ABSTRACT
In May 1717, a young man named Caspar Wistar packed his belongings, collected the money he had saved, and set out from a little Palatine village a few miles south of Heidelberg for the British American colonies. Wistar was one of 100,000 or more German-speaking immigrants who traveled to the British American colonies between 1680 and 1780. The large majority of the German-speaking immigrants traveling to the British colonies between 1680 and 1780 arrived through the port of Philadelphia. Wistar’s decision to emigrate came early in the eighteenth century, prior to the spread of “Pennsylvania fever” and during the period when a relatively small number of German-speaking settlers migrated to British America. Francis Daniel Pastorius’ fellow travelers to Germantown, Pennsylvania were Quakers and Mennonites who were linked to a network of congregations that spanned the area between the Netherlands and Switzerland. Illicit trade was only one link between transatlantic trade and German-speaking migration.
