USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 5
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THOMAS HANDASYD PERKINS
PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC
Gray named this river Columbia's and the North en- trance Cape Hancock, and the South Point, Adams. This River in my opinion, wou'd be a fine place for to set up a Factory. ... The river abounds with excellent Salmon."
On her first voyage, the Columbia had solved the riddle of the China trade. On her second, empire fol- lowed in the wake.
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CHAPTER V THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE 1788-1812
BEFORE the Columbia returned again, another rash enterprise of Boston merchants, an attempt to enter the Canton market through imitation of the British East India Company, had failed. The ship Massachu- setts, of almost eight hundred tons burthen, the largest vessel constructed to that date in an American ship- yard, was built at Quincy in 1789 for Samuel Shaw and other Boston merchants. Her model and dimen- sions were taken from a British East-Indiaman, and her equipment and roster, with midshipmen and cap- tain's servants, imitated the Honourable Company so far as Yankee economy permitted. Under the com- mand of Captain Job Prince, the Massachusetts sailed from Boston on March 28, 1790. She carried a gen- eral cargo, which her owners expected to exchange at Batavia for goods suitable for Canton. But the Dutch authorities (as one might have foreseen) refused a permit. When the Massachusetts arrived at Canton with an unsalable cargo, after a long and tempestuous voyage, Samuel Shaw gladly seized an opportunity to sell her for $65,000 to the Danish East India Company. This experience prejudiced American ship- owners against vessels larger than five hundred tons, and determined the merchants of Boston to concen- trate on the Northwest fur trade.
"The habits and ordinary pursuits of the New Eng- landers qualified them in a peculiar manner for carry- ing on this trade," wrote one of them, "and the em-
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THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE
barrassed state of Europe gave them ... almost a monopoly of the most lucrative part of it." Salem merchants preferred the Cape of Good Hope route, over which they attained their first success; English- men, Philadelphians, and New Yorkers soon dropped out; and by 1801, out of sixteen ships on "The Coast" (as Boston called it this early) all but two were Bos- tonian. The masters and mates, and at first the crews, were for the most part Bostonian, and the vessels of Boston registry. So it is no wonder that the Chinook jargon, the pidgin English of the Coast, names United States citizens "Boston men" as distinguished from " Kintshautsh (King George) men."
The most successful vessels in the Northwest fur trade were small, well-built brigs and ships of one hundred to two hundred and fifty tons burthen (say sixty-five to ninety feet long), constructed in the ship- yards from the Kennebec to Scituate. Larger vessels were too difficult to work through the intricacies of the Northwest Coast. They were heavily manned, in case of an Indian attack; and copper-bottomed by Paul Revere's newly invented process, to prevent accumu- lating barnacles and weeds in tropic waters. The Win- ships' Albatross, which neglected this precaution, took almost six months to round Cape Horn, and found her speed reduced to two knots an hour. Clearing from Boston in the autumn, in order to pass the high lati- tudes during the Antarctic summer, they generally arrived on the Coast by spring.
"The passage around Cape Horn from the East- ward I positively assert," wrote Captain Porter, of the frigate Essex, "is the most dangerous, most difficult, and attended with more hardships, than that of the same distance in any other part of the world." A passage in which many a great ship has met her death;
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in which the head winds and enormous seas put small vessels at a great disadvantage. Yet, so far as I have learned, not one of these Boston Nor'westmen failed to round the Horn in safety.
To obtain fresh provisions and prevent scurvy, the Nor'west traders broke their voyage at least twice; at the Cape Verde Islands, the Falklands, sometimes Galapagos for a giant tortoise, and invariably Hawaii. For these were leisurely days in seafaring, when a homeward-bound vessel would stand by for hours while the crew of an outward-bounder wrote letters home. Captain Ingraham on his passage out in the Hope, in 1791, discovered and named the Washington group of the Marquesas Islands, whose women (so he informed the jealous officers of the Columbia) were "as much handsomer than the natives of the Sandwich Islands as the women of Boston are handsomer than a Guinea negro."
After the soft embrace of South Sea Islands, the savage grandeur of the Northwest Coast threw a chill on first-comers. Behind rocks and shingle beaches, on which the long Pacific rollers broke and roared in- cessantly, spruce and fir-clad mountains rose into the clouds, which distilled the sea-borne moisture in almost daily showers. The jagged and picturesque coast-line - a Maine on magnificent scale - offered countless harbors; but behind every beach on the outer margin was a mass of dank undergrowth, impenetrable even for the natives, whose dugout canoes served for hunting and fishing, transport and war.
