For his voyage up the China coast in 1831, Gutzlaff took passage on a native junk out of Bangkok, a 250-ton trading vessel bound for Tianjin with a Cantonese captain and a crew of fifty Chinese sailors. Like Manning, Gutzlaff made himself useful by serving as a physician. He also helped with navigation as the ship sailed up to China and then farther up the coast to Tianjin. His sleeping quarters in steerage were a fetid, cramped compartment barely large enough for him to lie down in, and he shared with the crew the same simple meals of rice, vegetables, and salt. In the space allowed for his cargo he carried some medicines and a “large quantity” of short Christian texts in Chinese that he planned to hand out as he traveled.
The Chinese ship’s crew was remarkably indifferent to the presence of a foreign missionary on board their vessel, though Gutzlaff himself was less than charitable toward them. As a pious Christian, his entire purpose for the voyage was to spread the seeds of moral salvation, and he was repulsed by the degree of sin he found on board the ship—which, as he described it, was practically a floating opium den. The captain was “long habituated to opium-smoking,” as were the pilot and his assistant. The ship’s officers all “partook freely of this intoxicating luxury,” which left them unfit for duty and often caused them to fall asleep on their watches. Meanwhile, the crew, left to their own devices, put the others to shame. When the vessel first made landfall in China, at a harbor some two hundred miles up the coast from Canton, a crowd of small boats pulled up alongside it to ply the crew members with opium, wine, and prostitutes. Gutzlaff wrote in dismay that “the disgusting scene which ensued, might well have entitled our vessel to the name of Sodom.”24
Nevertheless, the dominant theme of Gutzlaff’s voyage, at least as he reported it, was how remarkably welcoming everyone was to him along the way. The Chinese with whom he traveled were thrilled to be returning to their home country and “congratulated” him, he wrote, that he had finally “left the regions of barbarians, to enter the Celestial Empire.” He received similar congratulations as the ship made its way north. In Tianjin he happened to run into some Chinese patients he had treated in Bangkok, who remembered him. “They lauded my noble conduct in leaving off barbarian customs,” he wrote, “and in escaping from the land of barbarians, to come under the shield of the ‘son of heaven.’” He was curious to learn what people along the coast thought about foreigners. Some told him the British were violent, others said they were good rulers at Singapore. Most of the people he talked to, though, didn’t know much more than that Europe was “a small country inhabited by a few merchants who speak different languages, and who maintain themselves principally by their commerce with China.”25
Laying the groundwork for future missionary work, Gutzlaff chronicled the grim spectacle of opium smoking in the ports he visited, along with the more traditional vices of prostitution and gambling. There was agitation, he reported: rumors said that Daoguang’s heir apparent had died from an opium overdose, and the authorities were cracking down harder than ever. As with Thomas Manning, as soon as word got out that Gutzlaff was a doctor he was swamped with patients (though unlike Manning, he preached to them and sent them home with Christian tracts). One patron put him up in a grand house in Tianjin, where he treated large crowds of the afflicted until his medicines ran out, gaining wide notice; a wealthy man living across the street offered to purchase him outright for two thousand taels of silver, apparently in hopes that Gutzlaff would drum up business for his shop. Even some officials came to see him, mainly because they heard that he might know how to cure opium addiction.26
Gutzlaff’s voyage was unexpectedly successful, the first journey up the coast and into the northern Chinese interior by a westerner since Amherst’s mission, and the first without official sanction since James Flint. After a rough passage back down to Canton in December, Gutzlaff took leave of his sailor friends to make his way back to Macao (where, the Chinese sailors informed him, “many barbarians lived”).27 He arrived on December 13, and Robert Morrison was there to welcome him after his six-month journey. Gutzlaff’s disguise had worked. His spoken Fujian dialect was fluent enough to convince even officials that he was a native. He had distributed his Gospel tracts, preached a bit, and managed to avoid arrest or deportation in the process. Even better, unlike Manning’s journey to Tibet, his voyage held the promise of being repeated. Nothing like it had been done in living memory.
Back in 1810, Thomas Manning had been angry that the British government in India would not use his secret journey into Tibet as a means to try to open trade between Bengal and the western reaches of the Qing Empire. When Karl Gutzlaff went up the coast in 1831, however, times were beginning to change. A great many eyes had been watching him from Canton with interest.
