The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Relations with the Hong merchants were often cordial. Both sides knew that their relationship could be very lucrative. One, Howqua (1769–1843), is said to have become the richest man on earth, worth $26,000,000 by 1824 – he had no trouble in generously abandoning a claim for $72,000 against a Philadelphia opium-trader to whom he had taken a liking. One wonders how credible the account of their conversation is: ‘You and I are Number One, olo flen [old friend], you belong honest man, only got no chance.’ But pidgin English was a standard way for the foreigners and the Chinese to communicate. Howqua fascinated the Americans and was commemorated in countless paintings sent back to America which show an ascetic-looking, painfully thin man wearing silken robes. His investment policy was wise: protecting himself against the ups and downs of the international tea trade, he became a property magnate as well as a tea-trader, owning some of the land on which the foreign factories stood; and he went straight to the tea-growers or even grew the tea himself, cutting out costly middlemen. He entered into close partnerships with his friends from Boston and invested in the new American railway network; he relied on American businessmen to write whatever letters he needed to send abroad. It is not an exaggeration to speak of his American friends: he sent off one American trader, Warren Delano (an ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt), who had spent ten years trading through Canton, with a spectacular fifteen-course dinner that included bird’s nest soup, shark’s fin, sturgeon’s lip and other Chinese delicacies. Some Americans made a fortune in China: John Cushing went back to the United States in 1831 $700,000 richer, though no one could quite compete with that.28

  The Americans adapted quickly to all this, selling and buying in the Chinese markets through the Hong merchants. When the Empress of China set out on her return voyage she was loaded with tea, silk, porcelain and the yellow cotton cloth known as nankeen, named after Nanjing in northern China, which was very popular in North America. She arrived back in New York in May 1785, bringing her investors a profit of at least 25 per cent, which was less than they had hoped but still a good augury for future trade in China. The next year five ships, including the doughty Empress, set out for China, and this time Philadelphia and Salem sent ships; by 1790 Canton had been visited by twenty-eight American ships, although they were often only a third of the size of the ships the East India Companies sent out from Europe. In the early nineteenth century the Americans were sending more (but smaller) ships to Canton than the British. Their fast, light vessels could cope more easily with the risks in sailing through poorly charted seas. The turn-around for American ships was quicker, though they had further to go – which raised the question once again of whether they were following the best route to China, especially if the Chinese wanted them to bring furs from the Pacific or, as will be seen, the far south of the Atlantic.29

  III

  The search for furs in the north-eastern Pacific opened up new worlds to the citizens of the United States who explored the shores of what would become Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska; they also provided the Americans with a launching pad for expeditions to Hawai’i, Fiji and other Polynesian islands, where they collected sandalwood, a dyestuff that was in demand in China. The challenge was to find goods that the Chinese were interested in buying, so that one did not have to pay in silver, for silver was in short supply in the early United States, with the effect that the volume of transactions fell and a severe economic depression took hold of the new country, with a heavy impact on merchant shipping.30 Other sources of credit were therefore essential, and the enormous attraction of fur trapping was that the seals did not need to be bought, although the less said about the revolting methods used to kill them the better. They could be found elsewhere than the Pacific, but the Chinese market was what attracted the Americans there, both to the far north and to the island of Más Afuera off Chile, which was a major sealing station, ‘the mecca of the fur seal’. This did not prevent them from looking for seals elsewhere: Captain Cook already knew that the Falkland Islands, not long discovered, were a good source of skins. Captain Cook’s journals were printed in London in 1785 and in a shortened version in Philadelphia eight years later. A year before the American publisher went into print, American ships had already begun to exploit Falkland furs.31

  There were two major obstacles to operation in the eastern Pacific (generally called, from the American perspective, the ‘Pacific north-west’). One was the presence of ships flying the flag of other powers: Russians along the coast all the way down to what would become known as Vancouver Island; Spaniards all the way up the coast of California, also very interested in Vancouver Island; and the British, who had come to know these waters after the third voyage of Captain Cook, and once again saw attractive possibilities on the very same island, while reports reaching the United States also made the island sound the ideal base for fur-trapping. The other obstacle was the route around Cape Horn. The Empress of China had avoided this route in the end. Its terrors and perils were nowhere better described than in Richard Henry Dana Jr’s best-selling account of Two Years before the Mast, recounting a journey out of New York in 1840:

  Wednesday, November 5th … Just before eight o’clock.

  Then about sundown (in that latitude) the cry of ‘All hands ahoy!’ was sounded down the fore scuttle and the after hatchway, and, hurrying upon deck, we found a large black cloud rolling on toward us from the southwest, and darkening the whole heavens. ‘Here comes Cape Horn!’ said the chief mate; and we had hardly time to haul down and clew up before it was upon us. In a few minutes a heavier sea was raised than I had ever seen, and as it was directly ahead, the little brig, which was no better than a bathing-machine, plunged into it, and all the forward part of her was underwater; the sea pouring in through the bow-ports and hawse-holes and over the knight-heads, threatening to wash everything overboard. In the lee scuppers it was up to a man’s waist … The brig was laboring and straining against the head sea, and the gale was growing worse and worse. At the same time sleet and hail were driving with all fury against us … At daybreak (about three, A.M.) the deck was covered with snow.32

  And this was summertime in the southern hemisphere.

