A bushel of earth from Sweden

A bushel of earth from Sweden is a small but consequential piece of homeland carried aboard the Charlotta: reserved for the burial of emigrants who die during the crossing, it makes Swedish ground part of their final rites at sea. As the ship’s supply is used, the earth records deaths while binding the emigrants’ new, unsettled lives to the country behind them.

A practical remnant of home

The earth is carried aboard the brig Charlotta, which sails from Karlshamn for New York on April 14, 1850, with 78 emigrants among the 94 people on board. It has a clear practical purpose: when someone dies at sea, the captain can use soil from the homeland in the burial ceremony. Yet its presence also gives the emigrants a tangible connection to Sweden, even as the ocean carries them away from it.

That function belongs to a larger movement of household things across the sea. The Nilsson family’s old oak clothes chest, inherited through generations and associated with baptisms, weddings, and funerals, is repurposed as their strongest packing case. The emigrants sort their belongings for a journey that allows little room: tools, clothing, bedding, provisions, and familiar implements must be chosen or left behind. The bushel of earth differs from these useful possessions, but shares their double significance: it travels as material cargo and carries the meaning of home into an unfamiliar passage.

Earth measured against death

At the end of a burial, the captain takes a scoop from the bushel and casts earth over the dead person. The act joins the sea burial to a practice of returning the dead to the ground, though here the ground comes from the emigrants’ homeland and the body must be committed to the ocean. In the funeral for one passenger, the hymn ends and the narrative marks the change in plain terms: there is one fewer person aboard, and three shovelfuls less earth from Sweden.

The diminishing supply makes each death count twice. A person is lost, and a portion of the soil set aside for the dead is gone with that person. The image turns the bushel into a quiet ledger of the voyage, registering mortality through a change in what remains aboard.

The remaining soil and the living

After Måns Jakob dies, the ship’s arrangements change: his widow, Fina-Kajsa, moves to the compartment for unmarried women, while Karl Oskar and another married farmer are allowed to sleep among their families. Karl Oskar takes the bunk Måns Jakob has left behind. The practical rearrangement brings death close to ordinary life on board: one person’s deathbed becomes another’s sleeping place.

The account recalls the saying heard on the Charlotta’s first day, “There’s more room in the hold the farther out we get.” It acquires a harsher meaning as the passage continues. More room comes not through the opening of the vessel or the relief of crowding, but because passengers die. The three shovelfuls used for Måns Jakob’s burial make that underlying cost visible in the bushel itself.

A farewell that cannot be reversed

In a later burial, the captain again takes three scoops of Swedish soil and empties them over the body. His words, “Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return,” place the emigrants’ journey within the certainty of death, while the ritual’s homeland earth gives that certainty a particular place of origin. Some soil slips from the burial cloth and falls into the sea. The gesture completes the object’s double passage: brought from Sweden to honor the dead, the earth itself is partly surrendered to the ocean.

The bushel therefore holds no promise that the emigrants can return to the life they left. It offers a limited, practical consolation for those who die at sea, while its repeated use exposes the human cost of the crossing. What began as a container of homeland becomes a dwindling measure of absence: each burial carries some of Sweden away into the water.