USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 20
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After selling all the market would take, Captain Kennedy unloaded a large separate consignment, with which Edward L. Gray, Jr., who sailed on the Tsar with his wife and sister, opened an agency at Papeete. Thence the ship proceeded to Honolulu, and discharged the rest of her cargo, including Merrimack Prints, Hamilton Ticking, Denims, fancy plaid linings, blan-
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kets, salt provisions, groceries and umbrellas, shoes and saddlery, and - palm-leaf hats. Yankee mer- chants would carry coals to Newcastle, if Newcastle wanted them! Captain Kennedy had the owners' per- mission to proceed from the Islands on "any lawful trade to any part of the world at peace with our na- tion," according to his judgment; or even to sell the ship. But the whalemen at Honolulu offered him a re- turn cargo of oil and bone, which with Hawaiian goat- skins and bullock hides, and some of the first gold- dust extracted from the California washings, gave him a valuable return freight.
When the Northwest fur trade died out, its place was taken by the hide traffic with California. The Coast from Cape Mendocino to Cape San Lucas had long been familiar to contraband fur-traders from Massachusetts, when, in 1822, California's adhesion to the Mexican Empire threw open her ports to legi- timate commerce. Before the year elapsed, William Alden Gale, of Boston (Cuatro Ojos the Californians called him by reason of his spectacles), induced Bryant & Sturgis to send their Sachem to the Coast with a cargo of notions to exchange for hides. From that time to the Mexican War the Californians obtained most of their merchandise from Boston 'hide-droghers,' as these Pacific Coast traders were called; for their return cargoes took the bulk of California's hides into New England shoe shops. In addition to this direct trade from Boston the sea-otter business continued into the thirties; New Bedford whalers visited the Coast for fresh beef, doing a little smuggling on the side; Boston firms at Honolulu smuggled in merchandise by swift brigs, using Santa Catalina Island as a base; and the China merchants sent over Canton goods direct. R. B. Forbes, when visiting the Mission Dolores at
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No. 1216
Signed,
United States of America.
District of Boston and Charlestown.
To all to whom these presents shall come :--- WE, the Collector and Naval Officer of the Port of Boston and . Charlestown, do, by the tenor of these presents-CERTIFY and make known, that the Captain, Officers, Seamen, and Passengers of the Brig called laden with Ayer, Brandy Portions. Gi Hals. Have two, trat Tochina Glasses, idolares . Hustarts. Sveits. Chem. Dry Goods Sugar Sei Une, don'ts
Cleopalins (Sarge)
Collector.
and of which
·chin Duster. is Captain ; consisting of fourion Officers and Seamen, and The Passengers, now ready to proceed on a voyage to the Seethe Whist Cash and elsewhere beyond sea, cí america "
And we do further certify-That no plague, or other contagious or dangerous disease at present exists in this port or in its vicinity.
are all in good health.
BILL OF HEALTH OF THE CLEOPATRA'S BARGE
SHIPS AND SEAMEN IN SOUTHERN SEAS
San Francisco in 1870, recognized among its 'old masters' some products of Hog Lane, Canton, which he had sold the padres thirty-five years before.
Secularization of the missions was regretted by the Yankee traders, from its unsettling effect on business. Protestants were not permitted to remain in Mexican California, but many Yankees of Puritan stock "left their consciences at Cape Horn," joined Mother Church, spoke Spanish with a down-east twang, mar- ried Californian heiresses, and absorbed the trade of the country. Dana found Massachusetts men estab- lished all along the Coast, from a one-eyed Fall River whaleman tending bar in a San Diego pulperia, to Thomas O. Larkin, the merchant prince of Monterey.
