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THE EMIGRATION SEASON OF 1738- YEAR OF THE DESTROYING ANGELS By KLAUS WUST He let loose on them his fierce anger, wrath, indignation, and distress, a company of destroying angels. Psalm LXXVIII, 49. "Es ist ein gräulicher Würg-Engel diss Jahr unter den Reysenden gewesen," a Germantown resident wrote on November 20th, 1738 to a fellow pietist in the County of Wittgenstein.¹ "Würg-Engel"—strangulating angel—the Luther Bible calls the angels of disaster let loose by God on those who angered him by their conduct. In a collective missive, written five days later, fifteen leading citizens of Pennsylvania and Jersey, almost all native Germans, also referred to the 78th psalm. After exempting those whom God bade to leave their home- land because some had suffered for their faith and others had faced extreme misery, the pious authors of the Send-Schreiben bore down on all others who merely sought wealth and an easy life in America. Such people, they wrote, "will go down with confused and burdened consciences, dispatched by their sins and by the destroying angels of righteousness." ² What sounds like a harsh condemnation to modern ears was merely a way of dealing with the seemingly incomprehensible events of the year 1738 in the pietist terms of the times. The literature on Central European emigration of the eighteenth century is replete with horror stories of sufferings and death at sea. Past writers seem to have focused on occasional disasters and on the mismangement of the emigrant trade by greedy recruiters, shippers and captains. Certainly even an unevent- ful Atlantic crossing then was not free of hardships to the unsuspecting lands- man. The poor standards of cleanliness and the obvious ignorance in matters of hygiene in those days had adverse effects on mass travel. An objective assess- ment, however, of the total German and Swiss migration to North America during that century reveals a rather successful operation of free market forces that enabled well over one hundred thousand souls to reach the desired destina- tion, many of them without even having sufficient funds to pay for the ocean passage. It can also be stated that the more spectacular instances of considerable loss of life were related to prolonged waiting periods in temporary quarters on land and on board of ships detained in ports. This was particularly true with three projects for which governments or officially sponsored colonization companies were responsible. One was the half-hearted attempt of the English authorities to deal with the unexpected, yet not entirely unwanted, arrival of upwards of twelve thousand Germans in 1709 amidst a war. Although the government [21]