On making his landfall, a Boston Nor'westman came to anchor off the nearest Indian village, bartered so long as he could do business, and then moved on to one after another of the myriad bays and coves until his
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THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE
hold was full of valuable furs. It was a difficult and hazardous trade, requiring expert discrimination in making up a cargo, the highest skill in navigation, and unceasing vigilance in all dealings with the Indians.
The Northwest Indians were dangerous customers. Captain Kendrick, on parting with Gray during their pioneer voyage, wrote him, "treet the Natives with Respect where Ever you go. Cultivate frindship with them as much as possibel and take Nothing from them But what you pay them for according to a fair agree- ment, and not suffer your peopel to affront them or treet them Ill." Gray obeyed, although he found the Indians already treacherous and aggressive; the result, he believed, of English outrages. The Boston men, both from interest and humanity, endeavored by just and tactful dealings to win the natives' confidence. But their work was hampered by irresponsible fly-by- nights who would pirate a cargo of skins, and never return.
In the early days, scarcely a voyage passed without a battle. Captain Kendrick lost a son, and was once driven from his own vessel by an Indian Amazon and her braves. The Columbia lost her second mate, and several members of her crew at "Murderers' Harbor." In 1803, the natives near Nootka Sound attacked the Amorys' ship Boston, Captain John Salter, and slaughtered all the ship's company but two; one of whom, John Jewitt, lived to write a narrative that thrilled generations of schoolboys. Given a firm mas- ter and stout crew, the Nor'west trading vessels could take care of themselves. Beside swivel-guns on the bulwarks, they were armed with six to twenty cannon, kept well shotted with grape, langrage or canister; and provided with boarding nettings, muskets, pistols, cutlasses and boarding pikes. The quarterdecks were
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
loopholed for musket fire, the hatches were veritable 'pill-boxes.' When a flotilla of dugouts surrounded the vessel, only a few natives were permitted on board at one time, and men armed with blunderbusses were sent into the cross-trees, lest the waiting customers lose patience.
Even peaceably inclined, the natives were hard to please. "They do not seem to covet usefull things," writes Captain Gray's clerk, "but anything that looks pleasing to the eye, or what they call riches." They rated a fellow-Indian socially by his superfluous blankets, by copper tea-kettles that were never used, and by bunches of old keys worn like a necklace and kept bright by constant rubbing. When rebuked by Captain Sturgis for this wasteful display, an Indian chief anticipated Veblen by adverting to the Boston fashion of placing brass balls on iron fences, to tarnish every night and be polished by the housemaid every morning!
The Indians evidently had more discrimination than generally acknowledged, for on her first voyage the Columbia carried large numbers of snuff-bottles, rat- traps, Jews'-harps, and pocket mirrors, which (except for the last) were a dead loss. Her second cargo, in 1790, is typical of the Northwest fur trade as long as it lasted. From Herman Brimmer were bought 143 sheets of copper, many pieces of blue, red, and green 'duffills' and scarlet coating. Solomon Cotton sold the Columbia's owners 4261 quarter-pound 'chissells'; Asa Hammond, 150 pairs shoes at 75 cents; Benjamin Greene, Jr., blue duffle trousers at 92 cents, pea jackets, Flushing great coats, watch-coats and 'fear- noughts';1 Samuel Parkman, 6 gross 'gimblets,' and
1 A stout woolen cloth, used for outside clothing at sea. The chisels were merely short strips of iron. Duffles, also a coarse woolen, had been
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The Ship BOSTON takenby the SAVAGES at NOOTKA SOUND, March 04 1803.
CAPTURE OF A NOR'WESTMAN BY INDIANS
THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE
12 gross buttons; Baker & Brewer, striped duffle blanketing; Samuel Fales, 14 M 20d. nails; and the United States government, 100 old muskets and blunderbusses.1 Very few of these articles were manu- factured in Massachusetts, and sometimes a Nor'west- man would make up a cargo in England before starting for the Coast. New England rum, that ancient medium for savage barter, is curiously absent from the North- west fur trade. Molasses and ship-biscuit were used instead of liquor to treat the natives.
The principal fur sought by Boston traders was that of the sea-otter, of which the mandarins had never been able to obtain enough from Russian hunters. Next to a beautiful woman and a lovely infant, said Captain Sturgis, a prime sea-otter skin two feet by five, with its short, glossy jet-black fur, was the finest natural object in the world. Its price varied consider- ably. Captain Gray's mate obtained two hundred skins at Queen Charlotte's Island for two hundred trade chisels (mere bits of strap iron); but at Nootka Sound the price was ten chisels apiece, or six inches square of sheet copper. Most vessels took a metal-
used by New Englanders in the beaver trade since the seventeenth century.