It took six months for the pleas for help from the Canton traders to reach London, and when they finally got there the British government slapped them down, hard. Jardine and his followers got their most sympathetic hearing from the House of Commons (where it was said that they “were not only respectable, but were British subjects, promoting British prosperity in a remote quarter of the world”). The conclusion of that debate, however, was a straightforward one: no ambassador, let alone any naval fleet, should be dispatched to China to relieve their state of alleged distress. As one lawmaker put it, “There should on no account be even a threat of an appeal to arms, for the matter could easily be arranged by much better means.” Charles Forbes, a Tory MP, suggested along the same lines as Robert Bennet Forbes (who was no relation) that the British merchants in China should be more appreciative of the status quo. He said he wished he could “ask those from whom this petition came, whether they would rather be treated there according to the laws of that empire, or according to the laws of Great Britain?” The answer, to his mind, was a simple one: in China they were able to smuggle freely without punishment; did they really want to exchange that for clear regulations and strict policing as in England?28
The House of Lords was even less sympathetic. In a discussion in December 1831 prompted by the news that the select committee had requested naval support from India, Earl Grey, the Whig prime minister, noted that “it did appear, that the factory at Canton had displayed a great deal of improper conduct.” Lord Ellenborough, a recent president of the Board of Control that supervised the East India Company, pointed out how much revenue would be lost to British India if the Canton market should be shut down from these troubles—the East India Company would be crippled, unable to pay dividends and likely to default on its debt payments. And that was to say nothing of the millions of pounds per year in taxes that the British government would lose if the Company’s tea imports to England were suspended. He wondered what was at stake that could possibly be worth such damage. “Far from complying with the request made for armed interference,” he suggested, the government should instead “issue orders, directing the British merchants to obey the laws of the country in which they resided.”29
Indeed, the voices of rebuke from back home were all but unanimous. Those in positions of responsibility in Britain roundly condemned the aggressive hopes of the merchants on the ground in Canton, telling them in a variety of ways that they had better start behaving themselves. The East India Company directors, for their part, wrote to the select committee to “decidedly condemn the requisition you made to the Bengal government, for the aid of Ships of War.” As they later clarified: “We have no pretensions beyond the subjects of other nations to dictate to the Chinese government the principles upon which alone they are to carry on her trade with foreigners.”30
The angriest and most pointed response of all, however, came from the First Lord of the Admiralty, James Graham. In a scathing letter to the British governor-general in India, he ripped the provocations of the Company supercargoes to shreds. The British traders in Canton, he insisted, “must not imagine that great national interests are to be sacrificed to their notions of self importance and to a spirit of haughty defiance mixed with contempt for the laws and customs o
f an independent people.” He declared in the plainest language possible, “Trade with China is our only object; conquest there would be as dangerous as defeat, and commerce never prospers where force is used to sustain it. No glory is to be gained in a victory over the Chinese.”31
It was a terribly inopportune time for the members of the British factory to be embarrassing themselves over trumped-up issues of national honor. For while Baynes was busy ferrying his wife back and forth to Canton and his successors were calling for gunboats to avenge their shrubbery, back home in Great Britain the East India Company’s charter—in particular its long-standing monopoly on trade with China—was under a tremendous political attack. An alliance of rising industrial interests based in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and other manufacturing cities had determined that the Company’s monopoly was the primary obstacle to selling more of their products to China, especially cotton textiles. If the monopoly were lifted, went their basic line of argument, and if private British firms were given the chance to trade freely and competitively between England and China, the market for British manufactured goods in Canton was certain to expand.
These nascent regional lobbying organizations had first tried to derail the East India Company’s China monopoly back in 1813, the last time its charter had been up for renewal by Parliament, but they did not succeed then—although they did manage to get the trade between Britain and India opened up to private firms. Parliament drew the line at opening China, however, heeding strong arguments made by George Staunton that the trade with China was a unique situation—entirely different from India—and only the East India Company supercargoes had the experience and discipline to manage it. Staunton argued that since the Chinese government was so notoriously suspicious of foreigners, allowing independent British traders free access to Canton would likely provoke hostility from the local authorities and might damage the tea trade that was one of the Company’s few sources of actual profit. Staunton insisted that the only way to avoid conflict and ensure a steady income from the commerce with China was to preserve the East India Company’s monopoly, and in 1813 Parliament had agreed with him.32
This time around, however, the industrial lobbying interests began preparing years in advance for a much more forceful and tightly orchestrated campaign against the monopoly. In favor of their arguments, the sale of British textiles in India had increased several times over since India was opened to free trade in 1813, and by analogy it seemed obvious that even greater results could be achieved if the trade to Canton were opened as well. To the most zealous advocates of the doctrine of free trade, for whom it was nearly a religion, the destruction of the East India Company’s monopoly was a matter of urgency not just for commerce but for the progress of civilization itself. As one partisan wrote in the Edinburgh Review in January 1831, “The Parliament of Great Britain have it now in their power to open new and boundless markets for the products of our artizans and they are called upon to assist in forwarding the civilisation of the Eastern world. . . . [The East India Company’s monopoly] checks the spirit of improvement, paralyses industry, and upholds ignorance and barbarism in vast countries. Its abolition will redound to the advantage of every man in England, the ‘gentlemen’ of the factory only excepted.”33
The free-trade lobbying societies this time were more numerous, more broadly representative, and far more professionally organized than they had been twenty years earlier. They enjoyed strong support from influential members of Parliament and ministers of the government, and they were single-minded in their enmity for the East India Company. Between February and July 1830, while Baynes was defiantly sneaking his wife into Canton for the first time, free-trade organizations across England and Scotland were swamping the House of Commons with nearly two hundred petitions demanding that the Company’s monopoly on trade in China be brought to an end.34
Both houses of Parliament set up committees to investigate the state of the East India Company’s commerce with China, and one of the strongest voices to come through in their hearings was that the primary threat to Britain’s economic interests in China was not the Chinese government, nor even the East India Company per se, but the United States. Speaker after speaker, coordinated by the free-trade lobbies, charged that American firms were cutting deeply into Britain’s share of the China market because they could buy and sell whatever they wanted, whenever they wished, while the private British firms had their hands tied by the East India Company and its monopoly. They trotted out statistics showing how American trade with China was growing at the expense of the British and argued that if only their own country’s private merchants were allowed full, unfettered access to Canton, without the domineering interference of the Company, then surely the Americans could be beaten back.
