Barons of the Sea

by Steven Ujifusa

  Coming ashore at the invitation of the British, the Americans met an unforgettable sight. If they had shielded themselves from the horrors of the opium trade, they now saw firsthand the horrors of military might. “The dead, the dying, and wounded lay in one indiscriminate mass, many of them with their clothes on fire,” William wrote his brother Josiah, “praying for water, or for an end to be put to their sufferings.”33 The sights and sounds of that day would haunt him for the rest of his life. Unlike the other American merchants, he felt some culpability for this conflict. He lacked a certain sangfroid that his Yankee colleagues had in spades.

  Low and his comrades sailed back to the safety of the Factories, hoping that the British and the Chinese would work out a diplomatic solution. But the Chinese were not going down without a final fight, this time bringing their rage to the hated foreigners’ front doors.

  Later that month, a furious mob descended on the Factories, determined to rid Canton of the fanqui once and for all. This time the American merchants knew the jig was up. Low and Delano quickly loaded all of Russell & Company’s goods into boats and fled the Factories to Macao, which was still under Portuguese protection. Of the Americans, only one remained in the Factory: Russell partner Joseph Coolidge, who stayed behind hoping to save what remained of his company’s property from the angry mob.

  The others left just in time. Tearing down the gates, the horde rampaged through the compound. They smashed furniture, slashed portraits (likely including the likeness of King George IV), destroyed crockery, and carried off the silver flatware and candelabras. In one last, desperate act of vengeance, the mob set the Factories on fire. Coolidge and several other Westerners were captured and tortured before being freed by the British troops who stormed ashore as Canton burned. His Portuguese secretary was not so lucky: beaten unconscious, he was thrown into the Pearl River and drowned.

  “The English landed at Canton yesterday,” Ned Delano wrote in his diary. “Hoisted the Br. Flag on the ‘Company’s hall’ + recommenced negotiations—only 2 or 3 men killed in Canton—1 an Englishman by his office—the British killed some 40 or 50 men in silencing the little forts in the neighborhood—W. (Warren) G. and S. were on and in the factories while the shots were flying—so was Ryan—2 or 3 shot went very near them.”34

  Only Houqua could save the city of Canton from complete destruction. Under a flag of truce, the old man was rowed out to the British squadron. There he told the British commander that he and the other members of the Cohong would pay a ransom that would make the British whole for their lost opium, plus damages. Houqua paid the British $1.1 million; the other Cohong merchants put up another $900,000.35 Shaken but alive and well, William Henry Low decided it was high time to join his brother Abiel Abbot Low at home. He had earned a decent sum during his short stay in Canton—not enough to be independently wealthy but enough, he felt, to propose to his beloved Ann Bedell back in Brooklyn, New York. Maybe one day he would return and become a partner, but only after the situation in China had calmed down. “There was no satisfaction in living in China in times such as these,” he wrote home in frustration.36 Yet William also proudly told his sister Harriet that he had made $15,000 from a series of shipments of silks, pearl buttons, and hyson tea—more than enough to pay off his debts from his bachelor days.

  Warren Delano was not as bothered by what had transpired. When he set sail for New York in January 1843 after nine years abroad, he saw more opportunity than ever before.

  Before his departure, Houqua threw his American “son” Warren Delano a final banquet in his honor. Canton was still in ruins, the Factories were burned, and the British Empire was victorious over the Celestial Kingdom, but the generous Houqua was in no mood for austerity when it came to the head of Russell & Company. One attendee noted that the dinner included “about 15 courses—bird’s nest soup—shark fins—pigeons eggs—quail &c—sturgeon’s lip, etc. We had 13 hours getting thro’ with it. It is many years since Howqua [sic] has given a Chinese dinner at his own house, and perhaps never before did he give to a friend the like of this.”37

  As he sat in Houqua’s glittering banquet hall, Delano was probably pinching himself. To be accorded an honor so rare, again especially after having survived such a harrowing siege! He had received Houqua’s kiss of approval, reaffirming his membership in a select fraternity of American men. He then bade farewell to his Chinese godfather, as well as brother Ned, and set sail for the United States, leaving the wreckage of Canton behind him.

  Even after nine years, Delano didn’t carry home much understanding or respect for the Chinese. “With two or three exceptions,” he snarled to the Russell & Company men back in America, “the Chinese with whom we are acquainted, talk and think like foolish little children, and of late, I keep as clear of them as I can.”38 But there was one important exception.

  Packed in Delano’s luggage were three portraits. Two were of Delano himself, painted by the Chinese artist Lam Qua. (“In my humble opinion,” he wrote, “neither of them look any more like me than they do—like—like—like Martin Van Buren.”39) The third portrait was of Houqua, by the same artist. Warren Delano treasured the Houqua portrait for the rest of his life.

