and ships, which could carry from fifty to six hundred "freights." These emigrants or freights were transported to Georgia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. The business was no casual one but was plied sys- tematically. In modern economic parlance it would have been termed a racket, and a most inhuman one. The shipowners or Rheeder, as they were known, employed agents called by the Germans Newlanders (Neuländer), and later soul-sellers (Seelen- verkäufer) who moved through the Rhineland inducing the ig- norant and gullible natives to sign up for the colonies in America. They were a ruthless, unscrupulous lot who stopped at nothing to attain their ends. They operated on a basis of a per capita com- mission, receiving for each freight from one to two gulden. Many of them were Germans who had been in the colonies for long or short periods and so were able to veneer their deceptions with a certain coating of reality.
In this business they employed every kind of trickery known in the annals of misrepresentation. Wherever more than the usual influence was necessary, they were equipped with funds to buy and pay even for the influence of a clergyman. It was, in fact, always the best policy to secure a minister to accompany a migra- tion; inasmuch as the Germans were all the more easily induced to migrate if a clergyman was to go in the ship.3 Since it was not always easy to secure a bona fide minister for such a purpose, anyone was taken who could pass for a minister or half-minister. This fact accounts in part for the charlatan preachers in the early Broad Bay colony and in other German settlements on the eastern coast, as well as for the rather excessive numbers of schoolmasters in all colonies who were willing to act in a ministerial capacity. Liquor was another frequent ally of the Newlanders. They would get the head of a family "good and drunk" and then sign him up with wife and children included.
The life of the common people in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not far removed from what we now regard as the animal level; nevertheless the passage across the Atlantic and the conditions under which these emigrants reached the American shores was rather strenuous even for those callous days.4 On arrival the ships were often veritable pesthouses of smallpox and other diseases of filth which had necessarily increased in virulence under the crowded conditions of a voyage lasting from five weeks to two months. One ship arrived after a voyage of six
3W. J. Mann, Life and Times of Henry Melchior Mühlenberg (Phila., 1887).
4Daniel Rupp, "Notes," to Benjamin Rush, Manners of German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania (Phila., 1789) ; and Rupp, Thirty Thousand Names of Germans, etc. (Phila., 1875).
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
months with its few surviving emigrants living on rats and vermin. It was not uncommon for a vessel to lose in passage one third of her cargo from disease. The Philadelphia editor, Christopher Sauer, who publicized these conditions in the hope of ameliorating them reported that in one year 2000 Germans died in crossing the Atlantic. The Palatine ship which was wrecked at Block Island in 1738, and which John Greenleaf Whittier used as the theme of his poem, "The Palatine," had left Europe with 400 passengers. At the time of the wreck this number had been reduced by dysen- tery and fever to 105. The horrors of the passage, especially to Pennsylvania, are almost beyond our contemporary, humanitarian imagination. For those who do not shrink from revolting realities there exists a somewhat detailed account of the conditions of the passage, written by a Gottlob Mittelberger who made the journey to Pennsylvania in 1750 and returned to Germany in 1754. A few paragraphs taken from the account of this eyewitness, even if considerably overdrawn, will furnish an insight into some of the horrors and brutalities of the passage:
In Rotterdam and Amsterdam they begin to pack the people in like herring, and since the ships insist on carrying not less than four, five or six hundred souls besides ... chests, water casks and provisions, many are obliged to occupy berths scarcely two feet wide by six long. .. .
It is not, however, till the ship has raised its anchor for the last time and started on its eight, nine, ten, eleven, or twelve weeks sail for Phila- delphia that the greatest misery is experienced. Then there are heart- rending scenes. The filth and stench of the vessels no pen could describe, while the diverse diseases, seasickness in every form, headaches, bilious- ness, constipation, dysentery, scarlet fever, scrofula, cancers, etc., caused by the miserable salt food and the vile drinking water are truly deplor- able, not to speak of the deaths which occur on every side.
In addition to all this, one invariably meets with an actual scarcity of every kind of provisions, with hunger, thirst, frost, severe heat, an ugly wet vessel, murmurings, complaints, anxiety, loathsome, contagious diseases and other innumerable varieties of tribulations, such as lice in such a number that they can literally be taken in quantities from the bodies of the passengers, especially of the sick. Forlorn, though, as the situation is, the climax is not yet reached. That comes when, for the space of two or three days, all on board, the sick and dying as well as those in health, are tossed mercilessly to and fro, and rolled about on top of one another, the storm-tossed vessel seeming each moment as if in the next, it would be engulfed by the angry, roaring waves.
