vessel North Star [Étoile du Nord],[4] which set sail for New Orleans,
where you had promised to come to meet us. Let me tell you the names of my
fellow-travelers. O brother! what courage I need to write this account:
first my husband, Leonard Cheval, and my son Pierre, poor little angel who
was not yet two years old! Fritz Newman, his wife Nina, and their three
children; Irwin Vizey; William Hugo, his wife, and their little daughter;
Jacques Lewis, his daughter, and their son Henry. We were full of hope: We
hoped to find fortune in this new country of which you spoke with so much
enthusiasm. How in that moment did I bless my parents and you my brother,
for the education you had procured me. You know how good a musician my
Leonard 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