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  Historical Committee
A Voyage to Pennsylvania and Native
American Voices
By John L. Ruth
Twenty-nine Palatine Mennonites boarded
the Mary Hope on the Thames River in London, June 24, 1710. An
eleventh-hour decision changed the destination of these Lancaster
County pioneer families from Carolina to Pennsylvania. Their final act
before sailing away from European shores was to send a letter of
gratitude to Dutch Mennonites for their financial assistance of 200
Guilders—assistance they would render many more times. The 94
passengers landed in Philadelphia, September 23, 1710.
Crossing the Atlantic in the midst of the War of the
Spanish Succession [1701-1714] was not without its frightening moments.
Within an hour after the Mary Hope left London on the Thames River, it
ran over a little boat and drowned a boy. Soon thereafter it bumped
another ship, with the result that a new captain was brought on
board.
After stopping at Gravesend and Harwich, the little vessel then sailed
toward a flotilla of large Russian battleships, towering over the
merchant ships around them “like so many superb castles among mediocre
houses.” To avoid trouble from French warships or privateers, the
captains of the Mary Hope and six other America-bound vessels, carrying
a total of only four cannon among them, wished to sail along with this
Russian convoy until well out from the British coast.
Also joining the
“Muscovy” fleet was the ship carrying
Christopher von Graffenried (and, apparently, Franz Ludwig Michel)
toward Virginia. Though they debarked on “a beautifully calm Sunday,” a storm soon made most of the
passengers seasick, snapped off |
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several masts, and sent the
Mary Hopeback to Harwich for three days of
repairs. Finally, as the little fleet headed toward Shetland Island,
the protecting Russians turned north, leaving seven smaller, westbound
vessels on their own. Almost at once the passengers were badly scared
by the appearance of several French warships until a heavy fog settling
in provided an escape.
From then on, it was to be a very pleasant voyage indeed. “I think that
I never was on a more healthy vessel,” commented the well-traveled
Quaker Chalkley, who, like fellow passenger Samuel Guldin, was
keeping a journal. The many fascinating sights included seafowl,
porpoises, and flying fish. Whales swam by, spouting in an “imposing
order” that reminded Pastor Guldin of a procession of cows. When a
“great storm” broke out, the passengers seemed to watch the mountainous
waves from the deck “without fear.” On Sundays and Thursdays,
Chalkley held Quaker meetings on the deck, preaching once via an
interpreter to the German- speaking Palatines. These folk, he recorded
optimistically, seemed “tender” and moved by his words. They “behaved
soberly,” he noted, “and were well satisfied; and I can truly say, I
was well satisfied also.”
After the last of the six accompanying ships turned away from the Mary
Hope on August 14, there was another month of good sailing before land
was sighted. To imagine that sensation, we might quote no better
description than one by a German schoolmaster arriving a little more
than a century later. Even two days before land was sighted, he
recorded, a sailor told the passengers that “he could already smell
America!” Though the passengers at first laughed, all of them, after
paying closer attention, “also felt a sweet, pleasant aroma, because a
gentle wind came there from us.” When they finally entered the Delaware
Bay,
we saw right and left the land that we had wished to see with such
great desire for such a long time, although still in the distance,
since the bay at its mouth is very wide; but the farther we went in,
the closer the banks on both sides came toward us. We then ran from one
side of the ship to the other, so as to overlook or miss nothing, and
still one had seen this, another that which the rest had not seen. It
is an indescribable joy when one has seen nothing in such a long time
except sky and water and now all of a sudden sees the wonderful green
of the forests, the mountains, the valleys and fields.
The view on “both sides of the beautiful low bank” of the Delaware
brought the travelers “the greatest pleasure, and everyone was cheerful
and breathed joy.”
So, too, the sight of land on September 16, 1710, brought the Mary
Hope’s passengers “a great and general rejoicing.” By- nightfall the
ship was in the Delaware Bay, its passengers feeling safe at last from
the threat of pirates. Not one had died or even been ill on the voyage.
| After first getting stuck on a sandbar, the ship had “a
very pleasant voyage” up the river. When a pilot was brought aboard and
again at the first stop at Newcastle, sacks of apples and peaches were
distributed on the deck; the salt-meat-weary travelers declared it “the
largest and finest fruit they had ever seen.” Some of them were so
eager to feel the land that they walked along on the shore. Chalkley
particularly noted the reaction of the Palatine Mennists to the new
landscape, so uncrowded in comparison to the Kraichgau they had left.
