The Dutch traders, at once noticing the insatiable demand for the famed remedy, sought all over the world for a supply. The sweetish and mucilaginous root, though considered worthless by Europeans, was then occasionally bringing its weight in gold, and usually seven times its weight in silver, at Peking, and the merchants in the annual embassy from Seoul were reaping a rich harvest. Besides selling the younger and less valuable crop in its natural condition, they had factories in which the two-legged roots—which to the Asiatic imagination suggested the figure of the human body they were meant to refresh—were so manipulated as to take on the appearance of age, thus enhancing their price in the market.
Suddenly the Corean market was broken. Stimulated by the Dutch merchants at Albany, the Indians of Massachusetts had found the fleshy root growing abundantly on the hills around Stockbridge in Massachusetts. Taking it to Albany, they exchanged it for hardware, trinkets, and rum. While the Dutch domines were scandalized at the drunken revels of the “Yankee” Indians, who equalled the Mohawks in their inebriation, good Jonathan Edwards at Stockbridge was grieving over the waywardness of his dusky flock, because they had gone wild over ginseng-hunting.
The Hollanders, shipping the bundled roots on their galliots down the Hudson, and thence to Amsterdam and London, sold them to the British East India Company at a profit of five hundred per cent. Landed at Canton, and thence carried to Peking, American ginseng broke the market, forced the price to a shockingly low figure, and dealt a heavy blow to the Corean monopoly. [[389]]
Henceforth a steady stream of ginseng—now found in limitless quantities in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys—poured into China. Though far inferior to the best article, it (Aralia quinquefolia) is sufficiently like it in taste and real or imaginary qualities to rival the root of Chō-sen, which is not of the very highest grade.
Less than a generation had passed from the time that the western end of Massachusetts had any influence on Corea or China, before there was brought from the far East an herb that influenced the colony at her other end, far otherwise than commercially. Massachusetts had sent ginseng to Canton, China now sent tea to Massachusetts. The herb from Amoy was pitched into the sea by men dressed and painted like the Indians, and the Revolution followed.
The war for independence over, Captain John Greene, in the ship Empress of China, sailed from New York, February 22, 1784. Major Samuel Shaw, the supercargo, without government aid or recognition, established American trade with China, living at Canton during part of the year 1786 and the whole of 1787 and 1788. Having been appointed consul by President Washington in 1789, while on a visit home, Major Shaw returned to China in an entirely new ship, the Massachusetts, built, navigated, and owned by American citizens. At Canton he held the office of consul certainly until the year 1790, and presumably until his death in 1794. This first consul of the United States in China received his commission from Congress, on condition that he should “not be entitled to receive any salary, fees, or emoluments whatever.”
Animated by the spirit of independence, and a laudable ambition, the resolute citizen of the New World declared that “the Americans must have tea, and they seek the most lucrative market for their precious root ginseng.”[1]
It was ginseng and tea—an exchange of the materials for drink, a barter of tonics—that brought the Americans and Chinese, and finally the Americans and Coreans together. [[390]]
Cotton was the next American raw material exported to China, beginning in 1791. In 1842 the loaded ships sailed direct from Alabama to Canton, on the expansion of trade after the Opium War.
The idea now began to dawn upon some minds that it was high time that Japan and Corea should be opened to American commerce.