Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Side 32

FINNISH EMIGRATION TO THE UNITED
STATES AND CANADA
By Rafael Engelberg,
President of the Finnish Overseas Society (Suomi Seura), Helsinki.
j| IKE other countries, Finland has had her share in the emi-
gration which has taken place from Europe to overseas
-II—Á countries, and has made her contribution to the population
of the United States and Canada. This emigration movement has
been due, on the one hand to the attraction exercised by the wealth
and potentialities of the new countries — greatly enhanced, as
they have been, by report — and on the other hand to the poverty
and undeveloped condition of the homeland, and the marked
predilection for pioneering life and hunting explorations in the
wilds which characterizes the Finns.
Early Finnish population movements were directed to the un-
inhabited parts of Oulujárvi in the ijjo’s, to the forest areas of
Central Sweden at the end of the i6th century, to Ingria and
Tver after the peace of Stolbova in the ijth. century, and later
on to Ruija (the Finnmark); there was also a continuous move-
ment on a smaller scale to Sweden, e. g. to Stockholm.
A few Finns went to America with emigrating Swedes at the
beginning of the lyth century, and with Russians in the i9th
century, but they did not come over in larger numbers till nearly
ioo years after the great rush of emigrants from Continental
Europe, and about 30 years after the emigration from Scandi-
navia got under way.
Their routes have been partly via Scandinavia, partly via
Central Europe, and especially via England.
For us — as for other countries — this emigration has been,
and still is, of great national and economic importance.
The Finns first began to contribute to the peopling of the
North American Continent together with the Swedes in 1638,
when the important colony of New Sweden was founded at the
mouth of the Delaware River.
Side by side with Axel Oxenstjerna, the Finnish admiral Klaus
Fleming displayed great energy in the work of founding this
colony, and its most celebrated governor, Johan Printz, made a
point of describing himself as a Finn.