''Here individuals ofall nations are melted into a new race ofman, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great change to the world." play of the British situation trading with Spanish Caribbean plantations 200 years earlier, they found willing buyers for vitally needed food, and willing sellers of the sugar and rum that wo uld otherwise pile up on the island wharves. And a fact of overwhelming significance slowly became apparent: Americans, no longer confined within the British Empire, were now free to trade anywhere. Soon Yankee traders were co mpeting with English and Dutch merchants in the Mediterran ea n and Baltic Seas-in effect reaching Europe everywhere that the sea touched it. This put American merchants into play on a wider gameboard, in a game that they were qui ck to master. And, it opened the way to trade wi th China. A Boston shi p went on that long voyage via the Cape of Good Hope in 1783, but her master found he could sell his cargo of ginseng to a returning British Indiaman for twice its weight of H yson tea-a great bargain , but no way to crack the C hin a marke r. Two New York vessels made the voyage in 17 84 and 178 5. They were followed by the Grand Turk out of Salem, whose voyage enriched her backe rs and fi xed the ambitions of Boston merchants' wives, as Morison notes, on "a chest of H yso n, a China silk gown, and a set of Ca nton china." The burgeo ning New England civilization suppo rted a rich crop of cultural achievements, which within a hundred years had led Bostonians to refer to their ciry, which supported Harvard, then the nation's greatest college, and a highly literate and cultivated merchant class, housed in arguably rhe noblest architecture in America, to call their ciry "rhe hub of rhe universe"-a phrase used in misprision by envious outsiders, but accepted quire calmly by rhe citize ns of wealth, achievement and intellectual ourreach who presided over the sryles, tastes and ideas which Boston exported to the nation, if nor rhe universe. Against this background ir is easy to understand rhar rhe ini riarive rhar Ledyard had proposed-raking furs from rhe Pacific Northwest to rhe China marker-was first picked up by a Boston gro up . The first Ameri can voyages made direct to Ch in a had demonstrated rhe great difficul ry of providing anything to trade with rhe Chinese. "To find something salable in Canton, was the riddle of the China trade,"
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observes Morison, in his Maritime History. H e adds: "Boston and Salem solved ir. " The backers of rhe first American voyage to rhe Pacifi c Northwest and on to China mer, appropriately, in rhe ho me of Dr. Thomas Bulfinch, a wealthy Boston physician. His son C harl es, who graduated from H arvard Co llege in 1781, was presenr, having recenrly come home to rhe family mansion from a long trip to England and Europe, where he educated himself in rhe Western rradirions of arch irecru re. T he voyage his father and his fat her's merchanr friends financed was to srarr a stream of wealrh flowing into Boston whi ch virtually transfo rmed rh e ciry. By one of rhe happier chances of history, th e so n, C harles, was to be rhe architect of this transformation. As Christopher Wren's perfect domes and soaring spires had enn obled rhe sp rawlin g ciry of London a hundred yea rs earli er, wirh similar confidence and sweep in g mastery Bulfinch gave Boston a chaste, exalted urban sryle still unmatched today in American ones. And to those who believe, as I do, rhar the shape of our physical surroundings sugges ts rhythms and parrerns to the human mind and psyche, su rely Bulfinch had an important role to play in rhe coming literary, philosop hi c and arrisric "flowering ofNew England" whi ch came to center on Boston as its hub. But befo re Boston became a hub, it had to send out spokes to form a wheel. Those spokes were fo rmed in rhe early days of rhe yo un g American Republic in the passages of irs fa r-flun g ships to distant corners of the wo rld. And the going was nor easy.
Columbia Rediviva The ship Columbia Rediviva, of about 23 0 to ns, and her consort, the 90-ton sloop Lady Washington, were making h eavy weather of it, barding their way around Cape Horn. Ir was March 1788, and getti ng into rhe Antarctic autumn, a bad season to take on rhe Horn. The ships had left Bosto n almost six months earlier, their passage prolonged by lengthy visits in the Cape Verde Islands off Afri ca and the Falklan ds, 300 miles downwind of Cape Horn. T hese delays were due to the eccentric behavior of rhe expedition commander, Captain John Kendrick of the Columbia. His dilatory ways and brutal outbursts of rage led young Robert H aswell, promoted
to second mate of the Columbia when th e mate quit the expedition in the Cape Verdes, to switch from rhe larger ship to the little Lady Washington, co mmanded by Robert Gray. So at last the two vessels headed off for rhe Horn . "We found frequent fogs and at the same rime a severe and disagreeable co ld," H aswell noted from rhe decks of rhe embattled Washington, as rhe ships reached Latitude 62° 29' South on 12 March, over 300 miles south of Cape H orn , practically in Antarctica. Tackling Cape Horn was surely a hard way to go. The direct route to C hina was a far gender road, slipping round rhe Cape of Good Hope and then slanting up through rhe Indian Ocean for rhe Sunda Strait through the Java Island chain , and so into the China Sea. The route to the American No rthwes t, however, demanded sa iling far south to take the Horn head-o n, in order to ger around South America and make o ne's way back up the Pacific coast to where rhe furs needed for th e C hin a trade co uld be picked up cheaply from rhe Indi ans. The Columbia an d the Lady Washington, from whose wer, slop ing decks yo ung Haswell surveyed rhe scene, had in fact got too fa r so uth, srriving to make westing against the howling northwest gales that smote th em, day afte r day. T he ships found themselves among a new peril, floating icebergs, each capable of crippling or sinking th e ship th at ran in to it. But th e two ships hun g on, "raking advance of eve ry favorable slant of wind," as Haswell nores. By 1 April they had fought their way northward to a little over 100 miles sourh of Cape Horn. Then, in rheearlymorninghours, thewind slammed aro und from northwest to rhe so uthward. In a birrer Ap ril Fool's joke, rhe new wind, a fair wind for progress north and west, rapidly developed into the wo rst gale rhey had mer. The two ships lost co ntact in the co nfusion, which on ly grew wo rse as the wind in creased to "a perfect hurricane" blowin g straight from Am arc rica "with an intense frost." H aswell writes of "huge overgrown seas" cresting aro und them, rhe smallest of whi ch, he says, wo uld "infallibly have put period to our existence" had it broken aboa rd. T he sloop scudded before the confused, breaki ng seas and screaming wind, and successfullywearhered the avalanching tons
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