Up a Tree

William Bradford's description of the Mayflower's  voyage gives a clear sense that life aboard ship was unpleasant at best. In the last post, I augmented that description a little, drawing on accounts of life aboard naval vessels in the 18th and 19th centuries and novels of naval life from that period. You can be sure life wasn't easier in the 1600s. While searching for information about Atlantic crossings involving immigrants, I found an account by Gottlieb Mittleberger of his travel to America in 1750, 130 years after the Mayflower crossing. Mittleberger had been hired to be the organist and schoolmaster at the St. Augustine's Church in Providence. I don't know if that's supposed to be the city in Rhode Island.  He would take an organ with him, which he picked up in Heilbronn in southwestern Germany, not far from Stuttgart. From there he sailed to Rotterdam, the Netherlands and thence to Cowes in England. From Cowes, he sailed aboard the Osgood with 400 other...

For the next couple of weeks, we will depart from my family's ancestors and their link to the times they lived in and spend some time dealing solely in history.  As previously noted many of our ancestors came to America as part of the original settlement of the country. They had exactly one choice of transportation for at least a couple of hundreds years for making the voyage -- sailing ships.  Now, maybe you've taken a cruise at some point, or you've seen a movie or television show that involves cruise ships. Maybe you've seen one of the movies about the Titanic and are aware that the ships making the Atlantic crossing and carrying immigrant passengers were divided into classes, with the passengers who could least afford the trip placed in steerage.  You might think that those sparse cabins that lacked any but the most basic of amenities might be somewhat similar to the conditions our ancestors faced when immigrating to the New World. If so, put those thoughts complete...