The Charlotta’s Atlantic crossing

The Charlotta’s Atlantic crossing is the ten-week passage of 78 emigrants aboard a crowded brig from Karlshamn to New York in 1850. It is both the practical route to America and an irreversible rupture with home: the ocean’s immense distance, regulated shipboard life, and repeated headwinds make migration feel less like open-ended freedom than a journey that can be made only once.

The Ship and Its Passengers

The brig Charlotta sailed from Karlshamn on April 14, 1850, bound for New York under Captain Lorentz. She was 124 feet long, 20 feet wide, and had a capacity of 160 lasts. On this, her seventh voyage as an emigrant ship, she carried pig iron and sundries alongside 78 passengers bound for North America. With a crew of fifteen, the total number aboard was 94.

The ship’s hold divided passengers by family status rather than offering them private cabins. Canvas partitions separated married couples and children from unmarried men and women; family bunks near the stern were boxed in by rough-board bulkheads, while single passengers slept in bunks strung between the supports. In the hold, berths had to be made for all 78 emigrants. Dust rose from mattresses, blankets, and skins as people unpacked, and their knapsacks, food baskets, bedding, and bundles filled the low, poorly aired space until barely a place remained to stand. Light reached it mainly through the hatch; after dark, a few smoking kerosene lanterns hung along the sides.

The shortage of room rearranged family life as well as sleeping arrangements. There was no space for Karl Oskar in the family pen, so he shared a two-man bunk with Robert in the compartment for unmarried men. Jonas Petter slept above them, and Arvid had the neighboring bunk. The men had scarcely a foot of width apiece, packed together like kindling. The ship was a vehicle carrying them toward a new continent, but its interior made movement and privacy scarce from the outset.

Provisioning, Discipline, and Daily Work

The mate laid out a system intended to make provisions last through the voyage. Food was distributed weekly in unprepared portions; passengers could not return after a few days demanding more. One person from each family was to collect the allotment, and the passengers had to take turns using the galley and its utensils. Refuse, bones, dishwater, and sweepings had to go overboard on the leeward side, never windward.

Fresh water was rationed separately: each passenger could draw half a gallon a day for drinking and washing. The emigrants themselves were responsible for cleaning the hold, and water was withheld until they had removed the vomit and dirt left by the night. The rule soon became a daily routine: men hauled buckets, while women scrubbed and scoured and hung wet clothing to dry on deck. Only when the quarters were clean could the thirsty drink and the dirty wash.

The restriction made ordinary household needs a matter of shared calculation. The daily half gallon had to serve for cooking, drinking, washing adults, and washing babies. Passengers complained that it was too little, but the second mate said the ship’s supply could not support a larger ration on a voyage that might last three months in unfavorable weather; they might eventually have to manage with less. When the women tried washing woolens in seawater, soap would not lather. After heavy rain, the sailors stretched a sail to collect water for washing, and Danjel Andreasson took the rain as a sign that the Lord had remembered them.

The rules joined hygiene and scarcity to command. The passengers had to obey the ship’s orders for their own safety: smoking below deck and carrying unprotected lights were forbidden, and the captain could punish disobedience. In this confined world, provisioning, cleaning, fire precautions, and movement were not incidental details but the means by which the voyage was governed.

Confinement and the Meaning of Freedom

The emigrants’ first view of the sea came after the exhausting wagon journey to the harbor. For the first time in their lives, they looked across water without seeing land on the other side. A cold, penetrating wind met them there; they pulled up coat collars and wrapped shawls more tightly around children, while the wind cut through even heavy peasant clothing. The people of the land had reached the sea before they had time to take it in.

At sea, the contrast between open water and restricted life sharpened. Passengers spent the daytime on deck, wrapped in all their garments against the cold, because the hold’s air was fetid and those who suffered from seasickness dreaded the nights below. After ten at night, lights were prohibited. In the darkness, buckets could be too few or impossible to find in time; daylight revealed what the night had left behind. The daily cleaning and water ration that followed turned the consequences of crowding into compulsory labor.

After one week aboard, Robert judged that his place was on land. He regarded the seamen’s work aloft in the mast-tops as dangerous, and saw that their watches left them no real peace: they could not rest completely by day or night. To him, the forecastle bunks were as tightly packed as salted herrings, and even the stable room at Nybacken—with its bedbugs—had offered him and Arvid better quarters. A farmhand tended horses night and day, Sundays and weekdays, while a seaman remained shut inside the ship’s rail, able to move only forty steps lengthwise and eight sideways. Robert’s comparison gives the voyage a pointed irony: migration has carried him away from the farm, but at sea he finds another form of confinement, and concludes that a farmhand on land has more freedom than a seaman.

The One-Way Passage and Arrival

As the Charlotta crossed the Atlantic, the wind blew against her for much of the time, bracing the bow and rigging and hindering progress. To passengers eager for land, the same billow seemed to lift and toss them again and again. After two months, they tried to comprehend the water already behind them and the immensity still surrounding them—an expanse whose scale they had never understood at home.

That growing sense of distance changed what emigration meant. Whatever awaited them on the new continent, a return to their homeland became almost impossible to conceive. The crossing was not a temporary excursion followed by a familiar road home; the ocean had made the separation too vast. The passengers understood their journey as one made only once, a movement that would last for the rest of their lives.

On Midsummer Eve in 1850, after ten weeks at sea, the Charlotta tied up at a pier in New York. The emigrants left the ship by a gangplank that rose steeply from the low vessel to the high pier. Kristina gathered her strength and walked onto land by herself; Harald was lowered from Karl Oskar’s arms and walked beside his father. Yet solid ground did not immediately feel secure. Karl Oskar became dizzy and stumbled: the earth seemed to roll like the deck beneath him, though he had never felt this way at sea. His first steps in the country where he must begin his life anew were therefore not a triumphant arrival but a bodily uncertainty, as precarious and unstable as the crossing had been consequential.