In the two years (1834-36) that Dana spent before the mast in Bryant & Sturgis's vessels, the California trade was at its height. All cargoes had to be entered at the Monterey custom house, Mexican duties were from eighty to one hundred per cent, and the regula- tions many. But the Mexican officials, knowing Cali- fornia's dependence on the Boston traders, let them off with a reasonable lump sum per cargo. The ships brought "everything that can be imagined, from Chinese fireworks to English cart-wheels," including even lumber (which the Californians were too lazy to cut for themselves), and shoes made at Lynn out of California hides. Part of the cargo was disposed of on shipboard, the cabin being fitted up as a variety store, to which dark-eyed señoras were conveyed in ship's boats. What they did not buy was placed in charge of a resident agent, who peddled it out at enormous profits (twenty dollars for a three-dollar piece of Lowell print-cloth) to the rancheros, against future deliv- eries of tallow at six cents a pound, and hides ('Cali- fornia bank-notes') at one to two dollars apiece, worth
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more than double in Boston. No contract was signed, for a Californian's word was his bond; but the agents employed cuerreros, or hide-brokers, to attend the matanzas (slaughters), receive the hides, and convey them in bullock-carts to an embarcadero on the coast. The Boston hide-droghers collected and carried them to San Diego. There each firm maintained salt-vats, where seamen and Kanakas cured the hides, and stored them until a shipload was accumulated. "Since the time when Queen Dido came the hide game over the natives at Carthage," wrote an irreverent grandson of Paul Revere, "it is probable that there has been no parallel to the hide-and-go-seek game between Boston and California."
Clean, slender ships anchored with slip-cable three miles offshore, gently swaying in the long Pacific swell, sails stopped with rope-yarns to break out and put to sea in a sou'easter. No sound to break the eternal roar and roll of surf on endless beach, save tinny bells jan- gling out vespers from a white mission tower. Sailors waist-high in boiling foam, 'droghing' hides on aching head from beach to longboat, or hurling them down cliff at San Juan Capistrano. Sleepy Santa Barbara coming to life at the wedding of Doña Anita de la Guerra de Noriego y Corillo to plain Alfred Robinson, Bryant & Sturgis's agent. "Splendid, idle forties" for the Californians; not so idle for the Yankee seamen whose labor made cent per cent for owners, and fat primage for officers. Few survived to get into Bancroft's register of California pioneers. Dana's book is their only monument - who would wish a better?
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SHIPS AND SEAMEN IN SOUTHERN SEAS
It was the very low price of California hides that made it worth while to send vessels for two years' voy- ages around the Horn in search of them. South Amer- ica was the great source of supply for Massachusetts tanpits and shoe shops. In 1843, out of a total of 311,000 hides imported at Boston alone (and Salem took many thousand in addition), over 100,000 came from Buenos Aires and Montevideo, over 46,000 from Chile, 48,000 from New Orleans, and only 33,000 from California.
Many years before 1815, during the first struggles of the South American patriots, Yankee vessels flocked to their ports; and Massachusetts commission houses preceded American consuls in several South American cities.1 Let historians seeking economic origins of the Monroe Doctrine look to the Northwest fur trade and to this early intercourse with South America!
The Lowell power looms at Waltham were making sheetings for the South America trade before 1824, and by 1850 that continent was taking over three- quarters of the total export of 'domestics' from Boston. The lumber trade to the River Plate increased, and old vessels on the point of falling to pieces were filled with Maine pine boards and sent to Buenos Aires to be sold for firewood. There was a sale for almost any- thing in South America, provided it could compete with British goods. In return, there was an excellent market in Boston, and all North American cities, for River Plate wool, hair, hides, sheepskins, and tallow, until the protective tariff system was applied to favor cattle ranches in the United States. The principal im-
1 One of them, Richard Alsop, of the firm of Alsop, Wetmore & Cry- der, at Valparaiso, with a branch at Lima, was making $100,000 a year by 1827. Others were Samuel Pomeroy at Arica, William Wheelwright at Guayaquil and other ports, the Thayers of Lancaster in Chile, Joseph W. Clapp at Montevideo, and Loring Brothers at Valparaiso.
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porting and exporting firm at Buenos Aires was Samuel B. Hale & Co., whose founder, of a Boston mercantile family, first visited the River Plate in 1830 as super- cargo on a Boston ship. The firm at one time owned forty-six sailing vessels, and in addition Mr. Hale be- came a director of the first railway in the Argentine Republic.
Along the Central American coast small brigs and schooners peddled notions, bringing home cochineal, goatskins, and tropical woods. Pirates were a menace in the Caribbean as late as 1840. The brig Mexican of Salem was plundered of her specie in 1832, and only an opportune gale prevented the pirate crew from executing their captain's order - "Dead cats don't mew." Five of them were hanged in Boston two years later.
Rio de Janeiro was a favorite port of call for Yankee traders. "I shall never forget," wrote Osborne Howes, "the beautiful afternoon that we sailed into that mag- nificent harbor." It was November 25, 1833, and he was master of the little barque Flora of Boston, with flour and lumber to exchange for sugar.
