OPIUM FLEET

The Boston Money Tree an excerpt from: The Boston Money Tree Russell B Adams Jr. 1977
[CTRL] [2] The Boston Money Tree Kris Millegan Wed, 8 Mar 2000 07:48:16 -0800​
All Rights Reserved Thomas Y. Crowell Company New York ISBN 0-690-01209-8 324 pps.
First Edition Out-of-print
 

Chapter Five

CHINA TRADERS, OLD AND NEW

At the age of sixteen, I filled a man's place as third mate; at the age of twenty, I was promoted to a command; at the age of twenty-six, I commanded my own ship; at twenty-eight, I abandoned the sea as a profession; at thirty-six, I was at the head of the largest American house in China.... I had been blessed, by a kind Providence, with a fair amount of success. -- Robert Bennet Forbes

While Francis Cabot Lowell's Boston Associates were marveling at the success of their Waltham mill and laying the foundations of the great manufacturing city of Lowell, John Perkins Cushing remained in Canton tending the affairs of Perkins & Company. For the great China trader Thomas Handasyd Perkins, though he built a short-lived cotton mill of his own along the Charles River in Newton, just west of Boston, and later made some fairly substantial investments in the Lowell mills he was even, for a time, president of the Appleton Company remained first and foremost a merchant, far and away the leader of Boston's mercantile community. And when it came to weighing his merchant and manufacturing interests over the question of the protective tariff, Perkins chose the side of free trade without hesitation.

Cushing had returned home for a brief visit in April, 1807 setting sail again for China after just six weeks. Not yet twenty: he was a full and respected partner in the Perkins firm, one of the most successful trading houses in China. One reason for Cushing's outstanding performance was that he, like many Americans, approached the hong merchants and other Chinese with whom he dealt as equals and treated them with the respect that they thought was their due. This was in sharp contrast to rival European traders, who were accustomed to shouldering the white man's burden and asserting supremacy over people of darker races than their own. In Chinese eyes, Americans remained Fan-Kwae, foreign devils from beyond the borders of civilized society, but their honest and courteous bearing made them somewhat less devilish than Fan-Kwae from other Western lands.

Cushing managed to outdo most of his countrymen in gaining all-important respect from his counterparts in China. As late as 1815, it was widely believed by the Chinese merchants that the only truly reliable Americans in Canton were Cushing and Philip Ammidon, at the time representing another American firm, but later an agent for the Perkins interests. So noted was Cushing for his implacable honesty that an agreement by a hong merchant to supply an American supercargo with tea at the market price once specified that if quality and price could not be agreed upon he would be called in as an arbitrator, and "Mr. J. P. Cushing's opinion shall be binding."

b.s. that CUSHING RESPECTED AS "HONEST" illegal DRUG DEALER

[ OPIUM POPPY HALLUCINATIONS: HE WAS AN OPIUM DRUG SMUGGLING PIRATE ]

By the 1820s Cushing was known as the most influential of all the foreigners in Canton. He was, according to young George W. Sturgis, who worked for him in the Perkins firm, "exclusively a man of business and in my opinion, as well calculated for one on a liberal scale as any I have ever met with; in manners the Gentleman, generous, intelligent, and independent, and deservedly esteemed and respected by all who know him."

Happily, Cushing had struck up a close business and personal relationship with the hong merchant Houqua, who at his death in 1843 was said to be the richest man in the world. Houqua had dealt with the Americans since the 1780s, and was as famed as Cushing for honest and upright conduct at a time when most Chinese merchants were noted for rascality and dishonesty in their dealings with foreigners. Indeed, Houqua at times displayed a streak of generosity that astounded his American clients. William C. Hunter, who in 1837 joined Russell & Company, the successor to Perkins & Company, recalled in his old age the experience of a merchant who had suffered considerable losses in Canton. To help the American recoup his losses, Houqua advanced him large sums of money, and after several years the two compared accounts and found that Houqua was out a total of $72,000. The hong merchant then took a promissory note for this amount and locked it away in his strongbox. Fortune continued to frown on the American trader, by now aching to return home but still hoping to repay his debt.

[ SEE THE CHINA CURRICULUM ]
"You have been so long away from your own country, why do you not return?" Houqua asked one day. Told that only the unpaid $72,000 kept the American in Canton, Houqua called for his purser and asked for the note. "You and I are number one olo flen," he said to his debtor. "You belong honest man, only no got chance." With that, Houqua ripped the note into tiny pieces and tossed the fragments into his waste basket. "Just now have settee counter," he smiled, "alla finishee. You go, you please."

With a permanent branch office in Canton, with a virtual monopoly on the fur trade on the Northwest Coast, and with their substantial resources, the Perkins brothers were better able than most China traders to ride out the disruptions that came with the War of 1812. During a part of this period, in fact, they sat back and put their money out-at a goodly 18 percent interest-to other merchants in Canton. But as the fur trade paled and hard cash grew harder to come by, a search began for a substitute for the furs and specie that had been foundations of Boston's China trade. Opium seemed the ideal commodity to fill the gap, and during much of the 1820s, the drug was virtually the only profitable commodity in the China trade. The British, with their monopoly in opium-rich India, were far and away the heaviest dealers, but the Perkins interests, sparked first by Cushing and later by the brothers Robert Bennet Forbes and John Murray Forbes, ran a worthy second.

 

british ignored china's plea to stop pushing drugs

The British East India Company, whose corner on the tea market had brought Boston's merchant tempers to a boil in 1773, had introduced opium to China in the same year. At first touted for its pain-dulling medicinal properties, the drug was soon found to dull pains of another sort, and it wasn't long before wretched Chinese peasants and coolies were turning to opium as a pleasant release from life's burdens.
So widespread and devastating had opium smoking become-and so draining was it on China's balance of payments that the emperor decreed in 1800 that the drug could no longer be brought in. The East India Company, not wanting to offend the emperor and jeopardize its favored position in the China trade, complied with the letter of the imperial edict while cheerfully flouting its spirit by auctioning off opium in India to independent British merchants who then smuggled the drug into China.

Having ready access only to the inferior grades of Turkish opium, American traders at first steered clear of the trade. But as the habit spread and addicts grew more interested in quantity than quality, a few American merchants began to dabble in the drug traffic, starting in about 1805. The first Perkins cargo of Turkish opium, on board the brigantine Monkey, arrived in China in 1816; when the transaction proved profitable, the firm dispatched an agent to Leghorn, Italy, to set up an opium-buying operation.

