/* How Yankee Seal Clubbers Made A Truly Historical Amount Of Money Due */
/* To The Emperor's Lover's Dictatorship Without Realizing What Hit Them*/
/* Any More Than The Seals. Or, Don't Count Your Seals Before They're */
/* Extinct. */
In 1792 Elijah Austin, of New Haven, Connecticut, conceived the bright
idea of selling a commodity, pelts of the South American fur seal, which
cost him essentially nothing, in Guangzhou, China, in exchange for Chinese
silk, porcelain, and other luxury goods. The initial voyage returned a
tidy profit; the Chinese bought up the seal pelts at seventy-five cents
each. Austin forthwith died, and his interest in the enterprise was
bought up by his partner, Ebenezer Townsend, whose plans were more
ambitious. As owner of the Olive Street Shipyard, New Haven, Townsend
built the good ship Neptune, at 350 tons and carrying twenty guns !
the largest ship ever built in New Haven to that time, and custom-built
for the sealing trade with China.
The world's largest market for furs at this time consisted of the
Mandarins, or metropolitan officials, of Beijing. Then, as now, and
for a thousand years by this time, bright young Chinese had hailed,
disproportionately, from the mild to balmy climes of the Lower Yangzi
region and the Southeast Coast, the economic-core areas of the Empire.
The winters in Beijing were, and still are, bitter cold, with biting
winds. The fur coat became as highly functional as it was fashionable.
Moreover, for every official thus clad, there were wives, concubines,
relative, and hangers-on. As the Chinese say, "When a person Attains
the Way Dao, his dogs and chickens also go to heaven." The demand
for furs was, in the eighteenth century, supplied hitherto by Russians
and the *coureurs du bois* of what was, until 1759, French Canada.
The advantage of the men of Connecticut lay in the fact that, for
them, killing aquatic mammals had long been, one might say, Traditional.
As I previously mentioned, already in 1653, during the First Anglo-Dutch
war, bellicose Connecticut marauders conquered what is now Suffolk County,
Long Island, from Dutch New Nederland, and forthwith founded the whaling
industry of Southport on the South Shore of their sub-colony. Compared
to hunting whales, killing seals was positively *fun*, if hardly likely
to give rise to epic novels, "Call me Ishmael," and that sort of thing.
The Neptune departed New Haven in 1796, reaching Guangzhou Canton
two years later, October 1798. Much of the intervening time was spent
in the Falkland Islands, massacring the dense population of South
American Fur Seal, *Arcotocephalus australis*, which covered the
place. Then, as now, control of the Falklands was disputed. The
British had seized them in 1774; Spain claimed them. There was
nothing the Spanish authorities in La Plata could do about the
US sealing industry had they known or cared, as the Kingdom of
Spain was alliied to the French Directory and the Netherlands
in the war against Britain, to which the reactionary Administration
of John Adams, elected in 1796, was covertly allied (due to Federalist
horror of the French Revolution). The British authorities, such as
they were, looked the other way, accordingly, as they themselves had
not the slightest notion of how to make money out of the local seals.
The total complement of the Neptune was 36 men and boys, aged 14
to 61, average age 23. This includes Daniel Greene, captain, age 30
and veteran of one previous voyage to China; also, Ebenezer Townsend,
Junior, supercargo, i.e., commercial agent, who alone did nothing on
board ship or off. About half of these men eventially returned to
New Haven. Several died of scurvy or drunken shipboard accidents.
Eleven of them were deposited on the godforsaken rock, Mas Afuera,
off the Chilean coast, where they set to work killing 100,000 seals,
awaiting pickup by their comrades; they were basically forgotten
about, however. It was not until two years later that another New
Haven ship happened to call at Mas Afuera and picked up the survivors.
Working feverishly, not least because they were on piecework, the
men of the Neptune clobbered seals with abandon, then set to the less-
appetizing labour of preserving the pelts. "I like sealing well," wrote
the ship's doctor, David Forbes. They managed to bash to death about
80,000 seals, both on the Falklands and in Patagonia. That done, they
made their aforementioned stop at Mas Afuera, then called at the
Sandwich Islands, or Hawaii, today, where they may have inadvertently
eaten sufficient citrus fruit to have saved them from further scurvy.
Then, on to Guangzhou, where they struck it really rich.
This is what made the voyage of the Neptune truly historic, though
not even the crew had any idea of it at the time.
