Trade by Sea

in the Wharf District

Ship owners with offices on India Wharf were very active in the China Trade. Like all foreigners doing business in China, U.S. traders were restricted, during the six-month trading season, to living and completing transactions in a designated area of Quangzhou (Canton) shown on this circa 1800 painting.

Independence freed Americans from restrictive British Navigation Acts, and Boston merchants leaped at the opportunity to trade with any country in the world. Soon their ships were sailing for the Mediterranean, Russia, South America, and the Far East.

Starting in the late 1700s, Bostonians made fortunes in the China Trade, including Thomas H. Perkins, George Lyman, and Thomas Wigglesworth, who had their offices on India Wharf. They imported thousands of pounds of tea as well as silk and porcelain. In exchange, they initially traded sea otter and seal furs obtained from Native people in the Northwest, and later sandalwood from Pacific islands. These natural resources were quickly decimated. Most U.S. merchants then switched to opium from Turkey and India as their principal trade product—despite Chinese laws prohibiting its importation.

In the 1860s, Boston’s sea trade began to shift away from the downtown wharves to other areas of the harbor. However, for decades India Wharf continued to be busy as regularly scheduled steamships operated from here to Portland, Maine, and New York City, until all commercial activity ended in the 1950s.

The Columbia-Rediviva, sailing out of Boston, was the first vessel bearing a U.S. flag to circumnavigate the world (1787-1790). Her crew launched the early U.S. trade of sea otter fur for Chinese products.

Illustration by George Davidson, a crew member on Columbia-Rediviva’s second fur-trading voyage in 1793. Courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society

1929 brochure advertising coastal service from India Wharf

Courtesy of Historic New England

In the second half of the 19th century, steamship sheds were built along the edge of India Wharf for easy loading. The Metropolitan Steamship Company (founded in 1866) and Portland Steam Packet Company operated from India Wharf until they were consolidated in the early 1900s into what became the Eastern Steamship Lines.

Original 1906 photo from Library of Congress; colored image courtesy of TD Bank

Sign Location

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1863 painting by Fitz Henry Lane of Antelope built by Samuel Hall in East Boston. Robert Bennett Forbes sent the ship from Boston to China to transport opium from India to China for Russell & Co. She was one of the fastest vessels in the trade that established significant fortunes for many Boston merchants.

Very early U.S. trade with China did not include opium. But U.S. (and European) increasing demand for Chinese tea, silks, porcelain, and decorative goods wasn’t matched by growth in Chinese demand for Western exports.[1] Americans did ship cotton, woolen goods, furs, clocks, and other mechanical curiosities, but the export value was far smaller than that of Chinese imports. Americans didn’t want to pay in silver, and so they followed in British footsteps and turned to smuggling opium. Heard company agent, Bostonian George Dixwell wrote to his boss in the mid 1840s: “Opium is cash in transactions [for Chinese products] and people who have no opium to trade will find it extremely difficult to do anything here [in China].[2]

[1] Spence, Jonathan. The Search of Modern China. W.W. Norton, 1990, 128.

[2] Quoted by Layton, Thomas. The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants & the Opium Trade. Stanford University Press, 1997, 94.

The British brought opium to China from India, but they barred U.S. access to that source until 1838. So beginning in 1804 Americans established sources in Turkey. Boston’s Thomas Handasyd Perkins began shipping Turkish opium to China a decade later. After 1838, American merchants switched to Indian opium, which was considered of higher quality.

1729 – The Chinese emperor banned the sale of opium, but not its importation because the drug was still permitted for medicinal use.

1799 – As the use of opium climbed, an imperial edict forbade foreigners from bringing opium into China, calling it “foreign mud.” The edict also forbade domestic production.

1813 – With the crisis deepening and addiction having devastating effects on Chinese population of all classes, the emperor banned opium smoking. The outflow of silver to pay for smuggled opium was also damaging the Chinese economy.

1838 – The Chinese emperor cracked down further, appointing highly respected Lin Zexu as imperial commissioner to end opium smuggling.

Long-standing tensions over access to Chinese markets and China’s insistence that foreigners abide by China’s legal system intersected with Western traders’ insistence on smuggling ever-increasing quantities of opium into China. In 1839, Chinese imperial commissioner Lin Zexu forced foreigners to surrender 20,000+ chests of opium (between 2.5 and 3.2 million pounds), which he then destroyed. The British, owners of most of the confiscated opium, were furious and dispatched a fleet to obtain “satisfaction and reparation,” for their merchandise and their pride. British naval might and state-of-the-art weaponry crushed Chinese defenses. The resulting Nanjing Treaty deeply humiliated the Chinese, forcing them to open additional ports for trade and ceding Hong Kong.

