The homeless state of emigrants at sea

The homeless state of emigrants at sea names the unsettled interval at the heart of the Charlotta’s passage: the passengers have left their homes in Sweden but have not yet reached a place where they can build new ones. The encounter with a Swedish vessel sailing home makes the contradiction acute. Sweden remains home in their thoughts even after they have deserted it, while the ship beneath their feet is at once their sole shelter and a fragile refuge afloat in an immense, indifferent sea.

Between departure and arrival

The passage begins with a collective movement out of familiar communities, where news of fertile land travels by rumor and conversation. The emigrants’ reasons for leaving are not all the same: the group from Ljuder parish gathers people pressed by crop failure, religious persecution, dissent, social exclusion, personal troubles, and unfair employment conditions. Their shared destination does not erase the distinct pressures that have pushed each person from home. The new land, however, remains largely an image and a promise: none of the people in their home communities has seen or explored it, and the ocean separating it from Sweden is forbidding.

For Karl Oskar Nilsson and Kristina Johansdotter, the decision exposes two different meanings of security. After four years at Korpamoen, Karl Oskar sees only mounting poverty and exhausting labor ahead: they are several hundred riksdaler poorer than when they arrived, and he fears that they will work until old age with little more to show for it than a reserved room and meager bread. Kristina doubts the assurances on which his American hopes depend. No deed or written agreement promises them land, and no farmer they know can testify from personal experience. Her attachment to home is not mere reluctance to travel; it is a demand for evidence before staking the family’s future on an unknown country.

Leaving nonetheless requires practical arrangements, not hope alone. Karl Oskar and Robert Nilsson book passage on the merchant vessel Charlotta through a firm in Karlshamn, paying a hundred daler in advance for six people. Spring is chosen so the ship can sail after the worst winter weather and the settlers can arrive in time to plant a crop. When Korpamoen is sold and its contents auctioned, about 1,200 daler remain after debts are paid; the family’s passage costs 675 daler, leaving Karl Oskar with about 500 for the expenses still to come. Kristina sews that money into a sheepskin bag that he can fasten to his belt. The journey is an aspiration, but it begins with a sharply limited reserve and no certainty about the land, distance, or costs ahead.

A road shared by people with different pasts

The collective journey takes shape at Åkerby Junction, where the emigrants gather before traveling to Karlshamn. There are nineteen people at the meeting, including three drivers who will return from the port; the emigrant party itself numbers sixteen, nine adults and seven children. Danjel Andreasson travels with his wife, four children, and Ulrika of Västergöhl. Jonas Petter of Hästebäck brings his hired man, while Arvid and Elin, unable to fit on Danjel’s wagon, ride with him. The group is large enough to resemble one family, but its members arrive by different routes and under different circumstances.

The road’s gates turn departure into a sequence of visible thresholds. Robert, once a farmhand at Nybacken, jumps down to open them and counts five before Åkerby Junction. He includes the open gaps in winter pastures as gates too, imagining how they would have been closed had the journey been delayed a month. The small task gives his passage a measure: he is the gate-boy on the road to America, counting openings as he moves beyond the place where his old service and fugitive status kept him. Meanwhile, Karl Oskar and Kristina look silently at the brook, meadow, and familiar spring flowers, trying to remember them because they expect never to see those places again. The road carries the group forward, but its first stages are also an act of looking back.

The homebound ship and the meaning of home

After weeks at sea, the emigrants see a vessel flying Sweden’s flag and sailing on a course exactly opposite to theirs. At first, they had spoken bitterly of their different fates in Sweden. As the country receded, those complaints diminished: they had left it once and for all, and it seemed wrong to revile a homeland too far away to hear them. Their relatives remained there; in time, the whole country seemed like a relative they had abandoned. The sight of the returning ship makes that relationship immediate. Its passengers may speak the same language or even come from the same kind of hamlets, and Sweden, suddenly near on the water, no longer feels simply like a place they have escaped.

The emigrants surprise themselves by continuing to think of Sweden as home. Yet they have deserted their old homes in order to seek new ones, and the distinction between homeland and dwelling becomes difficult to resolve. The Swedish ship soon shrinks to a gray speck, traveling toward the country the emigrants have left. Watching it disappear does not restore their former sense of belonging; it makes them feel more strongly that their own ship is sailing away. The encounter gives physical direction to an inward separation: home is now behind them, visible for a moment and then lost to sight.

A fragile refuge on the ocean

The Charlotta, a brig forty paces long and eight wide, is the emigrants’ refuge while no settled home is available. They are people who have left their old homes but have not yet found new ones, moving across the sea with no fixed ground beneath them. In the evenings, the ship’s smallness becomes palpable. The darkness fills with roaring wave crests, while the vessel rises and falls between depths and heights. The emigrants must entrust both their lives and belongings to its planks and go to sleep inside a home that moves restlessly on the water.

Their understanding of home is formed by the land they have left: a peaceful, stable place, an unmoving room, a house with sturdy walls and doors that can be shut and locked. The ship offers the opposite conditions. It shelters them, but it cannot provide the security of a cottage on firm ground. The sea has pulled them away from their footholds and from the earth that once organized their lives. The passengers are not simply traveling through a new landscape; they are deprived of the settled ground that makes a landscape feel like home.

They also experience the ocean differently from the sailors who live aboard and travel back and forth across it. For the peasants, the sea is only a passage between lands; the sailors travel without the emigrants’ definite purpose of reaching a place where they can settle. The passengers look for signs of the land-based seasons and wonder about the spring work at home: whether oats have been sown, potato fields prepared, and cattle released into pasture. The water gives them no reliable calendar. To cross it is to be removed, for a time, from the cycles of sowing and harvesting that once made their lives legible.

The lost spring and the promise of land

As May advances, the sea offers no blossoming ground to confirm the season. A mild wind can suggest spring, but the emigrants cannot see the familiar flowers of home or smell them carried on the air. The water remains an unchanging expanse, and its sameness makes movement difficult to feel: day after day, the passengers see what appears to be the same landscape. They long for even a patch of green, a tree or a bush, because any growing thing would distinguish land from the barren ocean around them.

This is the spring they lose by becoming seekers of new homes. They are traveling away from their old country while still struggling to imagine that a place ahead can eventually mean home. The narrative casts the crossing as a wilderness passage, with the ship bearing its passengers across the Atlantic like a caravan across a desert. The comparison gives their uncertainty a larger shape: the emigrants have left one settled world, but the promised destination is not yet theirs.

When America finally appears, the longing for land finds a visible answer in green ground. The passengers crowd onto the deck, including those too weak to climb without help. After storms, illness, the monotony of confinement, scurvy, and ship’s fever, the sight of living earth changes their sense of what is possible. Their exhausted spirits revive; the weakened feel they may recover, the depressed regain initiative, and the timid become bold. The arrival does not erase the homelessness of the voyage retrospectively. It marks the first moment when the emigrants can see the ground toward which their unsettled passage has been carrying them.