Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  Abiel Abbot Low must have kept to his Yankee resolve to “improve,” for he had done well for himself. As a Russell partner, he garnered one-sixteenth of the firm’s profits, or about $25,000 a year.29 Head partner Robert Bennet Forbes was most likely pocketing twice as much, with junior clerks earning perhaps only $500 to $1,500. Yet as Abbot Low prepared to return home with a handsome fortune, his brother William Henry was already sailing for China. The younger Low would face Canton’s dangers to turn around his own fortunes: during his New York bachelorhood, whether from card playing, haberdashery, booze, or a combination of all three, he had racked up over $2,000 in debt (a middle-class income in 1830s America).

  William Henry Low would join Russell & Company under a managing partner who embraced Canton’s work-hard, play-hard ethos wholeheartedly. Robert Forbes may have gone broke back in Boston, but here he was a social lion, a man people looked up to. As someone who had risen through the sailor ranks as a young man, he retained his love for that salty lifestyle and couldn’t resist a good betting opportunity or yarn, especially while he was away from his family. What Rose Forbes thought as she cradled their baby back in Boston is unknown. But she probably resigned herself to the fact that her husband was working to rebuild the fortune, and at that, he was doing the best he knew how.

  The biggest bash at the Factories during these years in Canton took place on January 22, 1839, in honor of William Jardine, who was preparing to return home. Trained as a physician, the Scottish-born Jardine had become the most powerful British merchant in Canton. For six years, his firm, Jardine, Matheson & Company, had filled the breach left by the end of the British East India Company’s government-backed monopoly of the China trade. Ruthless, flamboyant, with a nearly endless supply of Indian opium at his disposal, he had become immensely rich. He was also feared. One coworker described Jardine as “steady and ardent as a friend, equally steady and implacable as a foe.”30 The Chinese merchant community hated Jardine, nicknaming him “the Iron Headed Rat.”31

  Present at the farewell dinner were Warren Delano and Robert Forbes, among other representatives of the big American trading firms. The party took place in the main banqueting hall of the English factory. Eighty guests—British, American, and Indian—sat down at tables crowned with gleaming silver candelabras, the flicking candles illuminating oil portraits of traders and royalty. A cut-glass chandelier, fueled with whale oil, sparkled from the ceiling. The tables were set with snowy white linens. Above all hung a portrait of the late King George IV, the fat, dandyish son of the monarch who had lost the American colonies a half century earlier, and the uncle of the newly crowned Queen Victoria.32

  Feasting, dancing, and toasting went on into the wee hours of the morning. Robert Forbes stood up on a chair, raised his glass, and declared that they, the Americans and British, should cast all divisions aside, as they were bound by common heritage and blood, as well as commercial interest. “Union—not merely political, not merely commercial, but the union of principle, the union of heart and soul!” he shouted.33

  The dinner continued, with port, claret, and champagne served in rapid succession. The orchestra played waltzes, gavottes, and gallops. In the mayhem, Forbes noted gleefully, Delano was “let go of by his partner & tumbled headlong against a flower pot & cut a gash in his head an inch wide.”34 Was the dancing “partner” one of the other men? Or did the merchants bring in other company, from among the flower boat women who caught their eyes?

  Everyone woke up with throbbing headaches the next morning. Warren Delano would later insist that, “Canton was, and is, a most stupid place.”35

  Yet the hijinks and loneliness of the “Canton bachelors” would bind this group of men together for the rest of their lives. “We pursued the even tenor of our way with supreme indifference,” Russell & Company partner William Hunter wrote, “took care of our business, pulled boats, walked, dined well, and so the years rolled by as happily as possible.”36 Their unique social experience created a sense of loyalty that could not be replicated in any other setting in America, and in the years to come, these connections would carry over into their business lives. They would marry one another’s cousins, invest in one another’s ventures, and even rescue one another financially when times grew hard.

  Soon after the festivities, Jardine set sail for England, where he was looking forward to a long and luxurious retirement.

  Warren Delano was also looking forward. On January 1, 1839, a few weeks before the Jardine bash, the partners of Russell & Company drew up a new charter, in which the old partnership was dissolved. Delano’s firm, Bryant & Sturgis, was absorbed into the new Russell & Company. Robert Bennet Forbes remained the head, while Warren became a full-fledged partner of the most profitable American firm in China—and one of the most secretive and lucrative businesses in the world.

  Yet in the year to come, a zealous new Chinese official had decided that the high-living foreign devils had outstayed their welcome. There followed a trial by fire in which Jardine, Forbes, and Delano would all play a role. This misadventure would also bring about the genesis of the fastest merchant ships the world had yet seen.

  CHAPTER 3

  OPIUM HOSTAGES

  I took it:—and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night … a vast march—of infinite cavalcades filing off—and the tread of innumerable armies … the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me.

