Ulrika and Elin’s belief that they were reborn in Christ

Ulrika and Elin’s belief that they were reborn in Christ shapes how they understand stigma, bodily suffering, and the hardships of the voyage to North America. For Elin, rebirth is a source of dignity amid the prejudice attached to her birth; for Ulrika, it becomes a confident claim that faith has made her physically pure and exempt from ordinary affliction. Their convictions illuminate both the comfort religion offers and the strain placed on belief when the body does not obey it.

Elin’s identity and her mother

Elin knows that she is Ulrika of Västergöhl’s daughter born outside marriage, and says that she has been reminded of this since childhood. Her recollections give that identity a specific social history: men, but almost never women, visited her mother; Elin was sent outside and sometimes waited in the woodshed, wrapped in a sheepskin. When food was scarce, she understood that a visitor might mean they would soon have something to eat. She also recalls protecting her mother from a man who struck her, throwing a pressing iron at him and helping her mother push him out.

Elin does not treat her mother’s circumstances as grounds for condemnation. After learning what lay behind the visitors, she says she never again thought ill of her mother. She recalls that her mother had once forgiven her for a moment of suspicion and then told her what people had done to her. That history gives Elin’s claim to be reborn in Christ a moral force: her faith and her view of her mother resist the shame imposed on them by others.

The belief also informs Elin’s anger when she feels patronized. She resents a man who has spoken about her mother and insists that he mistakes her knowledge of the world for childish ignorance. Her account does not erase the uncertainty about her father. Her mother believed he might have been a cheerful itinerant who played the violin and stayed overnight, but also named the churchwarden, Per Persson of Åkerby, as a possibility. Elin rejects the latter possibility because she considers him evil and remembers that he called her mother a whore, despite Elin’s conviction that both women have been reborn in Christ and washed clean through His blood.

Ulrika’s claims of spiritual and bodily purity

Aboard the Charlotta, Ulrika interprets physical hardship through a sharp division between the old, sinful body and life in Christ. When lice provoke conflict among the passengers, she declares that she has been free of them since her rebirth. She reasons that vermin belong to a sinful, corrupt body, not to Christ or the pure believer, and offers to strip to prove her claim. Her certainty turns a shared shipboard nuisance into a test of spiritual identity, while Kristina objects that Ulrika’s proposed demonstration disgraces womanhood.

Ulrika makes a similar argument about seasickness. While many passengers suffer, she considers herself well and takes her health as evidence that a person living in true faith can endure the sea. She also applies this belief to Inga-Lena, reassuring her that vomiting may remove remnants of the old body and leave her cleaner and happier. The counsel is offered as spiritual comfort, but it also frames illness as evidence of incomplete purification, placing a burden of religious meaning on Inga-Lena’s physical distress.

The voyage tests belief

Inga-Lena eventually admits that she had doubted whether adherents to Åke Svensson’s teachings would be spared seasickness. During a storm, while cooking pork in the ship’s cookhouse, she had watched the waves and felt sick; fear and bodily symptoms unsettled the expectation that faith would protect her. Danjel interprets her doubt as a spiritual trial, but her confession shows how the voyage makes abstract teaching answer to immediate experience.

The narrative widens that tension beyond the household. Danjel reads the Gospel account of Christ calming a tempest to frightened passengers, yet the seasick cannot take comfort from the story: they remain absorbed in their own suffering, and Christ does not quiet the storm aboard their ship. Religious language offers an account of trial and divine presence, but it does not remove the passengers’ pain. Ulrika’s confidence that believers are exempt from seasickness stands in especially stark contrast to the illness around her.

Belief, illness, and human responsibility

The voyage’s illnesses also complicate any simple equation between bodily condition and spiritual standing. Inga-Lena becomes increasingly weak after prolonged digestive trouble, dizziness, headaches, fainting, and blood in her stool. She has continued to care for her husband and children, and Kristina sees how the unrelenting work has worn her down. The account names scurvy as the disease suffered by Kristina and several others; Captain Lorentz recognizes that Kristina has endured it for a long time when he sees how much blood she has lost. These bodily events are presented alongside religious interpretations, not as proof that faithlessness caused illness.

That distinction matters across the crossing. Danjel sees the storm as a trial sent to test faith, while the suffering passengers are too sick even to feel fear or respond to his reading. Ulrika interprets her own good health as confirmation of her belief, but the wider narrative records illness, survival, and death without making them a dependable measure of spiritual worth. The gap between conviction and outcome leaves the belief meaningful as a source of identity and consolation, but not as control over the body or the voyage.

Significance

Elin and Ulrika share a language of rebirth, yet the belief answers different needs. Elin uses it to affirm a dignity that social stigma denies her and her mother. Ulrika uses it to claim a visible distinction between the faithful and those who suffer. At sea, where disease and seasickness affect passengers regardless of these claims, the difference becomes consequential: faith can shape how hardship is understood, but the crossing does not consistently confirm the promises people attach to it.