Forty Paces Long and Eight Paces Wide

“Forty Paces Long and Eight Paces Wide” is both a literal measurement of the Charlotta and a recurring expression of the distance between the emigrants’ hopes of open land and the close, precarious world they inhabit at sea. Robert and Arvid pace the brig and discover how little room it offers: almost a hundred people must live, sleep, eat, and manage daily needs within a space they can measure in steps. The phrase makes the ship’s limits tangible, while the voyage continually shows how little control its passengers have over the world beyond them.

The Measurement and the Ship

The Charlotta sailed from Karlshamn for New York on April 14, 1850, under Captain Lorentz. The brig was 124 feet long and 20 feet wide, with a capacity of 160 lasts. Its fifteen crew members carried 78 emigrants, bringing the number aboard to 94; this was the vessel’s seventh voyage as an emigrant ship. The compact measurements later become more than a specification: they are the passengers’ own way of grasping the scale of the place in which their lives are now confined.

Canvas partitions divided the hold into spaces for married couples and children, unmarried men, and unmarried women. Family beds lay in rough-board pens toward the stern; other passengers slept in bunks, while bedding and loose straw covered the deck. As the 78 emigrants arranged mattresses, blankets, food baskets, knapsacks, and bundles, dust rose from the bedding and the already low, choking space seemed to shrink. A few crude tables were crowded with tubs and baskets, leaving hardly room to walk. The only daylight came through the main hatch; after dark, weak, smoking kerosene lanterns hung along the sides.

There was no room for Karl Oskar in the family pen, so he shared a two-man bunk with Robert in the unmarried men’s compartment. Jonas Petter slept above them, and Arvid’s bunk stood next to theirs. The men had scarcely a foot of width apiece. The measurement in the phrase thus names not simply the brig’s outer dimensions but the pressure of a shared interior, where family arrangements and personal space yield to the practical need to fit everyone aboard.

Pacing Out the Limits

Robert and Arvid inspect the ship from end to end. Even shortening their steps somewhat, they count forty paces in length and eight in width; a farmhouse floor, they observe, could be as large as the deck. Their arithmetic converts an unfamiliar vessel into a familiar measure, but the comparison also sharpens the danger: nearly a hundred people must live, sleep, eat, and perform all the necessities of life in this narrow space. If all came on deck together, they would nearly push one another overboard. The few raft-like boats carried on deck did not suffice for the passengers.

The ordinary details of the ship make the same confinement felt from below. Robert asks a sailor where the outhouse is and is directed to the roundhouse forward, though he finds a square structure; the terminology becomes one more riddle in an environment whose workings he does not understand. The two farmhands would rather remain on deck than return to the dark, damp hold, where dust from mattresses and straw mingles with the smell of urine and vomit. Robert’s imagined sailing ship, with sails like white angels’ wings, gives way to a deep-laden cargo brig with gray, weather-stained sails and pig iron below. The contrast does not extinguish his pleasure in the adventure, but it makes the distance between imagined passage and lived conditions unmistakable.

Order, Water, and Dependence

Space aboard the Charlotta was governed by rules as well as walls. The mate instructed the emigrants to take provisions by family, in fixed weekly portions of unprepared food, and to arrange turns at the galley so that each household’s right was respected. Refuse, bones, dishwater, and sweepings had to be thrown overboard on the leeward side, never windward. Fresh water was limited to half a gallon per person per day for drinking and washing. Passengers were responsible for cleaning the hold each morning, and water would not be issued until the work was done. Fires required particular care; smoking and unprotected lights were forbidden below deck, and the captain could punish disobedience.

The ration soon proved a daily constraint. The half gallon had to serve cooking, drinking, washing, and babies’ needs, while the emigrants were accustomed to draw from full wells. The second mate warned that the voyage might last three months if the weather was unlucky and that supplies might have to be stretched further. Washing woolens in seawater produced no suds; after a heavy rain, sailors collected rainwater in a sail, and Danjel Andreasson took the rain as a gift from heaven. The scene connects the passengers’ material dependence on weather with their efforts to interpret that dependence through faith.

The morning cleaning routine made the ship’s regulations part of the body’s daily life. Men hauled water in large buckets; women scrubbed, washed, and hung clothing to dry on deck. Only after the quarters were clean could the thirsty drink and the dirty wash. At night, seasickness emerged in the close bunks, while too few buckets, darkness, and the ban on lights after ten made the hold harder to endure. In the morning, the cleaning restored a little order, but it also revealed the cost of living within the narrow space the phrase measures.

The Phrase as a Measure of the Voyage

At the harbor, the emigrants first looked across water without seeing land on the other side. The cold wind seemed to challenge the people of the earth as they met the sea; coats, shawls, and blankets could not keep it from cutting through them. The passage then extended the meaning of the ship’s dimensions beyond its physical frame. Contrary winds, currents, and fog delayed the Charlotta, and passengers began to suspect that the distance to North America was greater than they had been told. They counted the journey not in miles but in days since leaving in the second week of April; Sweden grew incalculably remote, while their hoped-for new home remained remote too.

The measured ship offers an apparent certainty—forty paces by eight—inside a crossing governed by uncertainty. Its cramped interior requires rules, rationing, cleaning, and shared accommodation, while the sea outside decides how long the emigrants must remain there. In that contrast, the phrase gathers the voyage’s central tension: a passage toward a larger future takes place within a brutally limited space, and the people aboard can measure their confinement far more exactly than they can measure when it will end.