Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Chinese Magnet

     By the time Americans first ventured across the Pacific, as soon as their nation became independent, the major features of the ocean were already known. In the eighteenth century numerous voyages of discovery had been authorized by various European governments. The results, published without delay, filled in the vast uncharted regions extended across the South Seas. A large part of its unknown character disappeared as a result of the British and French expeditions of Anson, Byron, Wallis, and Carteret, Bougainville, and, above all, Cook. The expeditions carried out by La Boudeuse and L'Étoile in 1766-1769, Cook's three voyages on board the Endeavour in 1768-1771, on the Adventure and the Resolution in 1772-1775, and on the Resolution again, together with the Discovery, in 1776-1779, contributed a detailed knowledge of coastlines, winds and currents, natural resources, and native life. Nevertheless, many details remained to be filled in—and details could often make the difference between life and death. Coastlines were often drawn inaccurately, too many islands were misplaced or still had not been discovered, and reefs, which represented such a danger to shipping, were often not indicated. No way had yet been found to calculate a ship's longitude with complete accuracy. The tables of angular distances, published by the Nautical Almanac from 1767 on, made it possible, but only by carrying out long and tiresome calculations. Consequently, many navigators still preferred dead reckoning (i.e., using the log)to the lunar distance method, despite the margin of error involved. In a word, sailing the Pacific was still a risky business.

    This still little-known ocean lay between two continents which, to all intents and purposes, knew nothing about each other. To the east lay the coast of America, ruled by the Spanish, while to the west lay the shores of Asia, where Chinese power was at the height of its splendor, despite the increasing encroachments of European colonization. Perhaps the most striking contrast was in the relative size of the populations. The immense Spanish Empire, lying between the Chilean island of Chiloé and San Francisco Bay, ruled over 15 to 16 million subjects, while the Chinese Empire had approximately 300 million subjects, making it a potential market twenty times greater. It is hardly surprising that it was Canton rather than Valparaiso, Lima, or Acapulco which featured in the dreams of Yankee traders. San Francisco had recently been founded to counter a possible Russian threat from the north. The presidio was established there on September 17, 1776, and the Franciscan mission of Dolores was founded in October, two months after the United States Declaration of Independence, just as American troops were engaging the British on the Harlem heights and at Manhattan. This was not the full extent of Spanish ambitions, however, for the Crown in Madrid laid claim to any land which one of its mariners sighted. This meant that the Spanish Empire could have extended from Tierra del Fuego to the Queen Charlotte Islands, now part of Canada. The official mercantilism underlying its trade policy meant that—with the exception of the Manila galleon—the viceroyalties into which the Pacific coast was divided were really oriented toward the Atlantic and the ports of the Iberian peninsula (mainly Seville and Cadiz), which, in spite of this, lost their monopoly in 1778.

    Far to the north, the Russians were beginning to advance along the coast of Alaska. The two expeditions undertaken on behalf of the czar by the Dane Vitus Bering, in 1725-1728 and in 1741, discovered the population of sea otters, whose fur was highly prized in China. Trappers and traders made annual expeditions to the Aleutian Islands, massacring many of the natives and destroying the natural resources without any concern whatsoever for conservation. By 1784 this made a change of policy necessary if the fur trade was to survive. Permanent bases were established to serve as trading stations and military forts, rational management of stocks of marine animals was introduced, and regular communications with Siberia were established. Despite the failure of their application to Czarina Catherine II for a monopoly, a project developed by two Irkutsk merchants resulted that same year in the establishment of the first permanent Russian settlement in North America, on Kodiak Island. To the south, as far as San Francisco, not a single settlement had been established by any of the European powers, so the coastline, with its long, winding fjords, was left to the numerous Indian tribes.

    On the western side of the Pacific, European penetration was still restricted to the coasts. However, colonial preserves had been established in Indonesia and in the Philippines. In the former, the Dutch East India Company had taken over almost the entire island of Java. Elsewhere, it contented itself with setting up trading posts where it could buy the spices (pepper, nutmeg, and cloves) which were in such great demand among European consumers. The company experienced some temporary difficulties, for its monopoly was being undermined by smuggling, as well as by the provisions of the recent Treaty of Paris, under which the Dutch possessions were opened to British trade, and its profitability declined due to higher operating costs and rampant corruption.

