July 5, 1825

July 5, 1825, is the departure date of the Restoration, a small sloop whose crossing connects Norwegian migration to the history of Jorgen Knudsen’s family in Queens. In Jorgen’s account, the voyage is both a documented journey and the beginning of a much darker family history.

The Restoration’s departure

Jorgen tells Apollo that fifty-two Norwegians sailed from Stavanger aboard the Restoration on July 5, 1825. Many were Quakers seeking religious freedom in America. He presents the voyage as the first organized group of Norwegian immigrants to reach these shores since the Viking Age, a distinction that makes the date a marker of collective migration as well as an individual departure. The sloop was only fifty-four feet long and sixteen feet wide, and the crossing took fourteen weeks. Its passengers reached New York Harbor on October 9; none died, and a child was born aboard. Jorgen calls the Restoration the Norwegian Mayflower, framing the perilous passage as an origin story for the community that followed.

A date set against older landscapes

The voyage belongs to a history of movement that Jorgen stretches far beyond human settlement. He begins his account of Queens with the Laurentide ice sheet, which reached the area during the Ice Age: the glacier was about one thousand feet thick when it covered what would become New York City, and remained there for roughly twenty-five hundred years before melting. Against that immense geological duration, July 5, 1825, marks a more recent arrival, but not the beginning of change in the land itself.

Apollo’s later view of Jamaica Station gives this layered history a visible urban form. Renovated in 2006 with new platforms, elevators, escalators, and a pedestrian bridge to the AirTrain, the station differed sharply from the Jamaica Apollo remembered from the 1980s. Yet the earlier platforms and street-level neighborhood remained present in his perception, alongside still older accounts of marshland, the Old Rockaway Trail, and mastodon remains found near Baisley Pond. The date of the Restoration’s departure thus sits within a succession of landscapes and migrations: each account revises the setting in which the next one takes place.

The date’s family legacy

Jorgen’s account makes the Restoration’s departure date a hinge in the history of his family, not merely a point on a migration calendar. He explains that Nils needed to leave Norway with his wife, and, doubting that the small ship would safely carry his family, brought a troll as insurance. The protection came at a price: while the other Norwegians moved upstate, Nils, Anna Sofie, and Petra Mikkelsdatter remained in Queens, where the surrounding farmland and forests offered the creature places to hide. By 1898, land there had been bought for a park, but its hills and caves still provided secluded shelter. In Jorgen’s telling, the voyage that began on July 5, 1825, therefore also carried the Knudsen family’s dangerous bargain into the landscape that would become Queens.

Later arrivals and the changing island

The migration history Jorgen attaches to the Restoration’s departure has a later, unexpected echo on North Brother Island. By 1981, the smallpox patients and war veterans were gone, and the island had become known as a nesting colony for Black-crowned night herons. The birds remained for more than twenty years, then abandoned the island early in the twenty-first century; their departure had seemed no more than a minor mystery to bird-watchers. Apollo’s arrival reveals the human settlement that had displaced them: women and children had returned to the island, making a home in the Nurses’ Residence rather than the more intact Tuberculosis Pavilion. Repairs to the building’s ruined windows, with clear plastic stretched across the frames, turned firelight on the second floor into a beacon. The island’s history thus continues through departures and returns, with successive occupants reshaping a place that appears remote despite lying less than four miles from Apollo’s apartment.