7 This standard estimate, contemporary with the event, was made by Edward Johnson of Woburn, who migrated to the New World in 1630, probably in the ship Arbella with Governor Winthrop. Johnson reckoned that between 1630 and 1640 the number of “Men, Women and Children passing over this wide Ocean, as near as at present can be gathered, is also supposed to be 21,200 or thereabout.” His estimate of the number of emigrant ships is clouded by a typographical error. One passage reported 298 vessels; another, 198. Winthrop’s journal mentioned more than 100 vessels (many by name), and in approximately sixty instances supplied the number of passengers, at a little above 100 per ship. This suggests that the correct number of shiploads is 198. For text and learned commentary see Edward Johnson, Johnson’s Wonder-working Providence 1628-1651, ed. J. F. Jameson (New York, 1910), 58-61.
   A radically different estimate has recently been offered by an American economist who argues that the true size of the great migration to New England was only a little above 10,000. He obtains this result as a residual from estimates of fertility, mortality, emigration and total population—some of which may be mistaken; cf. Henry A. Gemery, “Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630-1700; Inferences from Colonial Populations,” Research in Economic History V (1980), 179-233; this difficult question will be discussed in more detail in a forthcoming work.

8 Only one of the 198 vessels in the great migration was lost—the ship Gabriel, on the coast of Maine near Pemaquid in 1635; Johnson, Wonder-working Providence, 61.