In return for these humiliations the Dutch East India Company was permitted to send one or two ships a year from Batavia to Japan and to export a cargo of copper, silk, gold, camphor, porcelain and bronze which returned immense profits.
This curious system of commerce was in operation when the ship Franklin cleared from Boston for Batavia in 1798. His owner’s letter of instructions ordered Captain Devereux to load Java coffee in bulk and to return with all possible expedition. As was customary, the ship’s company was given a share in the profits of the voyage, as defined in a letter to the captain:
“We allow your first and second officers two and one-half tons privilege, and one ton to your third mate, your sailors will be allowed to bring their adventures in their chests and not otherwise. Your own privilege will be five per cent. of the whole amount which the ship may bring and ’tis our orders that she be completely filled.”
When Captain Devereux arrived at Batavia in April, 1799, he learned that the Dutch East India Company was in need of a ship to make one of the annual voyages to Japan. The Salem shipmaster and his supercargo perceived that a large extra profit could be gleaned in such a venture as this, after which the ship might return for her cargo of coffee and go home to Boston as planned.
Page from the log of the Margaret, describing her arrival at Nagasaki and the prodigious amount of saluting required
The good ship Franklin
This Batavia charter was an attractive adventure which promised to fatten both the owner’s returns and the “privileges” of the ship’s company, and after considerable preliminary skirmishing between the hard-headed Dutchmen and the keen-witted Yankee seafarers, an agreement was reached which has been preserved in the log of the Franklin. It is a valuable fragment of history in itself, for it recites the elaborate formalities and restrictions imposed upon foreign visitors by the Japanese of a century and more ago. The document is entitled:
“The Ship Franklin’s Charter Party for a Voyage from Batavia to Japan, June the 16th, 1799.”