with child, then come before it is her time, as infants do not well survive the journey. Seven perished on my own passage, owing to the diphtheria croup which was a contagion on board. I will tell you in truth, Hontvedt, that the sanitary conditions aboard these ships are very poor, and it is too bad, but on my journey I was well disposed to prayer and to thinking of the voyage as a deliverance. I was seasick all but the last two days, and though I arrived in America very gaunt and thin, and remained so in Gloucester, now I am fat again, thanks to the cooking of Nordhal’s wife, Adda, who feeds me good porridge and potato cakes with all the fresh fish you can imagine.
When you are here, we may together purchase a trawler in the town of Portsmouth. Send me news and greet all my friends there, my mother, and all soskend.
Your cousin and servant unto death, Torwad Holde
May God forgive me, but I confess that I have truly hated the words of Torwad Holde’s letter and even the man himself, and I do so wish that this cursed letter had never come into our house. It was an evil missive indeed that stole my husband’s common sense, that took us from our homeland, and that eventuated in that terrible night of 5 March. Would that this letter, with its stories I could not credit, this letter that bore with its envelope strange and frightening stamps, this letter with its tales so magical I knew they must be lies, been dropped into the Atlantic Ocean during its transit from America to Norway.
But I digress. Even with the distance of thirty-one years, it is possible for me to become overwrought, knowing as I do what came later, what was to follow, and how this letter led us to our doom. Yet even in a state of distress, I must admit to understanding that a mere piece of paper can not be the instrument of one’s undoing. In John, my husband, there was a yearning for adventure, for more than was his lot in Laurvig, desires I did not share with him, so content was I to be still near my family. And also, I must confess, there had been that summer, in the Skaggerak and even in the Kristianiafjord, a fish plague that had greatly lessened the number of mackerel available to the fisher folk, and though not a consequence of this, but rather as a result of the importation of fish from Denmark, a simultaneous lowering of the price of herring in Kristiania, which caused my husband, in a more practical manner, to look toward new fishing grounds.
But bringing up a living fish with one’s bare hands? Who could be such a blasphemer as to put forth such lies against the laws of nature?”
“I will not go to America,” I said to Evan on the landing at Laurvig on 10 March 1868.
I believe I spoke in a quavering voice, for I was nearly overcome by a tumult of emotions, chief among them an acute distress at having to leave my brother, Evan Christensen, behind, and not knowing if I would see him or my beloved Norway ever again. The smell of fish from the barrels on the landing was all around us, and we could as well distinguish the salted pork in wooden cases. We had had to step cautiously to the landing, as all about us the rod iron lay for loading onto the ship, and to my eye, this disarray seemed to have been made by a large hand, that is to say by the hand of God, Who had strewn about the pier these long and rusty spokes. I believe that I have so well remembered the sight of this cargo because I did not want to look up that day at the vessel which would carry me away from my home.
I must say that even today I remain quite certain that souls which take root in a particular geography cannot be successfully transplanted. I believe that these roots, these tiny fibrous filaments, will almost inevitably dry and wither in the new soil, or will send the plant into sudden and irretrievable shock.
Evan and I came to a stopping place amidst the terrible noise and chaos. All about us were sons taking leave of their mothers, sisters parting from sisters, husbands from young wives. Is there any other place on earth so filled