  —THOMAS DE QUINCEY, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 18211

  The Americans and British called their spectral little schooners “opium clippers,” or simply “clippers.” The speedboats of their time, they carried small amounts of valuable cargo through treacherous waters as quickly as possible. In the best conditions, a sharp-nosed opium clipper could make fourteen knots, fast enough to outrun anything else afloat. Captains hated the rough weather that might force them to take in sail, which slowed them down. Captain Philip Dumaresq, a native of Maine and one of the most celebrated opium clipper masters, scrawled in his log angrily, “Fresh breezes, thick weather, double-reefed topsails!!!!”2

  Part of the opium clippers’ mystery lay in the illicit nature of the trade. They and their crews were the shadow actors of a publicly “respectable” industry. All the merchants of Russell & Company were initiated into this underworld, starting with opium’s arduous trip to China. It was they who built the ships to carry it; they who dutifully recorded costs and receipts. As a young man, company partner Robert Forbes supervised the construction of the storeship Lintin in 1830 at the Samuel Hall Shipyard in East Boston and personally kept the opium accounts for Russell & Company aboard her.3 Handwritten account books during Forbes’s time unashamedly noted “smuggler” in the source columns. A decade later, the lumbering, barque-rigged vessel still stood sentry at the gateway to Canton Harbor.

  Robert Bennet Forbes explained in a letter to his wife, Rose, how the opium supply chain worked. In addition to carrying opium itself, Russell & Company made much of its money lending cash to speculators who bought opium on margin and then hoped to make a profit by selling it for more than they’d paid for it.

  A speculator in India has ten thousand dollars more or less he wishes to buy forty or fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Opium to send to Mr. Smith in China for sale with this ten thousand Dollars, so he applies to Mr. Smith’s friend or agent in India who allows him to draw a bill on Mr. S requesting him to pay forty thousand dollars to a third party [Russell & Company]—this bill sells for cash which is given with the ten thousand dollars to pay for the fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Opium, the Opium is sent to Mr. Smith’s consignment & the person who bought the bill also sends it to his friend here for collection, when it is due here say 30 or 60 days after the arrival of the Opium Mr. Smith must pay for it.4

  If the opium sold for more than $50,000 plus the interest on the note, the spec
ulator made a nice profit on his $10,000, as did Russell & Company on its loan of $40,000. If he didn’t, he was ruined, and Russell & Company would lose money on the loan. The company’s opium clippers and Lintin were key links in the chain connecting the speculators to the buyers. The faster the opium got to China, the shorter the duration of the loan, and the quicker Russell and the speculator collected their money.

  William Hunter, the partner with the Chinese mistress, recalled later (without apparent shame) an opium-selling trip from Singapore to the Chinese coast. “We owned at the time a Boston clipper schooner called the Rose,” Hunter wrote, “which, in 1837, was about leaving for that anchorage with a quantity of opium sold at Canton for delivery there, and an additional number of chests to try to market. The whole consisted of nearly 300 chests.”

  It was valued at some $300,000—the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars today.

  Such opium imports had been forbidden by imperial edict in 1799, but that had no real effect on business. By the 1830s, the clipper drug runners were part of normal coastal traffic. Everyone knew they were illegal, but the Chinese government was nervous about using force to crack down on the trade. Craving for the drug had overwhelmed all means of enforcement. So had bribery.

  When the Rose—almost certainly named after Robert Bennet Forbes’s wife—arrived off the coastal city of Namao, the captain formally welcomed aboard a Chinese customs inspector, whom the crew scrupulously referred to as “His Excellency.” The captain plied the official with cigars and wine, and gravely explained to him that the Rose had dropped anchor to “replenish her wood and water” after a rough voyage.

  The Namao official pulled out a document and handed it to his secretary, who read it aloud. The Americans were reminded sternly that Canton, not Namao, was the only port open to Western trade. But, read the secretary, the Chinese emperor, whose compassion was “as boundless as the ocean, cannot deny to those who are in distress from want of food, through adverse seas and currents, the necessary means of continuing their voyage.”

  Once these formalities were over, “His Excellency” got down to business. How many chests of opium are on board? he asked. Are they all bound for Namao? Then, pocketing the expected bribe, the mandarin departed the Rose. As if on cue, a fleet of small Chinese merchant junks and “fast crabs” came up alongside the opium clipper. The balls of opium, Hunter noted, “had been already packed in bags, marked and numbered” for delivery to buyers.5

  Time was money: the smugglers paid the Americans $5 per chest delivered on schedule; $2 a chest if it was late. These cumsha payments went right into the coffers of the foreign merchant.

  The merchants came to believe that the trade was perfectly moral. “I insist that [the opium trade] has been fair, honorable, and legitimate,” Warren Delano wrote in one letter home.6 The Americans argued that they were merely following suit in a business the British regarded as aboveboard, and that the American share in the opium traffic was small by comparison. Moreover, they argued, it wasn’t just the British and Americans who were in on it, but also Indian and Turkish growers and suppliers.

  Indeed, both British and American merchants held that it was the Chinese trade system that was corrupt and cumbersome, and that confining foreign merchants to the single port of Canton was unfair and condescending on the part of the government in Peking. What they wanted, above all, was to be treated as equal trading partners. Opium smuggling was merely a way to circumvent an already rigged and rotten system. And easily-paid-off Chinese officials were in on the cartel.

