Passage to America, 1750 | Hacker News Reader

Passage to America, 1750

eyewitnesstohistory.com

71 pointswalterbell29 comments

> approximately 200,000 people inhabited the British colonies in North America

Step back and notice the subtle institutionalized marginalization of that statement. That the native population is not counted as "people". No footnote that the figure only counts immigrants, nothing. In author's view it is not even worth mentioning, native americans existing (or more like had existed) being such an unimportant fact. They are not part of the colonies, not part of what will become the America.

That view is pervasive throughout our society and its history. It is never/rarely stated, it's just "assumed". Making it insidious unless you notice it. Which is my point/hope in writing this. That you will look.

I honestly don't think the number of natives in America were relevant at all to the conditions aboard the colonist's ships while at sea.

njharman quoted the part about "existing inhabitants" in North America, not conditions on ships. Recommended read: "1491 - New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus; Charles C. Mann"

Although I admire your impulse: the author explicitly says "inhabited the British colonies," i.e. the towns and cities and land under the jurisdiction of the colonial authorities. The native Americans were not under British control, and indeed made treaties with the colonists as foreign governments (which they were recognized as by the British and later US-Americans, although usually only when it suited them). I don't think "all of what is now the USA and Canada" is intended by the term "British colonies" in this piece. I really think they just mean the European settlements hugging the eastern seaboard -- hence the unadorned 200,000 figure.

Jesus. How horrible was life for these Scotch-Irish/Germans that they would willingly undertake such a treacherous journey with their young children?

Given that the famine of 1740-1741 killed 38% of the population of Ireland, it was pretty horrible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Famine_(1740%E2%80%9341)

And the peasant's lot didn't improve much, as this happened less than 100 years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

...and here's an eyewitness account from the same site regarding the latter famine: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/irishfamine.htm

A lot of people from the Scottish Highlands weren't exactly given an option - the Clearances were pretty much low intensity ethnic cleansing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

Whomever dreamt up the idea of Indentured Servitude as a idea and sold it to ship owners was quite an amoral businessman.

Definitely parallels to the passage of migrants to Europe from Africa, but imagine after that ordeal they'd have to be slaves more or less for 5-10 years or so.

Have you ever been to prison? That's where the US Government throws people who they deem to be "bad people" for about 5-10 years, sometimes forced to do menial work. That ruins lives just like what you read in the passage. One key difference is that now, ruining lives has been institutionalized, so people are somehow OK with it. It is what it is, though, at the end of the day.

Don't the people got shot/raped/beaten/robbed by those people had their lives ruined too?

About half the people in prison are for non-violent drug offenses: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

Don't the other people on the ship get to avoid disease, hunger, and burdens?

I'm afraid it can justified either way. Doesn't change what it is -- locking people up in servitude or cages for extended periods of time.

We can't let them go free to keep committing crimes and harm other people. So if you criticise the model, you must provide a better one.

I'm just stating a fact about people locked up in isolated rooms against their will and how that's institutionalized. Is it OK? Idk. Is it true? Yes, it is physically true. We shouldn't avoid stating facts which make people uncomfortable. We should not avoid stating facts without any emotional connotations, otherwise, people would tend to think about things which made them comfortable -- and they have a confirmation bias.

For example, if you were to say that the average Indian penis length was 4.7 inches, maybe that would make me uncomfortable, because I am Indian myself (which I actually am). Maybe it wouldn't make me uncomfortable because that doesn't say anything about me specifically (which it actually doesn't). So, yeah how can we make you uncomfortable?

A murderer (killed two people and shot up a school, did 20+ years in prison) once threatened me while I was smoking pot with him. We ended being cool with each other anyways. Turns out, he was an incredibly fucking smart guy -- and he probably didn't need to be in prison for 20+ years. Of course, I'm not trying to say that all people in prison are like that. Of course, not. But, it is what it is, nonetheless.

Well, what do we have nowadays?

Want a house? Be a slave to Microsoft for forty years!

Want to eat? Be a slave to Google!

The poor were more than welcome to stay in England or Germany, it's not like they were kidnapped or anything.