The semioffical Guangzhou "Hong" merchant, whose name is given as
"Ponqua Sumity," offered not the expected seventy-five or eighty cents
per pelt, but the astounding price of three dollars and twenty-five
cents. What could have *possibly* stimulated the demand for fur coats
in Beijing to this fantastic extent?
The years spanning the voyage of the Neptune, 1796-1799, were
in China those of the dictatorship of Hoshen. Hoshen was a dashing
Manchu nobleman with whose looks the emperor Qianlong was quite taken.
Or so it was said. The sexual cravings of senile octogenerian emperors
are at this time ill-understood. Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, 1871-
1888, was another case. During the very last years of the official
reign of Qianlong (1736-1796), Hoshen was made Fourth Councillor
on the Qing dynasty's supreme Inner Court governing body, the Grand
Council. For the institutional history of the Grand Council, see
Beatrice S. Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers, University of California
Press, 1991. In 1796 Qianlong, for reasons of filial policy and modesty,
abdicated, lest he reign longer than his grandfather, the Kangxi
emperor (1661-1722). But Qianlong and, of course, his cronies and
proteges, contined to retain their grip on power: In 1797, Hoshen
was promoted to First Councillor. In this capacity, he was even
better placed to commit the offense for which he was executed shortly
after the death of Qianlong himself, in 1799, by the incoming regime
of the Jiaqing emperor (1796/1799-1820). This was the illicit use
of the top-secret palace communication system between the Inner Court
(ie, the monarch's personal Privy Council, in effect the ruling clique)
and the Outer Court (ie, the official agencies of government, or the
Civil Service properly speaking) for the purpose of transmitting
privileged tipoffs as to large state purchases to favoured merchants
and speculators for the purpose of "insider trading." The confiscated
fortune of Hoshen was given as a billion dollars, or some such astronomical
sum, at the time at least three times the total annual expendure of the
central state administration. This may have been exaggerated; for as
Bartlett believes, it was impossible, under the circumstances, for
the real offenses to be spelled out without prejudice to the top-secret
character of the communications channels which Hoshen most likely
misused.
The moral outrage of the Qing Court at the time of Qianlong'a death
reflected accumulated grievances as to misgovernment and corruption
which had scarred the emperor's latter years. A revolt of White Lotus
sectarians, the Yellow Turbans, had taken most of the 1790s to
suppress. Then, the dictatorship of Hoshen had unleashed a veritable
orgy of conspicuous consumption which offended conservative sensibilities.
Though Confucian officialdom generally speaking lived in splendour
relative to the mass of the population, it was expected to maintain
a posture, as well as a discourse, of frugality relative to the opulence
of the Court, such that, in times of fiscal stringency, it was routine
to urge cost-cutting measures on the Son of Heaven and his luxurious
establishment. It was obvious, however, from the reception of the
Neptune's cargo, and the great good fortune of Ebenezer Townsend,
who pocketed the vast sum of $100,000, and Ebenezer Townsend, Jr,
who kept another $50,000, and the federal government of the United
States of America, which took $80,000 in customs dues (at a time
when the total per annum tax receipts of the State of Connecticut,
from property levies, were only $75,000), that extreme-yuppieistic
conspicuous consumption was gripping the bureaucratic and mercantile
smart set of Beijing. Perhaps, all at once, just too many people were
"Attaining the Way," not to mention all of their "dogs and chickens"
who "also go to heaven." The transaction itself, whereby the Neptune's
cargo went for the then-astronomical figure of $280,000, raises the
more particular suspicion that, the higher the price, the bigger the
surcharges due to "insider trading" and other corrupt practices which
might be hidden in it.
It was all too good to last, and it was. As noted, the throw-the-
rascals-out ambience in Beijing after 1799, with the associated drive
for economy and frugality, led to the nosedive of the price paid for
seal pelts, back to the original level of seventy-five or eighty cents
each, if not less. This did not deter the Yankee traders, however.
Emboldened by the proceeds of the tons of silk, "thousands of crates
of tea," Chinese porcelain (monogrammed by the manufacturer, upon
request, for the New Haven customer), Nankeen cotton cloth (tough
fabric for workingmen's pants in those days, like denim today, and
equally fashionable), and other valuable goods, the shippers of New
Haven kept coming back. Until the voyage of the Betsy, in 1811. The
Betsy's crew killed 110,000 South American Fur Seals. This is a
record which has stood for all time. For the reason, you see, that
the South American Fur Seal had become extinct (or the next thing
to it, Endangered Species In Extremis).
Grateful acknowledgements to the Museum of the New Haven Colony Historical
Society.
Daniel A. Foss