Although Jardine and Matheson’s social world in Canton was mostly British (and within that, mostly Scottish), their business partnerships were far more varied. Jardine’s chief correspondent in India was a Parsi named Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, whose career trajectory had in some ways mimicked his own. The son of a poor family, orphaned at thirteen, Jeejeebhoy was born within a year of Jardine (who lost his own father at nine), and like Jardine he entered the China trade in hopes of finding a better life abroad. After his parents died, Jeejeebhoy moved to Bombay, where he worked for a bottle seller and began to learn English. He made his first voyage to Canton in 1799 as an apprentice to one of his cousins. Soon after, he began chartering his own ships with borrowed money for a succession of continuing trade voyages to China. In 1805, he and Jardine first crossed paths when Jeejeebhoy took passage to Canton on the same Company ship where Jardine was surgeon. Their ship was captured by a French frigate and both men were taken prisoner, then finally abandoned by their French captors at the Cape of Good Hope.33
Jardine and Jeejeebhoy made their separate ways home in 1805, but the contact appears to have held. After the misery of his imprisonment, Jeejeebhoy decided not to risk traveling to China anymore, instead sending cargoes under consignment to Canton to be dealt with by an agent—who by the early 1820s was usually William Jardine. With Jardine as his trusted partner, Jeejeebhoy could remain in Bombay while still reaping the rewards of the Canton trade. A bold speculator in cotton and opium—one of the boldest of his time—by 1822 he had amassed a huge fortune from his China ventures and was beginning to make Jardine a wealthy man as well.34
If there is any pattern to be found among the foreigners who got richest from the Chinese drug trade, it is that far from being stigmatized by their line of business, back home they would count among the most admired members of their respective societies. As with the Forbes brothers’ uncle Thomas Handasyd Perkins and his many philanthropic projects in the Boston area, by the 1820s Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy was making a name for himself as a philanthropist in Bombay, using the money he earned from opium speculation to found schools, hospitals, and other prominent public works.35 Eventually even William Jardine would find himself in Parliament with the ear of the prime minister, though that is getting ahead of the story.
After John Murray Forbes arrived in Canton, he moved into the building where his uncle’s business, Perkins & Co., was based—the so-called Swedish factory, five doors up from Jardine and Matheson (and which, despite its name, was entirely filled with Americans).36 Like most other firms, Perkins & Co. had two faces: the aboveground trade in tea, silk, cotton, and other legal commodities that took place openly in Canton, and the underground trade in opium that took place at Lintin Island. Living in the Canton factory, John represented the legal, open side of Perkins’s business. His account books from the time reflect mainly the purchase of tea and silks, sundries for the firm’s staff (furniture, soap, chessmen), and fees for the Chinese linguists and servants the firm worked with. Opium appears only as a ghostly presence in the books: the day-to-day supplies for the Lintin receiving ship were included in his reckonings, as were occasional insurance fees for cargoes of Turkish opium—but never the sale thereof, nor any mention of opium from India.37
Perkins & Co.’s business was in disarray after Thomas Forbes’s drowning in 1829, and even Thomas had only been entrusted with full control of the Canton office for a short time before his death. He had made arrangements that if anything should happen to him—knowing that it would be months before anyone else from the family could learn of the news, let alone reach Canton—then the firm’s business should be entrusted temporarily to its chief American rival, a firm founded by a Connecticut orphan named Samuel Russell. By the time John Murray Forbes arrived, Thomas’s bequest had set into motion a process that would ultimately result in the two rival houses—Perkins and Russell—deciding to merge permanently under the name of Russell & Co., forming an interest that would, upon its establishment in 1830, represent the largest American concern in China by far, coming in second only to the East India Company in the size of its legal trade at Canton.38
Americans had always done things differently in China. Without the unifying power of a monopoly company like the British had, the American firms were free traders from the start, working independently in competition with one another. This gave them less collective influence at Canton, but it also meant they had no national issues of prestige at stake in their trade so they avoided the kinds of embarrassment faced by the British during their two failed embassies under Macartney and Amherst. And although the China trade never comprised more than a small piece of America’s overall commerce—in the early nineteenth century it represented only about 5 percent of U.S. foreign trade—the houses involved in it were few in number, and they were closely held by the families involved, so those Americans who managed to succeed in China were able to accumulate truly fabulous fortunes.39
