and Finnish settled on the eastern side of the lower Delaware, and others moved to the north and northwest as far as present-day Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Although the British took over political control of New Sweden in 1664, the Swedish language continued to be spoken in certain villages and districts. In 1683 Andreas Rudman, a clergyman in Pennsylvania, sent a report back to Sweden that:
We live scattered among the English and Quakers, yet our language is preserved as pure as anywhere in Sweden. There are about 1,200 persons who speak it.6
A replica of a Norse sod building atLAnse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, at a site identified as an early Norse settlement of about the year 1000 A.D.
An imaginative drawing made after Jens Munk had returned from Nova Dania to Denmark showing the two ships, the Unicorn and the Lamprey, in Munk Haven in the estuary of the Churchill River. The crew are shown felling trees, burying the dead, burning charcoal, and hunting polar bears.
But among the Loyalists who in 1783 and 1784, and for some years afterwards, left their homes in the Thirteen Colonies to come north to Canada, those few who were of Scandinavian origin spoke English, for the use of Swedish had died out gradually in the preceding 50 years, even in New Jersey where there were strong religious ties with Sweden during most of the eighteenth century.7
Among the Loyalists from New Jersey who came to Nova Scotia after the Revolution were four brothers, members of the Van Buskirk family of Bergen County, New Jersey.8 The founder of this part-Dutch, part-Danish family was Laurens Andriessen Van Boskerck, the Dane mentioned earlier. He had settled in New Netherland about 1635 and had founded a large family. By 1784 its members were well established in New Jersey as well as New York. Those who settled as Loyalists in Nova Scotia brought with them a long-standing family tradition that claimed Laurens Andriessen had been a university student from Denmark studying at Leyden in the Netherlands when he joined two Dutch students in a voyage to New Amsterdam in search of adventure. About 60 years after the Van Bus-kirks arrived in Nova Scotia as Loyalists, a branch of the family moved to Essex County where they took up land newly made ready for settlement, a property located near the railroads built in the 1850s and 1860s.
The first emigrant to come directly from Scandinavia to settle in the Detroit River border region was Hans Georg Jaspersen, a merchant with international connections, from Slesvig, [now Schleswig] then a duchy which was part of Denmark. He had been born in the ancient town of Slesvig where his grandfather, Jasper Carstensen (1722-1777), was a Danish government official, Justice of the Peace for the area around Treia, to the west of Slesvig. There Jasper Carstensen had founded the family estate of Bransburg about the middle of the eighteenth century. While the eldest son, Carsten, inherited this estate upon his father’s death, the second son, Thom Jaspersen (1753-1800), became Royal Danish Justice of the Forest at Treia. Of his five sons, all but one left Slesvig. The eldest inherited the estate and in turn became Justice of the Forest at Treia. Another son, Johann, became a merchant at Kiel, in the neighbouring duchy of Holstein, also then a part of Denmark. The other sons, Thom, Wilhelm, and Hans Georg, all went abroad, Thom becoming a sea captain, Wilhelm a merchant in Buenos Aires, and Hans Georg eventually settling in the Windsor-Detroit border region.
In 1806, at the age of 18, Hans Georg emigrated to Reading, Pennsylvania. After seven years there, during which time he married Ann Madeira, he became a trader and merchant as had his brothers. By 1819 he had begun to speculate in land in the newly developed Missouri Territory, and in 1821 he was actively dealing in land in Kentucky. By 1822 he had closed his business in Kentucky and moved on to Dayton and Lewisburg in Ohio. In 1832 he arrived in Detroit where he set up businesses on both sides of the Detroit River, joining in a partnership with Peter Frederick Verhoeff, a businessman from the Netherlands.9 Their stores at Windsor, Detroit, and Algonac were intended to outfit settlers on the Upper Lakes. Soon Jaspersen had bought land on Walpole Island in order to trade with the local Indians. Over a period of 20 years, from 1832 to his death in 1856, he was one of the leading businessmen in the Detroit River area. Unlike Peter Frederick Verhoeff, who left Windsor and Detroit to retire in the Dutch community on Staten Island in New York State, Jaspersen settled at St. Clair, Michigan, near his large family.
Jaspersen’s sons, Louis Frederick and Bonanzo, were educated at the Detroit campus of the University of Michigan in 1840-1841. With their father’s assistance they settled in the southern part of Essex County where they became prominent pioneer business leaders in Kingsville and Colchester. Their descendants, the Jasperson family of present-day Essex County, can thus trace their family history back to Treia in Slesvig, now part of Schleswig-Holstein in Western Germany, but then part of Denmark.
While there were a few other individual Scandinavians who settled in the Detroit River region in the years 1820 to 1850, it was only in 1854, with the arrival of the Great Western Railway in Windsor that Scandinavian immigration effectively commenced. Hundreds of immigrants passed through Windsor each day, many of them Norwegians, a few Swedish, all bound for the American midwest. A few, however, remained in Essex County, unable to accompany their families across the international border, refused entry by the American medical authorities in Detroit for reasons of ill health.
This early photograph taken about 1870 at Gudvangen i Sogn, Norway shows the harsh conditions under which Norwegian peasants of the nineteenth century attempted to wrest a living from the soil to support their large families.
2
A Perilous Journey:
Nineteenth Century Norwegian Emigrants in Transit Through Canada
Between 1836 and 1850 the majority of Norwegian emigrants bound for the American midwest travelled to ports in the United States either directly from Norway or by way of Liverpool, Le Havre, or Hamburg. It has been estimated that in those years nearly 18,000 emigrants followed these routes, while only 240 landed at Quebec. This pattern changed dramatically between 1851 and 1853 when 7,510 sailed directly from Norwegian ports to Quebec and then made their way to the American midwest by water and rail, thus passing through Canada en route. From 1854 to 1865 Norwegian emigrants travelled almost exclusively by way of Quebec, some 44,100 out of a total of 46,900 taking this route with Chicago or Milwaukee as their goal before they dispersed for the settlements.1
This change in route was caused by a new international trade development which allowed the shipping companies to lower their fares to America. In the 1850s an emigrant could obtain steerage passage for about $8.00 in the Canadian currency of the day, about the same amount it cost to travel from Hamilton to Windsor on the newly opened Great Western Railway. These lower fares were made possible by a profitable new triangular trade route by which shipowners could send emigrants and ballast to Quebec, take on a cargo of lumber for a British port, and then return to Norway to the original starting point. As the ships were built to carry cargo, the accommodation provided for the passengers was primitive. Shipowners and captains overcrowded the ships, but congestion at the Norwegian ports of departure was still so great that would-be passengers often had to camp near the docks for days or weeks. Travellers had to provide their own food for the journey, while the captain would supply water and firewood. Cooking was usually done on deck in primitive stoves made from barrels. Below deck, the emigrants slept in rows of double-decked bunks, each shared by four or five passengers, arranged along the entire length of the ship. Some improvement in the conditions aboard these ships took place after 1859 when the British government imposed regulations to prevent overcrowding. However, in the 1850s conditions aboard ship were appalling, and disease and death en route to Canada were not unusual.
