Before leaving the topic of ships, let's make some general observations.
Even in the small sample given in the last note, one can see the seasonal nature of the Palatine shipping season. If I speak of the Palatines (Germans) as freight, that was exactly how the shippers thought of them. The Palatine shipping season commenced about May or June at Rotterdam. The first of the ships would be leaving then and, after a stop in England (required by the navigation laws), would proceed on to America, usually to Philadelphia. Ten weeks on the high seas was typical. The early ships would start arriving at Philadelphia in August, but September and October saw more ships. Beyond this time, the ships were usually considered late. The ship Oliver, though it had an early start from Rotterdam in 1738, did not arrive in American waters (off Virginia) until after January 1.
Besides conceiving how slow ship travel was across the Atlantic, we cannot easily imagine how small the ships were. Very typically there were in the category of a few to several hundred tons in rating. For the following discussion we will take a ship of 400 tons. (There are many methods of rating ships by tonnages and I am not sure what system the ratings of the eighteenth century were based on.)
The displacement tonnage is the weight of the water which the ship displaces. What volume of water weighs 400 tons? Four hundred tons is 800,000 pounds. Putting this into metric terms, it would be about 364,000 kilograms. And one kilogram of water takes one liter (as in a one liter bottle of soda). I will say, for these rough calculations, that one liter is equal to one quart. This displacement means the ship displaces about 90,000 gallons of water. I seem to remember from days long past that a cubic foot of water is about seven gallons of water. So we are talking about 13,000 cubic feet of water. How much space is this? It is a volume about 23 feet by 23 feet by 23 feet. This is not a lot, but this is the space below the water line. Much of the volume of a ship is above the water line. In fact, what one sees looking at a picture of a ship is the space above the water line.
Another way of rating passenger ships is one hundred cubic feet per ton. So, for our assumed ship of 400 tons, the space inside the ship (below the decks) is 40,000 cubic feet. This is a space about 33 feet by 33 feet by 33 feet. To understand this better, a house with a floor plan of 2,000 square feet with 8 foot ceilings contains 16,000 cubic feet. So our ship of 400 tons might have an interior space that is about equal to two and a half homes. In this space the shippers might place 250 people (or more), with their goods, and the food to feed them for ten weeks. This would be about 100 people per "home".
Do you want to go to America?
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.