Though the U.S. did not participate in the hostilities, merchants pressed the government to negotiate similar trading terms. The 1844 Treaty of Wangxia between the U.S. and China did just that. It effectively ended the Old China Trade with its many restrictions. Interestingly, the Treaty of Wangxia specified that any American smuggling opium would be subject to Chinese law, but even that concession to Chinese sovereignty had no teeth. Opium flowed into China in every increasing quantities, mainly on British vessels, but American companies with deep Boston connections like Russell & Co and Augustine Heard & Co. participated as well. The Chinese dared not put up a fight, and in an 1860 treaty finally legalized and taxed opium imports. U.S. involvement diminished a lot after the trade was legalized and by 1880, U.S. merchants exited the opium trade entirely.

Sources: Dolin, Eric Jay. When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. Liveright Publishing Corp., 2012.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. W.W. Norton & Co., 1990.

Boston merchants who smuggled opium into China as part of the China Trade made fortunes. Like virtually all drug smugglers do. Their wealth made a difference in Boston and beyond. They invested their money into railroads, real estate, banks, mining, textile mills and insurance companies. In short, their capital helped transform the U.S. into an industrial power. Several also became philanthropic. For example, Thomas Perkins was an early supporter of the Boston Athenaeum, and the Perkins School for the Blind carries his name thanks to his generosity. How does one balance good works like these with the staggering damage done acquiring this wealth?

In addition, the legacy of opium smuggling—the Opium Wars and the unequal treaties that resulted— lingers on in China. Many Chinese recognize this history as an egregious example of Western imperialism and disregard for their country’s sovereignty. By contrast, few Americans have ever heard of the Opium Wars.

Many older texts refer to the East Indies. There is no such place. It was a 19th-century catchall phrase that typically included China, India, Japan, and the rest of the Far East.

Boston’s trade with India was extensive. In 1857, for example, 96 vessels arrived at Boston wharves—including India Wharf—from Calcutta. They brought shellac, buffalo and cow hides, goatskins, linseed, indigo, jute, ginger, and mahogany. In trade, Americans shipped drills, tar, timber, naval stores, spars, and tobacco.

from “Other Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston,” State Street Trust, 1919, p 44.

Sailing cards, like these, were widely used to advertise departures of sailing vessels.

 

A photo of City of Rockland undergoing repair or maintenance work in East Boston on the 2000-ton double-track marine railway still visible there today. At the time, the marine railway was the largest in Boston and second largest in the country.

For the saga of one of Eastern Steamship Lines most unlucky vessels, the City of Rockland

Community activists. Colonial law. Political will. New state regulations. The combination created the 43-mile Boston Harborwalk–a public path, stretching from Logan Airport through seven neighborhoods to the Neponset River. In 1978, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) sought to improve public access to the waterfront. They succeeded by integrating early Colonial laws into new state regulations.

In the decades that followed, community activists, city and state government, and developers of shoreline projects have worked together to ensure the Harborwalk is always constructed along the waterfront. Some sites also provide public amenities–bathrooms, meeting places, kayak launches,
etc. The result is a fabulous path welcoming residents and visitors to our vibrant clean harbor.

Early Colonial laws established public right of access along tidelands to protect citizens’ rights to fish, hunt, and navigate at sea and along the shorefront. These laws go back even further: They stem from Roman law, which was incorporated into English law and brought over to Massachusetts by English
settlers. Then, in the 1640s, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting private docks in the intertidal area (between low and high tide) as long as public access was retained. Almost all of Boston’s waterfront is filled land that was once the intertidal area. This, together with the centuries-old legal right of access, served as the underpinnings for the 1978 CZM regulations.

Resources

  • Adams Jr., Russell B. The Boston Money Tree. Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1977.
  • Bunting, W. H. Portrait of a Port, Boston 1852-1914.  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.
  • Bunting, W. H. The Camera’s Coast: Historic Images of Ship and Shore of New England. Historic New England, 2006.
  • Dolin, Eric Jay. When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. Liveright Publishing Corp., 2012.
  • Hawes, Dorothy Schurman. To the Farthest Gulf: The Story of the American China Trade. Reprinted by The Ipswich Press, 1990 from articles in the “Essex Institute Historical Collections,” 1841.
  • Layton, Thomas N. The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade. Stanford University Press, 1997.
  • “Other Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston,” State Street Trust, 1919. (p47 for Perkins info)
  • Col Frank Forbes: “The Old Wharves of Boston” Proceedings of the Bostonian Society, Jan 15, 1952.
  • Rossiter, William Sidney, Ed. Day and Ways in Old Boston. “The Old Boston Water Front,” Frank H. Forbes, R. H. Stearns & Co., 1915.
  • Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. W.W. Norton & Co., 1990.
  • Vrabel, Jim. When in Boston: A Timeline and Almanac.  Northeastern University Press, 2004.
  • Whitehill, Walter Muir. Boston: A Topograhical History. Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2nd Ed 1968.
  • For more about key U.S. companies involved in the early China trade www.Industrialhistoryhk.org
  • For information about a replica of the Columbia Rediviva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_Ship_Columbiahttp://www.lewis-clark.org/article/577#rediviva  

Acknowledgments