Seasickness

Seasickness in the emigrant story is more than a discomfort of the crossing: it becomes a trial in which practical preparation, bodily experience, and religious conviction compete to explain what happens at sea. The passengers anticipate it before leaving, argue over whether faith can prevent it, and encounter shipboard conditions that make sickness difficult to avoid. The narrative’s distinction between seasickness and the longer illness called ship-sickness or scurvy also marks the limits of what either faith or folk treatment can account for.

Preparing for the Crossing

Before the Charlotta sailed from Karlshamn for New York on April 14, 1850, the emigrants assembled provisions and remedies for a voyage whose duration and hazards were uncertain. Karl Oskar prepared wormwood-seed brännvin, believed useful against seasickness as well as ship’s fever and contagious illnesses. Their preparations included medicines and cleaning supplies, while Kristina obtained brass fine-tooth combs to help keep the children free of vermin. The effort to anticipate illness was practical, but it rested on uncertain knowledge: even the remedies were offered as protection against a journey whose conditions could not be controlled.

Berta of Idemo gave Kristina specific advice based on her father’s experience at sea. She warned that married women were especially liable to seasickness, though she could not explain why, and gave Kristina a small skin pouch containing camphor to hang around her stomach. She recommended eating oat porridge daily and carrying vinegar to freshen drinking water that might grow stale during a long passage. Kristina trusted Berta because Berta had treated her gangrene-infected knee when she was young. That earlier connection made the instructions more than a collection of remedies: Kristina had personal reason to rely on the woman who had once helped restore her health.

Berta’s advice extended beyond seasickness to other expected hazards. She recommended pepper brännvin for diarrhea and urged Kristina to watch for digestive trouble, which she had heard could become severe after landing in North America. She also advised using dry camphor on snakebite wounds and described household treatments for injuries, including splinting broken limbs. These instructions reveal how the voyage was imagined in advance: not as a single passage across water, but as a sequence of bodily risks beginning aboard ship and continuing after arrival.

Faith and Disagreement

As the emigrants prepared to sail, seasickness became a point of disagreement between practical caution and Åkian religious teaching. Kristina wondered aloud whether they would become sick at sea. Karl Oskar dismissed the illness as no real ailment, but his confidence did not resolve the question. Inga-Lena’s baby had just vomited after feeding, a small domestic incident that turned Kristina’s thoughts toward the voyage and what the sea might do to them.

Danjel taught that a person with Christ within could endure the sea without becoming seasick, even on a first voyage. He repeated this assurance to his wife, who answered that she would have faith. Ulrika of Västergöhl supported the claim by reasoning from the Gospel: if Jesus and his disciples had suffered seasickness during the storm in the boat, she argued, the text would have said so. Kristina found Ulrika’s use of sacred history irreverent, and the discussion exposed a deeper divide. For the Åkians, bodily endurance could testify to life in Christ; for Kristina, applying ordinary ailments to Jesus in this way diminished his divinity.

The argument also sharpened personal tensions. Kristina cited Berta’s warning that married women were more prone to seasickness, and Danjel answered that those who lived in the spirit would not be affected. Ulrika countered that many women lived in the flesh, turning the exchange into an insult that Kristina chose not to answer. Robert, eager to contribute what he had learned from books, began to warn that ship’s fever and cholera were more dangerous than seasickness; Karl Oskar stopped him with a look. Around the same table, then, illness was at once a subject of folk knowledge, religious doctrine, and family friction.

Danjel’s own account of the voyage gave providence a visible place in the weather and in the passengers’ bodies. He thanked God for protecting the faithful from seasickness and interpreted the affliction of unbelievers as punishment. In his religious imagination, the ship was under divine command, and the sea’s dangers could be read as signs of God’s favor or judgment. That interpretation made illness morally legible, but it also raised the stakes for anyone who felt sick: bodily distress could become evidence of spiritual failure.

