For Boehler,
as for many who had preceded him, Georgia and Carolina were to be a school
where great life lessons would be learned. Fresh from the University halls
of Jena, he had met the students of Oxford on equal footing,
quickly winning their respect and admiration, but these soldiers and sailors,
restless, eager for excitement, rude and unlettered, were a new thing to him,
a book written in a language to which he had no key. Later he would learn
to find some point of contact with the unlearned as well as the learned,
with the negro slave and the Yorkshire collier as well as
the student of theology, but just now his impulse was to hold himself aloof
and let their wild spirits dash against him like waves about the base
of a lighthouse which sends a clear, strong beam across the deep,
but has few rays for the tossing billows just beneath.
On the 18th of September land was sighted, and on the 29th
the fleet anchored in the harbor of St. Simon's Island,
and with grateful hearts the Moravians watched the landing of the soldiers.
On the 4th of October they transferred their baggage
to a sloop bound for Savannah, which sailed the 6th,
but on account of head winds did not reach Savannah until the 16th.
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