Their crossing was rough

From The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. Only a quarter of the way into it but enjoying the story. I had realized that the Scandinavian immigrants of the late nineteenth century had, like many immigrants, hard circumstances that, being good Scandinavians, they tended to downplay. Lasking makes those hard conditions dreadfully clear.

The Tislands, also from the Telemark region, were not as fortunate as the Rollags. Of the nine children born to Ole and Karen Tisland, five had died of diptheria and were buried in Norway. Though their son Andreas survived the disease, he was left deaf and weakened. Andreas was six and a half when Ole and Karen emigrated to America with their three other children. Their crossing was rough. In the course of the voyage, twenty-two children and one adult died. Ole and Karen watched helplessly as Andreas shivered with fever in the unheated steerage quarters. When he died his body was sewn into a canvas shroud with weights attached to either end. The ship's captain read the last rites, and then the bundle was tipped off the side of the ship and into the sea. Some mothers on board immigrant ships kept the deaths of their children secret so they could bury them properly on land. Even burying a child in the strange land of a country they had never seen was better than losing a child's body to the ocean. About one in ten steerage passengers died on board immigrant ships.

The Norwegians journeyed to America on the strength of rumors, railroad company propaganda, hearsay, and letters from friends and relatives, "the America letters," singing the praises of the New World.