The voyage of the Columbia did not pay her owners, but those who followed her often made large profits. Perhaps the most interesting venture was one made by William Sturgis. While trading with the Indians (blankets, cutlery, firearms, molasses, and trinkets were then in demand), he learned that the Indians used the skin of the ermine in its winter coat as a currency, and that it was highly valued. Accordingly, Sturgis sent home a fine specimen of the ermine skin, and ordered as many as could be obtained. His correspondent secured 5000 at the Leipsic fair, and on the next voyage Sturgis carried them to the coast, where he traded five, which had been purchased for thirty cents each, for a sea-otter skin. He thus obtained a thousand sea-otter skins, which he sold in China for $50 each, or $50,000 for that part of the venture alone. Mr. Sturgis, in a lecture delivered in Boston, on January 21, 1846, said that he had known of a capital of $40,000 yielding a return of $150,000 in that trade, and in one voyage "an outfit not exceeding $50,000 gave a gross return of $284,000."
In the meantime Captain Derby's young supercargo on the Astræ, Thomas H. Perkins, had established a trading house in Canton. He entered the northwest coast trade with success, and in the course of twenty-two years his ships made thirty round-the-world voyages from Boston, by the way of the Horn, the northwest coast, Canton, and the Cape of Good Hope. It is an interesting fact that in the years immediately following the War of 1812 "all the supplies for the British [fur-buying] establishments, west of the Rocky Mountains, were brought from London to Boston, and carried thence to the mouth of the Columbia in American ships; and all their collections of furs were sent to Canton consigned to an American house, and the proceeds shipped to England or the United States in the same vessels." (Hunt's Magazine, XIV, 538.)
In connection with the stories that have been told of these voyages to the Far East, consider the following facts in the biography of Captain Nathaniel Silsbee:—
"Among the officers who rose most rapidly to distinction in the service of Mr. Derby, none is more prominent than the Hon. Nathaniel Silsbee, late Senator from Massachusetts. His father had enjoyed the entire confidence of Mr. Derby, and after his death Mr. Derby transferred that confidence to his son.
"In 1790 he appears as the mate and captain's clerk of a small vessel bound to Madeira. In 1792 [when but nineteen years old] he is master of a sloop in the trade to the West Indies, which Mr. Derby impowers him to sell for $350. In 1793, at the early age of twenty years, he is on a voyage to the Isle of France in command of the new ship Benjamin, of 142 tons. From the Isle of France he proceeds to the Cape of Good Hope, returns to the Isle of France, and brings his ship home with large profits.
"In 1796 Mr. Derby dispatches him in the ship Benjamin to Amsterdam and thence to the Isle of France, with a credit of $10,000 for his own private adventure. After selling his ship and cargo at a great profit he purchases a new ship of 450 tons for his owner and returns to Salem with a full cargo of East India goods for his owner, and such favorable results for himself as to enable him to commence business on his own account, in which he soon achieved fortune."
When Silsbee, at the age of twenty, was master of the Benjamin, on the way to the Isle of France, his first mate, Charles Derby, was nineteen years old, and his second mate, Richard J. Cleveland, was only eighteen. In 1799 this Cleveland made a voyage in a fifty-foot sloop from Canton to the northwest coast of America, and, though hampered by a mutinous crew, he secured there a cargo of furs which sold, on his return to Canton, for $60,000. The outfit had cost him $9000.
Although all ships of the day were, by modern standards, dangerous in size and rig; though scurvy was the plague of crews in long voyages; though vast breadths of the sea had never been explored, and the wild coasts visited had never been charted; although the first voyages were made when the American people were financially prostrate and the symbol of the American government was utterly powerless, not only in home affairs but in the face of the open and covert enmity of the leading commercial nations of the world,—in spite of all this, the American ship-owners reached out for the commerce of all the earth, and young men having ambition and ability worked their way to the command of ships before they were old enough to vote.
The picture of one of those boyish sea-captains flinging the Stars and Stripes to the breeze on the far side of the earth portrays, better than anything ever said, written, or done, the spirit of America.