Even those who escape sickness sometimes grow so bitterly impatient and cruel, that they curse themselves and the day of their birth, and then in wild despair commence to kill those around them. Want and sickness go hand in hand, and lead to trickery and deception of every kind. One blames another for having induced him to take the voyage. Husbands reproach their wives, wives their husbands, children their parents, parents their children, and friends their friends, while all de- nounce the cruel Newlanders whose trade it is to steal human beings.
Many heave deep drawn sighs, and exclaim mournfully: "O God!
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Early Migrations
O God! if I only had a piece of good bread or one drop of fresh water!" or cry out in the anguish of their souls: "Oh, if I were only at home ly- ing in my pigsty!" The wailing and lamentations continue day and night, and, as one body after another is committed to a watery grave, those who induced their unfortunate companions to leave their old home in search of a new one are drawn to the verge of despair.
The sufferings of the poor women who are pregnant can scarcely be imagined. They rarely live through the voyage and many a mother with her tiny babe is thrown into the water almost ere life is extinct. During a severe storm on our vessel one poor creature, who owing to the trying circumstances, was unable to give birth to her child, was shoved through an opening in the ship and allowed to drop into the water, because it was not convenient to attend to her. ..
It is little wonder that so many of the passengers are seized with sickness and disease, for, in addition to all their hardships and miseries, they have cooked food only three times a week and this (it is always a decidedly inferior quality, and served in very small quantities) is so filthy that the very sight of it is loathsome. Moreover, the drinking wa- ter is so black, thick and full of worms that it makes one shudder to look at it, and even those suffering the torture of thirst frequently find it almost impossible to swallow it.5
It is of course a human trait to magnify conditions wherever those faced are unusual or horrible. We may concede to this eye- witness as much in the way of exaggeration as we wish, neverthe- less we cannot, even by so doing, escape the inhumanity of this traffic. In a modified form at least it represents the conditions under which some of our ancestors reached these shores. From the deep mists which enshroud the coming of many of them there emerges here and there the evidence of suffering and death. Joseph Ludwig, the father of Jacob and Joseph, Jr., died in pas- sage, as did the wife of Henry Benner, David Rominger's second wife, and the father of Jacobina Dörfler. This is merely to men- tion the names of a few of the victims from our own early history.
But the profits of the Newlanders and the horrors of the passage by no means complete the story of exploitation. The captains and crews of the transports secured as well a share of such loot as was available. It was common practice with them to appro- priate the goods of the dead as well as to plunder the living of their clothes and chattels. Chests were rifled; money was taken; those with means were compelled to pay the passage of the poorer ones, and on reaching port the more unfortunate of the immi- grants were sold as redemptioners, regular sales being held on the ships. Here the citizens of the port would gather, pay the charges alleged as being due, and in this way secure the services of an immigrant for a number of years until the charges paid had been worked out in labor. Daniel Rupp in his notes to Dr. Benjamin
"Gottlob Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania in 1750, trans. Carl T. Even (Phila .: J. J. McVey).
