Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

Yet things were changing in China. In 1838, as Western traders shipped ever more opium to Chinese shores—and Robert Forbes and Warren Delano trained to win the coveted Canton Silver Cup—Chinese emperor Min-ning appointed Commissioner Lin Zexu as the new governor general of Canton. Lin, a scholar who had risen through the ranks of the Confucian bureaucracy, decided it was time to show the fanqui who was boss. A first step was to confiscate the opium that was draining China of resources and lives.

  Lin wasted little time. In March 1839, with the emperor’s blessing, he sent the Western merchants in Canton an ultimatum: hand over twenty thousand chests of opium to the authorities (estimated value, $10 million; in the hundreds of millions of dollars today), or the Chinese would cut off food to the Factories and starve them into submission. Two months after William Jardine’s farewell dinner, the old ways and good times seemed to be coming to an end.

  The British, who controlled most of the opium in question, refused to submit to the Chinese demand. American firms also refused—although most of the drug crates that Russell & Company had on hand were not their own, being held on consignment from British traders. When the merchants’ reply was made known to the Chinese, Lin put his plan into action. All Chinese servants were ordered to leave the Factories at once. Guards were posted to stop supplies from coming in. A row of lashed boats blocked all access to the Factories’ docks. It was an unprecedented action. The merchants were shocked. Robert Forbes was particularly indignant that his return home to Rose and their child would be delayed, as he refused to leave Canton empty-handed. He began to fear he might not return at all. Years before, an older brother, Thomas, had never come home from a trip to China; he had drowned when a typhoon sank his ship as it sailed out of Canton. Robert’s long-suffering mother, Margaret, should not have to lose another son.

  Lin took other measures to squelch the opium trade, threatening execution by beheading to any Chinese citizen caught smoking an opium pipe.12 Trapped inside the compound, Forbes, Warren Delano, Abiel Abbot Low, William Hunter, and several dozen other Westerners were forced to fend for themselves. No white man had ever entered the kitchen of the American Factory before, Forbes noted wryly. After he produced a breakfast of ham and eggs that looked and tasted like shoe leather, Delano took over as chief cook. “We laughed rather than groaned over the efforts to roast a capon, to boil an egg,” wrote Hunter. But everyone helped. “We could all clean knives, sweep the floors, even manage the lamps.”13 They were amused by how well they were getting on despite Lin’s best efforts. “The Chinese guards outside filled the square,” Forbes snickered, “and they imagined we lived primarily on rats and beer.” But Houqua had made sure that the Americans did not starve, by smuggling in supplies of food under cover of darkness. All that really bothered the captives was that they had to empty out their own chamber pots.

  Yet the laughter inside stopped when an angry mob paraded a convicted Chinese opium smuggler in front of the American Factory. They marched him to the pole from which the American flag flew in the breeze and prepared to hang him beneath. The Americans watched in horror from the balcony. To hang someone beneath the Stars and Stripes was a disgrace, especially since this square, by long tradition, was considered “neutral ground.” Several of the Americans rushed out to stop the hanging, but before violence broke out, the Chinese army arrived and dispersed the mob, and the smuggler, battered but alive, skittered into the alleys of Canton.

  A month after the siege began, in April 1839, the Americans and British were summoned to meet with the imperial authorities in the hall where the Cohong merchants ran their affairs. There Forbes was horrified to see Houqua—the richest merchant in the world—with chains around his neck. His mandarin button, the indicator of his noble rank, was missing. The mandarins told the fanqui in no uncertain terms that if they did not hand over all their opium, Houqua would be executed.

  To the Americans, the threat to their adoptive father was terrifying. Such acts seemed to confirm the common Western view of the Chinese as an uncivilized people (although Robert Forbes quickly wrote to reassure his wife that his hosts were “by no means so barbarous a nation as you would suppose from their late acts”14). Yet the Canton merchants decided to protect themselves for the time being. Russell & Company took the lead, announcing formally that it would withdraw from the opium trade. The risks to the safety of its partners, and to Houqua’s welfare, were just too great.