The Shipboard Conditions

The Charlotta carried 78 emigrants among 94 people aboard, on its seventh emigrant voyage. Its hold was divided by canvas into spaces for families, unmarried men, and unmarried women. The family berths were enclosed by rough-board partitions, while mattresses and loose straw covered the deck. The hold had low overheads, and passengers’ bedding, baskets, tubs, and food left little room to move. Karl Oskar could not fit in the family compartment and shared a two-man bunk with Robert in the unmarried men’s section; Jonas Petter slept above them and Arvid nearby.

The material arrangements of the passage made the distinction between illness and mere discomfort hard to maintain. Passengers received weekly shares of unprepared food and had to take turns using the galley. They were allowed half a gallon of fresh water per person each day, for drinking, cooking, and washing. Every morning the passengers had to clean the hold, and water was withheld until this was done. On deck, where the air was fresher than below, the emigrants endured bitter cold in all their clothing; at night, seasickness often became more troublesome in the hold. The ship’s rules organized food, water, cleanliness, and fire safety, but could not remove the crowding or the vulnerability it produced.

The first routines aboard made the practical burden plain. Men carried water while women scrubbed the quarters and washed clothing; only after the cleaning could passengers drink and wash themselves. The daily ration seemed scant to people accustomed to full wells, and the second mate warned that the voyage might last three months if the weather proved unfavorable. When rain fell, sailors stretched a sail to collect water, and passengers watched them wash with it. Danjel interpreted the rainwater as a gift from heaven. The same event thus had both a material meaning—an additional source of water—and a religious one.

Doubt in the Storm

The Åkian promise that faith would prevent seasickness met its hardest test when the Charlotta encountered a storm. Inga-Lena later admitted that she had sometimes wondered whether Åke Svensson’s teaching was true. At first, the claim had seemed strange rather than sinful to question. But while she stood in the cookhouse frying pork, she saw the waves and heard the storm as the ship lurched on the water; she began to feel sick and feared she would vomit. Her doubt arose not as abstract argument but from the pressure of a body that seemed to contradict the assurance she had been given.

Danjel understood her uncertainty as a spiritual temptation. He believed the devil had approached her while she was cooking, though she had not recognized him. The episode shows how his teaching could comfort and burden at once: it offered protection through faith, yet made the onset of ordinary physical symptoms a possible sign of faltering belief. Inga-Lena’s confession did not establish that faith could or could not prevent seasickness; it revealed how precarious the claim became when tested against fear and physical distress.

From Seasickness to Ship-Sickness

The story does not treat every illness during the passage as seasickness. Later, after the initial seasickness had passed, Inga-Lena suffered dizziness, headaches, fainting spells, and prolonged changes in her bowels. She continued to cook and care for her husband and children, but grew weak and worn down. Kristina noticed how little rest Inga-Lena allowed herself, and Inga-Lena confided that blood in her stool frightened her. These symptoms unfolded over weeks, not simply during moments when the ship moved heavily.

Kristina, too, experienced an illness that she understood as a threat to life rather than seasickness. The narrative names the disease affecting her and several others as scurvy, also called ship-sickness. The distinction matters: seasickness is the anticipated malady discussed before departure and during the storm, whereas scurvy emerges as a sustained danger during the voyage. Captain Lorentz recognized that Kristina had suffered from scurvy when he saw the severity of her bleeding. He consulted a Medical Adviser for Seafarers and searched for instructions on how to stop the blood loss, an instance of shipboard care grounded not in Åkian doctrine or Berta’s folk remedies but in a printed medical manual.

Seasickness therefore stands at the crossing of belief and circumstance. Berta’s camphor pouch, porridge, and advice express an effort to prepare the body; Danjel’s teaching makes endurance a sign of faith; the cramped hold, rationed water, and uncertain weather expose the emigrants to conditions no explanation can abolish. The later naming of scurvy further limits the category: not every sickness at sea is the same, and not every bodily crisis can be settled by the arguments made before sailing.