Gottlieb Mittelberger writes about the passage from Old England to Philadelphia and the hardships that come along with it. Mittelberger entered into indentured servitude like many others seeking a new life in the New World. Each ship is heavily crammed, and carries some 400-600 hundred people while also fitting tools and luggage alongside them. One can imagine it would be tough to move around in such conditions. These voyages would often take 2-3 months to reach their destination, which for many people is long to enough to be driven insane. Often enough, sea storms and gales would have rocked ships for 2-3 days at a time, leaving everyone aboard in panic. Infants and young children rarely would survive, and parents would have to watch their own offspring thrown overboard when they perished.…show more content… Most of these servants did not live to the end of their terms due to the high death rate. If a servant arrived in Philadelphia after the voyage was unable to pay, they had to wait on the ship until they were purchased. Of the children that did survive the voyage, many were sold or traded so that they may be debt free. Mittelberger’s writings serve as an accurate representation of the hardships that an average indentured servant might experience while on the passage to the New World. It shows that the amount of people who perished due to the harsh experiences on the voyage compared to those who survived was most likely far greater. Servants were treated more like cargo than people, and once on land, more like property. Once these people had finally made it to land, the conditions were slightly better, but not all different. They largely depended on who made it on the voyage, and who