It was the beginning of a thriving if illicit commerce for the house of Perkins and for the future of a number of other Boston fortunes.boston brahmins 
outrageously justify their illegal drug pushing

 

Though they recognized the demoralizing effects of opium addiction, there is no evidence that these early drug dealers felt that they were engaged in an immoral enterprise. It hardly mattered to them that their goods were illegal and had to be smuggled to their destination; smuggling was a time-honored sideline among Bostonians. And the fact that they were giving the customer something that he wanted and something that he would in any case get from British smugglers-seemed to bless their undertaking with enough commercial validity to overcome whatever moral qualms the merchants may have had. Years later, Robert Bennet Forbes, by then a pillar of his home Community, would observe of his own deep involvement in the opium trade that it was engaged in by the prestigious East India Company and was considered perfectly legitimate outside China. Besides, he said, he was only following the example of "the merchants to whom I had always been accustomed to look up [to] as exponents of all that was honorable in trade, the Perkins's, the Peabodys, the Russells, and the Lows." Forbes also justified his activities by noting that the effects of opium were probably no more harmful than the ravages of "ardent spirits." A present-day Forbes has been heard more than once to wonder if today's drug dealers will in time be as honored as are his own forebears.

For all that, Western medical doctors of the nineteenth century freely prescribed opium for a variety of complaints, and while it is doubtful that many Boston traders ever took up the drug in earnest, its use must certainly have been known to them. In 1837, William Appleton noted in his diary that his own mother, who had reached the ripe old age of eighty-one, had for the past two decades been using about four pounds of opium a year "without apparent bad effects." The elderly Appleton woman had begun taking the drug as a cure for chronic diarrhea, a condition that may or may not have been brought on by too-liberal consumption of the tea and rhubarb that the Chinese sold to the West in the belief that they were used as tonics to cure constipation. The Russell & Company partner William C. Hunter probably summed up the feelings of his colleagues when he wrote in later life that the opium trader's "sales were pleasantness and his remittances were peace. Transactions seemed to partake of the nature of the drug; they imparted a soothing frame of mind with three per cent commission on sales, one per cent on returns, and no bad debts."

Chinese officialdom did not view opium with such equanimity, and beginning around 1816 the imperial government launched a number of campaigns to enforce the ban on imports of the drug. By 1821 the crackdown was complete. Opium-carrying ships, which had previously slipped into the anchorage at Whampoa after payment of bribes to corrupt customs officials, were now barred from the anchorage. This time the Chinese meant business, and the ban was rigorously enforced. But the dope merchants were not about to let a little matter of law come between them and the profitable opium trade. They soon found ways to sneak their cargoes in and keep China's opium pipes burning.

Thomas Handasyd Perkins welcomed Chinese moves to halt the opium traffic, figuring that if China made things hot enough for drug dealers, the less venturesome traders would be scared out of the business, leaving a bigger share for the Perkins firm.
It was a shrewd guess: rival merchants John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard dropped the opium trade. For years, along with the Boston firm of Bryant & Sturgis-together, the Perkins firm and Bryant & Sturgis were frequently called the Boston Concern, and William Sturgis, scion of an old Cape Code seafaring family, was a Perkins nephew and erstwhile employee-the Perkins interests had a virtual monopoly on Turkish opium imports to China, sometimes buying as much as 75 percent of the some 150,000 pounds of opium produced annually in Turkey. In the coming century, this encouragement of opium-poppy cultivation in Turkey would yield a bitter harvest for American society, but the Boston Concern reaped lush profits from trade in the drug. Depending on market conditions, opium bought in Turkey for about $2.50 per pound sold for as much as $10 a pound in China.

The Origins of Philadelphia's Self-Depreciation, 1820-1920 see PDF
IN 1820 Stephen Girard, the richest man in the country, was at the peak of his mercantile career. Philadelphians were dominating the Smyrna-to-Canton opium trade.

Not only did the Chinese government oppose the drug trade; so did Houqua, the hong merchant upon whose good offices the Boston Concern's fortunes depended. For John Cushing, this posed a tricky problem; he didn't want to offend his Chinese associate, nor did he have any intention of missing out on so profitable a business. He solved his dilemma with a ruse that probably fooled no one, though it seems to have satisfied Houqua and has led some to claim that Cushing, bowing either to moral scruple or to Chinese law, withdrew from the opium trade. What he did was announce, on October 26, 1818, that the commission business of Perkins & Company would now be handled by a newly organized firm, James P. Sturgis & Company, whose head was William Sturgis's first cousin. On paper, this took Cushing out of direct involvement in the drug trade, since opium shipments from the Boston Concern would go through the Sturgis firm rather than Perkins & Company.

In fact, Cushing had hardly washed his hands of the opium traffic; not only was he related to the principals of James P. Sturgis & Company, but he was still a partner of the drug-dealing Perkins brothers, who also were Sturgis kinsmen. And even after he retired from active business and returned to Boston, he continued to invest in opium ventures.

To get around the strictly enforced Chinese ban on opium, the Bostonians followed the British lead and adopted the store ship system, or the Lintin system, as it was called in honor of the island downriver from Whampoa where opium ships would transfer their chests of drugs to a permanently anchored vessel that served as a floating warehouse and marketplace. The system had been worked out with methodical care. The Chinese smugglers, who handled whatever bribes may have been necessary, would pay cash for opium chits at a Canton counting house and make their buys aboard the storeship. In addition to paying the market price, they would also have to come up with a cumsha of five dollars per chest. (Each chest generally contained a picul, or about 1331/3 pounds.) The operator of the storeship charged sellers a commission on sales, and smaller dealers were charged a storage fee for their cargoes. For the Americans, it was a safe and pleasant, not to mention profitable, arrangement. The risks were taken by the Chinese smugglers who, to outrun government patrol boats, carried their cargoes ashore in wave-cutting galleys that sometimes had as many as thirty oars to a side. The Americans called these exotic vessels smug boats, or centipedes; to the Chinese, they were fast crabs or scrambling dragons.

The first Perkins store ship, the Cadet, anchored at the Lintin station in 1823, and was so successful that other dealers looked to Cushing to set the price of opium, which he was generally able to manipulate by parceling out the drug in quantities that would not drive prices down. On occasion' if a rival showed up with a large quantity of the drug, Cushing would start dumping his opium to move the price down, buy up his competitor's cargo at the lower tag, and then raise the price to its previous higher level. Between January, 1824, and July, 1825, the Boston Concern sent a total of 177,837 pounds of opium to China aboard six ships. In addition to dealing in their own cargoes of Turkish opium, the Perkins firm also handled the Indian product on a consignment basis, though a much larger share of Indian opium was brought in by another firm, Russell & Company, founded in 1824 with Cushing's encouragement. Later, Perkins & Company would be merged with the Russell firm, further consolidating the Boston Concern's interests in China.