    The Spaniards had been established in the Philippines since the sixteenth century and had turned them into a bastion of Christianity surrounded by a sea of heathens. For a long time the archipelago was to remain a dependency of New Spain (later Mexico). Starting in 1602, a regular shipping link between Manila and Acapulco was set up in the form of the famous Manila galleon, which made the only regular sailings across the Pacific. It was, however, of limited importance. The galleon made one or two round trips each year conducting a trade in precious objects over which the traders of Seville and Cadiz—a most effective lobby group—attempted to gain control at the expense of their counterparts in the New World and in Manila. However, the long-established mercantilism seems to have been weakened under the influence of the new governor general, Don Jose Basco y Vargas (1778-1786). Direct communications with Spain were improved, thanks to the ships of the Royal Philippines Company founded in 1785, while at the same time the port of Manila—unlike ports of the Dutch and British colonies—was opened to all Asian nations. This victory for "free trade" was the first sign of the decline of the Manila galleon, which would be abolished by the Cortes of Cadiz in 1813.

    In Asia proper, the tiny peninsula of Macao, near the entrance to Canton, was a Portuguese possession, while the Siberian shoreline north of the Amur basin from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Bering Strait along the Kamchatka Peninsula had been occupied off and on for the past century by the Russians. The rest of Asia was ruled by empires too powerful to allow European nations any hope of establishing colonial-style rule in their territory. Indeed, the Europeans failed to persuade them to even open their frontiers to foreign trade, so that commercial relations, when any existed, were restricted to a single port. Since 1641, Japan had been completely closed to foreigners, except for the island of Deshima, opposite Nagasaki, where the regime controlled by the Tokugawa Shogunate allowed a Dutch ship from Batavia and a few Chinese junks to dock each year—an average of thirteen vessels a year between 1769 and 1789, which was a very small number for a nation with a population of between 26 and 27 million. On the opposite shore of the Sea of Japan, Korea, under the Yi dynasty, was just as closed, for the official neoconfucian dogma had no difficulty containing the influence of the reformist Sihak school. To the south, contacts with Westerners were also minimal. In Vietnam, the civil peace established around 1680 had made it possible to get along without such contacts, and it was only following the disturbances in the south, after the overthrow of the Nguyen regime by the Tay Son brothers, at Hué (1777), that relations were resumed in 1784 between the heir to the fallen dynasty, Nguyen Ant, and Monsignor Pigneau de Béhaine, his French political and military adviser. In 1782, Siam, hard-pressed by a Burmese invasion, recovered its former glory under the founder of the present dynasty of Thai kings, General Chao Phraya Chakri, or Rama I. However, Rama I favored basically restricting commercial exchanges to China, thus reviving the policy which had led to the expulsion of the French in 1688. The only exception was Malaya. There, the Bugi Sultans, originating in Celebes, encouraged free trade, particularly on the island of Riau, off present-day Singapore. However, a certain amount of piracy went along with the trade, leading the Dutch fleet to shell the trading station in order to reestablish the authority of the Amsterdam company.

    Except for Japan, all these countries fell within the Chinese orbit. The "Middle Kingdom"—the only superpower in the Far East at the end of the eighteenth century—was at its peak under the reign of Qianlong (1736-1796), of the Qing (or Manchu) Dynasty. On the one hand, foreigners could not fail to be impressed by the power of this expanding country. It had been able to subdue the nomadic tribes of Central Asia and force the surrounding vassal monarchies to become its tributaries, while refusing to establish any official diplomatic contacts with the outside world. It was enjoying an apparently remarkable economic prosperity which allowed its population to grow by 0.8 percent per annum during the 1780s. But a few cracks were beginning to appear in the edifice. Behind the stability of the "immobile Empire" an experienced analyst might have detected some early indications of decline. The population was growing faster than per capita production, leading to the gradual impoverishment of the masses. The heavy military expenditures required to deal with internal unrest caused by ethnic minorities and secret societies opposed to the Manchus were a drain on the budget. The Court was discredited by its corruption. The country was closing in on itself—Christians were being persecuted and books burned by the hundreds to ensure the triumph of a dogmatic neoconfucianism that forced all its subjects into a straitjacket of conformity. An intolerant despotism was leading to dangerous intellectual stagnation, just when the Enlightenment was making the West open to new areas of knowledge and new technology. China as a superpower was in fact fast becoming a paper tiger, though it was still too strong for any Western nation to dare challenge it. As a country, it was capable of self-sufficiency—or such at least was the official doctrine expounded by the Peking Court to English Ambassador MacCartney, in 1793, in rejecting any establishment of formal diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, trade with the West, in whose favor the balance stood, was far from negligible. It supplied the silver needed to mint coinage and also provided a means for the mandarins to enrich themselves, with minimal effort, by pocketing more or less arbitrarily what were sometimes considered exorbitant sums of money to reward them for turning a blind eye, or for influence-peddling.

