Lintin is an island in the middle of the gulf twenty-five miles south of the Bogue, or about where the bar of the A should be. Its southeast end—the island is two and a half miles long and lies on a slant—is occupied by a brush-covered hill a thousand feet high. Its northwest end is lower and indented by several small bays, and in one of these there is (or was) a little fishing village. The fishermen work with nets strung from poles driven into the mud, a thing possible because the water is extremely shallow around most of the island. At the very northwest tip, however, there is a fair depth; and it was here that Harriet found the bark belonging to Russell and Company, her uncle’s agency house.
The bark was named, appropriately, the Lintin. Harriet spent almost a month aboard her as the guest of Macondray, her master. Sometimes she went ashore and explored the island. Once she climbed the hill and ate a picnic lunch at the top—Macondray assured her she was the first western woman to set foot there. For the most part she stayed on board talking to Mrs. Macondray, waging war on the cockroaches, and watching what went on among the other ships.
For there were always ships at the anchorage: her first morning Harriet counted twenty-three. A few of them, like the Lintin, did not move from month to month except when bad weather threatened. Most came in, anchored for a few days or weeks, then went away again. Curious native craft came and lay alongside some of them—one day Harriet spent several hours hanging over the rail watching one moored close against the Lintin. It was long, low, and narrow, and carried a large crew, a far larger crew than one would have expected for a boat of that size, though Harriet does not seem to have been surprised. “They muster generally about a hundred men,” she wrote. While she watched, the crew collected “round five or six little messes of fish and oysters cooked in divers ways. Each man has his bowl of rice in one hand and his chopsticks in the other, which they dip into the public bowl and thence into their mouths . . . and then shovel as much rice into their mouths as they can possibly crowd in.”1 How ugly and dirty they were; and how indolent they seemed, lying about playing cards or dominoes after stuffing themselves so! Only in passing did she mention that the boat was a smuggling boat.
One afternoon after dinner she was rowed over to a neighboring ship, bark-rigged like the Lintin but built along cleaner lines, on which a party was in progress. There was a little band, “and we danced a quadrille upon the deck, and the gentlemen waltzed.”2 The name of the ship was Red Rover. Harriet failed to add, however, that Red Rover was not just another merchant vessel carrying cotton or rattans and pausing momentarily before proceeding up the Canton River. She was an opium clipper—the very first of all opium clippers, being then already three years old—and she had come as close to the Bogue as she was meant to come. Calcutta was her port of origin, Lintin was her destination; of half a dozen vessels anchored within a radius of a quarter of a mile one could probably say the same. As for Macondray’s Lintin, she was a receiving ship; which is to say she was a permanent floating warehouse, to which clippers and other country ships brought the drug, and from which coasters and small native craft like the one Harriet had watched were systematically supplied.
All about Harriet opium was changing hands in quantities worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. That was what Macondray spent his days doing. From the deck of the Lintin he conducted a business that fully equaled what Harriet would have seen aboard any Indiaman at Whampoa. And where was the Lintin lying? Off a barren little nothing of an island in the middle of nowhere! How odd, until one remembered that in India opium was legitimate—and in China, contraband.
The first edict prohibiting the drug issued from Peking in 1729. At that time opium was reaching China in very small quantities and was being consumed, in the southern coastal provinces chiefly, as madak. So the Chinese government can scarcely have understood how dangerous it was. Very likely Peking pronounced against the drug for the same general reason that, ninety years earlier, it had banned that other pernicious foreign article: tobacco. The emperor, however, had been as little able as the rulers of England, Russia, or the Ottoman Empire to keep his people from smoking the weed. Trying to shut opium out of China was likely to prove equally useless.
For a time consumption rose quite slowly. All through the eighteenth century not China but places short of China took the largest share of India’s still trifling production. Penang became an English station explicitly as a convenient Straits outlet for Indian opium; so large was the traffic on Java that when the English occupied the island briefly during the Napoleonic Wars, Raffles, the English governor, actually proposed that the East India Company assume a monopoly of opium distribution there. Fort William refused. Java and its opium trade reverted to the Dutch. At the same time, however, the Dutch share of India’s annual export sank to a fraction of the total. By the early 1820s the number of chests leaving India had passed five thousand a year—and almost all of that volume went to China.
