Soon after the Revolution the spirit of commercial exploration began to stir in other ports than Salem.Out from New York sailed the ship Empress of China in 1784 for the first direct voyage to Canton, to make the acquaintance of a vast nation absolutely unknown to the people of the United States, nor had one in a million of the industrious and highly civilized Chinese ever so much as heard the name of the little community of barbarians who dwelt on the western shore of the North Atlantic.The oriental dignitaries in their silken robes graciously welcomed the foreign ship with the strange flag and showed a lively interest in the map spread upon the cabin table, offering every facility to promote this new market for their silks and teas.After an absence of fifteen months the Empress of China returned to her home port and her pilgrimage aroused so much attention that the report of the supercargo, Samuel Shaw, was read in Congress.
Surpassing this achievement was that of Captain Stewart Dean, who very shortly afterward had his fling at the China trade in an eighty-ton sloop built at Albany.He was a stout-hearted old privateersman of the Revolution whom nothing could dismay, and in this tiny Experiment of his he won merited fame as one of the American pioneers of blue water.Fifteen men and boys sailed with him, drilled and disciplined as if the sloop were a frigate, and when the Experiment hauled into the stream, of Battery Park, New York, "martial music and the boatswain's whistle were heard on board with all the pomp and circumstance of war." Typhoons and Malay proas, Chinese pirates and unknown shoals, had no terrors for Stewart Dean.He saw Canton for himself, found a cargo, and drove home again in a four months' passage, which was better than many a clipper could do at a much later day.Smallest and bravest of the first Yankee East Indiamen, this taut sloop, with the boatswain's pipe trilling cheerily and all hands ready with cutlases and pikes to repel boarders, was by no means the least important vessel that ever passed in by Sandy Hook.
In the beginnings of this picturesque relation with the Far East, Boston lagged behind Salem, but her merchants, too, awoke to the opportunity and so successfully that for generations there were no more conspicuous names and shipping-houses in the China trade than those of Russell, Perkins, and Forbes.The first attempt was very ambitious and rather luckless.The largest merchantman ever built at that time in the United States was launched at Quincy in 1789 to rival the towering ships of the British East India Company.This Massachusetts created a sensation.Her departure was a national event.She embodied the dreams of Captain Randall and of the Samuel Shaw who had gone as supercargo in the Empress of China.They formed a partnership and were able to find the necessary capital.
This six-hundred-ton ship loomed huge in the ayes of the crowds which visited her.She was in fact no larger than such four-masted coasting schooners as claw around Hatteras with deck-loads of Georgia pine or fill with coal for down East, and manage it comfortably with seven or eight men for a crew.The Massachusetts, however, sailed in 411 the old-fashioned state and dignity of a master, four mates, a purser, surgeon, carpenter, gunner, four quartermasters, three midshipmen, a cooper, two cooks, a steward, and fifty seamen.The second officer was Amasa Delano, a man even more remarkable than the ship, who wandered far and wide and wrote a fascinating book about his voyages, a classic of its kind, the memoirs of an American merchant mariner of a breed long since extinct.
While the Massachusetts was fitting out at Boston, one small annoyance ruffled the auspicious undertaking.Three different crews were signed before a full complement could be persuaded to tarry in the forecastle.The trouble was caused by a fortune-teller of Lynn, Moll Pitcher by name, who predicted disaster for the ship.Now every honest sailor knows that certain superstitions are gospel fact, such as the bad luck brought by a cross-eyed Finn, a black cat, or going to sea on Friday, and these eighteenth century shellbacks must not be too severely chided for deserting while they had the chance.As it turned out, the voyage did have a sorry ending and death overtook an astonishingly large number of the ship's people.
Though she had been designed and built by master craftsmen of New England who knew their trade surpassingly well, it was discovered when the ship arrived at Canton that her timbers were already rotting.They were of white oak which had been put into her green instead of properly seasoned.This blunder wrecked the hopes of her owners.To cap it, the cargo of masts and spars had also been stowed while wet and covered with mud and ice, and the hatches had been battened.As a result the air became so foul with decay that several hundred barrels of beef were spoiled.To repair the ship was beyond the means of Captain Randall and Samuel Shaw, and reluctantly they sold her to the Danish East India Company at a heavy loss.Nothing could have been more unexpected than to find that, for once, the experienced shipbuilders had been guilty of a miscalculation.
The crew scattered, and perhaps the prediction of the fortune-teller of Lynn followed their roving courses, for when Captain Amasa Delano tried to trace them a few years later, he jotted down such obituaries as these on the list of names:
"John Harris.A slave in Algiers at last accounts.
Roger Dyer.Died and thrown overboard off Cape Horn.
William Williams.Lost overboard off Japan.
James Crowley.Murdered by the Chinese near Macao.
John Johnson.Died on board an English Indiaman.
Seth Stowell.Was drowned at Whampoa in 1790.
Jeremiah Chace.Died with the small-pox at Whampoa in 1791.
Humphrey Chadburn.Shot and died at Whampoa in 1791.
Samuel Tripe.Drowned off Java Head in 1790.
James Stackpole.Murdered by the Chinese.
Nicholas Nicholson.Died with the leprosy at Macao.
