Harvard’s Perkins Professorship of Astronomy and Mathematics was established in 1842 with an endowment from the estate of James Perkins, Jr., a highly respected businessman whose many commercial activities included investments in real estate, a theater, an iron foundry, bridges, toll roads, textile mills, hotels, railroads, canals, and coal mines. But before all that, Perkins and other members of his family were involved in the shipping industry. As in the import-export business. The goods they were importing-exporting, that launched them into high finance and big-time philanthropy, were slaves and opium.
Perkins was born in 1761 into a family of prosperous Boston merchants, and he grew up in the heady atmosphere of the American Revolution. As young adults, he and his younger brother Thomas were friends with George Washington—yes, the George Washington—as well as the Marquis de Lafayette and many of the other revolutionary figures whose names you’d recognize in a second. By his early twenties James was sailing back and forth between Santo Domingo—now called Haiti—and various American ports. Pleasure cruises? Not for the slaves belowdecks. This was the leg of the triangle trade* in which some of the humans originally abducted in Africa and now “working” in Santo Domingo* were imported to America, along with various products of the sunny Caribbean. James Perkins, soon joined by brother Thomas, supplemented the slave trade* with horses, dried fish, and flour.
The Perkins brothers were nothing if not opportunists. By 1788 they had their own fleet and were importing slaves directly from Africa to American ports. China had opened for trade in 1785; shortly thereafter the brothers put together a complex network dedicated to buying furs from the Pacific Northwest and selling them profitably in Asia.
And, sure, selling otter skins to the heathen Chinese was cool. But soon the Perkins men discovered something even cooler: Opium! In 1804 they built a ship specifically for smuggling Turkish opium into China and named it the Mandarin, in honor of the Chinese officials they were bribing to allow their illicit business to flourish. Demand was so great—to masses of Chinese people, opium was the opiate of the masses—that in 1815 they opened a Mediterranean office to support their Turkish operation. The money kept rolling in.
James Perkins died of pneumonia in 1822. A local newspaper eulogized that there was “not a shadow of suspicion of anything derogatory” to be cast upon this model citizen, and Josiah Quincy III, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, future mayor of Boston, and sixteenth president of Harvard University, wrote that he “was formed on the noblest and purest model of professional uprightness; without guile, without reproach.”
He left $20,000* to endow a chair at Harvard. When his wife died in 1842, the funds were delivered.