1 Most Boston business firms who do not figure in the invoices are found among those supplying the outfit. John Derby, part owner, fur- nished 4 cannon and 8 swivels (probably from one of his father's former privateers), and Captain D. Hathorn (great-uncle of Nathaniel Haw- thorne) freighted them from Salem. S. &S. Salisbury furnished twine and lead pencils; John Joy, one medicine chest; Thomas Amory Jr. & Co., 14 bbls. pitch and turpentine; J. & T. Lamb, 6 anchors; Josiah Bradlee, horn 'lantherns,' tin kettles and a coffee pot; Samuel Whitwell, a blacksmith's bellows; J. Lovering & Sons, 27 1b. tallow; Elisha Sigourney, 71 lb. grape shot; J. L. & B. Austin, cordage; Jonathan Winship, 135 bbls. beef; Mungo Mackay, 3 hds. N.E. rum; Lewis Hoyt, 2 hds. W.I. rum and 3 kegs essence of spruce; Wm. Boardman Jr., 3 ironbound casks; Robt. & Jos. Davis 20 bbls. cider, 6 of cranberries, 2 of barberries and 10 pigs. (Columbia MSS., 59.)
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MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
worker to make tools and weapons to order. Captain Ingraham's armorer made iron collars and bracelets, which became all the rage on the Coast and brought three otter skins each. Captain Sturgis, observing that the Indians used ermine pelts for currency, procured five thousand of them at the Leipzig fair for thirty cents apiece. On his next voyage he purchased one morning five hundred and sixty sea-otter skins, worth fifty dollars apiece in Canton, at the rate of five ermines, or a dollar and a half, each. But he so in- flated the currency that it soon lost value! Later, not- ing that war-captives were a recognized form of wealth among the Indians, some Boston traders began buying them from tribes which were long on slaves, and selling them to tribes which were short. This form of specu- lation in foreign exchange was sternly reproved by George Lyman, and forbidden to his vessels and ship- masters.
The first white men to attempt a permanent estab- lishment in the Oregon country were the Winship brothers of Brighton - Abiel, the Boston merchant, Captain Jonathan, Jr., and Captain Nathan, who com- manded the family ship Albatross. On June 4, 1810, she sailed forty miles up the Columbia River and anchored off an oak grove, where her crew broke ground for a vegetable garden, and started work on a log house. But the Chinook Indians, the fur middle- men of Oregon, would brook no competition. Having no warships or marines to back them up, the Winships were forced to evacuate. It was a sad disappointment. Jonathan Winship, Jr., whose hobby was horticulture, "hoped to have planted a Garden of Eden on the shores of the Pacific, and made that wilderness to blossom like the rose." Others fulfilled his dream, bringing slips from the very rose-garden of Brighton
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where Captain Jonathan spent the long tranquil years of retirement he had earned so well.1
Unless exceedingly lucky, vessels remained eighteen months to two years on the Coast, before proceeding to Canton, and it was commonly three years before Long Wharf saw them again. Small brigs and sloops were sent out, or built on the Coast, to continue the collection of furs during the absence of the larger vessel.
The Sandwich Islands proved an ideal spot to re- fresh a scorbutic crew, and even to complete the cargo. Captain Kendrick (who plied between Canton and the Coast in the Lady Washington until his death in 1794) discovered sandalwood, an article much in demand at Canton, growing wild on the Island of Kauai. A vigorous trade with the native chiefs in this fragrant commodity was started by Boston fur-traders in "the Islands"; leading to more Hawaiian visits to New England, to the missionary effort of 1820, and even- tually to annexation.
Another variation to the standard China voyage was contraband fur-trading along the coast of Spanish California. According to H. H. Bancroft, the first American vessel to anchor in California waters was the ship Otter of Boston, one hundred and sixty-eight tons, Ebenezer Dorr, Jr., master, which put in at Monterey for provisions in 1796. All trade and inter- course between Boston men and Californians was con- traband; but both seized every opportunity to flout the Laws of the Indies.
1 "Solid Men of Boston" (MS.), 70. Jonathan, Jr., founded the beef- slaughtering business at Brighton in 1775, and supplied the American army and French fleet during the Revolution. Charles Winship, another brother in this remarkable family, died at Valparaiso about 1800, when in command of the brigantine Betsy, bound for the Northwest Coast. A second Captain Charles Winship, son of a fifth brother, died at Val- paraiso in 1819 or 1820 when in command of a sealing voyage.
