The steamship Pieter de Coninck was built in 1881 by Alexander Stephen & Sons, Glasgow, for the Belgian-owned Engels Line. She was a 3,310 gross ton ship, with a length of 340.3 feet and a beam (width) of 40.8 feet. She was of iron construction with one funnel, and had three masts rigged for sails. Her reciprocating steam engine drove a single screw and provided a speed of 11 knots. She was launched on June 11, 1881, and sailed from Glasgow on her maiden voyage to New York and Antwerp on June 28, 1881. On August 18, 1881, she started regular Antwerp-New York sailings in a joint service with the White Cross Line.
The Schallau family arrived at the Castle Garden immigration station, on the southern tip of Manhattan, on April 3, 1882, from Antwerp. It had probably been a long voyage. Even if the Pieter de Coninck had maintained its top speed of 11 knots throughout the entire voyage (which it most likely did not), and even if the ship had traveled a direct line from Antwerp to the southern end of Manhattan (which it most likely did not), the trip would have taken 12 days to cover the 3,656 miles between the two ports. The Schallaus and their fellow emigrants were probably at sea for several days longer.
On the Schallaus' voyage, the Pieter de Coninck carried 539 emigrants, of which 413 were German, 115 Norwegian, and 11 English. The ship's master listed the occupation of all 539 passengers as "farmer" and indicated that all 539 had traveled in "steerage." (The ship's passenger manifest shows signs of having been somewhat haphazardly compiled, as first names are occasionly omitted, people with obviously female names are identified as males, and vice versa, and so on. Only the head count seems to have been carefully done.)
The last great wave of German emigration to the United States occurred in the decade of the 1880s, and the peak year, with 250,630 Germans arriving, was 1882. More Germans came that year than in any other year in U.S. history.
Information about the Pieter de Coninck was obtained from The Ships List, which, in turn, obtained its information from the four-volume book North Atlantic Seaway -- An Illustrated History of the Passenger Services Linking the Old World with the New, by N.R.P. Bonsor, New York: Arco Pub. Co., 1975, with the information on the Pieter de Coninck appearing in Vol. 3, p. 997.
The ship's passenger manifest for the April 3, 1882 arrival of the Pieter de Coninck at New York was obtained from the New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957, microfilm serial and roll number M237_448, line 17, list number 395, available electronically through the Ancestry genealogy service.
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Last updated on September 3, 2007