    When the first Americans arrived in China in 1784, they had to adapt to the already established set of rules governing foreign trade. Since 1757, commerce had been restricted to a single port, namely Canton (Guangzhou). Western traders were not allowed access to the city itself, and for no more than five months, from November to March, they were granted the use of a narrow strip 300 yards long along the waterfront and nine miles downstream, at Huangpu, where they were subjected to permanent surveillance. When their business was done, they had to leave, spending the remainder of the year at Macao. They were unable to communicate freely, being required to use a group of Chinese merchants with monopolistic powers, the hong merchants of the cohong, as intermediaries. The firms officially permitted to belong to the cohong were few in number—thirteen at the most. They fulfilled a complex role as agents and as tax collectors—a function which brought in considerable income but also required substantial expenditures in bribes to corrupt mandarins, such as the hoppo, or supervisors of customs and excise, leading to their indebtedness to Western merchant houses. As a result, periodic debt crises arose, which were supposed to be absorbed collectively by the hong merchants, who were reestablished in 1780 after a nine-year spell of open competition. In 1784, then, trade with China was subject to rules entirely different from those prevailing in liberal economics. Selling prices in Canton were inflated by the mandatory middlemen, while foreign businessmen were treated like lepers, and barely tolerated. In spite of this, China was attractive to businessmen in search of profit, for it could offer commodities not available anywhere else, such as tea, and had no interest in shipping them itself, having renounced all long-distance maritime ventures since the fifteenth century. China offered a bonanza to daring seamen who were frustrated elsewhere by colonial exclusions and the policies of mercantilist governments.

    Between America and Asia, neither the scattered islands with their populations of Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians, nor the immense area of Australia—which the British government would take over in 1788 only for use as a penal colony—were as yet integrated into the international economy. At best they were seen as an anthropological laboratory that could provide new knowledge of mankind. The cannibalism observed in certain groups of islands demonstrated that the state of nature so highly praised by Enlightenment philosophers was not always so benign, even if for some Western Christians the apparent absence of repression, particularly in sexual matters, conjured up the image of a Dionysian paradise. This lack of any communications with the mid-ocean archipelagoes, and the extreme tenuousness of the shipping link between the two continents provided by the Manila galleon, make it impossible to consider the Pacific as a unified whole at the end of the eighteenth century. Louis Dermigny refers to "the empty space of the Pacific, an uninhabited wilderness." Pierre Chaunu ends his analysis of the Philippine economy by rejecting any view of the Pacific as "an autonomous economic space, endowed with its own dynamic, capable of either arresting or furthering the destiny of Atlantic Europe." At that time it was no more than "a simple extension of the Hispano-American Atlantic ruled from Seville, as far as trade is concerned." In 1784, while the "Atlantic world" already had a long history behind it, one looked in vain for the first indications that there would one day be a "Pacific world." But this was precisely what was about to change, most notably with the coming of Americans, attracted by the magnet of China.

Direct Sino-American Trade

At the end of the eighteenth century and during the first half of the nineteenth, China, in fact, played a central role in trade between the United States and the Pacific area. It is true that official American statistics do not provide a continuous record until after 1820-1821, for prior to this date the American State Papers contain only incomplete information, which can, however, be partially supplemented from other sources, such as the trade figures for Canton. Nevertheless, we do know that trade with China was more significant early in this period than later on, if only because of the relative impregnability of Latin American markets before their liberation from Spanish rule between 1817 and 1825. If we omit the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (whose consequences for the tea trade we shall examine later on), the major features of economic relations between the United States and the Pacific emerge quite distinctly, in respect to both the average levels and the major trends (cf. Appendices, Table 2).

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from THE UNITED STATES AND THE PACIFIC by Jean Heffer. Copyright © 2002 by University of Notre Dame. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

---