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
Rush's Manners of the Germans in Pennsylvania has outlined the practice followed in such sales:
The usual terms of sale depended somewhat on the age, strength and health of the persons sold. Boys and girls usually had to serve from five to ten years till they attained the age of twenty-one. Many parents were necessitated, as they had been wont at home to do with their cattle, to sell their own children. The children had to assume the passage, both their own and that of their parents, in order that the latter might be released from the ship. Children under five years of age could not be sold. They were disposed of gratuitously to such persons as offered to raise them, and let them go free when they attained the age of twenty- one.6
This method was quite commonly in vogue at Broad Bay in the case of the Colony of 1753. During the winter of that year, many children were put out to service on this basis in the settle- ments at Damariscotta and on the Georges.7
It may please us to believe that New England was not quite as callous in its treatment of the Palatinates as certain of the colonies in the South. This is in a measure true, but notwith- standing we were quite amply indifferent. Note, for example, the light thrown upon this problem by this excerpt from a letter of Colonel David Dunbar to Secretary Popple, dated Boston, August 29, 1730:
It is now the 29th, of August, three days ago there arrived here a ship belonging to this towne from Amsterdam with 230 pallatines, by their contract bound to Pensilvania, they were so crowded in ye ship which occasioned the death of some, and ye want of watre brought them in here, the Master complained to Mr. Belcher [the Governor] that the passengers forced him in, which the Governor told me was an act of piracy, the poor people being frightened with threats to be prosecuted accordingly by the Master and Owner, have been obliged to give up the obligations they had in writing to be put on shore at Philadelphia whither some of the familys and Acquaintance had been before them, and where exposed to sale like Negroes, and are purchasing by a com- pany of Mr. Waldoes proprietors to be planted where the pine Swamps are in Shepscot river to ye Eastward of Kennebec; I begged Mr. Belcher to see that these poor creatures were not abused but he is gone to New Hampshire. God help them, they have a poor chance for justice - I am told that the Magistrates of this towne refused to let the pallatines be landed here, they are Yitt upon Island 4 miles from the towns where quarantine is performed, and are to be put upon the Same Vessel and sent to Philadelphia, it would be a fine opportunity to furnish such a number of people to Nova Scotia. . . . 8
Again on October 21 of the same year Dunbar wrote the following from Boston: "The poor pallatines mentioned in my former letter to you are begging about Towne, it would move any
·(Philadelphia, 1789), p. 8.
"Cyrus Eaton, Annals of Warren, 1st ed., p. 82.
8Colls. Me. Hist. Soc. Doc. Ser. XI, 36ff.
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other people to see them, no dyeing Criminals look more piteously, they were bound to Pensilvania but brought in here as I formerly mentioned where they are likely to perish this winter .... "9
Dunbar's comments point to a pattern of treatment similar to that of Pennsylvania, but of course on a smaller scale. In the situation he discusses above, it is a Boston shipping firm engaged in the traffic, a crowded ship; there is suffering and death; Boston is reached. The owners would profit the more if the added expense of a longer voyage to Philadelphia could be avoided. Hence the accusation of piracy which so frightens the immigrants that they do not insist on the fulfillment of their contract. They are turned loose to beg and starve or to sell themselves as redemptioners to land speculators - among whom we find Mr. Waldo. In fact, his presence on the scene leads us to further speculation. Did this ship chartered for Pennsylvania reach Boston by accident or de- sign? Were Mr. Waldo and his associates possibly diverting factors? Was Governor Belcher's indifference and his charge of piracy a part of a prearranged plan? In short, were Waldo and others in conspiracy with a Boston shipping firm to secure tenants for their land ventures? If so, it would be in line with a pattern later followed by Mr. Waldo, for when Martin Heyer and his fellow emigrants left Germany in 1748, their destination was Philadelphia, and they never even suspected that Broad Bay and Schenck's Point would be the scene of their ultimate landing.
The tale of the Mayflower has been retold in song and story as one of fortitude, courage, and endurance, and such it was. It is worthy of note, however, that the 102 Pilgrims were all landed after a voyage of sixty-five days. There was not a death from any cause, certainly none from starvation, and no evidence of the inhumanity of man to man. For suffering, sheer fortitude, and endurance this Mayflower voyage in comparison with those which brought these German migrants to our shores, is a pallid epic of misery indeed.
