3 - A “Swiss Amazon” in the New World: Images of America in the Lebensbeschreibung of Regula Engel (1821)

Summary

On 13 September 1816, Regula Engel boarded a passenger ship in Le Havre, France, and set sail for the New World. After seventy-six days at sea, the woman later called the “Swiss Amazon” reached the eastern shore of America. The journey that brought Engel to the coast of New York had begun more than forty-two years earlier in Zürich, Switzerland, when the thirteen-year-old Regula Egli ran away from home. At the age of seventeen, she married Florian Engel, a young Swiss soldier, who would rise to the rank of lieutenant in Napoleon's army. Engel's life over the next thirty-eight years can be mapped onto the trajectory of her husband's military career, including the campaigns of Napoleon's troops across Europe, Egypt, and Syria and into exile on the island of Elba. She accompanied her husband into battle, at times even taking up arms to fight alongside him. She gave birth to twenty-one children and outlived her husband and all but three children. Widowed and penniless at the age of fifty-five, Engel arrived in America. She traveled from New York to New Orleans in search of her son, who died of yellow fever only three days after their reunion. Homesick for her native Switzerland, after three years in America Engel made the voyage back to Europe, where she spent the following years petitioning the French government, unsuccessfully, to secure her husband's pension. Ninety-two years old and impoverished, Regula Engel passed away at the Predigerspital in Zürich, the city in which her journey had begun.