The ships

Four voyages carried the colony over in the spring of 1855, and three of their manifests survive as the customs officers took them down at the port. Each roster below is the project's line-by-line transcription of the manifest, with its reliability notes, and the scans it was read from. The manifests are whole-ship lists — only a part of each ship was bound for La Réunion — and the transcriptions are best-effort readings of cursive, flagged where uncertain.

• Nuremberg Le Havre → New Orleans, sworn 21 April 1855

  307 passengers on the manifest's own tally — 290 adults and children, 9 infants, 10 cabin passengers. The ten in the cabin are the French colony leadership; the steerage is mostly German and Swiss families bound for New Orleans, only some of them for the colony. 10 colonists of the registry identified.

  U.S. Customs passenger manifest, District and Port of New Orleans, NARA M259 vol. LAM259_41, pp. 0844–0851 · scans: p. 0844 · p. 0845 · p. 0846 · p. 0847 · p. 0848 · p. 0849 · p. 0850 · p. 0851

• Uriel Antwerp → New York, sworn about 21 February 1855, master James G. Foster

  211 passengers: the Belgian contingent, on the Antwerp–New York leg of a voyage that went on to New Orleans. 1 colonists of the registry identified.

  U.S. Customs passenger manifest, New York bond format, NARA M259 vol. LAM259_41, pp. 0623–0628 · scans: p. 0623 · p. 0624 · p. 0625 · p. 0626 · p. 0627 · p. 0628

• Lexington Le Havre → New Orleans, sworn about 24 February 1855, master Edward Stone

  The numbered list runs to about 267; the colony's French and Swiss block is at #201–253, and the last page fades to illegible. 2 colonists of the registry identified.

  U.S. Customs passenger manifest, District and Port of New Orleans, NARA M259 vol. LAM259_41, pp. 0630–0635 · scans: p. 0630 · p. 0631 · p. 0632 · p. 0633 · p. 0634 · p. 0635

• Franziska Bremen → Galveston, departed 13 May, arrived 4 July 1855

  97 family entries: the Swiss contingent — Bürkli, Boll, Long, Frick, the Baers, the Knöpflis. The landing date corrects Cordillot's. 6 colonists of the registry identified.

  Galveston Immigration Database (Galveston Historical Foundation), digitising Blaha & Lembcke, Passenger Lists for Galveston 1850–1855; no manifest scans held