Gothenburg is the narrative’s first major threshold between inland life and the sea: Robert longs to reach it to see the water, while the emigrants later pass through it as part of a journey that leads to Karlshamn and the Atlantic. Yet the city also exposes the gap between a journey’s promise and its completion. Fredrik Thron is sent there with money for passage to North America, but stays behind, spends the fare, and returns home; Robert, by contrast, leaves his old life behind and ultimately sails away.

The First Imagined Route to the Sea

Robert’s desire to visit Gothenburg begins not with a completed journey but with the work of preparing ships. After school, Rinaldo gives him a copy of History of Nature, though Robert does not open it for more than a year. During that time he helps Karl Oskar fell oaks for shipbuilding and pines for masts. As the trees are cut and sawn for a future life at sea, Robert follows the ships-to-be in thought. Gothenburg, fifty miles away, becomes the place where he might finally see the sea with his own eyes; timber carriers need two days and a night for the round trip, a measure of the distance separating the boy from the world he imagines.

The city’s pull is reinforced by Rinaldo’s stories. The one-eyed schoolmaster has travelled as far as Gothenburg and seen the sea, and his adventures hold the children’s attention more than the Little Catechism and Biblical history. To Robert, then, Gothenburg is not merely a point on a map: it is a place made vivid by another person’s experience and by the ships built from the trees he helps fell.

A False Departure

Gothenburg also figures in the story of Fredrik Thron, whose neighbors and employer try to rid themselves of him by financing a passage to North America. After Fredrik is caught exchanging his employer’s oxen for smaller animals and pocketing the difference, Lieutenant Rudeborg proposes that the farmers contribute toward his fare. They regard the payment as a way to send a troublesome servant beyond their reach; Rudeborg even comes in person to see Fredrik board the coach bound for Gothenburg.

But Fredrik never boards a ship. He remains in Gothenburg, staying at an inn and spending the money on drink and idleness until it is gone. Then he returns to Kvarntorpet, openly thanking the people who financed what he presents as an instructive journey and suggesting he would gladly undertake another. His return turns the attempted emigration into a local scandal: Rudeborg reports him for the theft of the oxen, but Fredrik disappears before the authorities can catch him. In this episode, the city is the limit of a departure falsely represented as a voyage to America.

From Road to Port

For Robert, Gothenburg belongs to the larger passage from a life of service toward emigration. During his first week at Nybacken, he decides he must escape the human and animal masters who command his labor. Years later, as the emigrants leave, he whistles when the wagon passes Nybacken and counts the gates along the road, taking on the task of gate-boy. The counted openings give the road a tangible sequence of thresholds, while the remembered lanes and familiar places make departure a separation from home as well as movement toward a destination.

At Karlshamn, the emigrants encounter the sea as a boundary with no land visible on the far side. Their passage begins when the brig Charlotta sails from that port for New York on April 14, 1850, carrying 78 emigrants among 94 people aboard. The contrast with Fredrik’s failed departure is sharp: he reaches Gothenburg but never crosses the water, whereas the emigrants board a ship and commit themselves to the Atlantic.

Distance and the Limits of Movement

The city’s meaning changes with the scale of the journey. In Robert’s childhood, Gothenburg is fifty miles away and difficult to reach; for Fredrik, it is the point at which an ocean crossing is evaded. For the emigrants, the route extends beyond any single city or port. Aboard the Charlotta, the ship’s confined hold, with berths for 78 people and scarcely room to step among baggage and bedding, makes the physical cost of passage immediate. On deck, Robert and Arvid pace the brig and find it only forty paces long and eight wide—a small vessel for nearly a hundred people.

The Atlantic crossing also makes distance something measured in days rather than miles. Contrary winds, currents, and fog prolong the voyage, leaving the emigrants to wonder whether they were misled about how far North America lay. Their homeland grows incalculably remote, even as their hoped-for new home remains distant. Against that open-water uncertainty, Gothenburg stands as both a remembered inland destination and the edge of a more consequential journey: a threshold whose meaning depends on whether a traveler stops there or sails beyond it.