Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling, and Diplomacy on the South China Coast

2: A Clash of Civilizations in the Pearl River Delta

Chapter 2 A Clash of Civilizations in the Pearl River Delta Stephen Girard’s Trade with China, 1787–1824 Jonathan Goldstein1 I am very much in favor of investing heavily in opium . . . It would be mortifying to me if after the ship Rousseau has been at or near a port where opium can be obtained that she should go to China without reaping the same advantages as others will do. (Stephen Girard to Mahlon Hutchinson, supercargo, and Myles McLeveen, captain, aboard Rousseau, January 2, 1806.)2 China trader Stephen Girard (1750–1831) of Philadelphia was one of America’s first millionaires.3 Because of its immense importance to the rise of the modern world, the era we often refer to as the “China trade” (ca. 1700–1842) has received much attention from historians . Holden Furber referred to the era as an “age of partnership” in international trade. John E. Wills, Jr., however, believes that Furber’s concept “does not really convey the flavor of these intricate and exasperating confrontations” and rather describes the Pearl River Delta as a vortex where Asians were active competitors with Europeans and others. In Wills’s analysis, the gradual rise of European hegemony in international commerce was less an over-determined foregone conclusion and much more a development of interactions between, and inputs from, Eastern and Western players alike.4 Girard’s experience in China provides an example of these multi-faceted interactions and confrontations that involved both Asian and Western players on several levels.5 Girard began his business career in Philadelphia as a FrancoAmerican merchant with no awareness of China. For generations his family had been sea captains from Bordeaux. His seafaring career began in 1764 when he served as pilot-apprentice under Captain Jean Courteau aboard the Pèlerin. In 1772 he served under Captain 18 Jonathan Goldstein Jean Petiteau aboard Superb. Both captains were engaged in traditional commerce between France and the West Indies. In July 1774 New York merchant Thomas Randall engaged Girard as a captain in his West Indian trade. In June 1776, while Girard was captaining Jeune Bébé, his vessel encountered contrary winds off the Delaware Capes; so he put in to Philadelphia for protection. The next month, the American Revolution stranded him there. For the rest of his life, Philadelphia would be Girard’s base of operations. Girard’s China involvement began in the late 1700s when he, like many other American merchants, experienced difficulties in their traditional transatlantic and West Indian commerce. On September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Anglo-American Treaty of Paris, Britain closed its West Indian Islands to American traders. That same year, the Spanish governor at Havana halted American trade to the Spanish West Indies. An economic decline beginning in early 1785 hit bottom in 1786. The new states suddenly found themselves not only without England’s protection, but with ports of England closed to their commerce , their fisheries partly destroyed by the Revolutionary War, navigation of the Mississippi blocked, and no significant trade between the states themselves. Consequently, commerce with China, which at this time barred no one from trading, became very attractive to Americans.6 Girard persevered with his traditional trade between the United States and the West Indies while several of his contemporaries abandoned it altogether in favor of more lucrative prospects in Asia. According to maritime historian Robert Albion, “a substitute had to be found” for the old swapping of flour for sugar in the British West Indies, from which Yankee vessels were now barred. Of the various new strategies which were proposed, the most promising was that of sailing halfway around the world to Canton. The Hingham, Massachusetts sloop Harriet attempted such a passage in 1783 with a cargo of ginseng root, an aphrodisiac highly valued in China. Harriet only made it as far as the Cape of Good Hope, where a British sea captain who was concerned about American competition in the China trade purchased Harriet’s entire cargo. The New York vessel Empress of China, financed by Robert Morris of Philadelphia and three other investors and also carrying ginseng, made the first successful American voyage to China in 1784–1785.7 Between 1784 and 1787, the voyages from Philadelphia of Alliance, United States, and Canton proved, like that of Empress of China, that direct Asian trade could be profitable. In 1785 Morris A Clash of Civilizations in the Pearl River...