Inga-Lena Andersdotter

Inga-Lena Andersdotter is Danjel Andreasson’s wife and the mother of their four children, whose steady care for her household continues even during the perilous Atlantic crossing. She emigrates aboard the brig Charlotta with her family, becomes seriously ill, and dies at sea on June 17, 1850. Her death leaves Danjel widowed before the family reaches North America and turns the voyage’s ritual of Swedish earth into a marker of the home and life she has left behind.

Identity and Family

A shipboard record gives Inga-Lena’s full name, her birth date as October 4, 1809, and her marriage to Danjel on June 23, 1833. She travels with her husband and their four children, including their youngest, Eva. The discrepancy between the record’s stated age and Captain Lorentz’s recollection contributes to his uncertainty about which passenger has died.

Inga-Lena’s work is defined by attention to others. Throughout the crossing, she sees to her husband’s and children’s meals and clothing, rarely allowing herself rest. Kristina notices how constantly she is in motion and how worn down she has become. Her care for her family is not a single dramatic gesture but the sustained labor of keeping their daily life going aboard ship.

The Crossing and Illness

The Charlotta sailed from Karlshamn on April 14, 1850, carrying 78 emigrants among its 94 people aboard. Its cramped hold and tightly managed provisions shaped the passengers’ daily life: they had to take turns preparing food, keep their quarters clean, and wait until the morning cleaning was done before receiving their water. Inga-Lena’s illness unfolds within these demanding conditions, on a voyage where ordinary household work continued alongside sickness and uncertainty.

During a storm, Inga-Lena admits to Danjel that she had doubted whether followers of Åke Svensson’s teachings would be spared seasickness. Seeing the waves and feeling sick while cooking, she could no longer trust that promise. Danjel interprets her doubt as a spiritual temptation. The scene reveals both her private uncertainty and the strain placed on faith when bodily experience contradicts an expectation of protection.

After her seasickness passes, Inga-Lena suffers recurring dizziness and headaches, fainting during chores, and prolonged bowel trouble that eventually includes blood. She confides her fear to Kristina and wonders whether she has contracted ship-sickness. Kristina sees that she is growing gaunt and weak, yet Inga-Lena continues caring for her family. The narrative identifies scurvy as the name given to the illness affecting Kristina and several others aboard; Captain Lorentz later recognizes that Inga-Lena has suffered from it for a long time.

Death and Burial at Sea

When Kristina suffers a severe nosebleed, Captain Lorentz consults his Medical Adviser for Seafarers, a manual that sets out measures for trying to stop dangerous bleeding. His attention is fixed on Kristina, but his reflections also reveal that another woman’s death is imminent: he thinks of the widowed husband and children Inga-Lena would leave behind. The crossing’s medical vulnerability is thus bound to its family consequences; illness threatens not an isolated passenger but the care and future of an entire household.

Inga-Lena dies without telling Danjel that she has been ill. He learns of her death when Karl Oskar sees him in grief; another man, not Karl Oskar, has become a widower that morning. Captain Lorentz must then establish the details needed for the funeral. His notes identify Inga-Lena as a wife from Kärragärde in Ljuder Parish, but he struggles to reconcile the recorded information with what he remembers of her and her children.

Lorentz records her death as occurring on June 17, 1850, aboard the Charlotta on its passage to New York. At sea, she is an emigrant who has died before reaching the destination toward which she had followed her husband. The shipboard funeral gives that interrupted journey a communal form, but cannot provide a marked grave or return her body to the land where she lived.

Swedish Earth and Narrative Significance

At Inga-Lena’s burial, three shovelfuls of Swedish soil rest on the canvas covering her body. The earth comes from the country where she had worked in potato furrows and barley fields, carried milk and water, and cared for her family through the seasons. As the bier is taken toward the sea, grains slip from the cloth into the water before the body. The soil makes the distance between her former life on land and her unmarked resting place at sea tangible.

Inga-Lena’s fate also sharpens the cost of emigration. She is one of the passengers carried by the collective hope of reaching a new country, yet she does not survive the passage. The contrast between her years of labor on solid ground and her burial in the ocean gives her death a particular force: the journey meant to carry her family toward a new home instead separates Danjel from his wife before they arrive.