 

TWO. "IF YOU MEET THE DEVIL CUT HIM IN TWO"

drug dealers establish their network

On a fine spring day in 1830, twenty- five-year-old Robert Bennet Forbes, nearing Boston in a mail coach after a trip to New York, spotted a pair of coaches wheeling past him, headed south toward Providence. In the coaches, he recognized "the two individuals who held my fate in their hands," Thomas Handasyd Perkins and the captain-trader William Sturgis, leading principals in the Boston Concern's China ventures. Calling his coach to a halt at the first likely spot, Forbes rented a chaise and set out in hot pursuit. At Dedham, he was told that Perkins and Sturgis planned to pass the night at Fuller's halfway house in Walpole, and after buying a toothbrush and a fresh collar, Forbes dashed off once more, arriving just as the slower-moving Perkins-Sturgis party was alighting at the Fuller establishment.

Across the street at Polley's halfway house, Forbes cleaned himself up, buttoned on his sparkling white collar, and strolled nonchalantly into the dining room at Fuller's, where he found Perkins and Sturgis in high spirits and in the company of several young ladies. Forbes readily accepted a dinner invitation, and after the meal he took Sturgis aside and confessed that his presence there was more than a mere chance encounter. He was returning from New York, Forbes said, where he had inspected the ship Milo, which he intended to purchase in hopes that he would be given a chance to take it to the Lintin station as the Bryant & Sturgis store ship. This berth was currently occupied by the Tartar, under the command of a Sturgis nephew, but the elder Sturgis had long taken an interest in Forbes's seafaring career, and readily agreed to the young man's plan, advising him to forget about the Milo and buy a new ship instead. Later in the evening, Forbes cornered Perkins with his proposal, and when told that Sturgis had already approved of the scheme, Perkins said he had no objection to it. He, too, suggested a new vessel, and volunteered to advance Forbes the funds to buy it. The hour was now late, and Forbes decided to spend the night in Walpole before setting out once more for Boston. Sleep came easy, and never in his life, Forbes recalled later, had he been blessed "with more happy dreams of prosperity."

Forbes had been a long time in preparing for command of the Lintin store ship, which in addition to being the central cog of the Boston Concern's opium operations also did a thriving business in provisioning passing ships. And while he would later go on to bigger things, he had regarded the Lintin post as the height of his ambition, . . .

all the powerful drug families 
connected through marriages

 

. . an ambition whose fulfillment was made possible by happy accident of birth. Like John Perkins Cushing, Forbes was a Perkins nephew. His father, Ralph Bennet Forbes, had married Margaret Perkins in 1799, and when the hapless Ralph Forbes's merchant ships seemed never to come in, young Bennet was taken under the generous Perkins wing, as were his brothers Thomas Tunno Forbes and John Murray Forbes.

In another time or another place, kinship to a princely merchant family might have bestowed more modest blessings, but the Forbes boys, born as they were in the first years of the new century, came into a world of great promise and prosperity. In the twilight of that century, the writer Julian R. Sturgis looked back wistfully at the generation of his merchant father, Russell Sturgis-born in 1805, and a nephew of the brothers Perkins as well as of their Sturgis associates-and remarked that Bostonians sired at that period "were exceptionally fortunate in the time of their birth." It was an age of energy, courage, and integrity, a time of boundless opportunity. Fortune was on the wing, ready to be brought down by those endowed with the will and ready to seize the way. No matter what their birthright, young people were expected to work, and work hard. There was no such thing, in Boston, at least, as the idle rich "even the conception of a 'leisure class' was not yet," said Sturgis.

Robert Bennet Forbes entered this age of grace in 1804, the same year that his Cushing cousin was learning the ins and outs of the China trade, the same year that the first American opium ships were making their way to Canton. He got his first taste of the sea that would bear his fortune in 1811, when he and his older brother Thomas sailed with their mother for Marseilles, where Ralph Forbes had gone in search once more of his own elusive fortune. At Foster's Wharf on the bitter January day of their departure, young Forbes watched in wide-eyed wonder as the crew of the schooner Midas, which was heavy in the water with its mundane cargo of salt fish, beat ice from the canvas and rigging in preparation for setting sail. It was a rough passage, marred by the vessel's capture and brief detention by three British warships enforcing the blockade of French ports, but it was perhaps a fitting first voyage for a child fated for maritime adventure, and to bear the nickname of Black Ben Forbes.

The return trip, more than two years later, was no less eventful. On board the armed merchant ship Orders in Council, the Forbes family came under fire from a hostile British squadron-the War of 1812 was in full swing-and their Boston-bound schooner took refuge in a Spanish harbor. Boarding next the brig Caroline, the Forbeses fared no better; the Caroline, too, was bagged by a British frigate which towed the vessel to the mouth of the Tagus River. Eventually, mother, father, and children-another son, John Murray Forbes, had been born in Bordeaux-made it to Lisbon, where an obliging Sturgis cousin took them in and arranged for passage aboard a Baltimore ship bound for Newport. While waiting for the vessel to depart, the family did some sightseeing, and beneath an arch of an aqueduct near Cintra, the future Black Ben fired a pistol for the first time, and "heard the many reverberations resulting therefrom."

Back at home, which was now in Milton, just south of Boston, the Forbes boys enrolled at Milton Academy, where their fluent French and harum-scarum tales of sea fights and other worldly adventures made them the most curious of classmates, hardly the type to buckle down to studies and other such schoolboy concerns. So it was that in 1815, at the age of thirteen, Thomas Tunno Forbes was apprenticed at the Perkins countinghouse at Charles Bulfinch's monumental India Wharf. Bennet, too young to begin his mercantile career just yet, remained in school. But in 1816, just twelve years old, he became the first apprentice in a new firm formed by the junior Thomas and James Perkins along with Samuel Cabot, husband of the elder Thomas Handasyd Perkins's daughter Elizabeth. Boston business was ever a family affair.

Forbes's duties as a merchant apprentice were simple enough, but boring to one of his temperament. At the counting house of S. Cabot & J. & T. H. Perkins, Jr., on Foster's Wharf, the young man swept floors, laid fires on cold winter mornings, copied correspondence in letter books ("in a very indifferent manner," he confessed in his old age), and ran a variety of errands. He might have been satisfied to perform such lowly chores, confident in the knowledge that dutiful performance would surely lead to promotion and possible partnership. But Forbes had a touch of the sea in his blood, a tendency nourished by his doting uncle Thomas, with whom the young apprentice now lived. Dishing up heaping portions of pudding at dinnertime, Perkins would sometimes remark to his nephew that he would hardly be eating so high on the hog off the Cape of Good Hope, instilling in the young man the abiding notion, as he put it, that "I was born to eat bad puddings off the Cape."

