White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (30 page)

In February 1709, thousands of peasants began to arrive in Rotterdam in preparation for crossing the channel, with the expectation that the British would look after them from there on.

Neither the Dutch nor the British were expecting them and by now the migrants were running out of money to pay for the crossing.

As their numbers swelled, they built a series of
strassendorfen
, or one-street towns, balanced miserably on top of the dykes outside the city. The Rotterdam authorities provided what food and shelter 215

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they could. The British representative in Holland, James Dayrolle, sent dispatches home about these strange immigrants, who, having hardly the means to put bread in their mouths, expected to be carried to Carolina and resume their lives as farmers.

In early eighteenth-century England, as today, debate raged over immigration. While Britain was colonising North America, its own economy was in a slump. Some thought an influx of immigrants would revitalise it; others thought they might overwhelm the country. James Dayrolle was among those who favoured immigration and suggested that the German refugees might be a boon to the economy. This idea was taken up by the sympathetic Whig government. The fact that the refugees themselves kept saying they wanted to go to Carolina was ignored in the general whirlwind of debate.

Britain was at war on the Continent and Dayrolle arranged that troop ships should depart for home stuffed full of Palatines, doubtless singing with renewed energy. They swamped the poor London docklands area of St Catherine’s and some of London’s charitable inhabitants raised funds for the ‘Poor Palatines’. Barns were rented in the villages of Camberwell and Kennington, and a large encampment was created on Blackheath. Charity kept the refugees barely above starvation. Disease was rife.

England debated what to do with 13,000 or more newcomers.

The Tory opposition in Parliament was opposed to the idea of attempting to integrate thousands of foreigners into British society. But Dayrolle had the backing of the government and their influential supporter Daniel Defoe. Today, Defoe’s fame rests on his novels,
Robinson Crusoe
and
Moll Flanders
. He was, however, primarily a journalist and propagandist, who took up fiction later in his career. As a one-time hosier, wine merchant and part-owner of a brick factory, Defoe was fascinated by most aspects of trade: as he said himself, trade was the harlot to which he most returned.

Defoe’s ruminations on the economy led him into the immigration debate. As a Whig, Defoe was a reformer. Whigs favoured relaxed naturalisation laws that would make it easier for foreigners to become British subjects. On the other side, the Tories felt an influx of immigrants could take jobs from indigenous 216

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workers and become a burden to the state. There were also worries about the religious persuasion of newcomers, with Tories casting a baleful eye on dissenters.4

Defoe took up his pen in a pamphlet entitled
A Brief History of
the Poor Palatine Refugees, Lately Arrived in England
. Defoe, who was well used to battling for political ideas, described his work as

‘A full Answer to all objections made against receiving them; and plain and convincing proofs, that the accession of foreigners is a manifest advantage to Great Britain, and no detriment to any of Her Majesty’s native subjects.’5

According to Defoe, if the Poor Palatines were given sufficient land to feed themselves, Britain would not have to provide for them. Other migrants, like the Huguenots, had arrived some time before and had added to the country’s wealth by exporting the goods they made. By Defoe’s estimate, 10,000 Palatines would increase the annual wealth of the nation by £80,000.

He continued, ‘In truth, our own country England is not half peopled, Ireland not a quarter part, Scotland less . . . and yet we complain that Providence has sent us people to help us in these necessary services to the Public!’ The nation described by Defoe did not sound like a country that had such masses of surplus people that they had to be transported to colonies overseas.

Defoe, like Dayrolle and everyone else, had completely forgotten that the Poor Palatines did not want to settle in Britain – they spoke about little else but Carolina. Defoe looked at all the possible options of where to settle the Palatines and discounted all schemes involving the colonies: a new settlement south of the River Plate was too expensive, as were Virginia and Maryland, and the same went for Jamaica and the Indies. For Defoe, the solution was to employ some of them in England and send the rest to Ireland.

