As to the information you give me with respect to commerce, you will be pleased, Sir, to add a memorandum of the places where insurance can be effected on vessels destined for America, and the premiums of insurance to be paid. I will then examine your propositions, and will soon be able to inform you whether we conceive it possible to make an experiment of the kind with success.
I have the honor of being, &c.
BARON DE SCHULENBURG.
TO BARON DE SCHULENBURG.
Berlin, June 10th, 1777.
By the accounts received a little before I left Paris, the premium on insurance to America at Cadiz was twelve and a half per cent. At Bordeaux it was forty per cent to and from America. A scheme was then forming for the establishment of very considerable and responsible companies of insurance at Rouen and Nantes. But I am apprehensive there will be some difficulty about insuring any but French property.
I should, therefore, conceive your Excellency would do best to have it tried at Amsterdam, where one would imagine that forty per cent, which is infinitely beyond the risk, would be an irresistible temptation.
If the insurance to America were made here, the Congress might insure back. There is, however, an obvious objection to this, arising from their want of funds in Europe to answer the loss. This objection would not now have existed, had not our commerce with Europe been so much discouraged by an almost universal concurrence of its powers in prohibiting our being supplied with arms and ammunition, things essentially and immediately necessary to our defence and existence. The European ports being also shut against our vessels of war, it is impracticable to contrive convoys for our trade, and it is thus exposed to the enemy.