The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade.

Randall, Stephen J.

The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade, by Thomas N. Layton. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1997. xi, 227 pp. $24.95.

What a wonderful treat this slim volume is to read. Thomas Layton has integrated into this important study the attention to and patience for detail of the archeologist, the painstaking archival skills and detective work of the historian, and the craftsmanship of a very good writer.

The study began with the chance discovery in 1984 by Layton and his archeology students of Chinese porcelain fragments at the site of a Pomo Indian village on the pacific coast north of San Francisco. His obviously keen curiosity whetted, Layton gradually pieced together a fascinating account of the history of the Frolic, a New England-owned but Baltimore built clipper ship that had been wrecked off the coast of that village in 1850 and which had been the source of that mysterious Chinese porcelain as well as the local folklore of Pomo women wearing Chinese silks in the 1850s.

Layton's remarkably thorough research led him to the records of the Baltimore shipbuilding firm of the Gardner Brothers, the pages of the south and east Asian newspapers in search of shipping announcements and to the extensive collection of the papers of Augustine Heard & Co. in the Baker Library of the Harvard School of Business Administration. The result is the careful interweaving of the history of a single ship which engaged in New England-Orient trade with the much larger story of the opium trade in regional and international history in the 1840s. It would be difficult to imagine what other dimensions Layton could have added to the rich tapestry he has produced. His archeologist's eye for detail provides the reader with a careful account of the history of shipbuilding in Baltimore, and his historian's sense of the importance of that larger context provides excellent insight into the ways in which the opium trade operated between India and China in the 1840s, the dominant place of Great Britain and the lesser role of American commercial and diplomatic interests in the region. His account of the development of American involvement in the opium trade is business history at its best. The study shows in detail how trade was financed, and how opium was packaged, valued, and traded in Chinese markets. There is even a well-crafted and fascinating vignette on the illegal African slave trade involving Baltimore-built but refitted ships at a time that the later important black abolitionist and slave Frederick Douglass (then known as Fred Bailey) was working in that shipyard.

It was not until 1838 that the British permitted American-owned vessels to carry opium from India to China, although American ships had earlier been involved in the export of lower quality Turkish opium into the market. Within a few years of American engagement in the trade, however, Chinese authorities were faced with what they considered an increasingly serious problem of social disorder and economic threat occasioned by the high levels of opium imports into the country. By 1837 opium represented fifty-seven per cent of the value of all imports into the country, and since payment for those imports was made in Chinese silver, the outflow of silver created serious economic difficulties. Such problems clearly undermined the capacity of the Chinese emperor to control his subjects, with the result that he and his officials in 1839 banned the opium trade to all Chinese ports. Prior to 1839 the trade had been conducted through Chinese-appointed intermediaries known as Hong, and corruption was widespread. As part of the crackdown, in 1839 Chinese officials arrested Chinese engaged in illegal operations, seized foreign property, and totally closed Canton to foreign trade. The British retaliated in what came to be known as the Opium War of 1840-42. The treaty of Nanking which ended hostilities demonstrated British dominance in the area. The Chinese government ceded Hong Kong to Great Britain and paid an indemnity for lost and damaged property. Most important for the opium trade, the treaty provided that five treaty ports in China would be open to foreign merchants, and although the still legal opium was not mentioned in the agreement, it was clear what the dominant commodity would be in the trade that passed through those ports.

It was into this newly-stabilized trading environment that the Frolic sailed under Captain Edward Faucon (of Two Years Before the Mast fame) in 1845. For four years the Frolic and Faucon established an enviable record for speed, efficiency, and profitability in the opium trade until after 1849 when larger, more reliable, and faster steam-powered vessels drove the clipper ships out of the market. It was at this stage that the Frolic was reassigned by Heard & Co. to the wealthy California gold rush trade between oriental markets and San Francisco, and it was on its last voyage with its cargo of Chinese silks, porcelains, furnishings, and jewelry that the Frolic ended its career on the rocks off the Mendocino coast.

Stephen J. Randall University of Calgary