The East India Trade Company had prepared the way for this little Britain in the East. The United States in the middle of the century began to trade at Canton from the ports of Boston and Salem. It is a very curious and almost forgotten fact that the first cargoes from New England to Canton consisted largely of ginseng, a plant now little esteemed, but which at that time had acquired such a medical reputation in China as to be almost worth its weight in gold. The plant was held to be a magical cure for nearly all diseases and to possess the gift of immortal youth.
Boston and Salem are still adorned with the tall and stately mansions of these old merchants, whose wooden vessels went to the China Sea, at first carrying ginseng and returning with tea. A writer in a Boston paper thus pictures this period:
"The generation that would not have had to look at a map to find out where Manila was when George Dewey arrived there, is almost passed away. These were the great sailors of their time; men who met emergencies with nerve and overcame tempest and adversity with equal complacency, who knew the merchants of Canton and Calcutta as well as the merchants of Salem and Boston, and whose tempers were never ruffled if even stress of circumstance compelled them to put up with a paltry profit of one hundred per cent. They lived at a time when there might easily be a fortune in a single freight, and when one turn round the world might represent more than a million of money. Most of them lived before the day of the bill of exchange, and when the solid old method of carrying specie in the hold was the familiar business practice. They knew the pirate of the China Sea and he of Barbary, too, for it was this old-fashioned system of carrying your capital with you that made the pirates' life worth living. They lived before the cable as well, and from the moment that a ship cleared from Canton or Manila or Singapore there was no way in the world for the consignee or the merchant in Boston to know what she had on board until she arrived here to speak for herself. Be it silks or teas or what-not, the merchant must move quickly to bid or buy, for the nature and value of the cargo could not have been discounted in advance, while the ship was skimming the oceans. Each vessel made her own market, and the wharf was the market place. It was good news, indeed, when a captain with a cargo of teas was informed by his owners, who may have met him upon the completion of a two years' cruise, that the price of tea had advanced the day before his arrival. It was pretty apt to be something in the captain's own pocket, too, for in those days he was allowed to carry twenty-five tons of freight for his own private speculation, and a salary of three hundred dollars a month in addition was not uncommon. There are retired captains on Cape Cod and in Salem and in the suburbs of Boston to-day who earned a competence in those times of Boston's water-front prosperity. They became masters sometimes before they were of age, and occasionally there would be one, like the late R. B. Forbes, who would become a great merchant, the head of a famous, wealthy house, known the world over, almost before he realized how great was the fortune that had overtaken him. And there was another very nice thing about those old days of plenty. If a man came home from China rich, invested his wealth in a railroad or some manufacturing or mining project that would be pretty apt to ruin him, all he would have to do would be to exile himself, under the right auspices, for another year or two in China, and then return to his home and friends with his fortunes quite mended."
Iloilo.
The great merchant at Canton at the time of the Boston commercial period was Honqua. He was as noble as he was rich, and Mr. Forbes, the famous old Boston merchant, relates the following story of him:
"A New England trader had gone to Canton, and had been unsuccessful, and owed Honqua one hundred thousand dollars. He desired to return home, but could not do so if he discharged the debt. Honqua heard of his condition, pitied him, and sent for him.
"'I shall be sorry to part from you,' he said, 'but I wish you to return as you so desire, happy and free. Here are all your notes canceled.'"