The vessels reached port and the passengers prepared to step ashore, when to their amazement and dismay Grandsteiner laid the hand of the law upon them and told them they were “redemptioners.”  A redemptioner was an emigrant whose services for a certain period were liable to be sold to the highest bidder for the payment of his passage to America.  It seems that in fact a large number of those on board the Johanna had in some way really become so liable; but it is equally certain that of others, the Kropps, the Schultzheimers, the Koelhoffers, the Muellers, and so on, the transportation had been paid for in advance, once by themselves and again by the Government of Holland.  Yet Daniel Mueller and his children were among those held for their passage money.

Some influential German residents heard of these troubles and came to the rescue.  Suits were brought against Grandsteiner, the emigrants remaining meanwhile on the ships.  Mr. Grymes was secured as counsel in their cause; but on some account not now remembered by survivors scarce a week had passed before they were being sold as redemptioners.  At least many were, including Daniel Mueller and his children.

Then the dispersion began.  The people were bound out before notaries and justices of the peace, singly and in groups, some to one, some to two years’ service, according to age.  “They were scattered,”—­so testified Frank Schuber twenty-five years afterwards,—­“scattered about like young birds leaving a nest, without knowing anything of each other.”  They were “taken from the ships,” says, the jungfrau Hemin, “and went here and there so that one scarcely knew where the other went.”

Many went no farther than New Orleans or its suburbs, but settled, some in and about the old rue Chartres—­the Thomas family, for example; others in the then new faubourg Marigny, where Eva Kropp’s daughter, Salome’s young cousin Eva, for one, seems to have gone into domestic service.  Others, again, were taken out to plantations near the city; Madame Fleikener to the well-known estate of Maunsell White, Madame Schultzheimer to the locally famous Hopkins plantation, and so on.

But others were carried far away; some, it is said, even to Alabama.  Madame Hemin was taken a hundred miles up the river, to Baton Rouge, and Henry Mueller and his two little boys went on to Bayou Sara, and so up beyond the State’s border and a short way into Mississippi.

When all his relatives were gone Daniel Mueller was still in the ship with his little son and daughters.  Certainly he was not a very salable redemptioner with his three little motherless children about his knees.  But at length, some fifteen days after the arrival of the ships, Frank Schuber met him on the old customhouse wharf with his little ones and was told by him that he, Mueller, was going to Attakapas.  About the same time, or a little later, Mueller came to the house where young Eva Kropp, afterwards Schuber’s wife, dwelt, to tell her good-bye.  She begged to be allowed to keep Salome.  During the sickness of the little one’s mother and after the mother’s death she had taken constant maternal care of the pretty, black-eyed, olive-skinned godchild.  But Mueller would not leave her behind.