Whether some of the hypotheses of preceding paragraphs in reference to Mr. Waldo point in the direction of fact or not, we are clear in reference to the conditions under which many of our ancestors came to these shores. In fact, all who came to the Waldoborough area prior to 1750 experienced in a more or less limited way some of the cruelties and hardships here described. Around 1750 this condition in New England changed somewhat. The Governor and General Court were at this time formulating a policy whereunder the frontiers of Massachusetts Bay were to be settled by Germans who would serve as a buffer or first line of defense against the French and Indians. In order to secure Germans for such a purpose, it was felt that special inducements and safe-
ºIdem.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
guards would have to be provided to attract them in the numbers needed. Joseph Crellius or Crell, a German from Philadelphia, was made the agent of the Bay Colony. At the same time he also served as an undercover agent for Mr. Waldo and other land proprietors, and played a very considerable part in our local history in the years 1750 and 1752. Crell went about his work in a most energetic fashion and in a few months secured protective legislation in the General Court for all immigrants entering the Bay Colony, a feat which the humane citizenry of Philadelphia had been seeking for years, but which was never accomplished. Crell believed that he would be greatly strengthened in recruiting emigrants in Germany if the inhumanities practiced on such settlers in passage could be controlled and regulated by law, so far at least as migrations to Massachusetts were concerned. Accordingly on February 5, 1750, there passed the General Court "an Act to regulate the Importation of German and other Passengers coming to settle in this Province."10
This law in its letter placed under strict regulation the im- portation of emigrants contemplating settling on lands in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. In the interest of such settlers it humanized the Palatine traffic in the following ways:
1. It limited the number of the passengers to the size of the ship, and defined the amount of space allotted per capita.
2. It provided "good and wholesome meat and drink" and other "necessaries."
3. It protected the goods and money of passengers from unjust ap- propriation on the part of ship masters or crews.
4. The execution of the law was made mandatory on the part of the Commissioner of Import at the port of entry.
5. Fines for the violation of any feature of the law ranged from five pounds and costs to two hundred pounds.
This humane piece of legislation, while motivated by mer- cenary considerations, is in itself prima-facie evidence of the existence of the evils adduced elsewhere in this chapter. It had its effect, and from 1750 on less is heard of the characteristic brutalities of the earlier voyages across - at least to the Bay Colony. To incur risks in this respect was hereafter dangerous. It would have been especially so for Samuel Waldo, since he had powerful political enemies who would have made capital out of any in- humanity of his. The law, however, had its limitations. It did not and could not control the conditions existing in Europe from the time of recruiting to the time of embarking. It was loosely enforced and hence only partially effective. Nor did it regulate conditions once the passenger had landed and passed into the jurisdiction of the proprietor. Proprietary abuses continued un-
10 Mass. Archives (Ms.), XV A, 52-55.
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Early Migrations
abated, and their cruelties in some instances projected themselves into the Broad Bay Colony until the last migrant from across the water had reached these shores in 1753.
With some change in the conditions of passage effected by this law, it will surely be of interest to know in a general way what life on shipboard was like for some of our ancestors who reached these shores under the new dispensation. This is revealed here in the form of a contract entered into between certain proprietors and the Germans of a given migration. This document pertains to a shipload of Rhinelanders who came to Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1751, a considerable number of whom in 1752 and in 1760 came to Broad Bay to make their permanent homes. Among them were John Stahl, John Hilt, George Smouse, David Vose, Jacob Burkhardt, and others. This was one of the colonies recruited in the Rhine Country by Joseph Crell. The form of the contract is as follows:
The said ... and ... [names of the proprietors] shall furnish us with a good tight and commodius ship that sails well, and cause us to be transported on board of said ship to our destination. Fixed bed-rooms or cabins are to be made in the ship six feet long and one and a half broad, for every whole freight. The said . . . and said ... [proprietors] are to victual the ship with very good provisions, viz: Good bread, Syrup, Butter, Cheese, Bear,11 Good Fish, Water and other necessaries. The ship is to be purified twice a day with vinegar and juniper berries, and to cause fresh air to circulate freely through the ship, and every whole freight shall daily receive the following rations: Sunday, one pound of beef boiled with rice; Monday, Barley and Syrup; Tuesday, one pound of Flour of Wheat; Wednesday, one pound of bacon with Peas; Thursday, one pound of Beef boiled with Rice; Freday, one pound of Flour of Wheat and one pound of Butter; Saturday, one pound of Bacon, one pound of Cheese and six pounds of Bread for the whole week. Every day one quart of Bear (as long as it remains drinkable) and two quarts for every whole freight, whoever desires brandy shall receive the same every morning, and such as love Tobacco shall have one pound for their journey at their setting out. They shall have liberty in time of fair weather to dress their victuals for themselves and their children, and for that purpose to make use of the fire from six o'clock in the morning to six at night, and to be on deck. Such as are sick shall espe- cially be entitled to have the use of the fire and water as they desire it. All sorts of spices and wine shall be put on board the ship to be used for their refreshment, in order to take the better care of the sick.12
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