As the volume rose and the form in which the opium was consumed shifted inexorably from madak with a low morphia content to chandu with a high, official declarations against the drug multiplied. There was an edict in 1780, another in 1796, an order from the governor-general at Canton in 1799, and pronouncements thereafter at a rate, counting Canton as well as Peking, of almost one a year. As these emerge in the translations of the time, they seem to show that the Chinese were beginning to discover the damage opium could do. “The Celestial Empire,” runs one, “does not forbid you people to make and eat opium, and diffuse the custom in your native place. But that opium should flow into the interior of this country, where vagabonds clandestinely purchase and eat it, and continually become sunk into the most stupid and besotted state . . . is an injury to the manners and minds of men of the greatest magnitude.” In fact the injury was to more than vagabonds. Opium smoking was no longer confined to the south coast. It had spread north and west. Well-to-do young men smoked for the novelty of it. They could at least afford the drug; clerks, runners, and other civil service underlings who could not, smoked anyway, and in their efforts to cater to the habit ate badly and sank into miserable little corrupt ways. The emperor discovered that even his eunuchs and the officers of his palace guard were taking the drug. It was alarming. At Canton the authorities exhorted the hong merchants not to let the vile stuff slip by. “Be careful and do not view this document as mere matter of form, and so tread within the net of the law,” they warned, “for you will find your escape as impracticable as it is for a man to bite his own navel.”3 The hong merchants took heed. They did not themselves buy or sell opium. They kept the drug out of their warehouses. As for the East India Company, which is to say the Government of India, it too heard the warnings; knew that its opium was being smuggled in growing quantities into China; and knew that Peking knew—the Factory correspondence, still carefully preserved, gives ample evidence of that. But what was the Government of India to do? Should it get out of the opium business altogether?
The answer was not easily yes. Two or three thousand chests of Patna and Benares costing perhaps 300 rupees each to produce, yet bringing in more than three times that amount when sold, were sources of revenue not lightly to be abandoned. The Government of India was anyhow of two minds (if it was of any mind at all) about the effect of the traffic on the Chinese. In 1819 it proposed to raise slightly the quantity of chests it offered. Doing so would not, it told itself, increase the consumption of the “deleterious drug” in China or extend its “baneful effects” there. The only purpose of the increase was “to secure to ourselves the whole supply by preventing foreigners from participating in a trade of which they at present enjoy no inconsiderable share; for it is evident that the Chinese, as well as the Malays, cannot exist without the use of opium, and if we do not supply their necessary wants, foreigners will.”4 Foreigners meant, among others, Indians outside the Bengal agencies; for there was nothing in the laws of horticulture that said the opium poppy could not be cultivated elsewhere than on the Ganges plain. If Patna and Ghazipur did not supply the market, other places would.
Except, however, for one small venture in the 1780s that turned out badly, the Company never itself shipped opium to China. Company officers speculated in consignments sent privately in country ships, but opium was never a part of an Indiaman’s regular cargo. Shortly after he came home from Canton to retire, a private merchant named Jardine was asked by a Parliamentary committee whether he and his partners had ever been approached by the Opium Board at Calcutta with proposals for encouraging the sale of opium in China. “Yes,” replied Jardine, “we have had musters of opium sent on to us in small quantities, packed in different ways, with a request that we would sell it and ascertain the kind of package that suited the Chinese market best.”5 So the board fussed about how its product was packaged. It did not, however, bother itself with the problem of how to get the product to China or how to sell it there. It left that to the Jardines.
William Jardine was a Scotsman who had come out to China in 1802 as surgeon’s mate aboard an Indiaman. Company surgeons were entitled to a certain amount of privilege tonnage in the vessels on which they served, so it was easy for Jardine to acquire over the years a taste for the China trade. In 1817 he made his last voyage for the Company; two years later he left for the East again on free merchant’s indentures, settled at Canton (he was now about thirty-five years of age), and began to do business on his own.