Perkins had marked Forbes's skill at sailing, the mysteries of which he had learned from his cousin James on Jamaica Pond. He must have noted, too, that Bennet often slipped away from Foster's Wharf to stroll along nearby Central Wharf, where the Perkins ships were fitted out for globe-girdling voyages to bring back the teas and silks of China. It was heady stuff for a young man, a boy, really, even one who had heard the roar of enemy guns and the drone of cannonballs passing overhead. Frequently, perhaps dreaming of distant lands, Forbes would scramble aloft on one of his uncles' safely moored vessels, surveying the city and the outer reaches of the harbor from his perch atop sturdy masts that had groaned at the beating of all the world's winds. No, a clerk's life was not for Bennet Forbes; boy that he was, he was summoned to the sea.

The call came in early October, 1817, when Forbes had just turned thirteen. On one of his regular jaunts to the Perkins ships, Forbes had gone aboard the Canton Packet, and it was there that his uncle Thomas found his nephew casting an eye at the rigging. "Well, Ben," said Perkins, waving at the forest of masts around them, "which of these ships do you intend to go in?" Without hesitation, Forbes replied, "I am ready to go in this one." Before three weeks had passed, Robert Bennet Forbes was on his way to China. Among other things, he took with him some seasickness remedies given to him by his mother and some advice from close family friend William Sturgis, who, in a pitched battle with Chinese pirates, had once prepared a keg of powder to blow up his ship rather than suffer capture. "Always go straight forward," Sturgis told the fledgling seafarer, "and if you meet the devil cut him in two, and go between the pieces; if any one imposes on you, tell him to whistle against a northwester, and to bottle up moonshine."

Forbes needed his mother's medicine long before he could heed any of Sturgis's words of wisdom, though neither her nostrums nor some pills given him by the captain prevailed against the severe bout of seasickness that kept him alternately throwing up over the side and moaning in his quarters for the first several weeks of the voyage. After his recovery, Forbes, whose youth and kinship to the Canton Packet's owners made him a somewhat anomalous crew member, began volunteering for a number of shipboard duties. Thomas Handasyd Perkins, after all, had advised him that a key purpose of the voyage would be to help make him fit for future captaincy, and there is no better place to start than before the mast. Furling sails and standing watches, young Forbes learned the ways of the sea quickly, and when the mate informed him that once he had asked to keep the watch he would continue to do so when ordered, he learned something of discipline, too.

Arriving at Canton in March, 1818, Forbes was put up by his cousin John Perkins Cushing in the foreigners' compound at the edge of the walled city. And though he knew that the natural order of things dictated that his older brother, Thomas, was being groomed to come to China as a representative of the Perkins & Company interests, he did a little grooming on his own, clerking for his cousin, helping weigh teas and pack silks for shipment home. Cushing was impressed with the boy and asked him to stay on; Cushing, after all, had come to Canton at sixteen, and knew that a boy could do a man's work in that quarter of the globe. Forbes, bowing to his brother's claim to a Canton post in the house of Perkins and heeding his own call to the sea, declined, and in June he set out for home on the Canton Packet. The ship put in at New York-already, that port was rivaling Boston as a central distribution point for the teas and silks of China-and after a brief visit with his family at Milton he headed back to New York, where the ship was being prepared for another China voyage.

Before the sailing, Thomas Handasyd Perkins gave him a box of dollars to invest as he saw fit on behalf of himself and his brother, and advised him that he had instructed the captain to teach him the mysteries of navigation. "You must bear in mind that you have many duties to perform," Perkins wrote, "and you must endeavor to conduct yourself in such manner as will do you credit at home and abroad." It was still the keystone of the Boston business philosophy. Do yourself credit at home and abroad, do yourself credit for the sake of your friends and close-knit family, no matter where they might be. For they had put their trust in you, even as a boy, and your performance of your duties was a reflection on them, a testing of their trust. And if you can't trust your friends and kinsmen, whom can you trust? It was the glue that bound the Boston commercial community together in a world of strangers.

In Canton once more, not two years since leaving Boston on his first China voyage, Forbes again gave Cushing a hand in minding the affairs of Perkins & Company and was again asked to stay on as clerk. But Forbes had promised Perkins to stay by his ship until he was fit to command it. Besides, he couldn't stand in his brother's way, even on the road to sure fortune;

that's what trust was all about. Later, hot and dirty in his cramped quarters below decks on the Canton Packet, resting with his head on a splintery stick of wood, Forbes thought of the luxurious life he had left behind and consoled himself with the thought that "I was doing my duty, doing what my mother and my uncles would approve."

While Forbes was in Canton on this second voyage, Cushing wrote to Thomas Handasyd Perkins about "our young friend, Bennet Forbes," suggesting that he be made a ship's officer on his return home. "He is," said Cushing of the fifteen-year-old Black Ben, "without exception, the finest lad I have ever known, and has already the stability of a man of thirty ... he had profited so much by the little intercourse he has had with the Chinese, that he is now more competent to transact business than one half of the supercargoes sent out." But Cushing knew where Bennet's interests lay and wrote to Forbes's mother that "as he has set out to make a sailor it is best to let him persevere....

On the voyage out from Canton, the Canton Packet put in at Hamburg to sell its cargo, then sailed to London for refitting and a return voyage to China. It was a good season for trading, and there was no need for returning home. Before leaving London for Canton by way of Gibraltar, Bennet was made third mate and was addressed by the captain as Mr. Forbes. His seafaring career was well under way. Meanwhile, as planned all along, his older brother Thomas had left Boston for Canton to take up his post as principal aide to Cushing in Perkins & Company.

When he arrived again in China, Bennet's duties kept him close to his ship, and he had little time to spend ashore with friends and relatives. He was a man of the sea now, not a merchant or clerk. Before the Canton Packet left for Boston in February, 1821, Mr. Forbes, now sixteen, was promoted to second mate.

Forbes had little time, either, for family and friends in Boston. Arriving home in June, 1821, he left later in the summer on the Canton Packet for a year-long voyage that would take him to Manila, Canton, and Rotterdam. More voyages followed, and though he loved the sea, there were again times when Bennet envied his brother and his comfortable life in Canton. Already, Thomas Forbes was spoken of as Cushing's successor, and the succession seemed to be coming soon. With one brief visit home, Cushing had been in Canton for nearly two decades, and was ready to retire and lead the life of a Boston gentleman. Bennet Forbes still plowed the oceans, and with notable success for the Perkins concern. In the fall of 1824, Thomas Handasyd Perkins rewarded him with command of the Levant, and other captaincies followed.

