Dated August 20, 1846
“Sir,
In answer to your letter of the 14th instant,
requesting me to inform you of the state and condition to which the passengers
of the barque “Elizabeth and Sarah” arrived at this station… On boarding her I
found the passengers in the most wretched state of filth and disease. No order or regulation appeared to have been
preserved, or any attempt at enforcing cleanliness. Their excrements and filth have been thrown
in the ballast, producing a stench which made it difficult to remain any length
of time below. I found about 26 cases of
fever and received the names of 20 others, including the master, who had died
on the passage…. On landing the passengers at the sheds, I had to send 50 more
to hospital, where there is at this moment 76, and six have died in hospital
since landing. The remainder, though
weak, are healthy at present, and have been made to clean themselves, their
clothes and bedding, those of them that have any, but the major part of them
are destitute of a second change of clothes....The causes which have conspired to produce disease and death
among the passengers are ….
1st. Want of cleanliness and inattention to ventilation.
2nd. Insufficiency of food and water, and that of
an unwholesome quality.
3rd. Overcrowding.
These causes conspired to produce fever, and when once disease
set in, the effluvium from the persons of the sick, dying, and dead, confined
in the hold (the master was kept two or three weeks on board after death), soon
rendered the whole atmosphere unfit for respiration."
He goes on to state that the Captain “was a man unfit,
morally and physically, to take charge of a passenger vessel; he was in ill
health and of intemperate habits.”
To read the whole report it can be found at
Papers relative to Emigration to the British Provinces in North America
House of Lords paper 1847 vol. XV