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Emigration of 1708



While the pioneer groups were preparing for emigration along the Rhine and its tributaries the Necker and Main River and beginning to gather In number, unidentified individuals approached the British authorities in their behalf late in December. 1708. The first British official reference to the 1709 Palatine immigration came from James Dayrolle, British Resident at the Hague. It was an undated and unsigned document in French entitled, "Memorial relating to the Poor Protestants from the Palatinate. "When Dayrolle enclosed it in a dispatch of December 24, 1708, he said, "It war brought to me from the German post office. How it came thither and from whence I know not. " The memorial read: "There arrived in this place a number of Protestant Families, traveling to England in order to go to the English colonies in America. They are now in the neighborhood of Rotterdam almost eight or nine hundred of them, having difficulty with the packet boat and convoys " After describing these emigrants as composed of poor familiar of vigorous people fleeing persecution and oppression in the Palatinate, the memorial concluded with an appeal to Dayrolle: "My Lord, you are humbly supplicated to procure passage and transportation to England out of the benevolence and charity of the Queen. " The unknown author of the memorial seems to have anticipated the arrival in Rotterdam of the Palatines by over three months, for it was not until April 19th, /1709/ that Dayrolle reported about nine hundred Palatines at Rotterdam. Meanwhile nothing appears to have been done in London with the exception of the first general naturalization act as related in Chapter I.

Although Davanant, the English representative at Frankfort in the Palatinate had been ordered in 1708 not to give any public encouragement, money or passes to emigrants (as was related in Chapter II), Dayrolle It the Hague in the Netherlands was under no such restrictions. Beginning on March 29, 1709, and at intervals thereafter, he reported to London the granting of passes to sixty or a hundred familiar at a time. On the same date Dayrolle informed London of the general naturalization



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