Passage to America, 1750

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm

by walterbell • 10 years ago

71 29 10 years ago

xfour• 10 years ago

Whomever dreamt up the idea of Indentured Servitude as a idea and sold it to ship owners was quite an amoral businessman.

Definitely parallels to the passage of migrants to Europe from Africa, but imagine after that ordeal they'd have to be slaves more or less for 5-10 years or so.

jayajay3• 10 years ago

Have you ever been to prison? That's where the US Government throws people who they deem to be "bad people" for about 5-10 years, sometimes forced to do menial work. That ruins lives just like what you read in the passage. One key difference is that now, ruining lives has been institutionalized, so people are somehow OK with it. It is what it is, though, at the end of the day.

andrepd2• 10 years ago

Don't the people got shot/raped/beaten/robbed by those people had their lives ruined too?

cbdfghh2• 10 years ago

Well, what do we have nowadays?

Want a house? Be a slave to Microsoft for forty years!

Want to eat? Be a slave to Google!

The poor were more than welcome to stay in England or Germany, it's not like they were kidnapped or anything.

And as far as conditions go, sure, nowadays such trips would be illegal, but how much worse was it than a payed for trip?

Don't forget than if someone died on the trip, the captain lost money.

vacri2• 10 years ago

This tech industry bubble and its self-centeredness really gets up my nose sometimes. Yeah, working for google is totally like actually shoving a woman in childbirth out a porthole or watching all the kids under the age of 7 die. Or selling your (remaining) kids into servitude and maybe never see them again. I bet that that nugget of info was on all the pamphlets back in the home countries!

MandieD• 10 years ago

Even when someone died on the journey, if they'd made it halfway or more, their family members on the ship were sometimes still held responsible for the cost of their trip!

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

No doubt their descendants dreamed up H-1B visas. :(

But more seriously it is as true today as it was then that you can be successful in business if you set aside your morals or your integrity. We see examples of that in large companies like Wells Fargo, startups like Zenefits, and everywhere in between. The part of that which hurts is when people who have chosen that path are held up as "success stories" for others to admire and emulate.

There will always be people with limited options, and others inventing ways to exploit those limits for personal gain.

codeonfire• 10 years ago

I don't think they dreamt up the idea with an amoral viewpoint. This was probably seen as a new moral high point in civil society. Before this people were simply slaves. Now they could work for their freedom.

bane2• 10 years ago

If Musk is able to help bootstrap passage to Mars, I can fully see a non-trivial percent of colonists willing to take on 5 years of indenture and hard, dangerous, labor in exchange for passage. I can even see the rich "sponsors" staying here on Earth until Mars is suitably developed for comfortable living.

maxerickson3• 10 years ago

You think there is a ready supply of people so detached from reality?

Come to Mars, work for free for 5 years, enjoy the bleak circumstances in the years that follow.

oh_sigh• 10 years ago

Jesus. How horrible was life for these Scotch-Irish/Germans that they would willingly undertake such a treacherous journey with their young children?

jpatokal• 10 years ago

Given that the famine of 1740-1741 killed 38% of the population of Ireland, it was pretty horrible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Famine_(1740%E2%80%9341)

And the peasant's lot didn't improve much, as this happened less than 100 years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

...and here's an eyewitness account from the same site regarding the latter famine: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/irishfamine.htm

arethuza• 10 years ago

A lot of people from the Scottish Highlands weren't exactly given an option - the Clearances were pretty much low intensity ethnic cleansing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

njharman• 10 years ago

approximately 200,000 people inhabited the British colonies in North America

Step back and notice the subtle institutionalized marginalization of that statement. That the native population is not counted as "people". No footnote that the figure only counts immigrants, nothing. In author's view it is not even worth mentioning, native americans existing (or more like had existed) being such an unimportant fact. They are not part of the colonies, not part of what will become the America.

That view is pervasive throughout our society and its history. It is never/rarely stated, it's just "assumed". Making it insidious unless you notice it. Which is my point/hope in writing this. That you will look.

whatshisface• 10 years ago

I honestly don't think the number of natives in America were relevant at all to the conditions aboard the colonist's ships while at sea.

peletiah• 10 years ago

njharman quoted the part about "existing inhabitants" in North America, not conditions on ships. Recommended read: "1491 - New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus; Charles C. Mann"

_petronius• 10 years ago

Although I admire your impulse: the author explicitly says "inhabited the British colonies," i.e. the towns and cities and land under the jurisdiction of the colonial authorities. The native Americans were not under British control, and indeed made treaties with the colonists as foreign governments (which they were recognized as by the British and later US-Americans, although usually only when it suited them). I don't think "all of what is now the USA and Canada" is intended by the term "British colonies" in this piece. I really think they just mean the European settlements hugging the eastern seaboard -- hence the unadorned 200,000 figure.

Passage to America, 1750

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