After some months, Londoners began to grow weary of their foul-smelling visitors. They were accused of bringing disease.

Worse, it become known that a good proportion of the migrants were Catholics. A mob threatened the Blackheath encampment but the Catholics were defended by their fellow refugees. It was clear that something had to be done. Government plans to disperse them around England were thwarted by provincial worthies. In the 217

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end, only a few hundred were resettled. The government in Ireland threw a lifeline, requesting ‘German Protestants’ to bolster religious hegemony. In September, 2,971 were shipped across the Irish Sea.

However, the Germans did not take to toiling as labourers on Irish estates. By November 1710, only 1,200 remained in the country.

The rest returned to London, remarkably fixed in their objective: they wanted to farm and they wanted to be free in Carolina.

Surprisingly, a plan finally was hatched to send some of them to Carolina. For the 600 who went, it must have seemed that all their prayers had been answered. If they had, it was by a god that liked to test his followers. During a voyage lasting thirteen weeks, half of the passengers died. The following year, sixty were killed during fighting with Tuscarora Indians. There were disagreements between the migrants and the owners of Carolina, with the settlers disputing the 250 acres per family they were allotted. Ultimately, some of the surviving migrants resettled in other colonies.

One other colonial plan showed promise: to use the Germans as indentured labour in a new tar and pitch industry in New York. The industry was to be set up to supply the maritime trade, smearing hulls and ropes to stop leaks and decay. The Germans would make a cheap and handy workforce whose labour would pay off their passage, secure a profit and eventually reward them with the land they craved in the New World. The power behind this scheme was a Scot named Robert Hunter, who fought in Europe under the Duke of Marlborough and was rewarded with the governorship of New York. Hunter saw the immigrant Palatine community as the perfect answer to the manpower needs of his industrial plan. If he had known how some of them were already reacting to their lot in Ireland, he might have reconsidered.

Of the Palatines remaining in England, 3,000 finally embarked on a fleet of nine ships. Even though they knew they were not bound for their beloved Carolina, they decided not to examine their gift horse too closely. The journey did not begin well. The emigrants were kept at anchor off Plymouth from the end of December until April the following year. Conditions became intolerable, with disease carrying off some of the younger and weaker migrants. The agreement with Hunter seems to have been thrashed out during 218

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these dreadful weeks. As far as the Governor was concerned, the Germans would work for seven years as indentured servants to repay the costs of their transport and keep, after which they would be given forty acres apiece. The Germans did not see it like that.

As the fleet set sail, the German refugee camps in London were closed down and destitute Palatine beggars wandered the streets. On 13 June 1710, the first ship reached New York. In all, 2,400 immigrants made it alive. Among them was that shameless opportunist Pastor Joshua Kocherthal. Records show that 470

either died en route or within the first month of landing. Matters did not end there. Within a year, a quarter of the total had died, most of them children.

Governor Hunter began arrangements for his tar and pitch industry. He intended to set up a large work camp in the Hudson River valley, north of New York town, where there was an abundant supply of suitable pine trees. These could be tapped for the resin, or pitch, that was in demand by navies around Europe to caulk the hulls of ships and render them watertight. Up until this time, Britain had relied upon other nations for these supplies. If Hunter could establish a British industry, not only would this dependence be broken but a profit could also be turned.

Overheads were paid for by the Board of Trade in London. The allowance was sixpence a day for persons over the age of ten and fourpence for those under ten. To cut expenditure, many immigrant children were sold by the British authorities as apprentices to families already living in New York town. In effect, these children became indentured slaves for the families who bought them. When they moved on to their new lodgings upstate, their parents would leave them behind, perhaps never to be seen again. Seventy children under the age of eleven were apprenticed, bound to strangers until the age of twenty-one. More than half of these children were orphans, the rest the children of widows or even members of large families. Some were as young as three.

