Originally, the Germans wanting to emigrate to America had to find their way to London, and then had to find a ship from London going to their destination. Before long, the ship owners started calling at Rotterdam and picking up passengers there. How did these ship owners regard the business?
I made a small study of the ships arriving at Philadelphia from 1727 to 1775. Several interesting facts turned up. During 1727 to 1775 at Philadelphia, the passengers had to "register" upon landing. These names have been compiled by Rupp and others. Using Rupp, I found interesting data. A total of 252 ships (identifiable by name) docked with passengers from foreign ports, i.e., from Germany. There was a total of 169 different ships involved. The number of ships making only one trip was 119.
This is amazing. About half of the ships made only one trip carrying passengers from Germany. One would tend to assume that when a ship went into the business of transporting passengers that it would stay in the business. How many businesses engage in any activity for such a short period of time? Surely the word would spread among ship owners that such and such had tried carrying passengers, but had given it up after one trip. This would hardly encourage others to try it also.
A few ships made a regular business of taking Germans to America. Four ships made ten or more trips, namely, the Samuel , the Loyal Judith , the Phoenix , and the Saint Andrew . Fifteen ships made only two trips.
This very strange set of statistics might be explained by the large fluctuations in passenger volume. There were severe irregularities in the year to year passenger count. This discouraged anyone from permanently going into the business. The low points in the traffic could not support many ships.
In years when there was an above average demand for passenger transport, owners would hurriedly convert an existing ship, probably used for freight mostly, into a passenger ship. This meant building bunks below decks. A minimum amount of effort went into this. The chances were that the captain had no experience in transporting a ship full of passengers.
The net result was that a German emigrant had about a one in two chance that he would be sailing with a ship which had been quickly converted to passenger traffic, and captained by a man who had never done this sort of thing before. These were hardly the specifications for an enjoyable cruise.
One other thing that turned up from the study was that British-built ships were better than America ships in the sense that they lasted longer. None of the ships had a really long life. Many only lasted for a handful of years.
(15 Feb 02)
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.