The treaty ending the American Revolution was signed at the Hotel d'York in Paris. The American delegation shown in the image included John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin. The British reportedly refused to pose.
The Industry leaves Bristol, bound for Philadelphia. David and Liam meet.
Gottleb Mittelberger, a German schoolmaster, traveled from Europe to Philadelphia in the mid 1700s. His diary left a vivid eyewitness account of the journey: “. . . during the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot, and the like, all of which come from the old and sharply-salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die miserably. Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions, and lamentations, together with other trouble, as e.g., the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body. The misery reaches a climax when a gale rages for two or three nights and days, so that every one believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously. No one can have an idea of the sufferings which women in confinement have to bear with their innocent children on board these ships. Few of this class escape with their lives; many a mother is cast into the water with her child as soon as she is dead. One day, just as we had a heavy gale, a woman in our ship, who was to give birth and could not give birth under the circumstances, was pushed through a loophole (porthole) in the ship and dropped into the sea, because she was far in the rear of the ship and could not be brought forward.” “Passage to America, 1750,” EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2000).
The last British troops in America leave New York harbor
The ship detours to Charleston and the Hales disembark
The Confederation Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris at the State House in Annapolis, Maryland
David and Liam arrive in Philadelphia and go their separate ways
David lodges with the Halls; Mr. Oliver's crew settles in Carter's Alley. Though Carter’s Alley no longer exists, it might have looked much like the image to the left. In the eighteenth century it would have been filled with middle class working families (the “middling sort”)—neighbors who both lived and worked in their homes. Carts would have clogged the roadway, carting goods to and from the harbor a few blocks east. Some of the larger homes in the alley may have had enough space in the rear to grow a garden or to keep a cow or a hog. Others may only have had only enough space to place a privy. Most would not have had their own well, but would have made use of a public pump to satisfy their water needs.
The Hales arrive after being stranded for days at Seven Mile Beach
