3 Arrivals included the ships Griffen [sic] with 150 settlers who founded Salem in 1675; Kent, with 230 passengers who established Burlington in 1677; Willing Mind, with 60 or 70 and Martha with 114 to Burlington in 1677; Mary and Shield to Burlington in 1678. In 1677, the deputy lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire reported that “some 200 men, women and children from Sheffield and nearby parts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire had sailed from Hull to ‘an island in America called West Jersey.’” Most authorities agree that 1,400 Quakers migrated to West Jersey by 1681. A few other Quakers may have settled in what is now Pennsylvania and Delaware before 1680. See John E. Pomfret, The Province of West New Jersey, 1609-1702 (Princeton, 1956), 75, 102-3, 106-7; Amelia M. Gummere, “The Early Quakers in New Jersey,” in Rufus Jones, ed., The Quakers in the American Colonies (rpt. ed., New York, 1966), 357.

4 These estimates were made by William Penn himself, who recorded the arrival of “about ninety sail of ships,” each carrying about 80 passengers each, or 7,200 immigrants in all from 1682 to 1685. He also noted that “not one vessel designed to the Province, through God’s mercy, hitherto miscarried,” but many emigrant ships to Pennsylvania suffered severely from shipboard epidemics. See William Penn, “A Further Account of the Province of Pennsylvania,” in Albert Cook Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware, 1630-1707 (1912, rpt. New York, 1967).

5 The growth of population was as follows:

Year

West Jersey

Pennsylvania

N. Delaware

Total

1670

100

000

500

600

1680

1,700

700

700

3,100

1690

2,500

11,500

1,000

15,000

1700

4,000

18,000

2,000

24,000

1710

7,000

25,000

3,000

35,000

1720

10,000

31,000

4,000

45,000

1730

16,000

52,000

6,000

74,000

1740

24,000

86,000

9,000

119,000

1750

36,000

120,000

14,000

170,000

Census returns in West Jersey enumerated 14,380 people in 1726; 20,900 in 1737-38; and 31,931 in 1745. Pennsylvania conducted no census before 1776, because of Quaker hostility to “numbering the people.” Immigration to the Delaware Valley (both transatlantic and intercolonial) may be estimated by decade as follows: 1,500 (1670-80), 11,000 (1680-90), 3,000 (1690-1700), 2,500 (1700-1710), 5,000 (1710-20), for a total of 23,000 from 1670 to 1720. Only a small minority of these emigrants carried certificates from Quaker meetings, but many were sympathetic to the Society of Friends.

The conclusion adopted here mediates between Joseph Illick’s standard estimate that “some 8,000 people, almost entirely English, Welsh and Irish Quakers, migrated to Pennsylvania by 1685” out of a British population of 60,000 to 80,000 Quakers in 1680; and Richard Vann’s revisionist argument that the number of Pennsylvania immigrants who were “Quakers in good standing … could not have been much greater than 1,000 in the 1680’s and another 1,000 in the 1690’s,” from a British population of approximately 50,000 to 60,000 Quakers ca. 1681–85. See Joseph E. Illick, Colonial Pennsylvania (New York, 1976), 7, 21; Richard T. Vann, “Quakerism: Made in America?,” in Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, eds., The World of William Penn (Philadephia, 1986), 164-65; HSUS (1976), series Zl-19; Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1932); Robert V. Wells., The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776 (Princeton, 1975); 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.