  The ship on which Dana sailed had many American precursors. In 1787 the Lady Washington and the Columbia had set out from Boston, in the hope of loading furs along the Pacific coasts of North America. News of the impending voyage set off enormous enthusiasm. Around 300 pewter medals were struck in the newly founded Massachusetts mint to commemorate the two ships, along with silver and copper versions intended for grandees such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The pewter medals were mainly intended to be gifts to the native inhabitants of the regions the ships were expected to visit, though what they would make of them is a mystery. Captain Cook had also received the accolade of having medals struck in his honour by the Royal Society of London. But that happened after, not before, the voyage.33

  This voyage contained plenty of high drama, from the moment the ships reached Praia in the Cape Verde Islands and the surgeon of the Columbia, Dr Roberts, decided he had had enough of the tough rule of Captain Kendrick. He left the ship and could not even be persuaded to go back on board when Kendrick found him in the street and threatened him with his sword. Roberts insisted that without a promise from Kendrick not to have him flogged for deserting the ship he would stay in Praia. Kendrick refused to make this promise, oddly acting as if he did not really need the surgeon on his ship, and let him go. This and other quarrels kept the ships in the Cape Verde Islands too long: if they did not leave soon they would face the seasonal hurricanes that plague the waters off Cape Horn – that, at any rate, was the prediction of Captain Gray, who commanded the smaller ship, the Lady Washington. Once they were under way, an officer named Haswell struck a sailor who had disobeyed an order to come on deck. Kendrick took the side of the sailor and threatened Haswell with being shot if he ever again set foot on the quarter-deck (reserved for officers); he would have to sleep in the common quarters.34 These e
vents, recorded by Haswell himself, confirm that Kendrick was a tough captain, though perhaps no tougher than many of his contemporaries, who took the view that keeping order on board demanded ruthless decisions, all the more so when a ship was following an unfamiliar route that exposed it to natural dangers as well as danger from rivals.

  The ships rounded Cape Horn by heading hundreds of miles to the south of the cape, experiencing the full diet of gales and sleet before entering what Haswell called ‘a perfect hericain’. The two ships were driven apart, and Gray’s opinion that time had been wasted in Praia seemed to have been confirmed.35 The ships would travel separately for many hundreds of miles before they arrived at Nootka Bay on Vancouver Island; and in the meantime they faced constant harassment from Spanish ships along the coasts of Chile, Peru and Mexico. In August 1788 the Lady Washington reached the shores of North America and started trading with the native Americans, only to find, as so often happened, that a friendly reception turned sour: at first the Indians brought cooked crabs, dried fish and berries, and were happy with the small items of truck, buttons and bells, that the Americans offered in payment. Captain Gray was also happy, as fresh food was the best cure for the scurvy that raged on board. But when an Indian stole a cutlass that Captain Gray’s servant, an African who had boarded at Praia, had left stuck in the sand, the mood changed. The servant, Marcus Lopius, tried to recover the cutlass and was seized; the Indians unleashed their arrows against the American intruders and skewered Lopius with their knives and spears. Even when the Americans scrambled back on their ship, their troubles were not at an end, because the Lady Washington was stranded on a sandbank and had to await the tide before it could float out to sea.36 But the ship and its crew survived, and managed to meet up at long last with the Columbia off Vancouver Island.

  All this was happening just as the Spaniards pressed further and further north along the same coast, reaching Kodiak Island in late June 1788, while another Spanish ship coasted along the Aleutian Islands in the far north of the Pacific, and met the sole Russian inhabitant of Unalaska Island, Potap Zaikov, who relied on local Aleut hunters to obtain the skins he traded. Isolated he may have been, but somehow he knew, or thought he knew, a great deal about his country’s plans: four Russian warships were expected to arrive by way of the Cape of Good Hope. The Russians too were determined to stake their claim to rule this coastline – literally, for the ship Trekh Sviatitelei was carrying stakes and copper plates that could be hammered into place as a formal sign that Imperial Russia laid claim to these lands. Moreover, the Russians knew that British ships lay not far off, and they were determined to stop them from establishing a settlement of their own.37

  The flashpoint was Nootka Sound, which everyone identified as good seal-hunting country; and when the Americans arrived they found a British settlement under construction, with a partly imported labour force – there were Chinese carpenters at work. The Americans also witnessed the arrival of irate Spaniards, who claimed Nootka Sound for themselves, and managed to impound four British ships, as well as arresting all the Chinese workers. These events could easily have set off a war between Great Britain and Spain, but everyone’s attention was turning elsewhere at the moment, as the political crisis in France turned into revolution. The Spanish commander was less worried about the Americans than about the British. It seemed extremely unlikely that the Americans would try to create their own settlement on the west coast of this continent; the United States was patently an east-coast entity. When the Boston newspapers reported the friendly encounter between the Spanish and the American commanders at Nootka, they rejoiced in the ‘protection and respect of the European Lords of the Soil’ for their flag and took wicked delight in the fact that the flag ‘of another nation hath been forbidden to be unfurled on the coast’.38 In the event, the British preferred to make their peace with Spain, signing the Nootka Convention in October 1790, which was a victory for diplomacy (and for Spain) over war – even so, in the long run, this area would fall under British rule, when the boundary between Canada and the USA was fixed in 1846.39

