Much is known about the voyage of the ship Oliver from the records of the owners, the passengers, and the shipping authorities. The Oliver left Rotterdam on June 22 (1738), but returned within a few days because the Captain felt that it was overloaded. (It was not a large ship.) The owners solved the problem by getting another Captain. Early in July the Oliver left again and reached Cowes (on the Isle of Wight opposite Southampton), where it remained for six weeks. Soon after leaving Cowes, the vessel incurred such heavy seas that it had to put in at the harbor of Plymouth for repairs.
A ship which met the Oliver at sea reported that the Oliver had lost the Captain, Mate, and 50 or 60 passengers, and that they were in great distress for want of provisions. The Oliver approached the James River in Virginia in early January (1739 NS) after a six-month voyage and anchored at the demand of some of the armed passengers who wished relief from the voyage. The Captain went ashore with some of the passengers. While this acting Captain was away, a strong wind came up causing the ship to drag its anchor until the ship hit bottom. Holes in the bottom admitted water so quickly that between 40 and 50 were drowned between the decks. Because the weather was so cold (it was January), about 70, who were able to get ashore were frozen to death. There were about 90 survivors. (The preceding was from the " Virginia Gazette ".) Approximately two out of three of the embarking passengers died of starvation, disease, drowning, and the cold.
If the Freudenberg emigrants had taken the Oliver , how well would that explain some of the known conditions?
Only six of the eighteen departing family units from Freudenberg have been detected in America. This is just about the rate at which passengers survived on the Oliver .
The surviving six family units do appear in Virginia, not in any other Colony.
Klaus Wust was convinced the Freudenberg emigrants had taken ship on the
Oliver
. He cited the report of the Moravian missionaries, Schnell and Hussey, who visited Germantown in Virginia in 1743. A German there reported, "...that he had had a dangerous sea voyage, for one hundred and fifty of the passengers were drowned at one time." Allowing for some confusion between the causes of the deaths, it is still clear that there was a ship wreck to cause a large number of deaths by drowning. The only vessel in this time frame which we can associate with this kind of an accident is the ship
Oliver
.
(23 Jan 06)
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.