Page:Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the state of New York.djvu/217

Rh Winston, Esq., in the chair, and a quorum being present, the following resolutions were, on motion, adopted:

Resolved, That the Report of Commissioners Kapp and Bissinger, in relation to the mortality on the sailing-ship Leibnitz, be accepted and adopted, and be referred to the Special Committee, Messrs. Kapp, O'Gorman, and Bissinger, and said Committee be requested to draft a bill, subject to the approval of this Board, to be presented to Congress for adoption.

Resolved, That official copies of the Report be transmitted to the Honorables the Secretaries of State and of the Treasury of the United States, Baron Von Gerolt, as the Diplomatic Representative of the North German Confederation, to the Consul-Generals of Prussia and Mecklenburg, and to the daily press of this city.

Resolved, That one thousand copies of the above Report be printed for circulation.

The following is the Report of Messrs. Kapp and Bissinger, referred to in the foregoing resolutions:

To the Board of Commissioners of Emigration:


 * Although not expressly authorized, yet, because the emergency arose since your last meeting, the undersigned deemed it their duty to go on board the ill-fated ship Leibnitz, and to enquire into the condition of her passengers transferred to the hospital-ship Illinois, in the Lower Bay.

Dr. Swinburne, the Health Officer, kindly placed the steamer Fletcher at our disposal. On Wednesday, Jan. 15, we went down the bay, accompanied, among others, by the physicians of the German Society, Drs. Pieper, Schwarzenberg, and Krause, who volunteered their services for the examination of the cause of the sickness.

The Leibnitz, originally the Van Couver, is a large and fine vessel, built at Boston for the China trade, and formerly plying between that port and China. She was sold some years ago to the house of Robert M. Sloman, and has since sailed under her present name.

We were informed that her last trip was her second with emigrants on board. Last summer, she went to Quebec with about seven hundred passengers, of whom she lost only a few on her passage; this time, she left Hamburg, Nov. 2, 1867, Capt. H. F. Bornhold, lay at Cuxhaven, on account of head-winds, until the llth, whereupon she took the southern course to New York. She went by the way of Madeira, down to the Tropics, 20th degree, and arrived in the Lower Bay on Jan. 11, 1868, after a passage of 61 days, or rather 70 days—at least, as far as the passengers are concerned, who were confined to the densely crowded steerage for that length of time.

The heat, for the period that they were in the lower latitudes, very often reached 24 degrees of Réaumur, or 94 degrees of Fahrenheit. Her passengers 544 in all—of whom 395 were adults, 103 children, and 46 infants—came principally from Mecklenburg, and proposed to settle as farmers and laborers in Illinois and Wisconsin; besides them, there were about 40 Prussians from Pomerania and Posen, and a few Saxons and Thuringians.