In the autumn of 1710, Hunter’s plans for industrialisation took root on the Hudson when a group of 1,500 Germans arrived in his camps. Instead of the hundred acres of land per person they had been dreaming about, each family was given a plot of 2,000

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square feet to grow vegetables. This was not what the Germans had envisaged. The workforce looked around at the heavily wooded valley and compared it to other land in the area. They wanted to know why Hunter could not resettle them where the land was better for agriculture and a ‘New Canaan’ might be built. The good Paster Kocherthal was among them, ensuring their vision remained vivid. Disgruntlement turned to surly non-cooperative resistance.

Hunter found it difficult to impose his will upon the recalcitrant workforce. Many Germans carried guns provided by the British for defence against the indigenous tribes. Twice, Hunter had to bring armed troops to the camps to quell dissent. After one particularly tense stand-off, the Germans retreated into the forest and fired their guns in the air in an act of ineffectual defiance.

Some work did get done. Trees were tapped and prepared for the collection of resin. Heartened, Hunter unwisely moved more indentured Germans upcountry. The population of his encampments rose to 1,800. Expenditure was mounting but as yet no tar had been made. Soon, the £8,000 advance from the Board of Trade had gone.

In London, a Tory government replaced the Whigs and the mood changed. In
The Spectator
, Joseph Addison described the Palatine refugees as ‘this race of vermin . . . this idle, profligate people’. Even the Lutheran pastors who had once befriended them chided them, saying that God had commanded the Children of Israel into exile whereas the Palatines left their land purely in search of property.

The Tories repealed the Whigs’ naturalisation law. They stopped paying out for risky schemes involving migrant labour and Hunter found himself paying for his venture. The Germans grumbled on, though their bellies were filled. British bills for food and household supplies began to go unpaid. After a year, with not a barrel of tar produced, Hunter ran out of money and the venture folded. He felt he had no option but to free the Germans. They were at liberty to do what they had always wanted and take up farming.

By sheer bloody-minded stubbornness, the Germans had beaten the British colonial powers and escaped the indentured labour 220

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system. With an untypical burst of energy and initiative, the ‘Poor Palatines’ promptly negotiated with Mohawk chiefs, who gave them permission to settle and farm along the Schoharie Creek, north of Albany. For a second time, the migrants had sought and were given help by foreigners – the difference being that it cost the Mohawks nothing and they asked nothing in return. As the unwilling tar workers drifted up the Hudson Valley to reacquaint themselves with the trade they knew in a valley they did not, Governor Hunter’s dreams of industrial profit faded into the shadows of the New York forests.

Elsewhere, the efforts of William Penn and others did not go in vain. Pennsylvania developed into a thriving colony that attracted large numbers of German immigrants. Its charms continued to be sung not only by salesmen in Europe but also by those who had already made the trip. In the 1720s, Johann Christoph Sauer wrote from Pennsylvania to describe a land bursting with goodness and charity. Thirty years later, however, he had changed his tune. In 1755, Sauer wrote to warn about those he termed

‘Newlanders’, who preyed upon new immigrants to Pennsylvania.

German immigrants often depended upon a method known as the ‘redemptioner’ system to pay their passage. This system had evolved in the seventeenth century and under it an immigrant could have his or her fare paid upon arrival in the New World by a sponsor, friend or relative. This meant that the immigrant had a chance of paying their passage without having to enter into indentures and so might escape the colonial flesh markets.

It was when sponsorship failed to materialise, as could often occur, or when the bill presented on arrival was much larger than envisaged when setting out, that the redemptioner became open to exploitation. According to Sauer, the Newlanders ferreted out those who had debts or no resources of their own and sold them into servitude to ruthless planters.

Sauer’s warnings were corroborated by a young German music teacher who wrote a detailed account of the miseries awaiting emigrants without money to pay their way. Gottlieb Mittelberger’s description referred to German emigrants in Pennsylvania but it could equally well have applied to emigrants from other parts of 221

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