We passed the fort shortly before sunset, were hailed and directed to proceed to the anchoring grounds some two miles distant, and were there boarded by the health officer. When the business with him was finished I went on deck. The land breeze had set in, bring- ing with it the fragrance of the orange-trees. The beautiful little islands rose abruptly from the water, on the tops of many of them were churches, the bells of which were ringing. West of us was a deep bay, some fifteen or twenty miles in extent, at the head of which were the Organ Mountains, with their peaks from five thousand to six thousand feet in height. Near us rose the Sugar Loaf, one thou- sand feet or more above the sea, and not far distant, the beautiful Corcovado Mountain. Small boats were passing across the bay, urged by sail or oar, and the negroes, as they pulled at the latter, were singing gayly. The lights of the city, some two miles distant, gleamed over the water, and these, brought out by the high moun-
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tainous lands a little behind them, rendered the outlook most en- chanting. The moon was shining brightly, and I remained on the deck till midnight, enjoying the beauty of the scene.
A considerable coffee trade was built up with Brazil; in 1843 Boston imported thence over four million pounds, one-quarter of her total imports of the fra- grant bean; and a million and a quarter more from Puerto Cabello. A million more came from Cuba, and eight and one half millions from Hayti. In this, as in most branches of South American trade, Boston was surpassed by other Atlantic ports of the United States, but at Valparaiso the enterprise of Augustus Hemenway gave Boston the bulk of North Ameri- can commerce. This self-made merchant approached South America by way of the Maine coast and the West Indies. He owned a township in Washington County, Maine, where pine was cut on his own land, sawed into lumber at his own sawmill in Machias, and carried to Cuba (where he owned a sugar planta- tion) or Valparaiso on his own ships, which returned from the west coast laden with copper and nitrate of soda.
Massachusetts merchants found South America a good market for India shawls and China silk, which suggested a direct trade from Canton in Boston ves- sels. R. B. Forbes, at twenty-one given command of his uncle Perkins's brig Nile, disposed of a Canton cargo at various ports from Bodega Bay to Buenos Aires, where John M. Forbes, another uncle, was chargé d'affaires.
As a feeder to New England's leading industry, as an outlet for her products, and as a carrying trade, this intercourse with South America became one of the most important branches of Massachusetts commerce; and it is one of the few branches that still continues
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in sailing vessels. It was very similar to, and largely replaced the West-India trade of colonial days; with the important difference that it fed looms and shoe fac- tories instead of slave coffles and distilleries.
CHAPTER XVII CHINA AND THE EAST INDIES 1820-1850
RETURNING around the Horn, we find that the China trade until 1840 was carried on by the same unique methods and the same shrewd traders as before the war. Ships of all nations still anchored at Whampoa, and lightered their cargoes up-river to Jackass Point. Boston merchants of the old Nor'wester families maintained luxurious bachelor quarters in the Canton factories, and a summer residence at Macao. The only new element was the missionaries, among whom the Reverend Peter Parker, M.D., of Framingham, Massachusetts, deserves a passing mention for his pioneer work in founding native hospitals at Can- ton and Macao. There was little variation from dec- ade to decade in the total volume of the American China trade, but a great change took place, even before 1840, in its character, and its relative impor- tance for Massachusetts commerce.
Among the "flowery-flag devils," as the Chinese called our compatriots, the Perkins-Sturgis-Forbes connection remained all-powerful; for China trading required great experience in details, and sound finan- cial backing. 'Ku-shing' (John P. Cushing), their Canton agent, with only two clerks to his establish- ment, did a business of millions a year, and returned a wealthy man in 1830 to his Summer Street mansion and his Belmont estate, attended by a retinue of Chinese servants. Perkins & Co., James P. Sturgis & Co., Russell, Sturgis & Co., and Russell & Sturgis of
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Manila were finally consolidated into the firm of Rus- sell & Co. of Canton, which had been founded by Samuel Russell, of Middletown, Connecticut, about 1818. Joseph Peabody, of Salem, as we have seen, maintained a foothold at Canton until 1840. Augus- tine Heard, at one time a partner of Russell & Co., established a separate house which remained in the hands of his nephews until well after the Civil War. Small firms were founded from time to time; but these "needy adventurers" and "desperadoes," as Captain Bill Sturgis called them, did not last long.