  *

  The Chinese formally capitulated to the British in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which ceded the island of Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River as a Crown colony. In addition, it granted Western traders access to four additional Chinese ports: Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai. As a final insult, the Chinese government was obligated to pay a staggering £21 million indemnity to the British Crown, due in full by December of the following year. Only upon receipt of a first portion of the payment, the treaty asserted, would Her Britannic Majesty’s forces retire and “no longer molest or stop the trade of China.” For the Chinese, the treaty ending the First Opium War was the start of the Century of Humiliation.”40

  When news of the Chinese defeat reached the United States, Congressman (and former president) John Quincy Adams declared that the Chinese had been at fault: “[T]he cause of the war is the Kotow!—the arrogant and insupportable pretentions of China, that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of relation between lord and vassal.”41 (A Kotow was when Westerners were forced to act in a deeply subservient manner to Chinese officials.) Opium, Adams declared, had nothing to do with the conflict.42

  The year the treaty was signed, Ned Delano, still in China, lonely and lost without his brother, sailed to Singapore for company business. There he made his first visit to an opium den. “Found smokers in all of them,” he wrote in his diary. “One man was prostrate under its effects—pale, cadaverous, death-like … for when I took his pipe from his hand, he offered no resistance, though his eyes tried to follow me.”

  In the same journal, Ned decried the evils of slavery in the American South by jotting down the following bit of verse:

  A boasted flag of Stripes and Stars

  Once fluttered oe’r the waves

  Hangs dripping down in deep disgrace

  Wet with the tears of slaves.43

  Then Ned Delano got back to work, earning the competence that would allow him to return home and get married. His brother Warren, in New York, was planning not only to do just that but also to invest his newfound riches in a new type of ship, one that would exploit the newly opened China.

  *

  I. The Akbar was one of the largest and fastest of John Murray Forbes’s vessels at the time.

  CHAPTER 4

  YANKEES IN GOTHAM

  I am a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose … Well, a man like that is a man that is full of fight—that goes without saying.

  —MARK TWAIN, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889

  Franklin Hughes Delano had smoothed the path for his younger brother Warren’s arrival back in New York. As Warren and his fellow Canton bachelors
dined at Houqua’s villa, Franklin climbed Manhattan’s social ladder. The Yankee lad from Fairhaven distinguished himself in the shipping business as a partner at Grinnell, Minturn & Company, where he worked diligently at the firm’s South Street office. Yet he also was very popular after hours. Like his brother, he was tall, but he was also an easy talker and blessed with extreme good looks. He excelled at the waltz and the gavotte.1 One young lady, the granddaughter of one of New York’s richest men, found the whaler’s son irresistible.

  Yet not all New Yorkers were so welcoming toward the Delanos and the New Englanders who were pouring into the growing metropolis.

  Washington Irving, America’s first professional author, was one of them. He had gained international fame as the creator of Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. He moaned that New York, founded in 1625 as the dignified old Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam, was now being overrun by the crassly commercial, money-grubbing Yankees: “a longsided, raw-boned, hardy race of whoreson whalers, woodcutters, fishermen, and pedlers [sic], and strapping corn-fed wenches; who by their united efforts tended marvelously toward populating those notable tracts of country called Nantucket, Piscataway [New Jersey], and Cape Cod.”2 To Irving, the Old Dutch families, whose wealth came from large feudal tracts of farmland in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, meant gentry and good manners. Irving coined a name for this aloof and insular elite: Knickerbockers. He also came up with a lasting nickname for New York: Gotham.

  Irving’s nostalgic portrayal of old New York sold books but had little basis in the factual past; the city had never been particularly dignified. Nor did the musings of Irving’s alter ego Diedrich Knickerbocker stop New York’s continuing transformation into what De Witt Clinton, governor of New York State, called “the emporium of the world.”

  New York in the early 1840s was the nation’s largest city, with almost three hundred thousand residents. It had displaced rival Philadelphia to the south as America’s financial center and Boston to the north as its busiest port. The impetus that triggered and sustained the transformation was the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, a 363-mile-long ditch dug by thousands of mostly Irish laborers. The waterway stretched between Albany on the banks of the Hudson and Buffalo on the shores of Lake Erie, and made moving grain out of the interior to the Port of New York and then to Europe easy and cheap—cheaper than sending it floating down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans.

  The Erie Canal boom launched some of the new nation’s first great fortunes. Ironically, the richest man in this “new” New York was neither a Knickerbocker nor a Yankee. He was an uneducated German-born musical-instrument maker turned capitalist named John Jacob Astor, who had amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune in the fur trade and then multiplied that many times over by buying up New York real estate as the city crept northward up Manhattan Island.

  Still, it was the new Yankee initiative that was driving growth. And few industries exemplified Yankee ascendancy more than the growth of New York shipping, which was firmly in the control of a group of families with New England roots. Ships and commodities, not rent payments and land, had produced their fortunes. They were the masters of New York’s global trade—centered on its thriving seaport, which was bringing in greater riches with every year that passed.

