nard was, and our intention was on arriving to open a boarding-school
in New Orleans; in your last letter you encouraged the project--all of us,
movables with us, all our savings, everything we owned in this world.

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,