But now Forbes was beginning to wonder where all his sea roving was getting him and where it would all end. His pay as a captain was a paltry fifty dollars a month, and while he was allotted space in the hold for small cargoes of his own, or to charge others for freight, he hardly seemed on the way to laying up a fortune, particularly when his progress was measured against his older brother's. He could top most men when it came to tales of travel and derring-do: he had outsailed pursuing pirates, seen much of the known world and some of the little-known, and helped put down incipient mutinies. But all this would profit him nothing in his old age, leave him little but memories of olden times and a stock of stories to spellbind wondering boys come to marvel at the tall masts of Boston Harbor. Forbes knew that he had to do more than sail other men's ships, hauling rich cargoes that were not his own.

 

THREE. "AN UPRIGHT & HONORABLE CONDUCT"

forbes drowns
at sea

By the 1820s, the China trade had changed considerably from its earlier days of high adventure and romance. The rich fur trade on the Northwest Coast was no more, and ships seldom made the storm-tossed Cape Horn passage, stopping for water and provisions at exotic tropical isles. The eastern passage, the more direct route by way of the Cape of Good Hope, was becoming the rule for Canton-bound vessels; the trade that had begun as a constant scramble for goods had become a regular commerce, conducted, not by roving supercargoes, but by resident agents. Ginseng grubbed from the ground of New York State, fragrant sandalwood chopped on lush Pacific islands, furs bartered for trinkets in Nootka Sound, all were giving way to the steady commodities of opium, hard cash, and cotton from the Lowell mills that had been built in large measure with the profits of earlier trading times.

As the New England textile mills began spinning out more fabric than the domestic market could absorb, it was only natural that sellers should turn to foreign shores for an outlet for their goods. As early as 1823, Boston's William Boardman sent out 3,400 yards of cotton sheeting on a ship "bound for Rio Janiero and a market," and in the following year he sent two more loads to Buenos Aires. Until Britain's opium war with China forced a humiliated Celestial Empire to fling open the doors of trade at numerous other ports than Canton, South America sopped up most of the exported American textiles, which had so thoroughly captured that market by the 1840s that British merchants seeking a piece of the South American action sometimes slapped such labels as "Appleton," "Boott," and "Suffolk" on their cheap cotton goods. The Near East, too, was a good early market for Boston's cloth, and even into the twentieth century cotton sheetings were still called cabots by the Turks.

But it was China, unindustrialized China with its teeming millions needing to be clothed, that was most highly prized as a consumer of American cottons. The first few shipments went out in the late 1820s and were so eagerly received that by 1830 John Perkins Cushing was advising the Boston Concern that if stock in a textile mill could be had at a "dog cheap" price, it would be worthwhile to buy out a factory for the sole purpose of turning out goods for China. It would not even be amiss, he added, to start a mill from scratch, so promising was the market. To textile king Patrick Tracy Jackson, Cushing wrote in the same year that "when you come to consider that the whole of the immense population of this country from the Emperor to the laborer are clad in cotton, you can form some idea of the extent of the consumption of cotton fabrics...." And American cloth could be made at considerably less cost than the laboriously handwoven native Chinese article.

In time China would become the most important single export market for American cottons, and when the so-called treaty ports were opened up in 1843, making possible much wider distribution in a huge country where interior transportation was poor, China's share of total U.S. cotton exports leaped to 34 percent, nearly triple the previous year's figure. By the late 1840s, the Lowell mills had become so dependent on the market in China that Nathan Appleton would chalk up the industry's depressing performance in that period to the sporadic rebellions and disturbances that upset trade in China. With the opening of still more ports in 1859, and the coming of stable conditions, China took nearly 56 percent of total American cotton exports. Oil for the lamps of China, indeed! There was more money to be made in clothing the country's coolies.

The China trade was changing, and so were the affairs of the house of Perkins. As early as 1821, James and Thomas Handasyd Perkins had decided that nearly thirty years in business was enough, and made plans for slow and orderly withdrawal. Hopefully, they brought their sons-who had previously set up a house of their own-into the senior firm, though it is likely that even pride of parenthood did not blind them from seeing the move as a vain gesture. Two generations of merchant genes had failed to fire the younger Perkinses: Thomas, Jr., much preferred the pleasures of wealthy Boston society to the hard nosed rigors of commerce, and his cousin James, Jr., was an alcoholic who before the decade was out would be "daily disgracing himself." It would be left to other men's sons to carry on the Perkins interests and traditions, to nephews John Cushing and the Forbes boys, all sons of failed merchants whose setbacks would be more than made up for by the success of their offspring.

John Perkins Cushing returned to Boston from Canton, where he had spent nearly half his life, in 1828, leaving Perkins & Company's affairs in the able hands of Thomas Tunno Forbes. ("I had now become aware of his superiority over me," wrote Bennet Forbes of his older brother, "and was ready to look up to him as the head of the family.") Before his departure , he had written Forbes a lengthy letter, a distillate of all he had learned in his lengthy stay in the Orient. Always be punctual with the Chinese, he said, and never ask for credit from anyone but Houqua. "I need not again remind you," he reminded his protege once more, "of the advantages that are derived in business concerns by pursuing on all occasions & with all persons with whom you have transactions an upright & honorable conduct. . . ."

The China trade had been good to Cushing-he had amassed a fortune of more than $600,000 and he was little inclined to leap into the hurly-burly of Boston business, which he found totally alien after so long an absence. Rejecting a proposal that he go into partnership with Samuel Cabot (a Perkins son-in-law) and Thomas Perkins, Jr.-Cabot was too unpopular, Cushing thought, and the junior Perkins would simply "not be a desirable partner in business" Cushing also turned aside Perkins's offer to make him head of the Perkins firm, which since the death of James Perkins in 1822 had been run by Samuel Cabot and Thomas Handasyd Perkins with only the barest help from the disappointing sons of the founding partners. What Cushing had in mind was a life of ease, with an investment now and then in a China venture, but nothing that would keep his head spinning with business affairs. Not for him was the obsessive Boston concern for commercial matters, the "vortex of business" which the merchant William Appleton complained so engrossed his mind "that I can hardly free it when I return to my family or even on the Sabbath." Cushing didn't yet have a family, but he aimed to start one and live in well-earned peace.

