Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  At least one trader couldn’t repress his desire for illicit companionship. American William Hunter kept a Chinese mistress at Macao, out of sight of the authorities, and had two children with her. When he sailed home alone after twenty years away, he grew so sad that he got on another ship bound for Canton to be with her again. “The man must be insane,” wrote a colleague. “A man who has been from home since 1825 … and amassing more than $200,000, return[ing] to China and his miserable Tanka mistress.”4 I Unlike his fellow Americans, Hunter also learned Chinese in secret and came to understand the culture deeply. This was also an act of defiance: the government forbade foreigners from learning the Chinese language, and any exchange beyond what was proscribed by law was furtive at best.

  Hunter was a rare exception. The Western traders pulling the six-man gigs that day were not thinking about Chinese culture. Rather, they were focused on competition between England and her former colonial possession, the United States of America. The gun went off, and the Not So Green sprung forward, her sharp bow cleaving through the Pearl River. Delano and his five crewmates strained hard, groaning with every stroke as the oars clanked in their locks and the wooden blades gripped the water in unison. Sweat streaming, muscles burning, and the palms of their hands chafing raw, the Americans tore past the other boat, and an intense ten-minute effort swept across the finish line. They had won the Canton Regatta’s highest prize, the Silver Cup. The racing committee, attired smartly in pressed white linens aboard a flower boat hired for the occasion, applauded. But the American merchants watching from the balcony of their nearby warehouse broke into wild cheers. “What with our national flags and much other bunting,” wrote William Hunter of the celebration, “displayed on tall bamboos from the flat roof of the flower boat, the gathering of so many Fankwaes [or fanqui, the foreign devils], their numerous boats manned by English and American jacks well got up, with the LascarsII in tidy white and fresh turbans, it was indeed a gay scene … on the Pearl River by the City of Rams.”5

  Back at work in the days that followed, Delano must have basked with pride at his part in the triumph over their British rivals. A descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims, he would one day consider changing his Anglicized family name back to the original French Protestant Delannoy. His dislike of the English had been learned from his father, who had been captured by the British navy in the War of 1812 and nearly died aboard a prison ship. “I would sooner grow a tail and become a Chinese in customs, manners, and religion than be an Englishman,” Delano wrote later. “Still, I have no prejudice.”6

  There would be other races in the months ahead, but Delano’s part in winning the Silver Cup would not divert him for long from his true contest in Canton. “Between you and I,” Warren wrote his younger brother Franklin back in America, “I have the prospect of joining an old established house here, and if I can succeed in so doing, it will be far more advantageous to my pecuniary interests than anything I could expect to do by going home. I should repeat, in case of my joining this house, that it would involve the necessity of my remaining in Canton 3 or 4 years longer, but am sure should be disappointed were I to go home seeking business or employment, I must … submit to this privation. Of one thing you may be assured—that if I soon do get money enough to enable me to live at home in a very moderate degree of comfort, I shall soon turn my back upon Canton.”7

  *

  All foreigners who lived in Canton (modern day Guangzhou) were confined within the whitewashed colonnades of the so-called Factories. The classical architecture and low-slung roofs stood out against the ochre and browns of the rest of the city. Flags of many nations fluttered from the poles on the wharves just beyond: England, France, Sweden, Holland, and, newest of all, the Stars and Stripes of the young United States of America.

  The Factories didn’t really make anything; their title was derived from the word factor: a merchant or broker. In this case, the residents of the Factories were brokers of Chinese export goods. The first floors of the Factory were for storing those riches: Bohea tea from the Wuyi Mountains and young hyson tea from Anhui; luxury goods such as nankeen,III silks, jades, lacquer, and porcelain; medicinal herbs such as camphor (used to treat colds and fungal infections); and exotic foodstuffs such as rhubarb. Of everything there, young hyson (Cantonese for “flourishing spring”) reigned supreme. Picked before the first spring rains, the leaves were first fired in a wok, and then twisted into brow-shaped knots and fired again. It was crates of hyson tea that the members of the Boston Tea Party heaved into Boston Harbor in 1773.

