- Historic Sites “damned Plague Ships And Swimming Coffins” On
the long voyage from Bremen to America, the promised land,
emigrants from eastern Europe endured a cramped, dangerous, and
disease-haunted pilgrimage August 1960 | Volume 11, Issue 5 The
grandparents, or the great-grandparents, or the great-great-
grandparents of millions of Americans had as their last view of
Europe the diked lowlands where the Weser River leaves Bremen,
widens, and Hows into the North Sea. This coastal country is
austere and lonely, and looks today much as it must have looked
for generations, sparsely dotted with thatched farmhouses that
have the sturdy but not particularly cordial air of the house
that the smart little pig built. When the sun shines, the light
has the diffused and tender quality of the light in a Dutch
landscape painting. But there are more storms here than
sunshine; and the hostile weather may have struck more than one
emigrant as symbolic of the ordeals he had to pass through.
Bremen, which until the unificati