Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [103]
As they matured, these networks facilitated intricate multilateral exchanges in both commodities and commercial paper that involved other New York merchants, indirectly but no less deeply, in the West Indian trade. Around the middle of the century, for example, Gerard G. Beekman (grandson of the Leislerian Gerardus Beekman) ran a store on Beekman Street from which he presided over a remarkable variety of projects that depended in one way or another on Caribbean products and markets. He sold limes and indigo on commission for a Philadelphia merchant, bought ginger from another Philadelphia merchant and paid for it with a shipment of logwood, bought more ginger at New London, Connecticut, that a commission agent sold for him at Boston and Newport, sold rum on commission for a Rhode Island merchant, shipped bread and flour to Rhode Island for reexport to the West Indies and used the proceeds to buy molasses that he sold on his own account in New York, and invested in a large order of cocoa that he meant to sell either there or in Philadelphia, depending on the market. Beekman’s quick thinking must have saved the day more than once for his correspondents, as it did for the Rhode Islander whose shipment of cheese “Spoiling with maggets” seemed lost until Beekman hired a cartman to peddle it on the streets of New York. It was a safe bet that he would one day take advantage of a similar favor in return.
Knowing that the difference between profit and loss might well be a matter of whether or not they complied with the Navigation Acts, Beekman and his correspondents didn’t scruple at evasive measures—bribing customs collectors, doctoring ships’ manifests, circulating fraudulent bond certificates, and outright smuggling. After Parliament passed the Molasses Act in 1733, such conduct became almost a way of life. Planters on Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other islands of the French West Indies responded to the law by offering premium prices for North American provisions and asking less for sugar and molasses than did their British counterparts. When it became evident that customs officials were making only halfhearted attempts at enforcement, the profitability of illicit trade for North American merchants was assured. (It may have accounted for one-third of all northern commerce.) Beekman himself became so accustomed to smuggling that he would complain bitterly if circumstances compelled him to pay full duty on the rum and molasses he imported by way of Rhode Island.
What Beekman and men like him almost never did was invest their profits in plantations. Trade, not production, was the New Yorkers’ forte, and they tended to think of the West Indian plutocracy as wildly dissolute and irresponsible. Nor did more than a handful of them engage in direct trade with England. Local products alone couldn’t fetch high enough prices in the mother country to pay for imported manufactures. Also, because the prevailing winds blew out of the west, getting back to New York from, say, Bristol or Liverpool was a hazardous and time-consuming proposition. Ships outward bound from British ports usually took tropical routes to the New World, dropping down to Madeira to catch the Canaries Current, then winging across to the West Indies and working up the North American coast. Over time, improvements in ship rigging and design—the appearance of the gaff-rigged “schooner,” the development of jib and headsails, and the adoption of the helm wheel—gradually made it easier to sail in the teeth of the westerlies. Even then, however, the majority of New York merchants