  The second and third floors of the Factories contained offices and single sleeping rooms for merchants, clerks, and the occasional Christian missionary. Chinese servants waited on the Westerners from dawn to dusk, making their beds, drawing their water, cooking their meals, and emptying their chamber pots. In the American Factory—which housed the firms of Russell & Company, Wetmore & Company, and others—great counting rooms were lined with wooden desks where clerks and literary men (known as “writers”) kept track of business transactions and meetings. Each seat was equipped with a quill, ink, a big ledger, and a dome-shaped bell, which the office worker could ring if he needed a drink or a snack.

  Canton’s Factories gathered together a few hundred young men from all over the world. Most were from Great Britain: younger sons of the nobility; Scottish merchants; a few missionaries hoping to convert the Chinese. There were traders from Holland and France, as well as a handful of Indians and Sephardic Jews from the Middle East. The Americans were the newest arrivals, not having established a beachhead in Canton until after independence from England.

  The Portuguese were the luckiest. Because they had arrived in China first, they had their own colony—architecturally a little bit of Lisbon—on the island of Macao, sixty miles downriver, near where the Pearl River drained into the South China Sea. Since no Western women were permitted on the Chinese mainland, Macao became home for the wives of Canton’s other foreign merchants. There the few women who braved the long journey to the East could raise their children, see their husbands as often as they could, and try their best to re-create the social life they knew back in New York, Boston, or London. During the winter off-season, a young trader could waltz until the wee hours of the morning. “I had never seen so brilliant a party anywhere, not even at the garrison fancy ball at Gibraltar,” wrote the young American merchant John Murray Forbes. There, lit by crystal chandeliers and surrounded by swirling skirts, a young man would climb on a chair, raise his glass, and toast: “To the bright eyes of Macao!”8

  Back in Canton, the atmosphere was hypermasculine, a work-hard-play-hard routine of long hours punctuated by cricket games, gambling, and eating and drinking to excess. “You can form no idea of the enormous extravagance of this house,” wrote one trader, noting, “the consumption of the article of Beer alone would suffice to maintain one family comfortable in Salem. Our young men finish an entire bottle at each dinner, a dozen bottles are drunk at table at ordinary occasions & frequently 1-1/2 dozen bottles.”9, 10 Despite servants and many creature comforts, the Factories were still claustrophobic. “If you could see the packed-up way we have to live here, crammed as close to each other as jars of sweetmeats in a box of bran,” complained one American missionary—“no yard, no out-houses, no trees, no back door, even—you would feel as keenly as I do the pleasure of sometimes seeing growing green things.”11

  During the busy trading months in spring, summer, and fall, the American merchants worked as many as twenty hours a day, rising early for a breakfast of rice, tea, toast, curry, eggs, and fish. A light lunch was served at noon, and a big dinner at six thirty, washed down with wine, beer, and India ale, and topped off by brandy and strong draws from Manila cheroot—a thin cigar made of tobacco, roots, and bark, cut at both ends.12 Supposedly, smoking a cheroot warded off fatal tropical diseases such as malaria. Work then continued into the night, no matter how much they’d had to drink.

  Foreign merchants were restricted to trad
ing with a government-approved Chinese guild, the Cohong. Based on the Americans’ best guess of what the demand would be back home in six months’ time, they would make an offer to one of the guild’s dozen or so Chinese merchants, who made up the formal Cohong association.13 The foreign merchants were called yanghang, or “ocean traders.” If the tea market back home was oversupplied and weak, a bad buy could ruin the Yankee merchant. If the tea market was strong, he would make a nice profit.