In doing so, though, they had to be creative about how they went about things. With no commercial base in Asia like the East India Company’s colony in India, the Americans were forced to work at a broader level, making longer voyages, buying and selling as they went in a so-called chain trade named for all the links along its way.40 A typical American ship leaving Boston or New York in the early nineteenth century for Canton might first sail down around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, trading American and European goods for seal skins in the South Atlantic along the way, and then land at Mexico or Peru to sell as much of its remaining cargo as possible for silver, which was the most crucial commodity of all. Up to the mid-1820s, when bills of exchange on London began making it more convenient for Americans to buy Chinese goods on British credit than to carry physical specie to Canton, silver—mainly in the form of Spanish dollars—represented three-quarters of the value of all American imports into China.41
From Mexico and Peru, the ship could then continue on up the west coast of the North American continent to Oregon, where its crew would trade iron goods and textiles for sea otter pelts. So regular was this route that when Lewis and Clark first reached the mouth of the Columbia River in 1805, they found that the natives could already speak a bit of English thanks to the Canton fur trade (though their vocabulary, according to Lewis, consisted of little more than “musket,” “powder,” “shot,” “knife,” “damned rascal,” and “son of a bitch”—which gives about as concise a portrait as can be had of the sailors who engaged in this trade).42
From the Pacific Northwest, the American ship could then set a southwest course to Hawaii or the Fiji Islands, where, if it was lucky, it might pick up some sandalwood to bring to Canton. Fair trade was one thing, but the uninvited harvesting of valuable natural resources could spark violence—one American on a ship collecting sandalwood in the South Pacific in 1811 recorded three of his shipmates being killed in a battle with natives on Fiji who “rosted and eat” them. (That unfortunate ship, the Hunter, did make it eventually to China, only to be captured at Macao by HMS Doris as part of the War of 1812’s arrival to the region.)43 After taking on sandalwood, the American vessel could continue across the Pacific and into Southeast Asia to barter for sea cucumber and other delicacies, then perhaps take on a load of rice or sugar at Manila before finally arriving at Canton with a cargo that bore almost no resemblance to the contents of its hold when it left America.44
The directors of Russell & Co., however, threw themselves into India as well. Beginning under Samuel Russell himself in the later 1820s and continuing aggressively under the merged firm after it added Perkins’s business in 1830, Russell & Co. worked with several American brokers based in Calcutta to buy a piece of the British-dominated Indian opium trade. Within a year of the merger, the American firm was handling more than one-fifth of the Indian opium coming into China, posing serious competition to the British traders like Jardine and Matheson who sought to control the country trade.45 In light of later events, the British collectively would wind up receiving nearly all of t
he blame for this commerce. One-fifth, however, was hardly an insignificant share.
Everyone who lived in the Canton factory compound was aware that opium was technically illegal in the Qing Empire, but nobody knew quite what that meant. “Most of our readers know that Opium is strictly forbidden by the laws of China,” observed James Matheson’s Canton Register in April 1828. “Nevertheless [China] is the country, where the principal portion of the Indian Drug is consumed, together with a large quantity of what is produced in Turkey.”46 This was the paradox at the heart of their trade: they knew the commodity was forbidden, but they also knew it was welcome. To shun the opium trade on moral grounds meant giving up the easiest and most effective way to succeed at trade in China, whereas engaging in it carried almost no risk of punishment. For most, it was a temptation too attractive to resist.
And yet these men did not consider themselves immoral. In the following issue of the same paper, the editor complained about a practice whereby certain Western ships were dodging the tariffs they owed on legitimate, dutiable imports by offloading them onto Chinese vessels at Lintin and other islands instead of bringing them to Canton or Macao where they could be properly taxed by the Chinese government. The free-trading editor deplored this practice, writing that “in this age of civilization, and we are happy to think, of moral improvement also, we are unwilling to see any thing that can in the slightest degree detract from that distinguished character, which in former times, gained to the merchants, the title of ‘Princes.’”47 Which was to say that the great reputation of “merchant princes” for civilization and expansive moral virtue was apparently threatened by their avoidance of paying taxes. Selling opium, though, was perfectly fine.
