A bushel of Swedish soil aboard the ship

A bushel of Swedish soil aboard the ship is both a provision for the dead and a material link to the emigrants’ homeland. Carried by Captain Lorentz for use in sea burials, it answers a practical failure from an earlier voyage while giving the burial ritual a remnant of the earth to which the emigrants remain attached. On the Charlotta’s seventh voyage to North America, that stored soil is used over a dead body, but some of it slips into the sea: the object offers continuity with home without undoing the emigrants’ separation from it.

Origin and Purpose

Captain Lorentz’s decision to bring soil came from experience. On a previous voyage, cholera had made him perform repeated sea burials, and he had no earth aboard. He eventually used ashes from the galley, reasoning that they were little different from soil, but the substitute remained a reminder of what was missing from the rite.

After that voyage, Lorentz made a more deliberate provision: a bushel of Swedish earth for the emigrants who might die at sea. He understood them as people bound to the land and attached to it; those buried in a churchyard would return to earth, while those who died on the ocean faced burial in water, far from home. The small quantity was intended to let them receive three shovelfuls of their own homeland’s soil. The passengers did not know that the ship carried it.

Carried on the Charlotta

The Charlotta sailed from Karlshamn for New York on April 14, 1850. It was a brig 124 feet long and 20 feet wide, carrying pig iron and other goods as well as 78 emigrants; with a crew of fifteen, there were 94 people aboard. The vessel was making its seventh voyage as an emigrant ship. Lorentz knew that the soil he had brought would be used on this passage.

The passage placed the emigrants’ household belongings and bodily needs within a crowded, regulated shipboard world. In the hold, canvas separated families, unmarried men, and unmarried women; bedding, food baskets, and bundles left little room to move. Passengers received weekly portions of provisions, had to take turns using the galley, and were responsible for cleaning their quarters before they could receive their daily water. Against this close material economy, the bushel was a provision of a different kind: not food or equipment for the living, but an unseen resource reserved for the dead.

Use in the Burial Rite

When the burial came, Lorentz took a small scoop and filled it three times from the bushel of soil carried from the homeland. He emptied each measure over the body, lying beneath canvas. The earth fell onto the shroud in three uneven mounds, and Lorentz spoke the words of the burial ritual, affirming that the dead would return to dust and be awakened on the Day of Judgment.

The soil made the rite tangible, but the sea remained its setting and its final power. Before Lorentz had finished reading, lighter particles slid from the small mounds and passed over the rail into the water. The bushel could supply a token of home, not a churchyard grave: what had been brought across the ocean for the dead was partly carried away by the ocean itself.

Material Memory and Separation

The soil belongs to a larger pattern of packing and departure. The Nilsa family’s old oak clothes chest, inherited through generations and used for belongings associated with baptisms, weddings, and funerals, was repurposed as a strong packing case for the journey. The emigrants also packed tools, clothing, bedding, food, and intimate household implements, choosing what could fit into a limited load. Such objects carry practical value, but they also make the break with familiar domestic life materially legible.

The soil performs a more concentrated version of that work. Unlike the tools and supplies meant to sustain life in the new country, it is carried for a possible death before the emigrants reach land. Its destination is not a new home but a burial at sea, and its use recalls the contrast between being laid in a churchyard and being lowered into the ocean. In the funeral, three modest measures of Swedish earth briefly place homeland within reach; their scattering into the water shows how fragile that continuity is. The bushel is at once a compassionate preparation, a portable remnant of home, and a measure of how far from home the emigrants have gone.