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Boston vessels generally carried a Carta de Amistad from "Don Juan Stoughton, Consul de S.M.C. para los Estados Unidos de New Hampshire, Massachu- setts," etc. This was to be used if forced to put into one of His Catholic Majesty's ports "par mal Tiempo o otre acontecimiento imprevisto" - which exigency was pretty sure to occur when the land breeze smelt sea-otterish. Richard J. Cleveland, of Salem, owner and master of the brig Lelia Byrd, tried to make off with some pelts under the very nose of Commandant Don Manuel Rodriguez, who retaliated in the blood- less "Battle of San Diego" on March 21, 1803. But untoward incidents were rare. At his next port, San Quintin, the Lelia Byrd's people got on beautifully with a group of mission fathers who came down to trade and gossip. They spent two merry weeks together on this lonely shore, dining alternately in tent and cabin, inaugurating a half-century of close and friendly rela- tions between Puritan and Padre on the California coast. Nothing like a common interest in smuggling to smooth religious differences!
Captain Joseph O'Cain, of Boston, in a ship of two hundred and eighty tons named after himself and built on North River for the Winships, inaugurated a new system of otter-hunting in 1804. Putting in at New Archangel (Sitka), he persuaded Baranov, the genial Russian factor, to lend him a hundred and fifty Aleut Indians, on shares. These expert otter-hunters, putting out from the ship in their skin canoes, like Gloucester fishermen in dories, obtained eleven hun- dred sea-otter pelts for Captain O'Cain in his first California cruise. Kills were made under the very walls of the San Francisco presidio. Three years later, O'Cain chartered his ship Eclipse of Boston to the Russian-American Company, traded their furs at
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Canton, visited Nagasaki and Petropavlovsk, lost the vessel on the Aleutian Islands, built another out of the wreck, and returned to trade once more.1 California sea-otter and fur-seal hunting, combined with contra- band mission trade, was pursued with much success for about ten years, when the Russians declined further aid to their competitors.
Another class of Pacific fur-traders were the "seal- skinners." About 1783, the ship States, owned by a Boston woman,2 was fitted out for a voyage to the Falklands in search of fur-seal and sea-elephant oil. Some of the sealskins obtained were carried on a venture to China, and the result encouraged others to follow. Although sealskins brought but a dollar or two at Canton, such quantities (even a hundred thou- sand on a single voyage) could be obtained merely by landing on a beach and clubbing the helpless animals, that vessels were especially fitted out to go in search of them, and the smaller Nor'westmen occasionally picked up a few thousand on their way to the Coast. Connecticut was more conspicuous in this trade than Massachusetts; but several vessels were commanded by Nantucketers, and others were owned there and in Boston or Salem. As in whaling, the men were gen- erally shipped on shares, and often cheated out of them. Masafuero, in the Juan Fernandez group, was the center for seal-killing; but other islands off the Chilian coast, St. Paul and Amsterdam Islands in the
1 One would like to know more of this Captain O'Cain. He was an Irishman whose parents lived in Boston, and first visited the Coast in 1795 on an English vessel, whose master, at his request, left him at Santa Barbara. He managed to return to Boston in time to be married there in 1799.
2 'Lady ' or 'Madam' Haley, as she was called in Boston, was a sister of the famous Jack Wilkes: for second husband, she married Patrick Jeffery, a Boston merchant.
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Indian Ocean, South Georgia, the Farralones and Santa Catalina off California, were visited before 1810. Gangs of sealers would be left on some lonely island in the South Pacific, while the vessel smuggled goods into Callao, Concepcion, Valparaiso, and smaller places like Coquimbo and Pisco. Amasa Delano, of Duxbury (private, U.S.A., at fourteen, privateersman at sixteen, master shipbuilder at twenty-one, second mate of the ship Massachusetts), with his brother built the sealers Perseverance and Pilgrim, and sailed as far as Tas- mania, where they matched rascalities and exchanged brutalities with one of the British convict colonies. It was a Boston sealskinner, the Dorrs' Otter, which rescued from Botany Bay Thomas Muir, one of the victims of Pitt's Sedition Act. Eighty years later, New Bedford whalers were extending the same cour- tesy to exiled Fenians.
The first commercial relations between the United States and the west coast of South America, were established by sealers, Nor'westmen, and whalers putting in "under stress of weather" to obtain provi- sions, and indulge in the favorite Yankee pastime of swapping. To a certain extent they imported ideas; Richard J. Cleveland made a point of spreading republican propaganda at Valparaiso. The manner of their reception depended on the official mood. Bernard Magee in the ship Jefferson had only to present his ship's papers, signed by Washington, to receive the freedom of Valparaiso from Governor-General Don Ambrosio O'Higgins. Others were not so fortunate, and many a poor sailor, forced against his will into smuggling, spent in consequence a term of years in a South American calaboose.
