Ginseng long remained worth a fortune, but even that had its limits, and before long the China trade required additional products valuable to the Chinese traders. From John Ledyard, the merchants of Boston and Salem soon learned the answer. Ledyard had been with James Cook on one of his famous voyages to the East, and his accounts of the expedition were published in Hartford in 1783. Ledyard now revealed that the Chinese had paid unbelievable prices for furs which Cook’s men had picked up on the Northwest Pacific coast, and he proposed a simple system: send out ships to trade with the Northwestern Indians for sea otter skins, take these skins to China and watch the profits roll in.
Six Boston businessmen were convinced enough to put up the money to outfit two vessels, the Columbia, under Captain Robert Gray, and the Lady Washington under John Kendrick. They left Boston in September 1787, and eleven months later arrived at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. There they spent the winter of 1788-89 trading with the Indians, and the following July, Robert Gray set out with the Columbia for China. After trading his cargo of furs for tea, they continued eastward and on around the world to Boston – the first American vessel to girdle the globe.
Other captains soon followed in the wake of the Columbia with cargoes to the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, and from there with furs to China. On this trade in iron, blankets, trinkets, furs, silks, fragile china, tea, and other exotic luxuries and necessities, many fortunes were founded and others enlarged. It was a difficult trade, for the Chinese were troublesome trading partners, with a cunning as great as that of the notorious sea captains of New England. But the profits were immense as long as the otter skins were plentiful and the Indians could be kept ignorant and their fickle tastes easily satisfied.
At first, as Shaw wrote in his journal, the Chinese could not quite understand the distinction between Englishmen and Americans. “They styled us the New People; and when by the maps we conveyed to them an idea of the extent of our country, with its present and increasing population, they were highly pleased at the prospect of so considerable a market for the production of their own empire.”
European traders soon came to resent the brash Americans who had virtually overnight become serious competitors in the Oriental trade. What’s more, Americans imported far more than they could ever use, and they certainly did not store these goods to have them molder away. Instead, they found their way to many European countries, even to England, by devious means or otherwise, until a British consuls in America could write home that Americans were shipping tea to the British West Indies, covered with Indian corn, and he predicted that this traffic would soon “through some other medium of deception be extended to Britain and Ireland . . .” He also declared that European agents in the United States were actually helping Americans in this trade by supplying them with goods on credit, hoping to get their money back after the goods had gotten to Europe, by whatever devious and illegal means.
