The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  In the growing literature on the opening of America’s trade with China there is a tendency to begin the story with the expeditions sent out after British recognition of the independence of the United States in 1783. That is when direct contact was established between North America and Chinese ports. However, American ‘Red Sea men’ were bringing exotic goods to North America a century earlier – by ‘Red Sea’ was meant the Indian Ocean. Five or six ships reached Pennsylvania from the ‘Red Sea’ in April 1698, and others arrived at the same time off Connecticut. Among those sending out ships was the wealthy Jacob Leisler, a smart operator with a murky record of contraband trade and privateering, who had manoeuvred himself into the role of lieutenant-governor of New York. He sent the modestly named Jacob to Madagascar and India in 1689. Leisler was born in Germany, and he had more experience of the Atlantic than he could have wished: in 1678 he and his ship were seized by Barbary corsairs in one of the Atlantic archipelagoes, where he had been loading wine, and he found himself paying a vast ransom of over £2,000.8 The Jacob was still at sea when his tumultuous career ended with his execution for treason against William and Mary in 1691, but the sailors, who came back to America in 1693, handed out dozens of bribes in gold and silver to ‘prevent them from being put to trouble’ by the new governor of New York. The crew told the tale that they had thrown their eastern goods overboard when they heard what had happened to Leisler, but no one can have believed that then and no one does so now.

  It was standard practice to unload goods on a deserted American beach, letting most of the sailors disappear with their share, and then to sail into harbour where officials could be, and expected to be, bribed to ignore this contraband trade. The bribe would be made up of silver coins already collected in a whip-round of the sailors before they went their separate ways. Many cargoes contained large consignments of tea, which was easily available in the Dutch West Indies for those willing to circumvent the customs regulations imposed by Great Britain – the Dutch had no qualms about selling to American smugglers, and they sold plenty of Chinese porcelain to the Americans, for that too was smuggled in via the West Indies.9 More tea arrived by these unofficial routes than through the customs houses of Boston, New York or Philadelphia. When smuggling was so widespread it may seem odd that tea became the catalyst for revolt against British taxation, and ultimately against British rule.

  The China trade was an issue from the moment that rebellion against British rule broke out in the Thirteen Colonies. The Boston Tea Party, during which 342 chests of tea were dumped in the town’s harbour in December 1773, was the culmination of a long series of protests against British taxation of tea, and the monopoly exercised by British firms in the tea trade. In the weeks before the Tea Party, British ships loaded with 2,000 chests of tea, or approximately 90,000 pounds of tea, had arrived in North America, where consumption of honestly acquired tea amounted to about 200,000 pounds of tea a year by 1770. The complex history of these events goes right back to the restrictive Navigation Act of 1651 and to the adjustments to the taxation of tea made by the British Parliament in the years before the Tea Party. This legislation culminated in the Tea Act a few months before the Tea Party, which assigned a monopoly on tea exports to America to the East India Company at a time when the EIC was in increasing financial difficulty, and facing increasing competition on the routes to the East; it urgently needed help from the British government. American opposition to the new tea taxes took several forms: customs officials were beaten up; rumours spread that English tea had been poisoned with smallpox germs; and a tea temperance movement recommended herbal teas made out of all-American raspberry leaves. In the event, herbal teas made only a slight dent in the tea market. Caffeine was queen.10

  The British government’s new tax regime reduced the price of tea in the American colonies. But if prices fell below a certain point contraband tea traders would suffer, since legally imported tea would be available more cheaply than the tea they picked up in Holland or the Dutch West Indies. Unhelpfully, the EIC produced a list of partners in the North American ports that left out some tea brokers, for whom exclusion spelled ruin. Boston and the other coastal ports had become caught up in manoeuvres whose main aim was not to squeeze the American colonies, but to save the East India Company. In that way, what was happening in the Indian Ocean and along the routes to Macau and Canton was having an effect on what was happening right over the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.11

  Tea was still on the menu once peace with Britain was signed: the Americans immediately seized the opportunity to explore the sea routes to China. The ambitions of the new nation were clearly expressed by Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, in 1783 in an early example of the celebration of the Stars and Stripes (though at that time the stars were arranged like the flag of the European Union): ‘Navigation will carry the American flag around the globe itself; and display the thirteen stripes and new constellation at Bengal and Canton, on the Indus and Ganges, on the Whang-ho and the Yang-tse-kiang.’12 So determined were the Americans to reach China directly that the first of their ships to be sent to China, the Empress of China, left New York in February 1784 at the same time as another vessel slipped out of the city bound for London and carrying ‘the definitive articles of peace’ between the United States and Great Britain. Yet the prospects were not quite as bright as the optimistic President of Yale averred. Great Britain continued to block trade between the United States and its own valuable possessions in the Caribbean, which were a prime source of contraband goods from the Far East. It was far from clear that wider European markets would be open to the Americans, and that might well include European colonies in Africa, Asia and South America as well. The answer was to go global, taking advantage of the simple fact that the Americans were now free from the authority of the East India Company.13