His intended idyll came to an end almost before it started. In August, 1829, less than a year after Cushing had left his Canton business in the charge of Thomas Forbes, the ship Mentor anchored at the Lintin station. Learning at Macao that the vessel carried important letters from home-some of which, he thought, might have to do with the fate of the Perkins firms in both Boston and Canton-Forbes immediately set out for Lintin in his yacht, the Haidee. The evening was hot and humid, auguring a storm, but Forbes was sure that he could make the eighteen-mile journey in a couple of hours at most. His progress was slow, and when the boat was becalmed about seven miles upriver from Macao, Forbes threw out his anchor and awaited the wind. When it finally came, at about midnight, it was in the fitful gusts that herald a coming gale, and Forbes set his sails and steered back for the haven of Macao. By one in the morning, the Haidee was snugly anchored in the lee of the town-Forbes could have put ashore, but he didn't want to disturb his chief clerk, who was seasick in a bunk below deck.

Shortly before daylight the wind whipped in with hurricane force, churning the sea and killing all hopes of making shore. A cutter of the East India Company lay at anchor nearby, but its native crew either ignored or didn't understand the upsidedown Stars and Stripes that a desperate Forbes ran up the mast as a plea for help. Soon after dawn, as the larger cutter got under way for the safety of the inner harbor, Forbes set out in its wake, but heavy winds and blinding sheets of rain soon forced him to haul in his sails and drop both anchors. As the winds increased, so did the danger; preparing for the worst, Forbes stripped off his clothes. It was a wise but futile move. First one anchor chain gave way, then the other snapped like a frail thread. At the mercy now of raging wind and water, the Haidee was hurled wildly through the waves, driven toward the sea. Running up a part of the foresail, Forbes fought for control, battled the rising tempest. Through driving rain he saw a small beach, but not the shoals that turned waves to crushing breakers as he steered for shore. One nearly swamped the fragile craft, but Forbes stayed at the helm; the next smashed the rudder, leaving the Haidee helplessly broadside and awash in the furious breakers. A native crewman, who lived to tell the tale, shoved a skylight to Forbes as a handhold, but Forbes leaped instead for the main shroud. For a few moments, he clung there, beaten by the waves, thinking, perhaps, of a packet of letters from home. Then his final wave came, and he was swept away. He was twenty-seven years old.

When calm came, Forbes's body was recovered and buried in the English cemetery at Macao, a grave far from home. "I have visited the spot," Bennet Forbes wrote to his mother in 1837, "and shall go again."

 

perkins firm hands off opium trade to russell & co.

FOUR. "UNTIL MY NEW YORK AGENTS GO"

At twenty-five, Robert Bennet Forbes, almost constantly at sea for the past dozen years, was suddenly head of his family, a position that he had at long last granted without envy to his now-dead older brother. He could now expect to be offered his brother's post in Canton. But Forbes, lacking confidence in his mercantile abilities, feeling more at home in a captain's cabin than in a counting room, continued to pursue his less demanding ambition to head the Lintin storeship. He brushed aside the urgings of Cushing, Perkins, and other members of the Boston Concern that he represent their interests in China. It was a decision that was not made lightly, and one that would have a profound effect not only on the course of the Forbes family fortunes but on the eventual development of the American West.

John Cushing, persuaded by Perkins to join him in one last major speculation, was in London buying goods for shipment to China when he heard of the death of his cousin Thomas Forbes, who had prudently left behind instructions that Russell & Company should take over the Boston Concern's affairs if some mishap overtook him. Learning of Bennet's reluctance to go to Canton, and that Russell & Company principal Samuel Russell had a mind to return to Boston, Cushing himself left England for China in April, 1830, little more than a week after Ben Forbes had brushed his teeth and buttoned on a new collar in preparation for presenting Sturgis and Perkins with his scheme to take over the Lintin storeship operation. When he arrived in Canton in August, Cushing found that Russell had decided to remain in China after all, and though he stayed on for a time, selling off the cargo of English goods he had brought with him, Cushing sailed down the Pearl River for the South China Sea in March, 1831. He would not see China again, though he mirrored some of its exotic splendor in a $55,000 house that he bought on Summer Street. Later, at his estate in Watertown-it was called Belmont, and in time would give its name to a new town-Cushing became a virtual recluse, turning the management of his extensive investments over to Bryant & Sturgis for an annual fee of 2.5 percent of the income.

As his fortune grew through wise investments in a variety of domestic enterprises, Cushing enjoyed the life of an Oriental potentate, spending some $50,000 a year to maintain his household and pursue such avocations as horticulture and collecting music-box rolls. His library, his wine cellar, his extensive gardens with their banks of flowers, shrubs, and trees from Europe and China, all were tokens of his years of dealing in opium and furs, teas and silks. And he was, as William Sturgis had once described him, a generous man, on a liberal scale. It is said that the Watertown assessors, come respectfully to call on their most substantial fellow citizen to inquire what he thought his tax bill should be, were in turn asked what sum had to be raised. Informed of the total, minuscule by his munificent standards, Cushing advised the startled tax men to charge the entire amount to him.

Shortly before Cushing arrived at Canton for his last sojourn there, Captain Robert Bennet Forbes was setting out from Boston Harbor, bound for the same destination. His new ship appropriately named the Lintin had been launched from the Medford yards on June 17, 1830, to the echoes of a cannonade marking the fifty-fifth anniversary of the battle on nearby Bunker Hill, where Forbes's benefactor Thomas Handasyd Perkins was raising a commemorative monument. Less than three weeks later, the vessel, the first of many that Forbes would see launched in his name, slipped out of its moorings at Central Wharf and set a course for the Cape of Good Hope and the South China Sea. Among the passengers were Augustine Heard, a seasoned ship captain and supercargo who had been tapped to represent the Perkins interests as a partner in the revamped Russell & Company, and seventeen-year-old John Murray Forbes, whose upcoming clerkship in the firm was intended to prepare him for the partnership that Bennet had declined.

Nine years his brother Bennet's junior, John Murray Forbes had been apprenticed at the age of fifteen in the counting house of the Perkins firm near the end of Boston's Central Wharf. Like his brothers before him, he had impressed his elder merchant kinsmen, and it was only natural that he should be eyed as a prime candidate to fulfill the hope and trust that had been placed in the deceased Thomas Tunno Forbes. When he arrived in Canton in November, Cushing introduced the young Forbes to Houqua, and the venerable hong merchant immediately took to him as the successor to Cushing and Thomas Forbes, even though Heard was actually in charge of the Boston Concern's interests in China. It was an understandable and prescient error on Houqua's part: though affable and well liked by all, Heard lacked counting house experience, and was slow and plodding besides. Many of his duties soon fell to his young clerk, who quickly showed a ready head for mercantile affairs. Bennet, meanwhile, was busily running the storeship at Lintin, provisioning other vessels, and doling out chests of opium-for each of which he raked off a five-dollar cumsha to Chinese smugglers who hustled their contraband goods ashore in their "scrambling dragons." It was hard and demanding work for Black Ben Forbes, but it was far more profitable than his previous rovings on the high seas. Once he had consoled himself for his hard lot with the thought that he was doing his family duty; now his mind was eased by the prospect of "picking up 30m [thousand] dolls per annum." Not a bad prospect at all for a man whose salary as a ship captain had been just fifty dollars a month.