At Canton he saw a good deal of another Scot, a man in his twenties named James Matheson. Matheson had attended Edinburgh University, spent two years in a London agency house, and came out to Calcutta in 1815. From Calcutta he made repeated trips to Canton until, at last, like Jardine he settled there. In 1825 Jardine joined the Canton agency house of Magniac and Company. Two years later Matheson joined also, bringing his nephew Alexander with him. Later still the last Magniac went home, whereupon the house changed its name to Jardine, Matheson and Company. Long before that it had grown into the largest and the most active of the houses of agency at Canton, among the English and the Parsees rivaled only by Dent and Company, among the Americans only by Russell and Company. And one of the things Jardine, Matheson and Company was active in was opium.
Now an agency house, as the name implies, did not ordinarily own the goods it dealt in. Instead it bought (for a commission) what other parties asked it to buy and sold what they asked it to sell. In the case of the opium traffic, the other parties were private merchants at Calcutta. They purchased chests of Patna and Benares at the Tank Square auctions and consigned those chests to agents or agency houses on the coast of China. Naturally they did not do so blindly. Consignors and consignees usually knew each other well; indeed, almost the chief duty of a China agent was to maintain a regular communication with his “correspondents” in India and elsewhere. The fact remains that the parties who bought the drug at Calcutta did not themselves sell the drug at Canton, while the actual sellers there were not the owners. As for the original producer, the Government of India, it turned its back the moment the Tank Square auctions were over. One might almost suppose that to diffuse and dilute responsibility had been the whole intent of the arrangement.
There was a further question, however, When the opium left Calcutta, stored in the holds of country ships and consigned to agents in Canton, it was an entirely legitimate article. It remained an entirely legitimate article all the way up the China Sea. But the instant it reached the coast of China it became something different. It became contraband. This meant that it could not be landed openly, it had to be smuggled. And the question was, who was going to do the smuggling?
Not Russell’s men, not Dent’s or Jardine’s. Not smugglers they! As consignees they had to devise some means for warehousing the opium. So they early hit on the scheme of converting a number of merchantmen into receiving ships, floating depots as it were, and leaving them permanently on the coast. They had also to sell the opium thus warehoused, remitting to consignors the monies received; but the selling could be done while the opium was still afloat. Thus they would stay safely within the letter of the law. “Is it your idea that no one is engaged in smuggling unless he actually conveys the goods on shore?” a member of Parliament asked Thacker, a private merchant, when in 1840 England thought to make inquiries into the war it was about to wage. This was precisely Thacker’s idea. “You make smugglers of the Chinese, but you are not smugglers yourselves?” the M.P. persisted. “We supply the means of their smuggling” was all Thacker would say.6
That it was the Chinese who were doing the smuggling was a point of view forced upon the mandarins too. The reason for this was simple. The mandarins had it in their power to make life extremely uncomfortable for a receiving ship. They could harass its servants and scare away its bumboats; they could retaliate against the trade in silks, nankeens, and sugar candy that the agency house in question was also carrying on. But the mandarins had at their command no navy worth the name, whereas even a receiving ship, if armed with a few guns and officered by a few resolute westerners, was formidable. So it was beyond the capacity of the mandarins actually to capture one of these floating warehouses or to drive it clear off. If they wanted to break the opium traffic, they had to turn upon the Chinese end of it. They had to lie in wait to intercept the native smuggling boats or move against the brokers. That was the only way—that or learn to look in the other direction.
As it happened, the habits and circumstances of official life inclined the mandarins to this last. They were poorly paid, so poorly paid that they were obliged as a matter of course to support themselves, their families, and their official establishments out of the perquisites of office. Foreigners did not fully appreciate this. What they did see was that in the Canton area extra payments were the normal lubricant of the pilotage, port, and customs systems. Individual Chinese, the hong merchants in particular, might be honest to a fault, yet let a mandarin or a mandarin’s underling appear, and “squeeze” appeared too. Squeeze was what civil servants collected for themselves in the process of collecting for the state. It was so rooted, and so ubiquitous, that it was bound (foreigners felt) to make nonsense of edicts against opium. Indeed, were not such edicts simply a device for guaranteeing the mandarins a rake-off! For as the English missionary agent, G. Tradescant Lay, put it a few years after Harriet Low’s visit to Lintin, “unless a fisherman has a net, he cannot catch a fish”—by which he meant that without laws against opium, the mandarins would not be able to squeeze so many dollars a chest from the Chinese who dealt in it.