In response, defenders of the Company (who weren’t nearly so well organized) disputed the statistics on American trade, charging that in fact what was called “American” was in many cases actually British trade carried under consignment by American firms—or even Chinese trade, as in the case of Houqua shipping his goods with John Murray Forbes under the American flag. They also insisted that the Americans would never have prospered so well without the presence of the East India Company to keep the Chinese authorities “in check” (as the Company’s function was often described). Finally, there was the question of just what exactly “free trade” even meant in the context of China. As one merchant pointed out, the British government could only make the British side of the trade free; it had no power to change the Chinese side. For two hundred years, Britain and China had prospered in their mutual trade precisely because both sides used monopolies as their points of contact: the East India Company on the British side, and the Hong merchants of Canton on the other. If Britain were to do away with its own monopoly, he worried, it would mean nothing except confusion for the other side. China would still have its Hong merchants. British trade would still, as before, be entirely confined to the port of Canton. How, he asked, could that be called “free”?35
In the end, though, the argument that ending the monopoly would claw back Britain’s market share in China from the Americans rang true not just to the free-trade interests in Manchester and Liver-pool but to the Americans themselves, and that helped to tip the balance of the debate. Americans in China knew, after all, just how well the Company’s monopoly suppressed their potential British competitors. On that count, one of the most influential witnesses to come before the House of Commons committee was a man named Joshua Bates, a managing partner of Baring Brothers & Co., one of the oldest and most powerful merchant houses in London, who himself happened to be an American.36 Bates had long been a correspondent with Perkins & Co. in Canton and was an old friend of John and Robert Forbes’s cousin John Perkins Cushing as well as their deceased brother Thomas. Bates thus knew very well the kinds of opportunities Americans could avail themselves of in the shadow of the East India Company, and observed to the committee that the Perkins partners all returned home as “very wealthy” men.
Joshua Bates was certain what would happen if the Company’s role should change. If the monopoly were lifted, he testified in March 1830, the American share of commerce at Canton would decline. The market for British goods in China was likely to increase dramatically because individuals, he believed, would do a much better job of pushing their wares than the bloated Company had done. He predicted that private British firms would eventually come to dominate the global tea trade, to the detriment of the Americans. The price of tea would come down in England, to the benefit of the entire British population. In time, Americans might even find it more economical to buy their tea at London rather than send ships all the way to China.37
The Company’s supporters grilled him on issues of security. It was a fine thing to imagine an increase in overall trade, they said, but what about the role of the East India Company in ensuring the safety of Western trade at Canton? Bates stated that the Americans had never had any serious problems in Canton, and they needed neither
protection nor representation. “The trade has always gone on very well,” he said, “and without any difficulty.” Asked whether the Chinese were an “anti-commercial people,” as a witness in support of the Company had recently described them, Bates replied that at Canton they “seem to be very fond of trade” and “there is no unwillingness to deal with foreigners.”
Viewed from Canton, the Americans most assuredly did not want to see the monopoly end. John Murray Forbes, for one, feared it would destroy much of Russell & Co.’s business, especially between Europe and China, where the Americans had previously faced no private British competition at all. He wrote to an uncle in February 1832 that “small as the foreign community here is, it is our world, and . . . the stoppage of the Company’s trade would affect us more here than the appearance in Europe of a second Napoleon.” At the time he wrote that letter, everyone in the Canton trading compound was still waiting to see if a naval fleet would arrive from India to support the British factory in its hysteria over the shrubbery and the king’s portrait. Forbes noted to his uncle just how poorly timed the factory’s manufactured crisis was, given the context; he didn’t think it would result in a war, he said, but given the political climate back in London he thought “it may perhaps gain the casting vote against the continuance of the Company’s monopoly.”38
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