  “The unexpected proceedings of the imperial commissioner may be considered as having crushed the opium trade,” agreed the Friend of China, an English-language publication printed by the merchant colony. “No merchant possessed of ordinary prudence can justify to himself or his constituents the outlay of any further capital in so forlorn an enterprise.”15 Yet the British companies refused to comply with the Chinese order or acknowledge the illegality of the trade. Opium was their lifeblood, and their trade in the drug was their royally granted prerogative.

  The Chinese government dug in, refusing to be intimidated by the threat of British force. In the end, after a three-month siege, British trade superintendent Charles Elliott capitulated and handed over the twenty thousand chests of opium to Commissioner Lin, including about a thousand chests under Russell & Company’s care. Lin promptly ordered the $10 million hoard dumped into a ditch on the banks of the Pearl River, where the estuary tide washed the foul mix of opium and mud into the South China Sea.

  Houqua kept his head, his mandarin button, and his fortune. But the British traders, led by Elliott, left in a huff, vowing to return again with force.

  Russell & Company had declared it would abandon the opium trade, but head partner Robert Forbes refused to leave Canton. When asked by a departing British merchant why he was sticking it out while most other Westerners were leaving, Forbes declared that he had no queen to bail him out. But with the British ships gone, Russell now had a golden opportunity to make money by playing clever games with its fleet. “Russell & Company shipped teas in American bottoms to the Dutch port of Rhio, and there transferred them to British ships,” Forbes wrote. “This was thought to be a dangerous move, and our English friends predicted failure.” But Forbes believed the British government would want the revenues from tea duties too badly to refuse the cargo, even if it was coming from China in this time of crisis. Besides, England knew, wrote Forbes, that “other markets would be found” by the Americans if it did not accept their crates of tea. “The result proved the wisdom of our course.”

  Forbes was proud of his team. “At this time, when all of the energies of R. & Co. were taxed to the upmost, Messrs. W. Delano, A. A. Low, Edward King, and William C. Hunter were most able and efficient co-operators,” he recalled in his memoir, “and to them the concern was much indebted for its success during the unprecedented high pressure trade from May to December 1839.”16

  Delano was so busy that he called off the shipment of a guitar from Boston. “By the way, if the guitar is not already bought, don’t give yourself any trouble about it,” he wrote home. “I find that after all the stoppage of trade and the utter want of something to do, I have my hands full of work and but little time for music.”17 The hard work and camaraderie in the face of great risk would not be forgotten by the Russell & Company men in the years to come.

  As the British departed, the American team was only getting stronger, as fresh young members—William Henry Low among them—arrived after the siege of the Factories. Abbot Low was more than ready to leave Canton, but before he did, he advanced his younger brother $3,000 as well as another $8,000 from the company’s coffers, all of which William was to use to purchase tea to send home to New York at a hoped-for handsome profit.

  Warren Delano’s younger brother Edward, known as Ned, had also arrived.18 Unlike Warren, who was whippet thin, twenty-year-old Ned Delano was pudgy and unathletic, and burdened by a nagging sense of insecurity that never quite left him. When his ship dropped anchor at Whampoa, Ned hadn’t seen his brother in more than ten years. He was dismayed to find that the
siege had taken a toll on Warren’s health. “I should not have known him under circumstances different from which I was now placed,” Ned wrote home of their first meeting. “[H]e appeared to me worn out—a yellow cadaverous visage [Warren was recovering from an attack of jaundice] added to a slow gait and body [a] little inclined forward.”19

  Having family near did Warren good. As the two brothers sailed up the Pearl River on the eighty-mile journey from Macao to Canton, Ned saw Warren let down the guard he had carefully raised during his six years in Canton. “A delightful frolic … biting and pulling ears, pinching flesh, etc.,” Ned would write of their time together. “We amused ourselves with shooting birds, snipes, and magpies, the boatmen swimming on shore after them.”

  During the days, Ned Delano and William Henry Low were busy with shipping Chinese goods to New York, some on commission from the absent British firms. But the departure of the British had not changed the Factory’s work-hard, play-hard ethos, no matter how the Americans had complained of the corrupting English influence. During their precious off-hours, the Russell men continued to enjoy games of whist, curry dinners washed down with claret, and relaxing rows on the river. Ned noticed the temptations of the young women who drifted by in the flower boats. “Played the gallant to a young lady in a boat,” he wrote. “Modesty would not force a kiss from me, and I left her with only a squeeze of the hand. Chinese laws being against foreigners entering the boats de plaisir, I did not venture my person in the lady’s chamber.”20

  Yet the lucrative idyll was brief. The British vowed to return to Canton, and return they would, with guns. The only question until then was whether or not the Americans would find themselves in the crossfire of an international conflict. The conflict about to ensue would be known as the First Opium War.

