At The House of Emigrants in Växjö one can get a fair idea of the dark, cramped, crowded, and generally inhuman conditions on board the ship that carried the emigrants to America. There, one can see a scale model of life on board - perhaps even between decks, just like Karl Oskar and Kristina. The rats on the floor are not alive and the children are not really sick or bleeding due to scurvy. Unlike the real ship, the model does not stink of livestock, vomit, body odor, filth or urine. As one can see, the sleeping bunks are small and hard. Large barrels are standing there and one can surely understand that the drinking water on board tasted quite musty. The living space is so small as being suffocating and it requires little imagination to recognize how terribly frightening it must have been for those landlubberly farmfolk from Småland when storms would sway the boat to and fro upon the vast and infinite sea. Karl Oskar and Kristina were among the first to leave their local parish to pursue happiness westward and so their ship was small. As emigration increased, their Charlotta af Carlshamn was one of many vessels which combined the transport of goods and the transport of people. At the Emigrants House is a cross-section model of the Charlotta. "It was the Charlotta's seventh voyage as an emigrant ship," writes Moberg and assigns April 14, 1850 as her date of departure. He wrote that she carried 78 passengers, but adding in the crew and the captain makes the total number of people on board 94. New York was her destination. The American Civil War ended fifteen years later. It was a period of serenity and order in America. Pioneers, amongst them the emigrants Karl Oskar and Kristina, had been sending letters home. Life was going well over there. They were coping. Emigrant ships were becoming larger and larger due to the increase in emigration. There was money to be made, not only from those journeying westward but also from those returning home. Unlike the brig Charlotta which carried both people and iron, new ships were built primarily to transport people. It became easier to reach the harbors as well. With the help of the railroad, eventually one could purchase a ticket for the entire voyage, from a town in Sweden to a town in America. This was the age of the great railroad construction both in Sweden and in the United States. One could hop on a train and wave goodbye, no longer arriving at dockside by horse-drawn wagon like Karl Oskar and Kristina. Next page