The first emigrants travel by wagon to Karlshamn

The first emigrants’ journey by wagon to Karlshamn transforms a scattered set of hopes and decisions into a collective movement toward America. Sixteen emigrants set out in three wagons, carrying families, farmhands, and their provisions across fifty miles of road to the port. The gates Robert counts, the familiar places Kristina and Karl Oskar watch recede, and the first sight of water without land beyond it make departure at once practical and irrevocable.

From rumor to an organized departure

News of fertile land across the ocean has unsettled communities accustomed to inherited routines and scarce food. The movement begins with rumors, pictures, and information passed from neighbor to neighbor; no one in the home communities has seen or explored the new land. Hesitation and argument persist, but a few people’s willingness to act gives a private impulse the power to disturb a settled order.

The journey depends on arrangements made before the wagons roll. Spring is considered the best time to sail: winter storms have passed, and an early arrival would leave time to till and sow for an autumn harvest. Karl Oskar and Robert have written to a firm in Karlshamn and secured passage aboard the Charlotta for six people, paying a hundred daler in advance. Their plan is to embark around the second week of April and sail directly to New York. Robert offers to obtain a passage contract for Danjel as well, if the ship has room. When asked how many would come from Kärragärde, Danjel counts nine, including children and household members.

Three wagons become one company

The emigrants set out on a Thursday, regarded as an auspicious day for a new undertaking; the new moon, too, is taken as a good omen. They meet at Åkerby Junction, where the separate households and travel arrangements become one party. Danjel has hired a team from Kråkesjö and rides with his wife, four children, and Ulrika of Västergöhl. Jonas Petter drives his own single-horse wagon, with a hired man who will take the horse back from Karlshamn. Arvid and Elin, unable to fit on Danjel’s wagon, travel with him.

The Korpamoen wagon is already heavily loaded and carries four adults besides its other burdens. Jonas Petter thinks it should be lightened, so Robert changes wagons and takes a seat between him and Elin. Arvid greets Robert with a grin: the two farmhands from Nybacken are making the journey together after all. Their departure is not the secret escape they had once imagined. Instead of slipping away alone on a load of timber, they travel openly within a larger company.

There are nineteen people at the junction, but three are drivers who will return from Karlshamn. The emigrant party itself consists of sixteen people: nine adults and seven children. Jonas Petter calls them a suitably large family and asks who will lead it. Karl Oskar demurs, saying he is the youngest of the three farmers; Jonas Petter points out that Karl Oskar was the first to decide on the journey, while Jonas Petter was the last. The exchange leaves Karl Oskar as the practical center of a group whose members have different ages, household ties, and reasons for coming.

The road, its gates, and its dangers

Jonas Petter drives first because he knows the roads. The wagons keep roughly a wagon’s length apart, moving slowly or allowing the horses to walk to save their strength. The route is fifty long miles to Karlshamn, and on steep descents the wagons leave more room between them. The group’s progress is measured in shared effort and the stamina of the animals, not simply in distance.

Robert turns the journey into a private count. At every gate he jumps down to open it, and before Åkerby Junction he has opened five. He appoints himself gate-boy and counts the openings on the road to America. Even stretches of pasture where winter gates have been removed still count: had the departure been delayed by a month, those openings would have been gates too. As the road approaches inhabited places, the gates draw closer together. The count gives a small, repetitive task to a journey whose destination remains immense and uncertain; later, when Robert is rocked to sleep in the wagon, Jonas Petter opens the next gate himself, and the count goes on without him.

The route also brings the company through Blekinge and a pine forest known as the snake forest. Jonas Petter tells of old hostility between Blekinge men and travelers from Småland, and of a fight in which he himself was wounded. The forest’s stone-covered ground and reputation for poisonous snakes make it seem dangerous even before the party passes through it. Robert watches the undergrowth for possible attackers, but Jonas Petter reassures him that the road is more peaceful now and that their large company offers some protection. They emerge from the forest into Eringsboda, nearly halfway to Karlshamn and their first resting place.

Rest, distance, and the approach to the sea

At Eringsboda the wagons stop outside an inn, and the horses are unharnessed. The travelers are cold from the north wind; children are tired, and the adults have endured hours on the road. Kristina urges the group to get inside and warm the children. The respite is temporary. Later that evening they resume their journey toward Möljeryd, intending to rest there before continuing by way of Bredåkra to Karlshamn.

The weather softens as they travel farther through Blekinge. Snow melts, rain begins, and the early spring is visible in high roadside grass, open coltsfoot, and swollen tree buds. The contrast with home sharpens the practical meaning of the season: this is a region where spring work is already approaching. Yet the wagons’ heavy loads tire the horses, and the men sometimes walk beside them even on small hills. Kristina carefully keeps the lid on the food basket and saves the butter: although they have traveled only twenty miles, North America is still thousands of miles away, and the food must last.

Early the next morning the three wagons enter Karlshamn and stop near the harbor as the church clock strikes seven. The town is waking to the day’s work: fishermen bring in their catch, market women wait for herring, and a shop clerk sweeps outside a ship’s chandlery. The emigrants arrive stiff, tired, and short of sleep, with children still needing care. A cold wind blows in from the harbor. For the first time in their lives, they look across water without seeing land on the other side. The earth-bound travelers have reached the sea they must cross, but the wind and unfamiliar harbor make clear that reaching the port is only one stage of the passage.

Finding the Charlotta

Karl Oskar, already treated by the others as their leader, asks a herring fisherman which ships are in the harbor and where their America-bound vessel lies. The fisherman identifies the Charlotta, a brig anchored in the outer harbor. It has arrived recently and still needs to take on freight, so passengers may have to wait several days before boarding. The Charlotta is the ship promised by the travel arrangements: it is due to sail from Karlshamn on April 14, 1850, for New York, with a crew of fifteen and a cargo that includes pig iron and assorted goods. The emigrants are among its seventy-eight passengers, and this is the brig’s seventh voyage as an emigrant ship.

The group cannot remain exposed to the harbor wind with freezing, whimpering children. A fisherman directs them to the Maja’s Inn, in an alley near the harbor, where they can find quarters while they wait. The wagons move on, but Robert stays behind alone to look out across the sea. The party’s arrival therefore ends not in immediate embarkation but in a threshold pause: land has carried them to the edge of their old world, while the ship and ocean still lie ahead.

Departure as a collective and remembered loss

The journey’s repeated details give its practical progress an undertone of farewell. As the wagons pass familiar places, Karl Oskar and Kristina watch the brook and meadow as places they will not see again in the same way. Their attention turns the road into a last viewing of the landscape that has held their youth and family life. The group is traveling toward a hoped-for future, yet the act of leaving makes home newly visible as something already being lost.

Kristina sees the three wagons as a small funeral cortege and remembers that Anna’s burial had involved no more than three carriages. The comparison links emigration with death without making the two journeys identical: those leaving are alive, but the departure carries the finality of a procession away from the familiar. The port intensifies that feeling. Beyond the harbor is water without visible land, and beyond it a destination known through reports rather than experience. The wagon journey thus marks the point at which rumor, financing, family decisions, and local ties become motion—and at which the emigrants begin to understand the distance between the home they can see and the land they have yet to reach.