Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [221]
THE EMPRESS OF CHINA
Perhaps, though, New York’s future was brighter than Hamilton imagined. One morning in late February 1784, only a month or so after the appearance of his first Letter from Phocion, crowds of spectators lined the East River waterfront to mark the long-awaited resumption of overseas trade. For months ice had jammed the Narrows and East River, bringing business in the city to a standstill while acute shortages of food, shelter, and firewood, exacerbated by heavy snowfalls, wore at everyone’s nerves. Now, as winter began to relax its grip on the city, ship after ship slid away from the East River wharves, shook out its sails, and filled away down toward the harbor.
As the fleet passed the Battery, said a report in the New York Packet, “A large party of gentlemen” could be seen, “congratulating each other on the pleasing prospect of so many large ships being under sail in the bay.” One ship in particular commanded their attention: the copper-bottomed, black-hulled Empress of China, bound for the Orient. She was, boasted the Independent Gazette, “the first ship from this new nation, to that rich and distant part of the world.” New York owed a special debt of gratitude to “the gentlemen, whose ambition to discover new resources of wealth, by forming new channels for the extensions of our commerce” had thus prompted them to “risque their property” in the voyage.
Such an undertaking would have been unthinkable before the Revolution, when trade with the Chinese was an exclusive privilege of the British East India Company. Independence removed that obstacle, and as the end of the war drew near China had beckoned to entrepreneurs in every American port. First off the mark was John Led-yard, a Connecticut adventurer who had served as a corporal of marines on the third and final voyage of Captain James Cook. Ledyard turned up in New York City in the summer of 1783, touting a scheme to trade for furs along the Pacific Northwest coast and peddle them in Canton. Unable to find backers, he went to Philadelphia and got the attention of the financier Robert Morris. Intrigued, Morris agreed to raise some $120,000 for the purchase of ships and trading goods, eventually putting up half the money himself. The other half came from the New York firm of Daniel Parker and Company, one of whose partners was William Duer.
Over the autumn of 1783, amid all the commotion of the British evacuation, Parker and Company found a ship on the ways in New England, hired a crew, and began to assemble a cargo. Three thousand pelts were purchased, but when the idea of a second voyage to the Pacific Northwest fell through, causing Ledyard to go off in a huff, Morris and Parker shifted their focus to another commodity: ginseng root. Ginseng was prized in China as a cure for everything from indigestion and high blood pressure to impotence; one Chinese emperor was said to have paid ten thousand dollars for an especially rare sample. Happily, ginseng also grew wild in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, where native peoples had been harvesting it for trade since the 1750s. Agents of Morris and Parker scoured the backwoods of Pennsylvania and Virginia for all they could get their hands on, and eventually they had some thirty tons of it stashed in the holds of the Empress of China when she passed the Narrows on her way to the Far East.
Six months later, having been escorted part of the way by friendly French warships, she dropped anchor in the Pearl River below Canton. Another four months of bartering ensued, during which her pelts and ginseng were exchanged for several hundred tons of tea and fifty tons of “export” chinaware (so called because it was manufactured specifically for the Western market). Trading on their own accounts, agents of the investors and members of the