In the spring of 1832, perhaps tiring even of anchor-bound shipboard life, Bennet Forbes sold a half share of the Lintin to Russell & Company for twenty thousand dollars, with the agreement that 25 percent of the firm's proceeds from the storeship operation were to go to his brother John. Bennet was head of his family now, and he meant to look after his own. With a tidy fortune, he sailed home to Boston, where he set up in the offices of China merchant Daniel C. Bacon to handle consignments from Russell & Company. Through the influence of John Murray Forbes in Canton-who managed transactions for Houqua as well as for the Boston Concern the goods readily came his way. For the two Forbeses, Houqua's business offered a double-barreled return: John picked up a percentage of the hong merchant's business in Canton, and Bennet got a commission on his shipments sold in Boston.

At the same time, Bennet began to build an expensive house on a hill in Milton "I felt that I was carrying out my mother's wish to erect a fitting monument to the memory of my brother," Forbes said later. Family duty again, duty to those born and unborn. Bennet Forbes's descendants lived in this house until 1961; it is now the Museum of the American China Trade, under the curatorship of his great-grandson, Dr. H. A. Crosby Forbes, an expert on Chinese porcelain.

John Murray Forbes, his health broken from his labors, returned to Boston on doctor's orders in the summer of 1833. Together, the brothers Forbes must have made an odd pair as they strolled along the wharves: Bennet, with his deeply tanned face framed in a shock of once black hair gone gray, and John, not yet twenty-one but taken for thirty or more because of his advanced baldness and mature bearing. Both brothers married in the winter of 1834, and Bennet, the old sea rover, settled down and bought a house next door to the Thomas Handasyd Perkins mansion on Temple Place; John, his health restored and his eye on his fortune, shipped out just a month after his marriage as supercargo on Bryant & Sturgis's Logan, bound for Canton by way of Gibraltar.

John Murray Forbes had intended to return after the voyage and join the Perkins firm in Boston, but he arrived in Canton to find that Heard, fallen victim to exhaustion-an occupational hazard, it seems-was set to leave for home. Never one to dodge his duties, Forbes stepped in to fill Heard's place at Russell & Company; he would not see Boston again for nearly three years.

Forbes found the firm still deeply involved in the opium trade "I have written and thought so much of opium," wrote Thomas Handasyd Perkins to John Cushing in 1827, "that it gives me an opiate to enter upon the subject." The previous year, to drum up even more business and make up for increased competition in the Turkish drug market, Russell & Company had dispatched one of its clerks, Joseph Coolidge, to Bombay and Calcutta to arrange for more shipments of the higher-quality Indian article, sweetening the pot with an offer to forgo storage charges on lots of one hundred or more chests consigned to the storeship at Lintin. It was a concession that the firm could easily afford, since the store ship would still be skimming off its five-dollar bribe per chest, and Indian opium suppliers must not have seen it as much of a bargain-Coolidge was not very successful in his mission. Then again, he may have failed because of his notably abrasive manner.

Despite Coolidge's inability to get a grip on Indian opium supplies, and despite strong competition from the new firm of Russell, Sturgis & Company formed in May, 1834, by relatives and former associates of the Boston Concern who, for reasons of their own, chose to plot an independent course-Russell & Company continued to prosper. And so did John Murray Forbes. When he returned to Boston in the spring of 1837, he brought with him a sizable fortune-including a half-million dollars of Houqua's own money which the hong merchant gave him to invest in American enterprise as he saw fit-and an agreement to get a three-sixteenths share of the firm's profits for three years, in ex[c]hange for looking after its interests in the United States.

Forbes got home just in time for the panic of 1837, and just in time, too, to help bail his brother out of some financial problems that would soon send Bennet Forbes packing back to China to recoup his lost fortune. By his own admission, Bennet had not learned to say no to a likely-looking business venture, and in what he later called a weak moment, he agreed to put a large sum of money into some Pennsylvania coal and iron mines whose output was to be used by a large nail works on which Forbes took a lien to secure his loan. How could he go wrong, he reasoned, when the nails could be made for three and a half cents per pound and sold for seven cents? A profit margin like that made nails look almost as good as opium. Unfortunately for Forbes, nearly everything went wrong. The iron ore and coal turned out to be inferior, the commercial crisis barred customers from paying for the nails they had bought, and Forbes was left holding the bag which in this case held a trunk full of uncollectable bills, a nail factory, and an inventory of about twelve thousand kegs of nails. Not until Bennet had gone again to China was John Murray Forbes able to wind up the tangled nail works, at a loss of about $100,000.

The nail venture was bad enough, but it was only one of Bennet Forbes's sour speculations. just before the crash, he and his associate, Daniel Bacon, sold a $100,000 shipment of Chinese silks, which they had bought on credit. Came the crisis, and buyers couldn't pay their bills; to maintain their own standing with the British house of Baring Brothers and with Russell & Company, which had advanced them credit, Forbes and Bacon had to dip into their own capital to make good. Once more, Forbes was left holding a bag, this time an empty one. It would not be the end of his troubles. At lunch one day in a Boston social club, conversation came around to the current rash of business failures and one of Forbes's table mates rather tactlessly asked him how long he expected to hold out. Forbes replied, "Until my New York agents go," and before he left the table he heard that they had gone, owing him a considerable sum.

With Thomas Handasyd Perkins as cosigner, Forbes borrowed on promissory notes from his New York agents, but his finances had been struck a blow that could be salved only by a return to China. Leaving his tangled affairs in the abler hands of younger brother John, Forbes left in June, 1838, on board the Mary Chilton, loaded with goods consigned to him by sympathetic and well-wishing friends. And despite his failures at home, he was armed with John's power of attorney, entitling him to act in his stead as a partner in Russell & Company. It was a well-placed trust: Bennet Forbes was made chief of the firm on January 1, 1840, and man[a]ged to merge the competing house of Russell, Sturgis & Company into the older Russell concern.

 

FIVE. "THE EVEN TENOR OF OUR AFFAIRS"

china says "no more" to drugs; british respond with violence

 

Forbes arrived in China at a time of still more change. The imperial government, after decades of seeing its treasuries drained, its officials corrupted, and its populace demoralized by the opium trade, had determined at last to put an end to it. Most of the foreigners in Canton believed that this was just another bluff, that new ways would be found to bribe and smuggle, but they were disabused of this notion early in 1839 when the incorruptible Chinese "commissioner," Lin Tse-hsu, arrived in Canton. With few preliminaries, he demanded delivery of every chest of opium within Chinese waters; not even the Lintin store ships could save the trade now. Russell & Company, perhaps anticipating such a move and under strong pressure from Houqua to get out of the drug trade, had announced shortly before Lin's arrival that it would give up its opium business, but the move came too late. China was in earnest this time, and no mere announcement of good intentions could stay its hand.