  The Americans seized the opportunity to find the sea otter skins they knew the Chinese craved. Captain Gray sold his furs in Canton and decided to continue round the world, returning to the United States via the Cape of Good Hope, which made him the first American captain to circumnavigate the globe, after a journey of three years. Kendrick, on the other hand, was killed in a tragic accident while still in the Pacific: a gun salute went wrong and the shot pierced his cabin and blew him to bits.40 Meanwhile interest in the Nootka Sound continued to grow, but in more peaceful ways. A question that had been raised many times in the past was whether a channel could be found around the top of North America. Looking for the North-West Passage from the Pacific side made sense after so many failures on the Atlantic side, and was not a new idea – it has been seen that Francis Drake may have been looking for such a route when he sailed up to California on his round-the-world voyage. This was also a reason why British and other ships poked around the waters off Alaska and western Canada. Alejandro Malaspina, an Italian in Spanish pay, led two large ships into these waters in 1791. His expedition set out just as a Spanish publisher issued a specious account of a journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic in 1588 by a certain Maldonado. So Malaspina was sent on a wild-goose chase; even so, he mapped unknown stretches of coast, studied the life of the local Indians, and drew up elaborate and intelligent proposals for the creation of an integrated trade network in the Pacific, involving Russia and China as well as Mexico and the Philippines; but no one at court expressed much interest. After all, he had not found the gateway to the Pacific, and was seen in Madrid as a failure.41

  The merchants of this new nation were bringing furs from the south Atlantic as well as from the Pacific north-west. In 1792 Captain Daniel Greene led the Nancy to China by way of the Falklands. When he came back to the Falklands five years later, he loaded around 50,000 skins, and then added some more at Más Afuera in the south-eastern Pacific. The Falklands were at that time a largely unclaimed space. A French settlement on East Falkland, founded in 1764, had been matched a year or two later by a British settlement on West Falkland; and then the French agreed to hand over the islands to Spain, which sent two priests ‘who, beholding their settlement, were overwhelmed with grief’. As a result of these claims, the two islands were known to sailors as the ‘English Maloon’ and the ‘Spanish Maloon’, a corruption of their Spanish name, Las Malvinas.42 But the people who did most to exploit the islands at this stage were the Americans, with their raids on the seal population. Meanwhile, first the British and then the Spaniards withdrew from the Falklands early in the nineteenth century, and, although they were eventually reoccupied by Great Britain, the question of their ownership has festered ever since. Beyond the south Atlantic, American ships regularly went in search of seals in the southern Indian Ocean, on islands such as St Paul. Places uninhabited by humans were ideal, as the seals had as yet no reason to fear humans and lay passively on the rocks while the hunters did their bloody work. Later, seals did sometimes grow wise to what was happening, but escaping on land was almost impossible – these are animals made for the sea.43

  Furs from as far away as Alaska thus fuelled the maritime links between the early United States and China. The fur trade of the United States was truly global, stretching in both directions towards China, around both southern capes. The profits from this trade, and from the China trade more generally, fuelled the recovery of the American economy and the prosperity of great business houses such as that of the German immigrant John Jacob Astor. The first generation of American millionaires came into being, an aristocracy of wealth rather than blood whose prosperity had been created by the China trade and all the other business that was intertwined with it: trade in furs, trade in sandalwood and – as will be seen – trade in opium.44

  45

  Fur and Fire

  I

  One of the difficulties in dividing up the maritime
history of the world between the three great oceans, and several smaller seas, is that the oceans are themselves composite seas. The Atlantic embraces the North Sea and the Caribbean, icy waters off Greenland and warm waters off Brazil; the Pacific is even more complex, which is hardly surprising since it covers about one third of the globe: the South China Sea, and at times the Yellow Sea and the Japan Sea, acted as corridors linking east Asia to the Indian Ocean, rather than looking eastwards into the open ocean; the island worlds of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia were connected across great distances, and yet they had few or no links with the great continents surrounding the ocean; and in the far north another partly island world existed, inhabited by Ainus (the original inhabitants of northern Japan), Aleuts and other peoples, many of whom had adopted a style of life broadly similar to that of the Inuit of northern Canada and Greenland – a life heavily dependent on the resources of the sea, which provided them with food (fish), oil for lighting their homes (seal blubber), clothing (cormorant skins) and even warm overcoats (stretched seal intestines).1 In the Kuril Islands and the Aleutians, a certain amount of trade was carried on by boat. Along the coast of Alaska, the art of canoeing was taken to a very high level, and the inhabitants could handle choppy seas, strong winds and ice floes with assurance. Yet this maritime world was isolated from the rest of the Pacific. The Japanese and the Koreans did not, as far as is known, explore these waters. Only with the arrival of the Europeans in the seventeenth century did this area begin to arouse interest.