With observant farmers’ eyes, they
appeared to be “wonderfully pleased with the country, greatly admiring
the pleasantness and fertility of it.” |
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If the admiration of the Herrs, Kundigs, Multers, and Mylins for the
sandy Delaware shores was strong enough to register on someone not
understanding their language, what would be their enthusiasm over the
“goodness of the Soyll” they were soon to find in Susquehanna country?
If only someone had been watching and recording then!
Native
American Voices
Just as Lancaster’s Mennist pioneers were regaling themselves with
fresh American fruit and landscape along the Delaware, Pennsylvania’s
governor was meeting upstream in Philadelphia with a small group of
Conestoga Indians, including their queen Conguegas. Four summers
earlier, after she had dreamed of meeting William Penn in London, she
had advised her people to listen to Thomas Chalkley preach.
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In this summer of 1710, Conguegas could hardly have
dreamed that some of her people’s forested home would shortly be
surveyed for a set of non-English-speaking families coming with
Chalkley from London on his latest voyage and landing at Philadelphia
two days later. Nor could she have envisioned, as her little party of
Conestogas and Conoys laid down before the governor’s council “four
bundles of skins or furrs . . . to make him a cover for his table,”
that there would ever be any change in the |
policy of
the William Penn
she had heard preach in her dream. No doubt she was glad to hear the governor say that
Pennsylvania’s officials still “loved [the Conestogas] as their
brothers.”
Since most of the following chapters of this narrative will be about
Palatine and Swiss families taking over the rich Susquehanna bottoms,
it is fitting to pause and listen to Native voices expressing their own
longings for a peaceful home by the Conestoga. Their words had been
spoken a few months earlier while the twenty- nine Palatines in London
had been waiting impatiently to embark for Pennsylvania. North to
Conestoga’s village had come three chiefs of the Tuscarora tribe, from
what the white man was calling Carolina, where Christopher von
Graffenried was about to establish his New Bern on their lands. Within
a year desperate Natives attacked this invasive Palatine settlement
and- killed many of the homesteaders.
Who were those marauding people? In 1710, before von Graffenried’s boat
arrived, the Tuscaroras had been dreaming of a possible new home in
Pennsylvania. With that in mind, their chiefs had carried eight belts
of wampum north to Conestoga, where they thought they might find peace
with and protection from the powerful northern Five Nations, to which
the Conestogas were subject.
One of the wampum belts the Tuscarora chiefs brought to Pennsylvania
was in the name of their “old Women,” who hoped “that without danger or
trouble they might fetch wood & water” at a new home in Conestoga.
Another was for their children, desiring “room” for them “to sport
& Play without danger of Slavery.” The “young men fitt to Hunt”
hoped to be able to leave their villages to “Seek Provisions. . .
without fear of Death.” Another belt asked for peace so that the
Tuscaroras might “not be afraid of a mouse, or any other thing that
Ruffles the leaves.” Finally, as these threatened “Indians” sought a
new home by the Susquehanna, it was in hope of a place where they could
“lift up their heads without danger or fear.”
Were such poignantly expressed Native yearnings for a peaceful life at
Conestoga any less genuine than those of the approaching Swiss-Germans?
From John
Landis Ruth, The Earth Is the Lord’s: A Narrative History of the
Lancaster Mennonite Conference (Scottdale 2001) pp. 166-169. Used with
permission.
John L.
Ruth, storyteller, minister, film maker, videographer and author, is at
home in Harleysville, Pa, near the Salford Mennonite meetinghouse,
where he has served as minister.
Photos:
1.
London Bridge
2.
Herr house
3.
Lancaster farm
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Mennonite Historical
Bulletin
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Mission
Statement:
"God calls us to preserve our faith heritage, to interpret our stories,
and to proclaim God's work among us."
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