  Sending a ship to China was a dangerous and expensive business. The Empress of China was built in Boston, and was about a hundred feet in length, displacing 360 tons. The bottom of its hull was coated with copper, to keep at bay the barnacles and sea slugs that would eat into the wood during a long voyage. But this was only one of the ships that the investors, led by Robert Morris (English-born) and Daniel Parker, intended to send to China; the value of the goods and money on board was said to be £150,000. They were to sail on the riskiest route of all, around Cape Horn and into the Pacific Ocean, whereupon two ships would travel along the coast of South and North America until they reached the islands and ice floes on which seals and sea otters were known to congregate. The aim was to kill and skin as many animals as possible, and take their fur to Canton, where the third ship should already have arrived.

  Everything indicated that Chinese traders would leap at the opportunity to buy all this fur: Morris and Parker were relying on information from an American named Ledyard who had taken part in one of Captain Cook’s voyages, and had seen what happened when the English ships arrived in Canton carrying the pelts that the Chinese craved. It might be possible to take advantage of the doubts the English had about developing a fur trade in the far north of the Pacific. Captain Cook recorded his thoughts in the journal of his third and final Pacific voyage, in 1778, as he made his way along the coast of Alaska: ‘There is no doubt but a very beneficial fur trade might be carried on with the Inhabitants of this vast coast, but unless a northern passage is found it seems rather too remote for Great Britain to receive any emolument from it.’14 The English sailors discovered that there was intense demand for the sea otter furs, which contain an enormous number of hairs per square inch, making them the warmest furs anyone in China had ever found; besides, the type of fur one wore was an indication of status, sea otter fur being a sign of wealth and distinction. Traditionally, the Chinese relied on Russian fur-traders to supply pelts from the northern Pacific – the Russians could even be found on Vancouver Island, and they ventured right up to the Kamchatka Peninsula and to the Aleutian Islands strung out to the west of Alaska.15 If the Americans could break into this
traffic, they would have something valuable to sell to the Chinese, since it was not obvious what else the Chinese might be willing to buy from the United States.

  Morris and Parker dreamed of sending another three ships to China by way of the Cape of Good Hope, but they could not arouse much interest in the idea, and the plan to send ships to seal country in the northern Pacific began to pall. The early optimism of the first investors was soon dissipated. The funds available were only sufficient for one ship after all, the Empress of China, and the idea of sending it through the Pacific had to be abandoned; the safe route around the bottom of Africa, created by the Portuguese, was chosen instead. The ship was loaded with thirty tons of ginseng, a product of the Appalachian mountains known to be in high demand in Chinese medicine; $20,000 in Spanish coin; also furs and other goods.16 Even though the original plans had to be scaled back, the departure of the Empress of China was celebrated as the great event that it was, with a thirteen-gun salute representing the thirteen states of the Union.17

  One New York newspaper printed a poem by a prolific poet, Philip Freneau, that made plain the political as well as the commercial significance of the voyage, invoking the Roman goddess of war at the very start:

  With clearance from Bellona won

  She spreads her wings to meet the Sun,

  Those golden regions to explore

  Where George forbade to sail before …

  To that old track no more confin’d,

  By Britain’s jealous court assign’d,

  She round the stormy Cape shall sail

  And eastward, catch the odorous gale.

  To countries plac’d in burning climes

  And islands of remotest times

  She now her eager course explores,

  And soon shall greet Chinesian shores.

  From thence their fragrant TEAS to bring

  Without the leave of Britain’s king;

  And PORCELAIN WARE, enchas’d in gold,

  The product of that finer mould …18

  Freneau had served at sea during the Revolutionary War. He and other Americans keenly awaited the outcome of a voyage during which the ability of the United States to break into new markets was being tested – an outcome, in other words, of significance for the whole of the new country, and not just for Morris, Parker and the other investors.

  II

  The voyage passed through mainly calm seas of the sort that irritated diarists and letter-writers looking for drama on the high seas. The ship’s purser complained that ‘it has been one dreary waste of sky & water, without a pleasing sight to cheer us’. One went to sea for excitement, and all that happened was that the captain fell against a railing and bruised his head and arm.19 When the Empress of China reached the Sunda Strait leading into the South China Sea, the Americans found a French ship at anchor whose crew were delighted to hear stories about the American Revolution, which France had supported; so this ship, the Triton, agreed to accompany the Empress to Macau and Canton, showing the way and helping to fend off any attacks. In Macau the Portuguese welcomed the new arrivals, even though they had never seen their flag before. The Americans had little to fear: as they made their way up the tangled waterways of the Pearl River towards Canton in August 1784 they were greeted not just by the French, the Dutch and the Danes but by the British. The American supercargo, Samuel Shaw, was impressed by the polite conduct of the British, which is all the more impressive as he had served with distinction in the Revolutionary army:

