Herr Mittelberger was an individual whose glass was half-empty. Others might see the glass as half-full, but he tended to see the dark side, which he painted a bit blacker than others did. Still, I can't say that he made up any part of his description of the journey. Let's hear his story of the crossing itself.
"...the long sea voyage and misery begin in earnest. (After weighing anchor) the ships take eight, nine, ten, or twelve weeks sailing to Philadelphia, if the wind is unfavorable. But even in the most favorable wind, the vogage takes seven weeks.
"During the journey the ship is full of pitiful signs of distress -- smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentary, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions, all of them caused by the aged and highly salted food, especially of the meat, as well as by the bad and filthy water, which brings about the miserable destruction and death of many. Add to that the hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery, vexation, and shortage of food, as well as other troubles. Thus, for example, there are so many lice, especially on the sick people, that they have to be scraped off the bodies. All this misery reaches its climax when, in addition to everything, one must also suffer through two to three days and nights of storms with everyone convinced that the ship will all aboard is bound to sink. In such misery all the people on board pray and cry pitifully together.
"...when wind and waves permitted it, I held daily prayer meetings with (the passengers) on deck and, since we had no ordained clergyman on board (Mittelberger was an organist), was forced to administer baptism to five children. I also held services, including a sermon, every Sunday, and when the dead were buried at sea, commended them and our souls to the mercy of God.
"Among those who are in good health, impatience sometimes grows so great and bitter that one person begins to curse the other or himself and the day of his birth, and people sometimes come close to murdering one another. Misery and malice are readily associated, so that people begin to cheat and steal from one another. And then one blames the other for having undertaken the voyage. Often children cry out against their parents, husbands against wives, and wives against husbands, brothers against sisters, and friends and acquaintances against one another.
"...warm food is served only three times a week, and at that is very bad, very small in quantity, and so dirty as to be hardly palatable at all. And the water distributed in these ships is often very black, thick with dirt, and full of worms. ...toward the end of the voyage we had to eat the ship's biscuit which had already been spoiled for a long time.
"When at last, after the long and difficult voyage, the ship finally approachs land and one gets to see the headlands which had been longed for so passionately, then everyone crawls from below to the deck, in order to look at the land from afar. And people cry for joy, pray, and sing praises and give thanks to God. The glimpse of land revives the passengers ..."
There were voyages that were better than Mittelberger's, and there were voyages that made his crossing look like he was on a cruise ship. The facts that he describes are probably typical; he has just one color with which to paint, black.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.