Russell & Co. did more business at Canton than any other American house. No small measure of this success was due to the friendship of Houqua, the Chinese hong merchant; a legacy of John P. Cushing. Houqua, as generous as he was wealthy, extended un- limited credit facilities to his Boston friends during the worst financial panics. He shipped his own teas to Europe and America on the Russell ships, and on one occasion sent J. Murray Forbes half a million dollars to invest in New England factory stock. In England the relations of the Boston China merchants with Baring Brothers, who had financed their early ventures to the Northwest Coast, became so intimate that Joshua Bates (who married a Sturgis) and Russell Sturgis (a great-nephew of T. H. Perkins) were successively ad- mitted partners in that great merchant-banking house.
After 1815 the character of American imports from China gradually changed. Canton willow-ware, after a brief recovery, was crowded out of the Boston mar- ket by Staffordshire, Royal Worcester, and French porcelain. European imitations killed the nankeens. Crapes and silks declined with changes in fashion, and by 1840 teas made up over eighty per cent of American imports from China.
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CHINA AND THE EAST INDIES
The greater part of this, even when shipped by Boston firms in Boston vessels, was sent into New York. Out of ninety-one vessels entering New York from Canton and Manila between 1839 and 1842, thirty-nine belonged in Massachusetts; and the en- tries from China at Boston and Salem averaged but five or six annually.
A one per cent state tax on auction sales, the custom- ary method for disposing of China products, has been blamed for this exodus to Manhattan. This tax resulted from a temporary alliance in 1824 between retail grocers and the farmer vote. The former, for some obscure reason, wished to kill the auction system. The latter were looking for a new source of revenue rather than raise the state property tax from $75,000 to $100,000.
It was unwise to remove Boston's advantage (for New York already had an auction tax) at a period when the Erie Canal was pulling trade to Manhattan. But it is doubtful whether the tax drove any one from Boston. Some of her tea ships were already being sent to New York in 1824, and most of them continued thither when the tax was reduced one-quarter in 1849, and abolished in 1852. East-Indian, Russian, and Mediterranean imports continued to be sold princi- pally in Boston, although disposed of by auction, and subject to the same duty. Both Boston and Salem maintained their early lead in the Manila trade, which was closely connected with the China trade, and car- ried on by the same firms. Four and a quarter million pounds of Philippine Islands sugar, and great quan- tities of Manila hemp and indigo, were landed at Bos- ton in 1843. Similar commodities were imported from Batavia, where a Bostonian was the principal Ameri- can merchant in 1850, and near which Boston interests acquired a large sugar plantation. Massachusetts also
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retained a considerable though irregular share of the Java coffee trade. For obvious geographical reasons New York, after the opening of the Erie Canal, was a better market for teas than Boston, so that when one China merchant began sending his ships there, the rest followed in self-defense. The same movement took place, twenty years later, in the wholesale cottons trade. Other shipping merchants and wholesalers who did not enjoy the social preëminence of the China mer- chants might have followed their example; after the Civil War most of them did. Until then they remained loyal to Boston. The fate of Salem warned Bostonians to retain control of distribution, as the condition of a healthy commercial life.
On the whole the China trade grew less important for Massachusetts year by year. It enriched but two or three family connections, and between 1820 and 1845 was not very lucrative even for them. Yet it produced a new type of vessel, the Medford-built East-Indiaman,1 and provided an important outlet for New England manufactures. Our teas were no longer purchased with otter-skins and sandalwood. About 1817, the Boston merchants began to ship English goods to Canton, in competition with the British East India Company. Their success greatly irritated British merchants, excluded by the Honorable John's monopoly, and provided an additional incen- tive for Parliament throwing open the trade to all British subjects, in 1834. Already the Bostonians had begun to substitute Lowell cottons for the Lancashire; and ten years later the prosaic fruit of New England looms, to the annual value of a million and a half dollars, had replaced the lustrous and fragrant prod- ucts of Coast and Islands.