  The behaviour of the gentlemen on board was perfectly polite and agreeable. On board the English it was impossible to avoid speaking of the late war. They allowed it to have been a great mistake on the part of their nation, – were happy it was over, – glad to see us in this part of the world, – hoped all prejudices would be laid aside, – and added, that, let England and America be united, they might bid defiance to all the world.20

  Meanwhile the French let the Americans use their storehouse, or ‘factory’, until an American warehouse was made ready. Relations between the representatives of the European nations were very harmonious; they knew that their safety depended on mutual support, and that negotiations with a sometimes unpredictable Chinese government could be delicate. So, when a Chinese subject was accidentally killed by a ceremonial cannon shot from the Lady Hughes, a British ship that plied between India and Canton, its supercargo, named Smith, was arrested, and all the foreign supercargoes lodged a protest – but the Americans alone stood by the British even though the Chinese briefly suspended trade with them at the height of the row.21 The Chinese were perplexed that these new arrivals came from a state of which they had not heard, and needed to be shown a map before they were convinced it existed; everything seemed to suggest that they were just more Englishmen, though eventually the Chinese called them ‘New People’ and later still ‘Flowery-Flag Devils’, since they thought the stars on the American flag were flowers. The Americans had thought ahead, and the captain of the Empress was supplied with a letter that was indeed flowery, addressed to whatever ‘Emperors, Kings, Republicks, Princes, Dukes, Earls’, and so on ad infinitum, he might meet; it was made plain that he was a citizen of the United States of America and Congress, no less, requested that he should be treated ‘in a becoming manner’ and be allowed to trade freely.22

  In accordance with closely prescribed Chinese policy, the Empress of China had anchored at Whampoa Island, a dozen miles from Canton, rather than in the teeming city itself. The supercargo Smith described the conditions the foreign merchants had to endure:

  The factories at Canton, occupying less than a quarter of a mile in front, are situated on the bank of the river. The quay is enclosed by a rail-fence, which has stairs and a gate opening from the water to each factory, where all merchandise is received and sent away. The limits of the Europeans are extremely confined; there being, besides the quay, only a few streets in the suburbs, occupied by the trading people, which they are allowed to frequent.23

  As in the merchant fonduks of the medieval world, the ground floor was given over to the goods themselves; the first floor contained parlours and offices where deals were struck; and above that was the hostel where the merchants lived.24 They were not supposed to bring in women, but occasionally smuggled wives or mistresses in nonetheless. Sometimes Chinese merchants did invite their European counterparts to dinner, but it was impossible to squeeze any useful information out of them; and the tedium of life along the hot and humid riverbank, with a working day of up to fifteen hours, was eased by trips up and down the river to nearby pleasure gardens, and even, in the early nineteenth century, by yacht races along the river, despite official attempts to forbid this.

  By the end of the eighteenth century the Europeans decided to advertise their existence more visibly. Individual merchants claimed that they were consuls who represented their home power, and the consuls made sure to run up their flag, so that the factory area became a blaze of colour, beginning with the Austrian consul (who was in fact a Scot) in 1779. The Prussians, Danes, Genoese and Swedes followed suit, and paintings of the European factories were livened up by many of these countries’ colours. The trading community also contained people of non-European origin: Armenians, Parsees, Bombay Muslims, although in the early nineteenth century the largest groups were the British and the Americans – after 1812 and the end of a brief spat with the British Navy, the Americans had taken advantage of their neutrality during the Napoleonic Wars to transport tea back to Europe without the interference that every European nation faced as alliances were forged and broken with dazzling speed.25

  Despite these pretensions, what really mattered was a good relationship with the Hong merchants, members of the Co-hong guild which had been set up in the mid-eighteenth century (on much earlier foundations) to manage trade with the foreigners. By 1831 a complex set of rules, often honoured in the breach, had been imposed in the name of the emperor. Foreign merchants were not supposed to reside permanently in Canton; they were not allowed to b
ring women into the factories; they were not to take trips in sedan chairs; they could only communicate with the government through the Hong merchants.26 A ‘Canton System’ came into being, supervised by a powerful agent of the emperor, known as the Hoppo, whose office went back to 1645. One of the most memorable moments in a voyage up the Pearl River was the elaborate measuring ceremony, when the Hoppo would come on board and check the size of the incoming vessel with long silk tapes. But this was not just a matter of recording length and breadth. The Hoppos were flattered with gifts, and gave gifts in return, consisting of a couple of cows, a store of wheat and some strong drink; these practical gifts were a sign that the emperor cared about the welfare of the foreign barbarians who came to his lands, although the Europeans were known to complain among themselves that the animals were too old or scrawny to be edible. The Europeans would lay on music, make lengthy speeches and dispense plenty of wine; gun salutes would be fired time and again. Doing this again and again became tedious, so the Hoppos would save up ships and try to measure six or seven in one day.27