CHAPTER X
BUSINESS SUCCESS IN AUSTRALIA
1853-1855
My wife and I in returning to Boston came on a visit that we expected to be brief. I confidently supposed I should go back to Liverpool and continue the business of the branch house. But this was not to be. Instead, I was soon to make a far wider departure in business fields and methods, and to try my fortune at another end of the earth.
When I arrived in Boston, I had a conference with Colonel Train about conditions in England, and suggested to him that I should have a partnership interest in the Boston house, as well as in the house in Liverpool. To my surprise, Colonel Train was not only astonished, but indignant. He could not understand how I had pushed ahead so rapidly, and this swift advance was by no means pleasant to him. He felt that, in some way, I was pushing him out of his place.
"Would you ride over me roughshod?" he asked, almost fiercely, when I ventured to suggest a larger partnership interest. I replied that I thought I had given full value for everything that the house had done for me, and that I should be able to do so in the future. After some further discussion, in which the old gentleman was mollified, the matter was arranged. I received a partnership interest that was equal to $15,000 a year—and I was only twenty-two years old at the time.
As soon as the contract was signed, and it was in my hand, I said—because I was still nettled by the manner in which he had received my suggestion of a partnership—"Colonel, as you do not seem to care to take me into the firm, here is your contract"; and I tore it in two and handed him the pieces. "I am going to Australia."
This cool announcement astonished him. He did not know what to do. Finally, we came to terms. It was decided that I should go to Melbourne to start my own house with Captain Caldwell, one of our oldest ship-captains, the house to be known as "Caldwell, Train & Co." It was Colonel Train's view that this elderly man would act as a check upon my youthful rashness, he having no interest in the firm but good-will toward me and one of his captains.
The arrangements once completed, I was eager to be about my work in the antipodes, and prepared to sail at the first opportunity. Everything was taken from Boston—clerks, sets of books, business forms, etc. Nothing was left to the chance of finding or getting in Australia the material that we might need. And so the new house of "Caldwell, Train & Co." sailed away from Boston on the Plymouth Rock for Melbourne, Australia, on a singularly audacious venture.
Captain Caldwell went out in charge of the clerks, while I was to go by a different route a little later. I went to New York and took passage from there in the old Whitlock Havre packet, Bavaria, Captain Bailey. I had two clerks with me, and carried, also, a large amount of office supplies in duplicate. Duncan, Sherman & Co. had appointed me their agent for the purchase of gold in Melbourne, which was to be shipped to London or New York as circumstances permitted, and I had also been appointed by the Boston underwriters their agent to represent them in the South Seas. The outlook for business seemed especially bright.