“In China,” added Lay, “every man is a smuggler in opium from the Emperor downwards.”7 Now that certainly was not true. But there was no question that very large quantities of the drug flowed from the decks of the receiving ships into the interior of China. And there was no question that they moved there across a thick and almost noiseless cushion of squeeze.
It was not to be expected, however, that the opium traffic would always run with perfect smoothness. From time to time the even surface of official connivance was bound to be broken by a squabble among the connivers, the arrival of a new mandarin unfamiliar with the system, or an unexpectedly piercing shaft of scrutiny from the yellow-roofed throne halls of the Forbidden City. Then there would be trouble; opium dens raided; native smugglers caught and punished; and the traffic interrupted.
In 1821 there occurred a particularly sharp crisis. His attention directed to the problem by the Tao-kuang emperor (who had just ascended the throne in a reforming frame of mind) and by the circumstance that opium in the Canton area was fetching the unusual price of $2,000 a chest, the governor-general of Kwangtung and Kwangsi provinces moved with unexpected energy against the native dealers. Sixteen of them were arrested. One, sentenced to exile in central Asia, in his bitterness accused mandarins in the Canton area of receiving so much per smuggled chest. If Peking got wind of this, there was sure to be an inquiry. Prudently the governor-general ordered all foreign vessels carrying opium to get out of the river.
Of itself this order did not mean very much. It was one on the books all the time, so to speak. On this occasion, however, the hong merchants were involved. The governor-general was pointing openly at them, accusing them of shirking their responsibilities, threatening to deprive them of their buttons of rank if the opium traffic did not immediately move out of the river. They in turn were letting it be known that they would not have any dealings with ships (they named four) known to contain the drug. This was serious. Behind it lay the implied threat to stop the trade completely, not just with opium men but with all foreigners. It was a thing the Chinese had done before.
One of the named four was the American Emily. (She had arrived with 180 chests of Turkey, had sold only 47, and was waiting at Whampoa for the market to improve. It was because he did not want to publicize the nature of his cargo that her master had agreed to let the Chinese try Terranova, but the authorities had found out what she carried anyway.) The other three were country ships consigned to James Matheson, who used one to store opium. Matheson asked the Select Committee of senior Company supercargoes—“the Select,” as they were sometimes sardonically called—what he ought to do. This annoyed them. As individuals they knew all about Matheson’s opium activity and even acknowledged its usefulness to the tea trade. As Company men, however, they had nothing to do with the prohibited article and wished to hear nothing about it. So they turned Matheson a deaf ear. Was he not consul for the king of Denmark? If he must appeal, let him appeal to Copenhagen!
The fact that Matheson should be met with this response seems odd until one notices that, by the terms of the Company’s charter, private English had no business being in China at all. Numbers of them were there just the same, of course, and had long been. From time to time, however, the Select tried to drive the more bumptious away; it was to protect themselves from this that some of the private English had taken to obtaining consular commissions from lesser European states: from Prussia, Sardinia, Hamburg, at one time from Poland, and even from the Republic of Genoa. (In 1825 a stubborn Scotsman named James Innes balked at the masquerade and refused to take out consul’s papers for Ruritania or any other place. The Select, after huffing and puffing a little, let him stay. But this was still four years away.) Matheson, as it happened, represented Denmark; that was why the Select told him to seek his advice there.
Meanwhile, however, let him do nothing that might embarrass the tea trade. Matheson was only twenty-five, still very new to China. He was ready to risk a brush with the mandarins, he was ready to defy the Select, but he was not ready to do both. So he took his ships out of the river. Other private merchants did the same (Whampoa was uncomfortably confined and public anyway). And after 1821 the drug traffic was conducted entirely at the outer anchorages—particularly at Lintin.
Except for bad weather there was very little to fear at Lintin. Pirates so close to the Bogue were rare, and if they should appear the receiving ships were ready for them with cannon, muskets, cutlasses, and boarding nets well triced up. Of course there were the war junks to consider. A young American visitor describes how they would lie quietly off the island, then suddenly get under way, and sail past the opium ships “with colors and streamers flying, gongs beating, and a vast deal of ridiculous parade; and after a few equally vain manoeuvres, return to their moorings and dispatch a most bombastic letter to Canton announcing the annihilation of the ‘foreign thieves’ who come to poison the subjects of His Celestial Majesty with this filthy drug.”8 Men like Matheson and Macondray had no opinion whatever of war junks.
