Jonas Petter Albrektsson

Jonas Petter Albrektsson, a forty-eight-year-old homeowner from Hästebäck, joins the emigrants bound for North America after leaving his wife and children behind. An older farmer who helps lead the company on its journey to Karlshamn, he is also one of its most private travelers: the quarrel that finally drove him from home, and his modest hope of finding peace, come into view only through his own account aboard the ship.

Identity and Place in the Company

The emigrant list identifies Jonas Petter Albrektsson as a homeowner, aged forty-eight. He travels with a hired man who is to take his horse back from Karlshamn. At Åkerby Junction, his wagon also carries Arvid, the farmhand, and Elin, the daughter of Ulrika of Västergöhl, who have been unable to find room in Danjel’s wagon. The gathering numbers nineteen people in all, but three drivers will return from Karlshamn, leaving sixteen emigrants: nine adults and seven children. Jonas Petter calls them a suitably large family and asks who should head it.

The others initially look to Karl Oskar Nilsson, who resists the role because he is the youngest of the three farmers. Jonas Petter is older, but he argues that Karl Oskar should lead because he decided to make the journey first, while Jonas Petter was the last to join. The exchange gives leadership a practical rather than simply hierarchical basis: Jonas Petter acknowledges age, yet recognizes the initiative that set the migration in motion. He drives first because he knows the road, while Robert Nilsson repeatedly jumps down to open gates along the route.

Leaving Home and Joining the Journey

The group’s departure follows preparations made for a spring crossing. Karl Oskar and Robert have secured passage for six people on the Charlotta, a merchant vessel sailing from Karlshamn directly to New York. The planned departure in early April is meant to let the travelers cross after the winter storms and arrive in time to till and sow. Robert offers to write for Jonas Petter and obtain a passage contract if the ship has room for more, extending the original arrangements to another household and traveler. Jonas Petter’s presence in the company reflects this chain of decisions: a shared route and ship make distinct personal departures part of one migration.

At the inn on the road, the travelers settle around their separate food baskets. The people from Korpamoen and Kärragärde gather together, but Jonas Petter sits alone with his provisions. He has left his wife and children behind. Others say he departed without much forethought: after quarreling with his wife one evening, he packed his America chest the next morning. Yet they do not know how long the decision had been forming. Jonas Petter willingly talks about other people, but says nothing about himself, keeping the cause of his departure concealed even while traveling among companions.

The Quarrel Behind His Departure

Jonas Petter’s account aboard the ship turns a seemingly trivial object into the hinge of his life. The quarrel began when he went to fetch oats from the attic bin for his mare and could not find the grain shovel. His wife challenged his expectation that she should keep track of it, then complained that the mare consumed their oats while Jonas Petter used her to travel on his own errands. He answered that the cows were his as much as hers; she reminded him that she had brought two cows as her dowry when she came to the farm. He had never forgotten, she said, because she had reminded him every day for twenty years.

The argument lasted through the night. Jonas Petter explains that he and his wife had been married for twenty years, during which they averaged about two small quarrels a week and a major fight each month—several thousand quarrels in all. This one was the last. He could no longer endure the life they shared and resolved to leave. To obtain peace and quiet while he prepared, he sharpened a knife and had his wife turn the grinding stone. The account describes a calculated interval of ordinary household labor amid a moment of decisive separation: he does not depart after a sudden blow, but uses the familiar task to make ready for the break.

He found the shovel the next day, sunk so deeply in the grain bin that it had been hidden from view. Rather than treat it as a mere cause for irritation, he is grateful that it had helped him begin his journey. He presses its handle as if shaking hands with it, making the lost-and-found tool a small, concrete companion to his departure. The shovel does not resolve the marriage; it marks the point at which a long accumulation of conflict becomes action.

The Hope for Peace

On the ship, Jonas Petter is uncertain about the destination in a way that contrasts with the definite act of leaving. He says he does not rightly know why he is lying there or exactly where he is going; what he knows is that he has freed himself from his wife and that the miles between them will become too many to retrace. The outward journey has a clear direction, but his inward purpose is more tentative. America is less a clearly described future than a chance to put distance between himself and the life he has left.

He admits to shame, yet describes a small residue of hope: perhaps luck awaits somewhere, and perhaps he will still taste something he has long missed. He thinks of himself as having lived like an unwanted dog on his own farm, hungry and silent in a home where he did not belong. His image makes the misery of marriage a condition of exclusion within the household, rather than simply a list of arguments about work or property. He does not claim certainty that the new land will give him what he lacks; he holds on to the possibility that a wretched person should be allowed at least a little hope.

His conclusion is direct: aboard the ship, he is going somewhere on another continent, and he is searching for peace. The goal is neither expressed as a particular farm nor supported by a guarantee about life in America. It is an aspiration made legible by what he has left behind. Jonas Petter’s departure therefore gives the group’s shared migration a sharply individual dimension: the same crossing that promises new land to some passengers offers him distance from an intimate and long-standing conflict.

Storytelling Among the Emigrants

Jonas Petter’s guardedness is not a lack of sociability. During the voyage, when contrary winds and the broad ocean leave time for stories on deck, he tells the passengers of an unusual event from his home parish, said to have occurred about a hundred years earlier. The man who had kept his own reasons for emigrating to himself becomes a storyteller about other lives and an earlier generation. That contrast suits his role in the company: he joins its practical conversations, drives at the head of the wagons, and shares local knowledge, yet reserves his most personal history for a first-person shipboard account.

His arc connects the physical movement of group emigration with a private search for release. The company travels together, but its members do not share one motive; Jonas Petter’s journey begins in the accumulated strain of a marriage and turns on a shovel hidden in an attic grain bin. The large ocean crossing carries that small domestic rupture away from home, without proving that the hoped-for peace has yet been found.