Whaling was another industry of maritime Massa- chusetts that renewed its strength in the Pacific. But
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we must postpone our whaling voyage lest we lose sight of the Canton market, the golden lodestone for every otter-skin, sealskin, or sandalwood log collected on Northwest Coast, California, or Pacific Islands.
CHAPTER VI THE CANTON MARKET 1784-1812
THE Northwest trade, the Hawaiian trade, and the fur- seal fisheries were only a means to an end: the pro- curing of Chinese teas and textiles, to sell again at home and abroad. China was the only market for sea- otter, and Canton the only Chinese port where foreign- ers were allowed to exchange it.
Major Shaw's description of the Canton trade in 1784 would fit any year to 1840. After a voyage of several weeks from Hawaii, a Yankee trader passed be- tween Luzon and Formosa, made Lintin Island, ran a gantlet of piratical junks, paused at the old Portuguese factory of Macao, and sailed up-river past the Bogue forts to Whampoa, the anchorage for all foreign mer- chantmen. There the Hoppo came aboard to receive gifts for wife, mother, and self, and measure the ship for her 'cumshaw-duty.' Thence her cargo was light- ered in chop-boats twelve miles upstream to Canton, landed at Jackass Point, and stored in a factory or hong hired from one of the twelve Chinese security merchants, who had a monopoly of foreign trade, and acted as commercial godfathers to the Fan-Kwae, or foreign devils.
To Yankee seamen, fresh from the savage wilderness of the Northwest, how marvelous, bewildering was old Canton! Against a background of terraced hongs with their great go-downs or warehouses, which screened the forbidden City of Rams from foreign devils' gaze, flowed the river, bearing a city of boats the like of
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THE HONGS OF OLD CANTON
THE PAGODA ANCHORAGE, WHAMPOA
THE CANTON MARKET
which he had never dreamed. Moored to the shore were flower-boats, their upper works cunningly carved into the shape of flowers and birds, and strange sounds issuing from their painted windows. Mandarin boats decorated with gay silk pennants, and propelled by double banks of oars, moved up and down in stately cadence. Great tea-deckers, with brightly lacquered topsides and square sail of brown matting, brought the Souchong, Young Hyson, and Bohea from up- river. In and out darted thousands of little sampans, housing entire families who plied their humble trades afloat. Provision dealers cried their wares from boats heaped high with colorful and deadly produce. Bar- bers' skiffs announced their coming by the twanging of tweezers, emblem of their skippers' painful profes- sion. Twilight brought the boat people to their moor- ings, a bamboo pole thrust in oozy bottom, and paper lanterns diffused a soft light over the river. For color and exotic flavor there was no trade like the old China trade, no port like Canton.
Boston traders, in contrast to the arrogant officials of Honourable John, were welcomed by the Chinese; and on their part acquired an esteem for the Chinese character that has endured to this day. Russell Sturgis, who traveled and resided in many lands, said that he never knew better gentlemen than the Hong merchants. Houqua's name was a household word in Boston mer- chants' families. They never tired of describing old Houqua tearing up the $72,000 promissory note of a homesick Bostonian, with the remark, "You and I olo flen; you belong honest man only no got chance .... Just now have setlee counter, alla finishee; you go, you please." But trade did not always go on in this princely manner. The Chinese were able to instruct even Bostonians in the pleasant art of smuggling. There
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was much clandestine trade in otter-skins from Yankee ships in Macao Roads, or the near-by Dirty Butter Bay; good training for opium-running at a later period.
The strange laws and customs of the Chinese led to the creation of Boston mercantile agencies at Canton in order to ease the way for American traders. Major Shaw established the first, Shaw & Randall, on his return to Canton as American consul in 1786. The Columbia's cargo was handled by him, and a commis- sion of seven and one-half per cent charged on the re- turn lading. Competition later reduced this to two and one-half per cent, of which one was returned to the su- percargo. The most famous house of our period was Perkins & Co., a branch of J. & T. H. Perkins, of Bos- ton. Established in 1803, the illness of the chief put this concern under the charge of his sixteen-year-old clerk, John Perkins Cushing. The young man's letters were so precocious that his uncles made him permanent head man, and took him into partnership. Except for two brief visits home, Cushing remained at Canton thirty years, and became the most wealthy and highly respected foreign merchant in China.
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