So Russell and Company’s Lintin, Jardine’s Hercules and Samarang, Dent’s Jane, and other receiving ships that we know existed, but cannot always name, lay month after month—year after year—off Lintin. Into their holds went increasing quantities of Indian opium together with driblets of Turkish brought by the Americans. But though the native smugglers came right to ship’s side to take delivery of the stuff, the sales themselves were not arranged on deck. That part of the business was carried on at Canton, just as the buying and selling of teas, silks, and English manufactures were.
This was the beauty of the system. Driven from Whampoa, Matheson had been able to retire to the factories at Canton and dispose of his opium from there. At the factories, consignees like himself committed their chests sight unseen to native brokers acting for the big Chinese wholesale opium houses. These brokers came openly to bargain; they paid immediately, in silver; the consignee received a fixed commission on the sale. When a bargain had been struck, an order to deliver—blank opium orders could be purchased from the Macao printing shops at so much a hundred—was dispatched to the appropriate receiving ship at Lintin, often traveling in the very smuggling craft sent to pick the stuff up. Long narrow vessels beautifully built of bright unpainted wood, these craft were known, from their speed and from the rows of oars that assisted their mat sails, as “scrambling dragons” or “fast crabs.” They mounted a swivel or two amidships and another in the bow; their sides bristled with every kind of cut and thrust weapon; they were manned by those superb and fearsome boat people, the Tanka. Once loaded, they made for one of the inlets on the shores of the gulf or pushed boldly into the river, and if the proper palms had been crossed, landed their cargoes without incident. They went prepared to fight, however, being fully a match for the “mandarin boats” they so closely resembled and much too fast for war junks.
The whole business was conducted with the greatest trust and confidence. Native buyers knew that the Patna and Benares they were getting was unadulterated and full weight because it carried the East India Company’s mark. Though the traffic was illegal, the mandarins rarely tried to interrupt it. Best of all, what risks there were fell entirely upon the Chinese. It was this splendid feature that moved Jardine to call the opium trade “by far the safest trade in China.” It was safe “because you got your money before you gave your order. Whatever the difficulty was in landing it afterwards, you had nothing to do with it. When the cash-keeper reported so much cash paid into the treasury, you gave an order for as much opium as the man wanted, and then you had done with it; it was his affair after that.”9
Almost anyone could dabble in the traffic. “Dear Sir,” began a letter from the Parsee firm of Hukitjee Jimmybhoy to Russell and Company, “we avail of departure of Cornywallis, and thanking your favour of April 19 enclosing £2,000 in pamphlets suitable our order. [The writer meant bills of exchange.] Now heavy distress falling upon us through Almighty God taking from bosom of family and friends our worthy father, who died after loitering many days of chronic diarrhoea of guts, much regretted. O grave where is sting! O death where is victory! Nevertheless, resigning to will of Providence, and no change in freights since last advised,” let Russell’s expect a consignment of opium in eight or ten weeks’ time.10 It would come to exactly twenty chests. That was not an unreasonably small amount; from the Indian end small firms as well as large took their fling at the trade, and at Canton the participants were often equally modest. Hunter remembers visiting an Indian Muslim named Boo-Bull in the Dutch factory one summer day. The fellow sat crosslegged on a mat, smoking a hookah. The only furniture in the room was a large red chest containing papers, account books, pens, an inkstand made from a bamboo joint, rice, dal, ghee, curry powder, a bamboo pillow, a spare turban, and an extra pair of yellow shoes with long points like rats’ tails. Out of this chest Boo-Bull lived and did his business; it was his larder, wardrobe, and office; but this did not mean that he was poor or his affairs negligible. Like many other Indians at Canton he handled a great deal of opium, storing it in the receiving ships of the larger firms (for which he paid demurrage), selling it to Chinese opium brokers, and converting the silver into East India Company bills. For all this he needed no clerks, no coolies, no warehouse, no capital even—only his wits. Any private merchant who wanted to could participate in the traffic. And so many did that at last a special kind of vessel had to be developed to bring the drug to China.