And as far as conditions go, sure, nowadays such trips would be illegal, but how much worse was it than a payed for trip?

Don't forget than if someone died on the trip, the captain lost money.

This tech industry bubble and its self-centeredness really gets up my nose sometimes. Yeah, working for google is totally like actually shoving a woman in childbirth out a porthole or watching all the kids under the age of 7 die. Or selling your (remaining) kids into servitude and maybe never see them again. I bet that that nugget of info was on all the pamphlets back in the home countries!

Just because injustices in he current system aren't as physically horrible as those in years past, does not mean we shouldn't look back for comparisons and solutions.

The power of labor in the United States has been continually eroded for the past several decades, for the unbounded gain of corporations and management. https://rewire.news/article/2016/03/11/anti-union-right-work...

The right to organize has been near lobbied out of existence in many states, and any new attempts are easily busted. At the same time, increased automation, ever narrowing specialization and oversupply of an educated workforce has given employers even more leverage over the labor.

The OP was comparing working at google, one of the most sought-after jobs in the world, and which you can leave, to a coffin ship experience where the lice were so thick that you could simple scrape them off in bulk.

It's not just 'physically horrible'. How many people at google or microsoft have to sell their children to survive? The OP is just so patently ridiculous that the comment isn't even worth taking seriously - but unfortunately, there's Poe's Law...

I'm not comparing directly, but I want to put our "moral outrage" in perspective.

This was the 1700s. People were living on subsistence farming. If you weren't a landowner in England, you starved, and it wasn't like in 2016 where there's realistic talk of UBI based on automation, I mean it was like over a hundred years before Marx, and long before the industrial revolution.

And it's not like the "wealthy" were so terribly wealthy that they could just take "free" people to America.

And it's also not like the wealthy had nice 1890's first class ship rides.

The times were terrible, and the choices were terrible.

Even when someone died on the journey, if they'd made it halfway or more, their family members on the ship were sometimes still held responsible for the cost of their trip!

If you buy two cruise tickets with your credit card and your partner dies halfway through the trip, you still owe your bank the cost of two cruise tickets. (That is, unless the right kind of coverage is included in your annual fee.)

The only thing that has changed between then and now is that you might be able to sue for damages if unsafe conditions on the ship can be shown to have caused your partner's untimely demise.

On the other hand, if your partner buys their own ticket, their estate is responsible for the ticket and if it doesn't have sufficient assets their credit card company can go eat a brick.

This is a more reasonable comparison in our modern context where such a contract would be entered into individually, not on behalf of a partner.

No doubt their descendants dreamed up H-1B visas. :(

But more seriously it is as true today as it was then that you can be successful in business if you set aside your morals or your integrity. We see examples of that in large companies like Wells Fargo, startups like Zenefits, and everywhere in between. The part of that which hurts is when people who have chosen that path are held up as "success stories" for others to admire and emulate.

There will always be people with limited options, and others inventing ways to exploit those limits for personal gain.

I don't think they dreamt up the idea with an amoral viewpoint. This was probably seen as a new moral high point in civil society. Before this people were simply slaves. Now they could work for their freedom.

If Musk is able to help bootstrap passage to Mars, I can fully see a non-trivial percent of colonists willing to take on 5 years of indenture and hard, dangerous, labor in exchange for passage. I can even see the rich "sponsors" staying here on Earth until Mars is suitably developed for comfortable living.

You think there is a ready supply of people so detached from reality?

Come to Mars, work for free for 5 years, enjoy the bleak circumstances in the years that follow.

There are people already willing to go on a one-way ticket. I don't think it's too hard to believe.

They are provisionally willing, I'll put more weight on that declaration once they are on their way.

I also speculate that there are a number of people willing to go for historic prestige (or something like that), while most potential indentured tickets would have to see some pretty terrific economic prospects at the other end of the contract (it's warm on Earth and the air is free).

"Come to Mars!"

"Build a Better Tomorrow!"

"Start Over in a New Life![1]

"Free Transit, Food, Clothes and Shelter![2]"

"Only a 5 year contract!"

[1] new identities and Martian Citizenships issued after a simple medical checkup

[2] air and water are not included in this great deal

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