1 See previous chapter.
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CHINA AND THE EAST INDIES
In spite of these new exports to China there still remained a heavy annual balance against Boston. The growing Chinese consumption of Indian opium created a demand at Canton for bills on London, which our China merchants began to supply, in place of Spanish dollars, about 1827. To a certain extent they supplied the forbidden drug itself, and made no secret of it. Since the opening years of the century, Perkins & Co. had made a specialty of carrying Smyrna opium to Canton; so did Joseph Peabody and every Boston or Salem merchant who could get it. But the total import of this inferior variety was inconsiderable, in comparison with the immense consignments of opium from British India - five hundred and seventy- eight thousand dollars' worth in the season of 1833-34, as compared with fourteen million dollars' worth of seductive Malwa and fragrant Patna, smuggled in by British ships.1
A small part, also, of the imports under the British flag were on the account of Russell & Co. and Augus- tine Heard. Within a few years' time, a fleet of Boston clipper schooners and brigs (like the 92-ton Ariel, which almost drowned R. B. Forbes on her trial trip, the 100-ton Zephyr and the 370-ton Antelope, built by Samuel Hall) was distributing opium along the China coast from Lintin Island, where the American firms maintained receiving ships. One small house at Can- ton was founded by a Salem mate and ship's carpenter who, taking advantage of Chinese respect for the dead, landed a large consignment of the forbidden drug in coffins supposed to contain departed shipmates! Oly- phant & Co. of New York (derisively called 'Zion's
1 The American ships at Canton this season numbered 70, as against 24 British East-Indianmen, 77 Country ships (vessels owned in British India), 37 Spaniards, and 45 of all other nations.
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Corner' by their rivals) was the only Canton house that refused to participate in the opium trade; and their motive was not so much moral as practical. They feared that a traffic forbidden by the Chinese government, however countenanced by its officials, would breed trouble. They were right.
Having stated these facts, I must, in justice to the candid old China merchants and their descendants who made them public, warn the reader against exag- gerating this opium traffic. For English firms, it was vital. For Boston firms, it was incidental, even in the China trade; 1 which trade was but a small and declin- ing item in the commerce of Boston and Salem after 1815. Few, at the time, appreciated the moral and physical injury to the Chinese people they were com- mitting through this traffic. Even Christian mission- aries countenanced it, by taking passage on the opium clippers to ports they could not otherwise reach, and by accepting money from firms and individuals who dealt in the drug. It was commonly asserted that opium had no more effect on the Chinese than rum on Yankees. At the risk of appearing to black the kettle, I further submit that there is a difference between smuggling opium under the official wink and driving in opium with cannon and bayonet when officials are making a sincere if tardy effort at moral reform.
In England's opium war of 1840, Americans had no share; and few justified it save John Quincy Adams.2
1 Opium made up over half of the British imports into China in 1831-32. Only one-fifteenth to one-twenty-fifth of the American im- ports at the same period were in Smyrna opium, and the amount of Indian opium imported in American vessels before 1850 must have been very small, so few were engaged in it. British opium imports ex- ceeded greatly the total American trade.
2 In a public lecture at Boston, that aroused a storm of protest; printed in Chinese Repository, XI, 274.
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Many profited by it, nevertheless; both by absorbing the British trade during its course and sharing the fruits of its success. After England had extorted the Treaty of Nanking, which ended forever the old Can- ton methods and opened four new ports to European commerce, the United States government sent out Caleb Cushing, of Newburyport, as envoy extraor- dinary. In the treaty which he concluded on July 3, 1844, the United States disavowed all protection of opium smugglers.
The principal profits thereafter made by Boston capital in China were in tea, in steam freighting along the Yangtze River, and in clipper-ship freighting from the Treaty Ports to New York and London. A cer- tain amount of opium smuggling continued. As late as 1872 fast steamers, some of Boston registry, were run- ning it into Formosa, a thousand chests a trip; carrier pigeons conveying prices-current to interior corre- spondents. Russell & Co. removed to Shanghai, and finally went bankrupt in the nineties, by which time the Germans had crowded out the smaller Boston firms.
To-day no trace remains in Boston of the old China trade, the foundation of her commercial renaissance, save a taste for li-chi nuts, Malacca joints, and smoky Souchong.
Do you remember, in the "Second Jungle Book," the adjutant bird's description of his frigid and wounded feelings, after swallowing a "piece of white stuff," which a man threw him from a great boat in the Ganges? And Mr. Kipling's explanation that the Adjutant had swallowed "a seven-pound lump of
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Wenham Lake ice, off an American ice-ship"? Now, it cost one visionary Yankee some twenty-eight years' struggle to deliver that frozen sample of Wenham Lake, Massachusetts, to the Adjutant's crop.
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