  To buy the tea, the American merchants would use a combination of cash, usually in the form of silver, and promissory notes. The Chinese merchant was paid in full (plus interest) only after the tea had gone to auction back in America. An example from 1805 illustrates one such transaction: a Rhode Island trader purchased from his Chinese counterpart fifty chests of souchong tea for $1,533.12. Rather than paying the full amount at once, he put up $383.12 and promised to pay the balance of $1,150 (plus interest) the following season. To avoid confusion, the notes and proceedings were recorded in both Chinese and English.14

  Back in the Factory, the clerks would make a note of the amounts paid for the tea crates, dutifully recording all transactions in ledger books and carefully preparing hundreds of invoices to send to their bosses back home. The accounting side of the business was tedious and exacting, perfect for bean counters but aggravating for poets. As Russell & Company partner Abiel Abbot Low wrote home to his younger, bon vivant brother, William Henry, who was considering a trip to Canton to make his fortune: “Let me repeat that a thorough knowledge of bookkeeping is absolutely necessary to one who designs to act a responsible part; at least the principle of double entry should be so familiar that you could readily carry it into practice.” He also urged his younger brother to improve his handwriting.15

  While the clerks worked, others prepared the tea crates for shipment home. The quicker the tea got to New York—especially the coveted first picking of young hyson—the higher the price it fetched at auction, and the better the reputation of the firm. In Canton, each sealed crate was marked with the name of the merchant or consignee. Some were opened randomly to ensure that the contents did not include sticks, stones, or dried weeds. Like sommeliers in the wine trade, tea traders had to develop very acute senses of taste and smell. “A dirty business,” one trainee described the constant sniffing, tasting, and weighing, “the tea getting into the nostrils, soiling the hands, etc.”16 A fragrant luxury coveted by consumers back home quickly became a noxious nuisance to the merchants selling it.

  The foreign tea ships rode at anchor at Whampoa. From June to September—months when ships from America and Europe could take advantage of the seasonal monsoon winds, blowing them eastward to Canton across the South China Sea—the harbor became a forest of masts, with colorful flags fluttering. On hot summer nights, the air was damp and thick, and the calls of tropical birds mingled with the cries of passing boatmen. The Western captains would clear their ships’ imported cargoes with officials, go ashore to meet with their assigned hong merchant, exchange presents (cumshas), and receive the so-called Grand Chop: the official clearance document, stamped with the seal (“chop”) of the Hoppo, or head Chinese customs official.17

  Trips were timed with the seasons. Homeward bound vessels generally rode at anchor at Whampoa between July and October. If they didn’t, they would have to beat against the strong winds of the southwest monsoon. In the fall, the monsoon shifted, bringing winds that blew toward the southwest, which helped the foreign ships sail home faster. While they waited for the winds to change, the captains would go ashore to the Factories to lodge, dine, and network with the partners of the shipping firms. The sailors stayed aboard the ships, maintaining them and preparing for the hundreds of tightly packed tea chests expected on the voyage.

  Before these could be loaded, the crew would seal up all hatches and portholes, and light a fire down below to smoke out the rats and cockroaches. The cockroaches, one sailor wrote, “are really more troublesome than the rats, for they eat the labels off tea chests. They will gnaw your toe nails and eat your books and your oil clothing, and will fly in your faces; on one occasion, they drove all the watch below deck.” Once the fire was put out, a team of Chinese laborers would then cart away up to thirty bushels of dead bugs before the holds could be loaded with tea chests.18

  Finally, when the winds were right and the cargo fully loaded, the ships weighed anchor and set sail for home. Their route took them west through the steamy South China Sea, through the Sunda Strait to the Indian Ocean, and onward around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. The ships would then ride the southeast trades northward to the equator. There the paths of the British and American ships would diverge: the former tacking northward to London’s West India Docks; the latter westward across the Atlantic to New York’s South Street or Boston’s India Wharf.

  The ships that made these voyages had not changed much in design during the past two centuries. A typical American or British “Indiaman” was about 175 feet long and 30 feet wide, with a full hull and deep draft (hull depth before the waterline) and characteristic rounded topsides (hull above the waterline)—a feature known to sailors and builders as tumblehome. The British vessels, usually converted fourth-rate warships, boasted ornate sterns with latticed glass windows that glowed at night, when captains hosted other masters and friendly Chinese mandarins over claret and port.