  *

  Back in England, William Jardine, infuriated by the loss of his company’s opium, beat the drum in Parliament to punish the Chinese for their insolence. He sent a letter to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston urging military action against the Chinese government. The goal was reparations for the lost opium—and more. Jardine also pushed for seizing an island colony for British trade and opening additional Chinese ports to the west. The letter, known as the Jardine Paper, does not survive, but a letter from Jardine to his business partner, James Matheson, from around the same time hints that the “Iron Headed Rat” was eager to punish the Chinese for stealing his company property—especially since the American firms still in Canton were making money, while his firm was not. As he wrote quite succinctly: “You take my opium - I take your Islands in return - we are therefore Quits - & thenceforth if you please let us live in friendly Communion and good fellowship.”21

  A committed imperialist, Lord Palmerston listened eagerly to Jardine’s demands, and Parliament acted. A British naval squadron arrived in June 1840 to blockade the mouth of the Pearl River, cutting off Canton from all trade.

  Yet life in the Factories went on. As the noose tightened around the city, the Americans kept their eyes to the future. Having achieved his competence in the prosperous months without British competition, Robert Forbes set sail for home, leaving new partner Warren Delano in charge of Russell & Company’s Chinese operations. “All will be well under Mr. Delano’s control,” Forbes wrote an associate, “and I shall be satisfied with whatever he may think right, should he require my cooperation.”22

  Ned could not help but marvel at Warren’s newfound sophistication and worldliness. “Of course he feels his authority—yet he does not abuse it—a young man of 31 at the head of R & C[company],” Ned wrote admiringly. “He can carve a duck, eat curry, be interesting in conversation, be sarcastic in his remarks, tell a good story, and do many other things ‘too numerous to mention.’ ”23

  Warren Delano had achieved his supreme ambition of being anointed chief partner of the firm. It had not happened in the best of circumstances, but he now had his brother at his side, and if the two had fears, they left no record of them. Besides, the Americans gambled that the British would not dare open fire upon the residents of the Factories. Or if they did, the merchants would receive ample warning to evacuate.

  Business continued the old New England way: smuggling, with assistance from Houqua. “I tell the Hong Merchants also that if the Mandarins are allowed us to send teas to Macao for transshipment to American ships, they must do so immediately and without making any noise about it,” Warren wrote, “for if the English hear that such things are being done, the inner passage will be blockaded, inasmuch as they will not consent to us Americans doing trade while the English are cut off. Howqua [sic] will see the Quangchowfoo [mayor of Canton] this p.m.”24

  The elderly Houqua had reasons to be happy, despite his recent humiliation at the hands of Commissioner Lin. “The old gentleman is in good health,” Delano wrote Abbot Low, “and still vigorous if we can judge by the reported fact of his having taken to himself a nice, beautiful, and blooming wife of sixteen years only three or four months since.”25 Indeed they all had reason to be happy. “A magnificent profite [sic],” Ned Delano wrote of the fortune he, his brother, and the Russell partners had made with the British gone, “the like of which I think cannot again accrue.”26

  It seemed only a matter of time before China capitulated and opened up to further Western trade. Delano wrote to Robert Forbes, now back safely in Boston (and in Delano’s words, “in fine health and spirits”), that in preparation for this new economic landscape, Russell & Company would require a new type of ship.27 She should be as “plain as possible, inside and out, but strongly fastened and of good, sound, and sufficiently heavy timber.” Above all, in Delano’s furtively underlined words, this new ship, which should be able to carry around 1,500 tons of tea and other Chinese goods in her hold, must be able to “sail fast.” Deferring to Robert Forbes’s knowledge of shipbuilding—and perhaps to stroke the former sea captain’s ego—Delano added, “You understand these matters better than we do.”28

