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s appeal to the ill-used sectarians of Central Europe to join him in his "holy experiment" and thus enhance the value of his holdings in Pennsylvania had only a meagre effect. The small bands of Quaker converts and their Mennonite friends from the Krefeld and Worms areas who heeded Penn's call, did not turn out to be the immediate vanguard of thousands of Germans swarming to the New World. The pietists who had so enthusiastically invested in Penn's land through the Frankfurt Company, and who dispatched Francis Daniel Pastorius over to prepare a safe haven across the sea, never left the shelter of their comfortable homes. The learned Pastorius found himself as village mayor in the wilderness and as the administrator of the considerable holdings of the Frankfurt Company with next to no takers. Despite publicity efforts hardly more than eight hundred German speaking people came to Pennsylvania in the thirty-four years between 1683 and the arrival of the first larger shiploads of German emigrants in 1717. This was certainly not due to a lack of interest in emigration in many sections of Germany and Switzerland. Many of those willing to go simply did not have the means required for months of inland and ocean travel with their families, not to speak of any starting capital in the new country. In rare cases groups of religious dissenters such as the forty millenarians whom Johann Kelpius led to Philadelphia in 1694 were helped financially by kindred spirits in the Netherlands and in England.Pennsylvania was by no means the only colony soliciting immigrants from outside the British Isles. Concrete offers came from the southern colonies, but they generally lacked provisions for the payment of transportation. In 1699-1701 both the Carolinas and Virginia were much in the news in Europe because some of the French Protestant refugees were taken there through royal and private charity. In 1700 one shipload of them, including a number of Swiss, arrived on board the Nassau in Virginia where they were settled on the south side of the James River. Their transport comprised a strange family from Bern whose subsidized 43

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