John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 453

An inquiry on the Germanna Colonies list asked for information about an ancestor who went to North Carolina with Christopher de Graffenried, and who suffered an attack by pirates.  I responded by saying that the ship bringing Graffenried was not attacked.  A clarification is needed.

I interpreted the phrase "with Graffenried" as meaning "on the same ship".  Under this interpretation, I was correct; however, there were a total of three (?) ships.  Graffenried was on one of them, and one of the others was attacked by "pirates."  Graffenried writes:

The one ship which was filled with the best goods and on which those in best circumstances were traveling, had the misfortune, at the mouth of the James River, in sight of an English man-of- war, which however lay at anchor, to be attacked by a bold French privateer and plundered.

After the surviving colony had regained health in Virginia where they were received very kindly, they betook themselves about twenty English miles towards Carolina, all of which, along with the goods cost a great deal.

Graffenried, in the French version of his memoirs, said that more than half of the passengers had died during the Atlantic crossing.  In the German version, he says that after the passengers had reached North Carolina, less than half of them were left, but he says many of the deaths occurred in North Carolina.  He attributes these causes to the problems typical of Atlantic crossings in that time.  The number of ships involved in this crossing is not clear.  Some of the time Graffenried writes as though there were only one ship, but the quotation above says "the one ship" as though there were others.  From the number of passengers involved in the project, it would appear there were more ships.  This first contingent took thirteen weeks to cross, after leaving England in January of 1710, and Graffenried was not with this group.  Graffenried implies that the first group went by land to Carolina because they did not dare to take to the sea because of the privateers and the dangers to large vessels of the low waters in the mouths of the Carolina rivers.  At another point he says that the made the last part of the trip in smaller vessels.

Graffenried says that the ship he came on with his Bern contingent had a very favorable crossing.  This was a few months later in the year.  This ship also stopped at Virginia.  The first contingent seems to have been German, while on the ship that brought Graffenried, there were mostly Swiss.  So, anyone with a history of pirate attacks should look in Germany, not in Switzerland for their ancestors.