This paper is very bad, brother, but the captain of the fort says it is all he has; and I write lying down, I am so uncomfortable.

The earlier days of the voyage passed without accident, without disturbance, but often Leonard spoke to me of his fears.  The vessel was old, small, and very poorly supplied.  The captain was a drunkard [here the writer attempted to turn the sheet and write on the back of it], who often incapacitated himself with his first officers [word badly blotted]; and then the management of the vessel fell to the mate, who was densely ignorant.  Moreover, we knew that the seas were infested with pirates.  I must stop, the paper is too bad.

The captain has brought me another sheet.

Our uneasiness was great.  Often we emigrants assembled on deck and told each other our anxieties.  Living on the frontier of France, we spoke German and French equally well; and when the sailors heard us, they, who spoke only English, swore at us, accused us of plotting against them, and called us Saurkrouts.  At such times I pressed my child to my heart and drew nearer to Leonard, more dead than alive.  A whole month passed in this constant anguish.  At its close, fevers broke out among us, and we discovered, to our horror, there was not a drop of medicine on board.  We had them lightly, some of us, but only a few; and [bad blot] Newman’s son and William Hugo’s little daughter died, ... and the poor mother soon followed her child.  My God! but it was sad.  And the provisions ran low, and the captain refused to turn back to get more.

One evening, when the captain, his lieutenant, and two other officers were shut in their cabin drinking, the mate, of whom I had always such fear, presented himself before us surrounded by six sailors armed, like himself, to the teeth, and ordered us to surrender all the money we had.  To resist would have been madness; we had to yield.  They searched our trunks and took away all that we possessed:  they left us nothing, absolutely nothing.  Ah! why am I not dead?  Profiting by the absence of their chiefs they seized the [or some—­the word is blotted] boats and abandoned us to our fate.  When, the next day, the captain appeared on deck quite sober, and saw the cruelty of our plight, he told us, to console us, that we were very near the mouth of the Mississippi, and that within two days we should be at New Orleans.  Alas! all that day passed without seeing any land[5], but towards evening the vessel, after incredible efforts, had just come to a stop—­at what I supposed should be the mouth of the river.  We were so happy to have arrived that we begged Captain Andrieux to sail all night.  He replied that our men, who had worked all day in place of the sailors, were tired and did not understand at all sufficiently the handling of a vessel to sail by night.  He wanted to get drunk again.  As in fact our men were worn out, we went, all of us, to bed.  O great God! give me strength to go on.  All at once we were awakened