  Since Elizabethan times, popular shipbuilding consensus was that below the waterline, a ship’s hull should resemble the body of a fish: a bluff bow and a narrow, tapered stern. “Cod’s head and mackerel tail,” was how wags described a typical merchant ship’s hull of that period.19 And while these burdensome, full-bodied ships carried plenty of cargo, their average day’s run was slow. They were built of oak, teak, and other heavy materials, their bottoms coppered to repel boring mollusks—built for strength, not dispatch. “Safety and comfort were the watchwords, with no desire or effort for speed,” wrote Captain Arthur Hamilton Clark, one of America’s most astute chroniclers of the clipper ship era. “No one ever knew how fast these vessels could really sail, as they never had anyone on board who could get the best speed out of them.”20 A six-month voyage from Canton to London was seen as a perfectly respectable passage. It didn’t really matter which ship got to England first, as prices were fixed in London. In fact, until the 1830s, the British traders had worked for a Crown-sanctioned monopoly, the East India Company. But even after its exclusive China trading rights ended, there were no significant changes in ship design on either side of the Atlantic.

  The American ships were of similarly full-bodied build, although they generally carried less ornamentation. (They did, however, persist in painting faux gun ports on their topsides.) But the impetus for new ship design was great. Without the kind of government support that protected British profits, the US owners were under economic pressure to get their cargos to market faster. There was little room for fripperies such as gilded heraldry and luxurious cabins on American ships—for tightfisted shipowners, such things wasted time, money, and speed. Thanks to the Revolution and the War of 1812, Britain had little interest in shipping tea and China goods to its pesky former colonies. American merchants were more than happy to fill this void. Unlike the mercantilist British Crown, the federal government took a laissez-faire attitude toward the China trade. All Congress cared about was collecting duties, the main source of federal revenue at the time. As a result, skilled shipwrights and opportunistic merchants had been collaborating for a couple of decades to revolutionize ship design, with a focus on increasing speed in smaller vessels.

  The fruits of this Yankee ingenuity would be sailing full tilt into a greatly changed China within a few years.

  *

  To most Chinese, the few hundred fair-skinned people huddled in Macao and Canton were at best inconvenient guests—at worst, little better than rats. The Americans were the “flowery flag devils,” after the stars and stripes that flew from their ships. The Danish were the “yellow flag devils,” and the English
, “red-haired devils.”21

  There were no Chinese-flagged vessels bound for Europe. For almost four hundred years, the country had insulated itself from direct contact with the Western world. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain on his first voyage across the Atlantic to find the Celestial Kingdom described by Marco Polo, China’s own overseas commerce had essentially already been stopped. In 1371, more than a century before Columbus’s overseas gamble, the emperor and his mandarins declared a series of sea bans (haijin) that made the unauthorized construction of an oceangoing junk a capital offense. Gone were the massive trading junks of the Ming dynasty “treasure fleet,” which had ventured as far as the east coast of Africa. Although Chinese maintained a thriving international trade with the Philippines, the East Indies, and Vietnam, China tried to ignore the barbarians of the West.

  China was, after all, the Middle Kingdom, whose emperor ruled by the Mandate of Heaven. It was big enough and rich enough to ignore and snub the outside world. The Chinese grew all the food they needed and produced all the luxuries (porcelain, silk, jade) that its most privileged citizens required to adorn their palaces with an opulence of which the monarchs of Europe could only dream. China also saw itself as too big and strong to subjugate and colonize.

  But Europeans wanted China’s products too. When Portuguese captain Jorge Alvares sailed into Canton Harbor in 1513, his ship packed with tempting goods, the Chinese grudgingly agreed to trade. One new delicacy the Portuguese introduced to China—Mexican chilies—would forever put a fiery kick into the native cuisine.