  Robert’s brother John Murray Forbes was jubilant about not just his brother’s return to Boston but also the huge boost the war had brought to their family’s fortune. “My trade operations since I began business when a boy in Canton, or, if you take a fairer test, since I returned from China, in 1837, have not averaged over six percent interest on the amount invested if you take out the first lucky hit of the Acbar [sic]I by being out during the China war, and the very nice tea speculation to England that was made for me at the same time,” Houqua’s “American” son wrote years later. “Without these two operations, I am sure my profits have not been over six per cent, and I am inclined to think that with them they would not be much over six.”29

  Warren Delano was getting ahead of himself about the construction of a new type of ship. In the closing weeks of 1840, it was clear that the Royal Navy was prepared for an assault on the city of Canton. Although younger brother Ned professed public support for the impending British arrival, in private he hoped that the British would not use violence to get their way, not to mention to expand their overseas dominions. He and his brother had grown up knowing the stories of their father’s harsh imprisonment by the British in the War of 1812. “I truly wish that John Bull [the British equivalent of Uncle Sam] would meet with one hearty repulse,” Ned wrote in his diary, “for why should he enter their peaceful habitations and commit the horridest brutalities upon the women?”30 His observations perhaps reflected more hatred of the English than respect for the Chinese.

  Older brother Warren had a different view of the whole situation. Whatever harm the British had visited on their father during the War of 1812 had to be forgiven in light of the current conflict. “Great Britain owes it to herself and to the civilized world,” Warren wrote home, “to knock a little reason into this besotted people and teach them to treat strangers with a common decency.”31 By “civilized world,” of course, he meant the West.

  On January 7, 1841, six months after the blockade began, the British naval squadron made its move up the Pearl Riv
er, and the Chinese were aghast at the sight. The junks of the Chinese navy were no match for the steam-powered beasts headed for Canton, belching black smoke, paddle wheels thrashing, oak flanks bristling with cannon. As the HMS Nemesis led the British squadron upriver, they fired. Plumes of water erupted from the Pearl River as the shells fell around the junks of the forlorn Chinese navy. One by one, the ships blew up and plunged to the bottom. Finally, the Chesapeake, an old English merchant ship that the Chinese had seized and turned into a warship—complete with incongruous bright eyes on her bow—went up in a huge fireball as a shell hit her magazine. The shock reverberated across Canton, sending plaster tumbling from the ceilings of the Factories, shaking the crystal glasses in the sideboards, and causing the glittering cut-glass chandeliers to sway.

  The Chinese shore forts returned the British ships’ fire in vain: their guns were fixed and could fire only when an enemy ship passed directly in front of them. The forts were reduced to ruin. Hundreds of Chinese defenders were cut to ribbons by shells, shrapnel, and flying debris.

  Warren Delano observed the defeat with awe and a strange sense of delight: “the rabble look up on us with a sort of stupid astonished gaze … The British ships of war are close at hand, and the Chinese know that they will strike again if they [the Chinese] do not move cautiously.” In pidgin, he mocked them: “Poor Fokee, how you are humbled!”32

  The residents of Canton panicked as the British ships approached. Some fled for their lives. Others formed an angry mob outside the gates of the Factory compound. Inside, the remnants of the once-bustling Golden Ghetto prepared for the worst. They felt assailed on two fronts: by the British on the water and the Chinese on land.

  The British were striking other cities simultaneously. To the north, the queen’s troops went ashore and marched inland, crushing the Chinese army at the port cities of Shanghai and Xiamen.

  In May 1841 came the coup de grace: as the Royal Navy rode at anchor on the Pearl River, six Americans—the Delano brothers; William Henry Low; Russell & Company smuggling captain Philip Dumaresq (commander of Russell’s trading ship Akbar); and two others—sailed out to the waiting British HMS Calliope to ask that the blockade let American ships to continue upriver. They were, after all, neutral vessels. The British commander replied curtly that he was about to intimidate the Chinese government with yet another show of firepower. Would the Americans like to watch? From the safety of their schooner, William Henry Low observed the British warships fire broadside after broadside into the Chinese fortifications at North Wangtong, fifty miles downriver from Canton. At the same time, infantry soldiers stormed ashore from the HMS Nemesis, butchering the defenders. When the smoke cleared, William could see the Union Jack fluttering over the battered fortifications.