Dear Readers,
This is, as you can see, the twelfth issue of the Tea and Crumpets. This may also be the last issue. Of course, I thought Issue 11 would be the last issue, because I was tired of making Tea and Crumpets every 2 months, and then I started missing making the Tea and Crumpets so I made this one. The only thing I can guarantee you is that the Tea and Crumpets won't come as often as it used to. And after this issue is done, I want to get to work on the older issues – retouching them, and making them a little more like this one – in color!
Oh, yes. Another thing I can guarantee you is that I won't be making tons of copies of the Tea and Crumpets and handing them out anymore. It takes too much money and work. What I will be doing is putting them on my website as PDFs, so you can download, read, and print them at your leisure.
Mary Moberly
Senior Editor of the
Tea and Crumpets
If you like carbon, boron, silicon, hydrogen, and all those other elements that make up the world, then you might enjoy Carbonboy, Boronboy, Silica, Hydrowoman, and all those other superheroes and villains that make up the comic story thing called, well, I don't exactly know what it's called, but you can just call it Elemental Superheroes for now if you want to.
Some supervillains include a radium person
(Watch out for his pockets!).
Look for the comic Elemental Superheroes in the Tea and Crumpets!
German Colonists in the Early to Mid 18th Century
By Mary Moberly
The Holy Roman Empire was a mess. This was because the people were starting to rebel. Martin Luther began this with his 95 theses, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517. This act – akin to declaring that the emperor had no clothes on – inspired the people to form their own ideas of what the true church really should be, ignoring the fact that the religion of the state was Catholicism. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 granted the right of cuius regio, eius religio – "whoever owns the region, determines the religion", but this did not mean that the Empire was blessed with religious tolerance from then on.
These events, and others, also spurred the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which shattered the Empire. At the end of the war, The Holy Roman Empire was no longer much of an empire. It was a collection of states that shared the same name, but were not
especially united.
The Thirty Years' War took a huge toll on the people living in Germany. Only about thirteen million of the estimated twenty million people living in Germany remained after the war. Buildings and crops were destroyed, and many people had nothing left.
The fighting did not end after 1648 – it went on. In 1707, Louis XIV of France sent soldiers to the German Palatinate (a territory of the Holy Roman Empire, located on the west banks of the Rhine River) to destroy the food supply. The Palatines lost their crops and livestock to the French armies and the cold winter. With all these losses, many Germans had nothing left to lose, so why not embark on a journey to a new world?
In 1709, Queen Anne of England invited about 13,000 destitute Germans to London. They stayed temporarily and then were relocated. About 3000 went to Ireland. Over 600 went toNorth Carolina. About half of them died at sea. Three thousand were sent to New York to make tar and turpentine from pine trees. This idea didn't work very well, so the governor, Robert Hunter, quit the whole enterprise and left these Germans to fend for themselves. They eventually moved to Pennsylvania.
Germans came to America seeking freedom from the wars that ravaged their land, and freedom from the persecution that arose against their religions. Germans from many religions came to America – Lutherans, Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, German Presbyterians, and Moravians, to name a few.
Less than 1000 Germans came per year until 1727, and then there were 2000 per year. Twenty-five thousand Germans came from 1750 to 1754, then few, if any, came. By 1754, there were about 100,000 Germans living in America.
Many of these 100,000 Germans came as a type of indentured servant called "redemptioners". People called "Newlanders" traveled the Rhine Valley, searching for Germans to put aboard ships. They would go around telling the Germans how wonderful it would be in the New World, and how free they would be. Then they literally sold them to ship captains, who sold them as "redemptioners" to work for people in America. The idea was for the redemptioners to pay off the debt for their voyage across the Atlantic, but the redemptioners did not know how long they would be working until they got toAmerica. The time varied from about 3-6 yrs., sometimes longer. Parent redemptioners often had to work two or three times as long to pay for the fares of their children. Children were sometimes made to work as redemptioners until their coming of age.
Some shipping firms made families wait to be booked on a ship until they ran out of money, just so the captain could sell them off as redemptioners when they got to America. Some families had