Eine Seereise von Le Havre nach Valparaiso im Jahre 1848: eine Reisebeschreibung des Auswanderers und Kaufmanns Gottfried Wilhelm August Unshelm

Abstract

August Unshelm (1824-1864), eleventh child of a family of craftsmen, met with little success during his first few years in the merchant’s profession. Owing to the adverse economic circumstances, he decided to emigrate to Valparaiso, where he had a friend, at the young age of nineteen. On 29 July 1848, he boarded the barque STAOULI. Once in Valparaiso, he entered employment with a German trading house; presumably two years later he changed to the Joh. Ces. Godeffroy & Sohn company of Hamburg. In the service of the latter, he opened an agency in Apia on the Samoan island of Upolu in 1857, and in 1864 met his death in a hurricane near Tonga. After his arrival in Chile, strongly influenced by what he had experienced on the crossing from Le Havre to Valparaiso, August Unshelm wrote a number of reports on the basis of his diary entries. His account of the voyage is here reproduced. His writing style was left unchanged; only chapter headings and paragraphs were introduced to facilitate the text's readability. In Unshelm’s descriptions we learn about, among other things, his fellow passengers, encounters with other vessels en route, nutrition on board, the crossing-the-line ceremony, and a terrible hurricane.