The China Sea is dominated by two monsoons, the northeast and the southwest. The northeast begins in October and blows itself out in March; the southwest reaches the Gulf of Canton late in May and dissipates in September. Much the same calendar governs the Indian Ocean, the only difference being that in the Indian Ocean the summer, southwest monsoon is by far the more pronounced of the two. Its onset over the Indian subcontinent, bringing torrents of rain, breaks the terrible dry heat of the Ganges plain and makes the land green again for the indispensable crops of early autumn. In the China Sea it is the other way around. For though Canton’s wettest months are the summer ones, it is the winter monsoon that is the more powerful. During almost half the year it blows and blows, not continously, but often enough and with enough force so that sailing ships find it difficult to move up the coast.
The tubby, bluff-bowed country wallahs of the private trade did not even try. If the best of the European square-riggers, if even the great oceangoing Chinese junks, must think twice before attempting to beat to windward against the northeast monsoon at its height, country ships might as well rest content to roll comfortably up the China Sea before the southwest winds of summer and in the winter roll comfortably down again. By the late 1820s, however, too many chests of opium were trying to reach the China coast to be accommodated in so leisurely a fashion. Opium merchants wanted something faster. They wanted to be able to buy breaks of Patna or Benares at the Company’s January sale and put them on the China coast in February. They wanted to be able to load again in May and have the ship back at Calcutta in time to load a third time in July. They wanted, in short, several round trips a year. That meant defying the pattern of the monsoon. In the late summer of 1829 a Calcutta agency house thought it had found a way.
It put three hundred chests into a brig, commissioned the new side-wheel steamer Forbes to go along and tow when necessary, and sent the two off down the Hooghly. Partway, however, a serious mishap occurred. The Forbes ran upon a shoal. The brig, in tow behind, struck the steamer, had her anchor knocked into the water, and holed herself on one of the flukes. A passing ship helped William Clifton, her master, lift a few of the chests out. Then a gale blew up and pounded the brig and the rest of her valuable cargo to pieces.
Understandably the agency house was in no hurry to repeat the experiment. Clifton, however, persevered. A man of some means and influence, he boldly ordered from certain Calcutta builders a ship closewinded enough, he calculated, so that she would not require a tow but could beat up the China Sea against the full force of the northeast monsoon. Within weeks of the brig’s loss the new vessel had been laid down. The Government of India followed and encouraged her construction and on an afternoon in December half the society of Calcutta watched as she slid into the Hooghly. She was narrow, flush-decked with almost no sheer, square in the stern but with a long counter; she claimed 250 tons burden and was in rig a bark—which meant she carried square sails on foremast and mainmast, fore-and-aft sails on the mizzen. She looked less like a merchantman than a privateer, she was in fact said to be modeled after one. And her figurehead was an effigy, as like as the imagination could contrive, of the fierce pirate hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s latest novel, Red Rover.
Red Rover left Calcutta a few days after Christmas with eight hundred chests from the season’s first sale, and Clifton himself in command. On 4 January 1830 she cleared the Sandheads and was off down the Bay of Bengal; on 26 January she touched Singapore. From there it was beat to windward, tack and tack about, until she sighted the coast of China twenty-two days later. Ten days later still she was at sea again, and on 1 April picked up her pilot at the mouth of the Hooghly. Any other vessel would have taken three months simply to reach China and at that time of year would probably have had to get there by a roundabout route through the Java Sea, the Molucca Passage, and the waters east of the Philippines. But Red Rover went directly; she made three round trips that year; she was truly the first of the opium clippers, as Harriet Low knew. Her launching suggested that the opium traffic would soon come to dominate the country trade with China.
Perhaps come to dominate the China trade as a whole. It was noticeable that even Company men took a friendly interest in the drug. While they rarely visited the Hercules, the Jane, or the Lintin and did not cease to resent the confident manner of the interloping private English, they could not help welcoming the rising volume of opium. Without opium they would be hard put to go on doing what they did best and liked best to do—to buy and ship teas. And how was one to buy teas unless one had something to buy them with?