Chinese government efforts to suppress the relatively open traffic were infrequent and halfhearted, in part because many officials were themselves opium users or otherwise involved in the traffic, so they had a vested interest in seeing the trade continue. Those on the coast who bore direct responsibility for controlling the inland flow of the drug were also the most ripe for being bribed by Chinese smugglers, and of course officials in Canton were no strangers to corruption. Jiaqing’s abortive anticorruption campaign after Heshen’s trial had done nothing to rein them in, and the rising supply of opium simply gave them a new source of income. From what the foreigners could see, Chinese enforcement was not just ineffective but almost nonexistent.48
Nevertheless, despite its officially illegal nature, one of the Canton opium trade’s most remarkable features was just how much international trust had been built into it at the wholesale level. Chinese, British, Parsi, and American traders came together from different continents and different languages to traffic in the drug with few written contracts and no protection from laws or their respective governments, their deals typically settled by little more than a handshake—and yet their trade was eminently safe, friendly, and civil. Complaints of cheating or thievery were almost nonexistent, as were incidents of violence between participants on either side. Perversely, it seemed to some observers almost a model for international relations on the grander scale; as one American put it in 1830, “Few men are better diplomatists than the merchants and Chinese brokers” of the Canton opium trade.49 William Jardine, the dean of the British free traders, wrote to a friend back in England that the Canton opium trade was “the safest, and most Gentlemanlike speculation that I am aware of.”50
Whether or not the British and American opium traders admitted there was any moral problem with their chosen profession, those back home were scarcely unaware of opium’s harmful effects—not that European medicine had been terribly good at determining harmfulness, however. Even tea, for example, had long been criticized as a dangerous article. One 1706 London pamphlet by a certain Dr. Duncan, titled Wholesome Advice Against the Abuse of Hot Liquors, lumped tea together with coffee, hot chocolate, and warmed brandy in causing allegedly terrible harm to bodily organs. The abuse of hot drinks, Duncan wrote, “contributes very much to People the Kingdom of Death.”51 Even less forgiving was a pamphlet in 1722 titled An Essay on the Nature, Use, and Abuse, of Tea, which warned that the drink could “depauperate” the blood, its abuse causing a “Depression of the Spirits” that would leave the victim “oppress’d with Fears, Cares, and Anxieties.”52 It maintained that tea’s worst effects were on women, causing “a Dimunition of their prolifick Energy, a Proneness to miscarry, and an Insufficiency to nourish the Child when brought into the World.”53
There were also class-based attacks on tea in England, accusing the poor of spending so much on the drink that they ruined their lives (an argument that would echo in China as Confucian scholars eventually took up their own paternal crusades against opium use by the public). One anonymous British pamphleteer in 1777 condemned tea—along with sugar, white bread, butter, and other “modern luxuries”—as being “the foundation of almost all the poverty, and all the evils which affect the labouring part of mankind.”54 Above and beyond the wasting of scarce money, that author wrote, “It unstrings the nerves, it unbraces the constitution, dissolves nature, and destroys the Englishman.” Under the influence of tea, he claimed, the “pleasing smiles” of English peasant girls gave way to a “haggard, yellow, meagre visage.” They suffered “loss of appetite, sickness, and a puny race of children,” and their families became “dead weight on the landed interest for life.”
Such warnings did nothing to slow the spread and rising popularity of Chinese tea in England, but they did help muddle the British picture of opium—whose defenders typically claimed that it fell somewhere between tea and gin in the spectrum of harmfulness. As opium was known in Great Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century, it was a perfectly legal medicinal product, freely sold by apothecaries, tobacconists, wine sellers, confectioners, and barbers.55 Various liquid tinctures of opium were marketed as painkillers and remedies for coughs and intestinal disorders, sometimes even as a soothing tonic for teething babies (under such ominous names as “Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup”). Opium drops, often mixed with wine in a form known as laudanum, were also well known as a convenient means of committing suicide if taken in a sufficient dose. John Murray Forbes, for one, nearly died as an infant when his mother gave him laudanum to combat seasickness.56
What was comparatively rare in the West, however, and never caught on socially in the way that it did in China, was the recreational use of opium as a source of pleasure. England’s most prominent opium addict of the 1820s and 1830s was a journalist named Thomas De Quincey, a self-described intellectual who had begun using the drug around 1804 and was swept into what he described as an “abyss of divine enjoyment” from which he barely managed to escape.57 In 1821 he documented the horrors of his long addiction in a manuscript titled Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which Charles Lamb helped him publish in four installments in the London Magazine.58 In 1822, the magazine pieces were printed as a stand-alone book that would gain wide popularity and run through several editions. “I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal,” De Quincey wrote in the preface, “and have . . . untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me.”59
Though the opium De Quincey used came from Turkey (as did all of that sold in England), it was China—and the “Orient” writ large—that figured most vividly in his terrifying visions. “I ran into pagodas,” he wrote, “and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed.” China, to him, was the origin of an Oriental nightmare into which opium had dragged him, one of the sources for the hallucinations that haunted him after taking the drug. “I escaped sometimes,” he wrote, “and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c. soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions.”60
De Quincey’s imagined China was a world of addicti
on, horror, and inescapable dreams, and he all but blamed the country itself for his drug-induced torments. If he should ever be forced to leave England and go live “among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery,” he wrote in one especially harsh passage, he would go insane.61 From the deep associations De Quincey drew between his dream visions and the exotic otherworld of China, a reader would be hard-pressed to realize that the rising flow of opium at the time was not coming out of China, but going into it, and that the drug was being carried there for the most part by British hands.
There were less public addicts in England’s literary world as well, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the mutual friend of Charles Lamb and Thomas Manning. Coleridge became friends with De Quincey in 1807 after he had already begun experimenting with opium himself. Coleridge’s drug-induced hallucinations provided the visions behind some of his most enduring work—which, like De Quincey’s own narcotic dreams, were sometimes set in an imaginary China. “Kubla Khan,” one of the most haunting poems in the English language, was, as Coleridge scribbled at the end of one manuscript, “composed in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium.”62 It begins with an invocation of the Mongol founder of China’s Yuan dynasty, the predecessor to the Ming:
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