Throwing a cordon of soldier-filled boats around the riverfront residences of the foreign merchants, Lin ordered all Chinese servants and cooks to leave the area. Trade was shut off, and the foreign community held hostage for its stores of opium, the "vile dirt used in smoking." Having little choice, the merchants agreed to comply with the order-the British more readily than the Americans, since the superintendent of British trade pledged that the crown would make up for its subjects' losses. While arrangements were made for delivery of the opium, which took about six weeks, the foreign contingent in Canton was virtually imprisoned in its narrow enclave. But according to Forbes, a jolly time was had by most, if not all. Left to fend for themselves, the Americans drew lots to see who would do what in the domestic chore department, and when Forbes flopped as a cook "it was difficult to distinguish between eggs and ham: all bore the color and partook of the consistency of dirty sole-leather," he said of his first and last effort-he was transferred to caring for the glass- and silverware. Only the United States consul, P. W. Snow, seemed unable to enter into the spirit of things. "Is this not too bad, Mr. Forbes," he complained one day, "that a public official at my time of life, not owning a pound of opium, should be imprisoned and compelled to do chamber-maid's work?"

After the destruction of the confiscated opium 20,283 chests, worth some ten million dollars, were dumped into trenches, flooded with water, and left to rot the British traders decided to retaliate by cutting off trade with the Chinese. The British had more to lose from a halt in the opium traffic than the Americans did: the drug accounted for about two-thirds of the value of all their imports to China, while American reliance on opium never reached such proportions. Shutting up their warehouses at Canton, the Englishmen withdrew down river to Macao, sure that the Chinese would quickly repent of their folly. They begged Forbes, now head of Russell & Company, to join in their boycott, but he refused. Later, Forbes said that he told the British superintendent that "I had not come to China for health or pleasure, and that I should remain at my post as long as I could sell a yard of goods or buy a pound of tea." It was business as usual for the Bostonians, and the British were soon evading their own boycott by sending goods to Canton on American ships, which returned to the British anchorages in the South China Sea laden with teas and silks. It was a profitable sideline, this windfall ferrying trade, and British merchants paid dearly for it. According to Forbes, it was not at all unusual to charge as much as seven dollars for carrying a single bale of cotton on the ninety-mile voyage upriver to Canton. Forbes was well on his way to making up for his bad speculations at home.

The British, meanwhile, were biding their time, certain that their queen, who by the grace of God and the Royal Navy held dominion over a global empire, had more than mere boycott in store for the Chinese. In June, 1840, British warships blockaded Canton and other Chinese ports, and by the following year troops of the thin red line were slashing at will through China.

Canton fell to the British, and so did the imperial capital of Peking. In Chinese eyes, the despised Fan-Kwae had more than lived up to their reputation, and the victors imposed a harsh peace.

The hong system of trade monopoly was abolished, and Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai, the so-called treaty ports, were opened to foreign trade. No longer would Canton be the only Western entry to the vast Chinese interior. In the bargain, the British took over Hong Kong and slapped China with an indemnity of twenty-one million dollars. The Chinese Empire, which in the words of former President John Quincy Adams had held itself to be "the center of the terraqueous globe, equal to the heavenly host," had been humbled beyond recall, reduced to near vassalage by the claims of a more powerful commercial empire. To the Chinese, it was a bitter outrage that would not soon be forgotten, and it is perhaps more than mere coincidence that Western businessmen seeking to buy or sell goods in the People's Republic of China must now go to ... Canton.

Bennet Forbes, driven to exhaustion, left China for Boston shortly after the British blockade of Canton. He arrived home in December and was pleased to note that he had made up his losses and had a "handsome balance" besides. "I had worked hard," he said, "and had earned my reward by acting in very hazardous times with good judgment and decision." After working through the 1840s with his brother as a dealer in China goods, he returned to Canton once more in 1849. (Not yet done with derring-do, he leaped into the sea to help save a number of passengers when the British ship on which he had booked passage collided with another vessel; for his heroism, he was presented with medals by the Liverpool Shipwreck and Humane Society, Lloyd's Shipwreck Society, and the Humane Society of Massachusetts.) But the China trade was now totally different from the hazardous and heroic times past. The old hong system was dead, and so was Houqua, whose patronage had so benefited the Boston Concern. So regular and steady had commerce with China become that Forbes remarked in later life that the "even tenor of our affairs" had been marred during his two-year stay only by an illness so severe that he had ordered his coffin to be made from the mainmast of his first ship, the Lintin.

end of brahmin opium drug trade

New York was rapidly surpassing Boston as a port of entry for the teas of China, due both to its more central location and better access to transport to the interior and to an action by the Massachusetts state legislature, which was as ready then as it is today to slap new and ingenious taxes on the business community. Over the objections of Boston's merchants, the legislature had imposed a tax of I percent on all goods sold at auction, which the merchants claimed would surely drive the tea market to New York. When this prediction began coming true, the tax was reduced, in 1849, to .25 percent, and repealed altogether in 1852. But the move to New York was unstoppable, and by 1857, only six China ships arrived in Boston Harbor; of the forty-one that docked in New York, twenty were Boston owned.

To be sure, there were still profits to be made in the China trade, though they were not quite so heady as the spectacular results of some individual voyages might suggest. William Appleton, for example, cleared a cool $200,000 from the cargo of a single Canton ship that docked in New York in the fall of 1840. Writing of his own profits in the trade, John Murray Forbes observed in the early 1840s that with the exception of a couple of lucky speculations, his earnings from China ventures had not topped 6 percent-that magic figure so beloved by the mill magnates-since he returned from Canton in 1837. And he firmly believed that the average return on all the capital invested in the China trade during the previous two decades had probably not passed the 6 percent mark.

For venturesome Bostonians, China was losing much of its allure, though few doubted that its importance as a market would continue to grow. As late as 1855, Russell & Company partner Edward E. Cunningham observed that along with one or two countries in Europe, "China will become, in the course of time, our most important commercial connection, if no untoward event intervenes." But now there were new and fresher frontiers to be found closer to home, on the broad midwestern prairies and beyond. And the China merchants with their friends and kin, with their great stores of capital resources and their sharply honed entrepreneurial instincts, were well equipped to cross them.

pps. 104-132