Over 11,000 Palatines arrived in England on ships from Holland during the month of May 1709.⁴³ The government made preparations to provide the German immigrants with shelter. Approximately 1,600 tents were issued to be set up in towns such as Blackheath, Greenwich, Camberwell, Deptford, Walworth, Kensington, and Tower Ditch.⁴⁴ Barns and cheap houses were rented, large rope-houses were utilized for shelter, while others were disposed of by charitable people in the towns of Aldgate and Lambeth. About 1,400 were lodged in the large warehouse belonging to Sir Charles Cox, who had offered it without charge.⁴⁵

Contemporary Woodcut, showing the Palatines encamped on Blackheath outside London.

In London, the citizens were amazed at the large amount of Palatines in their city. The squares, taverns and all the refuges of London were crowded with Palatines. Every Sunday, curiosity-seekers would gather at the Palatine camps to observe the German-speaking immigrants. The Palatines took advantage of this opportunity by making toys and selling them.⁴⁶ There was not enough money to go around, and bread was in very short supply. The married women often would beg on the streets for food or money.⁴⁷

The novelty of the Palatines began to wear off when citizens, especially the poorer classes, realized that the Palatines were eating their already limited supply of bread and taking their jobs, reducing the scale of wages. The shopkeepers were also afraid that their businesses would be hurt by these foreign competitors who set up shops. The higher classes began to fear the possibility of disease spread by the Palatines. Mobs began to form and attack Palatine encampments and incur riots.⁴⁸

The government had a huge pressing problem facing them—what to do with the Palatines? There was no way the Palatines could remain in England—there was just too many of them. The Board of Trade asked two German ministers, who were residents of London, to compile lists of all Palatines encamped in London. These ministers were John Tribbeko, former chaplain to Queen Anne’s late husband Prince George of Denmark, and Georg Andrew Ruperti, minister of the German Lutheran Church in the Savoy. The lists they compiled were to become known as the Four Palatine Lists. The lists showed that over half of the first four groups were composed of farmers and vinedressers. The next highest occupations were carpenters and textile makers. There were even schoolteachers and surgeons among the emigrants. Ministers Ruperti and Tribbeko stopped compiling the lists in June 1709 when it became apparent that the Palatine population was rapidly rising with each new arrival from Holland.⁴⁹

With the aid of the lists, the government came up with several schemes to get rid of the Palatines. Most of these schemes were not successful nor carried out. Those schemes included settling 1,000 on the Rio de Plata in South America, some to the Canary Islands,⁵⁰ and 600 Palatines in the Scilly Islands off the southwest coast of England.⁵¹ However, they were able to reduce the Palatine population by sending back Palatines who were supposedly Catholic because the government only wanted those who were already members of the Church of England or willing to convert to Protestantism.⁵² Some were sent to other parts of England to become daylaborers and swineherds,⁵³ while others were even sent to Ireland to become tenants of Sir Thomas Southwell near Rathkeale in County Limerick.⁵⁴ A few were went to North Carolina where they joined the Swiss settlement of Christopher von Graffenried,⁵⁵ while a few others went to Jamaica and the West Indies.⁵⁶ The British army welcomed enlistment of 150 of the able-bodied young Palatine men and assigned them to Portugal.⁵⁷ But there were still a lot of Palatines left in England.

It seemed as if there was no solution to the growing problem of the Palatine population until a gentleman by the name of Colonel Robert Hunter proposed the idea of using Palatine labor to produce naval stores in New York.⁵⁸

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