The first vessel to sail was one of the two ships, the Johanna Maria.  Her decks were black with people:  there were over six hundred of them.  Among the number, waving farewell to the Kropps, the Koelhoffers, the Schultzheimers, to Frank Schuber and to the Muellers, stood the Thomases, Madame Fleikener, as we have to call her, and one whom we have not yet named, the jungfrau Hemin, of Wuertemberg, just turning nineteen, of whom the little Salome and her mother had made a new, fast friend on the old Russian ship.

A week later the Captain Grone—­that is, the galiot—­hoisted the Dutch flag as the Johanna Maria had done, and started after her with other hundreds on her own deck, I know not how many, but making eleven hundred in the two, and including, for one, young Wagner.  Then after two weeks more the remaining ship, the Johanna, followed, with Grandsteiner as supercargo, and seven hundred emigrants.  Here were the Muellers and most of their relatives and fellow-villagers.  Frank Schuber was among them, and was chosen steward for the whole shipful.

At last they were all off.  But instead of a summer’s they were now to encounter a winter’s sea, and to meet it weakened and wasted by sickness and destitution.  The first company had been out but a week when, on New Year’s night, a furious storm burst upon the crowded ship.  With hatches battened down over their heads they heard and felt the great buffetings of the tempest, and by and by one great crash above all other noises as the mainmast went by the board.  The ship survived; but when the storm was over and the people swarmed up once more into the pure ocean atmosphere and saw the western sun set clear, it set astern of the ship.  Her captain had put her about and was steering for Amsterdam.

“She is too old,” the travelers gave him credit for saying, when long afterwards they testified in court; “too old, too crowded, too short of provisions, and too crippled, to go on such a voyage; I don’t want to lose my soul that way.”  And he took them back.

They sailed again; but whether in another ship, or in the same with another captain, I have not discovered.  Their sufferings were terrible.  The vessel was foul.  Fevers broke out among them.  Provisions became scarce.  There was nothing fit for the sick, who daily grew more numerous.  Storms tossed them hither and yon.  Water became so scarce that the sick died for want of it.

One of the Thomas children, a little girl of eight years, whose father lay burning with fever and moaning for water, found down in the dark at the back of one of the water-casks a place where once in a long time a drop of water fell from it.  She placed there a small vial, and twice a day bore it, filled with water-drops, to the sick man.  It saved his life.  Of the three ship-loads only two families reached America whole, and one of these was the Thomases.  A younger sister told me in 1884 that though the child lived to old age on the banks of the Mississippi River, she could never see water wasted and hide her anger.