  New York in the early nineteenth century drew its lifeblood from its waterfront. In addition to the lucrative China trade, it was home to America’s first fleet of regularly scheduled transatlantic packets, sailing under the house flag of the Black Ball Line. Starting service in January 1818, not long after the end of the trade-crippling War of 1812, the line had a fleet of four ships, enough to schedule monthly sailings between New York and Liverpool, England. “[T]he regularity of their times of sailing,” the first advertisement proclaimed, “and the excellent condition in which they deliver their cargo, will make them very desirable opportunities for the conveyance of goods.”3

  The island of Manhattan, as poet Walt Whitman rhapsodized in his poetry anthology Leaves of Grass, was encircled by ships, and the sights and sounds of ocean commerce were never far away from its residents:

  Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,

  The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,

  The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,

  The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,

  The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,

  The flags of all nations.4

  When the thirty-four-year-old Warren Delano arrived in New York Harbor in the spring of 1843 and the great city unfolded before him, the newly wealthy merchant must have swelled with pride. True, China had made him rich, but New York was the real land of opportunity. He resolved to settle down in this city, the burgeoning center of America’s unregulated, unchecked capitalist system. Here were opportunities to invest his $100,000-plus competence in a bewildering number of new enterprises, as coal, iron, cotton, railroads, real estate, and ships all sang the siren songs to the speculator.

  Delano was returning to a city he had known well. He had clerked in New York at the merchant firm Goodhue & Company on his path to the larger fortunes of the China trade. But now, after having lived on the other side of the world for nearly a decade, he no doubt felt like a real-life Rip Van Winkle—few Americans of his time spent so long abroad, let alone strayed more than a few miles from their home. In his years away, the whole country had been changing. American capitalism had been loosed by President Andrew Jackson’s successful destruction of the Second Bank of the United States—the “many-headed monster” that had attempted to bring some semblance of federal control to the nation’s freewheeling financial system. Arkansas, as a slave state, and Michigan, as a free state, had been admitted to the union. Railroads were spreading fast throughout the United States: by the early 1840s, the country boasted almost five thousand miles of track, a tenfold increase since Delano set sail for China.5

  Of course, the speed and the potential profits of the steam-powered iron horse had not gone unnoticed by the merchants of the China trade. Comfortably rich John Murray Forbes contemplated coming out of “retirement” to bet his competence (and Houqua’s cash hoard) on the railroads. Yet the business was still a treacherous one, full of shady speculators and frauds as well as brilliant operators and real opportunities. Ultimately, Forbes decided to hold off, while others engaged in international shipping failed to share his enthusiasm for transportation over land. Convinced that America’s future lay with the sea, John’s brother Robert wanted to use his fortune and influence to build better and faster ships, giving Boston’s shipbuilders a chance against New Yorkers in the same business.

  For New York was a tough competitor, powerful and growing quickly. It was still largely a low-rise city of brick, wood, and brownstone—spreading northward rather than skyward for some years to come. Most New Yorkers lived in single-family rowhouses, except for those unfortunates crammed into the fetid tenements of Lower Manhattan’s Five Points slum. Yet the largest buildings occupied by working people were still no more than six stories high. The tallest structures in Manhattan were churches: the spire of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street would soon soar 281 feet in the air, making it the tallest building not only in New York but also in the entire United States. Only after the invention of the elevator and the steel-frame skeleton in the decades to come would the city start growing skyward. People would call these buildings by the name sailors gave to a triangular sail set from the truck and skysail yardarms: skyscraper.

  Yet as Trinity’s spire rose above, the city stank below. Sewage ran in the streets, especially in the slums. Pigs rooted through piles of trash dumped in alleys. The Collect Pond, for two hundred years the main source of water for New York, had long since been fouled with waste from tanneries. Cholera, typhoid, and other epidemics raged through the city on a regular basis. In 1830, af
ter a cholera outbreak killed one in thirty-nine New Yorkers, the city fathers took action by planning a public works project comparable to the construction of the Erie Canal a few years earlier. In 1842 the Croton Aqueduct had opened, bringing thirty-five million gallons a day of clear, upstate water to the city’s residents. Soon even this would not be enough to satisfy the growing demand.

  When he landed in 1843, the trim, sunburned Delano almost certainly stepped ashore at South Street, New York’s “Street of Ships.” Around him were the raucous sounds and foul smells of a thriving port. The East River, like Canton’s Pearl, was choked with commerce: packet ships, cargo sloops, and smoke-belching, clanking passenger steamers. Wharves were stacked with bales of southern cotton and barrels of flour destined for Liverpool, 3,100 miles across the Atlantic. Stevedores unloaded crates packed with English-woven calico and Staffordshire pottery, Jamaican sugar, Indian spices, and, of course, tea and silks from China—most in the care of Delano’s august firm of Russell & Company. Just across South Street from the bustling wharves and the ships’ jutting bowsprits and leering figureheads were the offices of all the great New York shipping houses, where men who sat at high-topped mahogany desks, wielding steel-nibbed pens, coordinated sailings and managed freight inventories with military precision. The buildings were faced with granite on the first floor, the upper stories with brick. Heavy oak joists supported the floors, while large windows admitted daylight into the counting rooms.