IMMIGRATION: In the Mayflower’s Wake

The sailing koster was hardly bigger than a lifeboat; she seemed even smaller when she left the Swedish coast and beat out into the foul weather and seam-starting seas of the Skagerrak. The 16 Estonian refugees—seven men, five women, four little children—who had wedged themselves into the Erma’s tiny cabin had no visas, no charts of the Atlantic, no food but potatoes, cereal, bread and canned fish. But they did not complain. After years of war and wandering, they were going to America.

They had fled from their Baltic homeland after it was taken over by Russia, refused to go back to their Communist-dominated country. It had taken virtually all their money to buy the Erma’s 36-ft. hull, to install an old marine engine, and equip her with sails and stores. The Erma was small but she was seaworthy. And the leader of the expedition, tough, blue-eyed Harri Pahlberg, was a master mariner. So was the first mate, leathery Arvid Kuun.

The two stood alternate watches night & day, four hours off, four hours on. Bad weather seemed to follow the Erma. For weeks her people endured the racking eccentricities of her progress from grey gully to dirty crest of endless rain-pocked seas. But 62 days after leaving Stockholm the Erma lay anchored under a hot sun off the green hills and white buildings of the Island of Madeira. They wanted to go ashore, but the port authorities said: “No Communists wanted here.”

Sun & Storm. After that, the tiny vessel sailed south to the 20th degree of latitude, headed west before the warm trade winds. For five weeks the women & children sunbathed on the deck, the men lounged, bare-armed, in the cockpit. Then, on Nov. 27, 60 miles off Cape Hatteras, the Erma ran into a freezing westerly gale. She was assailed by storm after storm. Sledging seas sent water spraying through her leaking cabin ports. Everything—clothes, shoes, blankets, bulkheads—grew wet with sea water. It was bitter cold.

Once she was within 40 miles of Atlantic City. Then she was forced to run closereefed, before new offshore gales, was blown east again and south; it seemed that her people were to die just out of sight of land.

Food ran low; the Erma’s passengers ate but one meal a day. To cook it, one woman held a Primus stove down on the deck, a second held a pan to the flame. Often the stove bounced and rolled; food and fuel spilled, threatening the boat with fire. Day after day the shivering women read aloud to quiet their shivering children; during the worst of the storms the men on deck sang to reassure them. Finally a U.S. destroyer sighted the dingy sailboat, pulled alongside. Her crew passed down food, cigarets, fuel. The Erma was 100 miles off Norfolk.

Two days later, at 10:30 in the morning, she tied up at the Army Mine Base at Little Creek, Va. The bedraggled, exhausted Estonians were hustled into the officers’ club, given hot drinks, hot food, candy, cigarets. Hundreds of people called to bring toys for the children, gifts of clothes and money. But the Erma’s people, like those who had crossed the Atlantic on many another sailing vessel, had come not for kindness. They wanted work and a chance to raise their children in a new land. At week’s end they were waiting to see if the U.S. would have them.