Setting out thus by whole families and with brothers' and sisters'
families on the right and on the left, we may safely say that, once the
last kisses were given to those left behind and the last look taken of
childhood's scenes, they pressed forward brightly, filled with courage and
hope. They were poor, but they were bound for a land where no soldier was
going to snatch the beads and cross from the neck of a little child, as
one of Napoleon's had attempted to do to one of the Thomas children. They
were on their way to golden America; through Philadelphia to the virgin
lands of the great West. Early in August they reached Amsterdam. There
they paid their passage in advance, and were carried out to the Helder,
where, having laid in their provisions, they embarked and were ready to
set sail.
But no sail was set. Word came instead that the person who had sold the
ship had not been paid its price and had seized the vessel; the delays of
the law threatened, when time was a matter of fortune or of ruin.
And soon came far worse tidings. The emigrants refused to believe them as
long as there was room for doubt. Henry and Daniel Müller--for locksmith
Müller, said Wagner twenty-seven years afterwards on the witness-stand,
"was a brave man and was foremost in doing everything necessary to be
done for the passengers"--went back to Amsterdam to see if such news could
be true, and returned only to confirm despair. The man to whom the passage
money of the two hundred families--nine hundred souls--had been paid had
absconded.
They could go neither forward nor back. Days, weeks, months passed, and
there still lay the great hulk teeming with its population and swinging
idly at anchor; fathers gazing wistfully over the high bulwarks, mothers
nursing their babes, and the children, Eva, Daniel, Henry, Andrew,
Dorothea, Salome, and all the rest, by hundreds.
Salome was a pretty child, dark, as both her parents were, and looking
much like her mother; having especially her black hair and eyes and her
chin. Playing around with her was one little cousin, a girl of her own
age,--that is, somewhere between three and five,--whose face was
strikingly like Salome's. It was she who in later life became Madame Karl
Rouff, or, more familiarly, Madame Karl.
Provisions began to diminish, grew scanty, and at length were gone. The
emigrants' summer was turned into winter; it was now December. So pitiful
did their case become that it forced the attention of the Dutch
Government. Under its direction they were brought back to Amsterdam, where
many of them, without goods, money, or even shelter, and strangers to the
place and to the language, were reduced to beg for bread.
But by and by there came a word of great relief. The Government offered a
reward of thirty thousand gilders--about twelve thousand dollars--to any
merchant or captain of a vessel who would take them to America, and a
certain Grandsteiner accepted the task. For a time he quartered them in
Amsterdam, but by and by, with hearts revived, they began to go again on
shipboard. This time there were three ships in place of the one; or two
ships, and one of those old Dutch, flattish-bottomed, round-sided,
two-masted crafts they called galiots. The number of ships was
trebled--that was well; but the number of souls was doubled, and eighteen
hundred wanderers from home were stowed in the three vessels.