Inga-Lena’s illness during the voyage

Inga-Lena’s illness during the voyage begins amid the strain of the Charlotta’s crowded crossing and becomes a prolonged sickness that leaves her dangerously weakened. Her experience links shipboard conditions to the demands of household care: even as her health deteriorates, she continues tending Danjel and their children, while concealing her condition from her husband. The illness also brings into view the gap between religious confidence and bodily vulnerability, as her family interprets sickness through faith but cannot make it disappear.

The voyage and its bodily conditions

The brig Charlotta sailed from Karlshamn for New York on April 14, 1850, carrying 78 emigrants among 94 people aboard. In the hold, canvas partitions divided the sleeping quarters, and the berths, baggage, food, and bedding left little room for passengers to move. The ship’s rules allotted weekly portions of unprepared food and limited each person to half a gallon of fresh water a day; passengers had to clean their quarters before receiving water. These details establish the material circumstances in which illness unfolded: crowding, restricted water, shared space, and the daily labor of keeping the hold clean.

The passengers’ symptoms were not confined to one person or one cause. Seasickness affected people in the hold, while the passage’s routine demanded continued work from those who were ill. Inga-Lena’s condition would eventually be identified as scurvy, also called ship-sickness in the narrative. The text distinguishes that name from the symptoms and explanations available to the passengers, presenting her decline over time rather than as a single sudden episode.

Seasickness and concealed doubt

While cooking pork in the galley, Inga-Lena became dizzy, weak, and sick. She went below to rest among other passengers who were also unwell. Her illness unsettled a particular religious expectation: adherents of Åke Svensson’s teachings believed they would be spared seasickness on the voyage. Inga-Lena had sometimes wondered whether this teaching was true, and when a storm made the ship move violently, her doubt returned as she felt sick at the stove.

She tried to manage the symptoms privately. She carried camphor against her stomach and took a spoonful of Four Kinds of Drops, then avoided eating at supper. When she could not rise from her bunk to return the cooking utensils, her legs would not carry her. She told Danjel that she had already eaten, rather than admitting that she was unable to eat. Her silence arose from concern for her husband and children: she believed she needed to remain well for them, especially while their youngest child was ill.

Inga-Lena eventually confessed to Danjel that she had doubted whether those who followed Åke Svensson’s teachings would escape seasickness. She explained that the violent weather and her physical symptoms had made the teaching impossible for her to trust. Danjel understood her doubt as a spiritual temptation. The scene places his religious interpretation beside her immediate experience: she is struggling with illness, while he reads that struggle as a trial of belief.

A longer illness and hidden labor

After the seasickness passed, Inga-Lena continued to suffer. She experienced recurring dizziness and headaches, fainted while cooking or doing heavy work, and had to lie down. A prolonged change in her bowels weakened her, and blood in her stool frightened her. She confided in Kristina that she might not be well, explaining that she had prayed for help but had received no answer she could recognize. She wondered whether she had caught ship-sickness.

Kristina had watched Inga-Lena keep working throughout the passage. She regularly saw to Danjel and the children’s meals and clothing, rarely resting even as she became increasingly gaunt and unsteady. Kristina told her to go to bed and urged that Danjel take over her chores. Inga-Lena resisted because she did not want him to know she was sick; she thought he had enough troubles already.

She also asked Kristina not to tell Danjel either that she was ill or that she had confided in her. Kristina promised, though she wanted to tell her uncle that his wife was wearing herself down and needed his help. The promise leaves Kristina caught between protecting Inga-Lena’s confidence and recognizing the danger of her silence. It also makes visible the labor normally treated as routine: cooking, cleaning, and caring for children continued to depend on Inga-Lena even when she could scarcely manage them.

Scurvy and the limits of interpretation

The narrative names the prolonged sickness as scurvy and also refers to it as ship-sickness. The name comes to Kristina as an explanation for the illness she and several others suffer, but it does not erase the fear and uncertainty with which the symptoms are experienced. Inga-Lena’s own attempts to understand her condition include prayer and the possibility that she has caught a disease; the passage does not present a medical diagnosis from her perspective.

When Captain Lorentz later sees Kristina in a severe crisis, he recognizes that she has suffered from scurvy for a long time. He consults his Medical Adviser for Seafarers, a practical reference among the papers aboard the ship. The book’s presence points to the limited medical resources available at sea, while the captain’s recognition connects a later emergency with the illness already developing during the crossing. Inga-Lena’s story thus belongs to a larger account of how sickness accumulated aboard the Charlotta, although her concealment and relentless work give her decline its particular shape.

Narrative significance

Inga-Lena’s illness exposes a tension between interpretations of hardship and the physical needs of the people enduring it. Danjel understands doubt and suffering through religious struggle; Inga-Lena, meanwhile, must contend with symptoms that persist despite prayer and with duties she believes she cannot set aside. Kristina sees both the strength of Danjel’s religious presence and the cost of Inga-Lena’s submission to household expectations, but her promise prevents her from directly intervening through disclosure.

The voyage’s restrictions make this conflict more than a private matter. Food and water are rationed, quarters are cramped, and the passengers must maintain their living space themselves. Against that setting, Inga-Lena’s hidden illness shows how a household’s care work can continue to fall on the person least able to sustain it. Her condition is therefore both a bodily ordeal and a measure of the human costs carried beneath the emigrants’ larger hopes for North America.