October 9, 1825

October 9, 1825, is the date the Restoration arrived in New York Harbor carrying fifty-two Norwegian emigrants after a hazardous fourteen-week crossing. In Apollo Kagwa’s story, the arrival is more than a milestone in immigration history: it opens onto a family’s decision to remain in Queens and the concealed history of the creature they brought with them.

The Crossing and Arrival

The Restoration sailed from Stavanger on July 5, 1825. The small sloop was only fifty-four feet long and sixteen feet wide, yet it carried its passengers across the Atlantic in fourteen weeks. Many of the Norwegians were Quakers seeking religious freedom in America; their voyage was described as the first organized group migration from Norway to these shores since the Viking Age.

The crossing ended on October 9 without a passenger dying. A girl was born aboard, a detail that made the voyage remarkable not only for its survival but for a beginning of life at sea, without a hospital or painkillers. The newspapers reported the journey, and the emigrants became known as the Sloopers—a name that captured the public’s fascination with how so many people could cross an ocean in so small a vessel.

The Family That Stayed

The date also marks a divergence within the migration. According to Jorgen Knudsen’s account to Apollo, most of the Sloopers moved away from the city and settled upstate, while Nils Knudsen, Anna Sofie, and Petra Mikkelsdatter remained in Queens. Jorgen presents Nils’s choice as an attempt to protect his family: doubtful that the sloop could safely make the crossing, Nils brought what he considered insurance, at a price.

Queens was then farmland, with thousands of acres of forest and green space. In Jorgen’s telling, its woods and hills offered the kind of landscape where a creature from the family’s Norwegian homeland could make a lair. The land’s later development did not erase that possibility: by 1898, the area that became Forest Park had been acquired and plans for golf courses and hiking paths were underway, but its hills still held secluded pockets and caves. The voyage’s public story of a successful arrival thus conceals a private history rooted in the place where one family stayed.

A Date Recovered Through Story

Apollo encounters the date not in a contemporary account but in Jorgen’s retelling, delivered in a den among framed pictures of children and a rendering of a ship at sea. Before turning to the more recent Norwegian immigrants, Jorgen places human movement against a much older history: he describes the Laurentide ice sheet crossing the region about twenty thousand years ago, when the landscape that would become New York City lay beneath a glacier. The sequence makes October 9 one layer in a much longer account of movement, settlement, and changing land.

The novel repeatedly treats places as records that can be revised rather than as fixed backdrops. At Jamaica Station on the Long Island Rail Road, Apollo sees the renovated station and remembers its earlier platforms; imagining his mother’s earlier experience of Jamaica, he considers how many versions of the place can coexist. The Restoration’s arrival supplies another such layer: the newspaper-famous crossing is preserved, while the choice and bargain that kept Nils’s family in Queens remain hidden beneath the familiar history of settlement.