When a ship filled with several hundred German immigrants landed in colonial Mobile in 1721, the port was little more than a backwater military garrison. The first and former capital of French Louisiana now served primarily as a portal to the colony's interior. Starvation, disease, natural disasters, and the threat of attack by local tribes made daily life for the five hundred or so civilians who resided in the insect-and snake-infested swampland an uphill struggle. The village was hardly the locale to attract a member of European royalty. But among those German immigrants was a young woman claiming to be Princess Charlotte Christina Sophia of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, daughter of a duke, sister-in-law to the Holy Roman Emperor, and wife of Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich, the son of Russia's emperor Peter I.
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