  Customs officials on the docks were not the only players. While the Canton Cohong trade guild profited from all cargo moving among China, Europe, and America, it was opium from India and Turkey that was the real moneymaker. By the early nineteenth century, thanks to the addictive power of opium, silver was starting to flow out of China rather than into it, severely depleting the imperial treasury. But some of the silver was, in fact, flowing back into the Chinese economy: from the drug addicts, to the dealers, to the foreign suppliers, and then into the trade guilds’ pockets in exchange for tea and other Chinese goods. In the 1818–19 trading season, for instance, Americans coordinated the importation of an estimated $7.3 million worth of silver specie into China. By 1838, however, that sum had plummeted to $678,350. At the same time, tea exports from China to America rose from an estimated $1.3 million to $5.8 million.7 In other words, opium filled the trade imbalance, allowing Western merchants to rob Peter (the Chinese addicts) so they could pay Paul (the Co-hong merchants).

  As with the boat races on the Pearl River, Cohong leader Houqua claimed official ignorance of the opium trade. As one top American trader said, “I am aware that Houqua … never liked the flavor of opium”—the great Chinese merchant “always knew” where the money came from but was “willing to shuttee eye.”8 The arrangement, although complicated, was good for both sides. The Americans went home rich, and Houqua accumulated so much cash that he began to wonder what to do with it. That was where the proto-venture-capitalist Forbes brothers came in.

  To protect himself, Houqua tried to leave no fingerprints on the opium side of his American friends’ business. His greatest fear was that the Chinese government would seize his assets to punish him. As rich as he was, he knew that his position in Chinese society was tenuous. He, along with the other merchants of the Cohong, were personally liable for the conduct of the fanqui camped out in Canton. His father-son relationship with his favorite US merchants was his gentle way of keeping tabs on his charges, as well as keeping them loyal to him. But although Houqua did his best to avoid any direct connection with the sale of opium, the business was just too profitable to avoid.

  The drug, of course, had terrible social consequences. Once the pastime of the wealthy, opium smoking had spread to all strata of society, affecting countless middle-class and poor Chinese. Unlike taverns, which were social (and often political) gathering places, opium dens were antisocial spaces. Pipe-smoking addicts would lie comatose, surrounded by pungent blue smoke, drifting into their own private dreams. Addicted breadwinners spent themselves into debt and left families destitute. If an addict didn’t get his fix, the withdrawal could be excruciatingly painful.

  But these ills could be ignored by those who profited from the trade, especially the Western merchants cocooned in the luxurious seclusion of the Canton Factories. Addicts got their fix out of sight, hiding from the authorities in back alleys and opium dens. “Opium was never for sale in Chinese shops in Guangzhou,” Hunter observed, “nor were there any signs by which one could judge it was being prepared for smoking, it being used in no other form.”9

  The merchants had other excuses for their industry. The opium trade was not unlike the liquor business back home, they argued. Alcohol was seen to be ruining countless lives in America, where men drank away their wages on cheap whiskey and demon rum. And yet the sale of alcohol remained legal (although temperance would soon become a major political movement). Why, thought the merchants, should selling opium in China be condemned as worse?

  Thus, while merchant Robert Forbes acknowledged that “there can be no doubt that [opium smoking] was demoralizing to a certain extent,” he qualified this: “not more so, probably, than the use of ardent spirits.” His memoir went on to divide “twenty or thirty thousand chests” of opium into the (then) population of 350 million Chinese and conclude that opium “had a much less deleterious effect on the whole country than the vile liquor made of rice, called ‘samshue.’ ”10 He definitely knew otherwise.

  The other merchants also knew better. Opiate addition was rampant in Europe and America, as well. Laudanum, an alcohol-based herbal medicine containing about 10 percent opium, had been used as a painkiller and sedative since the sixteen hundreds; mothers and nurses soothed cranky infants with it. Now it had become popular among the creative figures of the Romantic Era; for example, the poet Lord Byron relished the euphoria it produced. Other opium-based quack “patent medicines” were being sold, a
dvertised as good for every conceivable ailment: migraines, tuberculosis, insomnia, cancer, menstrual cramps, mental disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, and that mysterious, catchall female ailment of nineteenth-century medicine, “hysteria.” The eighteen hundreds also brought a new, even more potent opiate when in 1805 a German chemist named Friedrich Sertürner turned poppy seeds into what he called morphine (from Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams).11 Morphine addiction would balloon out of control as the nineteenth century progressed, especially in American cities.

  Moreover, at a time when the United States was struggling to define itself as a virtuous republic, the suffering that came with the opium trade was, for some contemporary observers, a contradiction perhaps as great as the existence of slavery in the South. Yet American merchants had sailed through such moral battles in the past. Before the slave trade had ended in Northern states, Yankee merchants such as the Browns of Providence built fortunes transporting captured Africans to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the tobacco farms of the Southern states. If that was acceptable, how could trading in opium be so bad? Selling the deadly, addictive drug was only the regrettable means to a good end, part of an American merchant’s rite of passage to the wealth he desired.

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