Rotch and turned to the China trade in South American sealskins, a line hardly less lucrative than whaling. In 1799, Mayhew Folger, Anna Coffin’s younger brother, had captained one of the first ships solely devoted to sealing, the Minerva. On this one voyage, Folger and his crew accumulated 87,000 skins, gathered by clubbing the mammals to death. Though the practice was vicious, the profits were enormous: Folger brought back $40,000 from this trip (unsurprisingly, by 1807, when Folger commanded the Topaz, the seals had disappeared and he had to look for new sealing grounds).41
In 1800, Coffin invested in the ship Trial (or Tryall) with Moses Mitchell, Paul Gardner, Jr., and Thomas Starbuck. Mitchell and Gardner were members of the Richard Mitchell family, which had “a controlling interest in virtually all of Nantucket’s ventures to China.” Captained by Coffin, the Trial headed for the Juan Fernández island group off the coast of Chile. But rather than killing the seals themselves, Lucretia’s biographer and granddaughter Anna Hallowell claimed, the crew allegedly “bought” skins in the Straits of Magellan and sent them to China by another ship. Whether an invention of Coffin’s squeamish great-granddaughter, or an expression of Coffin’s Quaker principles, the decision to send an initial load of seal skins on to China guaranteed the voyage’s profits.42
This decision proved wise when the Spanish authorities in Valparaiso arrested Coffin the next year, condemning his vessel, charging a “violation of neutrality.” In the 1790s, Spanish seizure of American ships was a common occurrence. The Spanish did not allow any foreign trade in their American colonies, though between 1796 and 1800 they allowed neutral ships from countries like the United States to bring goods owned by Spanish merchants into their ports. Nevertheless, extensive illegal trading persisted. Spain’s enemy Britain pierced their defenses, seeking to turn the Spanish colonies into a market for their manufactured goods. American whaling vessels, whose Nantucket captains combined their close economic ties to Britain with increasing distrust of imperial and religious authority, may have aided their efforts. While the Spanish authorities suspected U.S. ships of bringing contraband into their ports (often under the guise of distress), the Americans suspected the Spanish of merely wanting to loot their ships. Often, the Spanish suspicions proved true. In 1801, Captain Swain of the Mars (another ship owned by the Mitchells and Paul Gardner, Jr.), tried to smuggle $2,000 worth of luxury goods into the port of Callou. Captain Swain’s cargo was seized, though the ship was sent on its way. In 1808, Lucretia’s uncle Mayhew Folger’s ship, the Topaz, was also condemned on its way back from Pitcairn Island, where he had discovered the survivor mutineers of the HMS Bounty.43
Seeking to recover his investment in the Trial, Coffin stayed in Chile for three years, only returning when the courts ruled against him a final time. When he arrived home in Nantucket, “he learned that his family had heard nothing of him for more than a year, and had believed him lost.”44 During that time, Anna and her children undoubtedly hoped for Thomas’s return. As time passed, however, they came to accept their lot as a familiar one in a whaling community, and began to grieve his passing. Anna and ten-year-old Lucretia, who took on the responsibilities of an eldest child, probably worried what would happen to the family without the economic support of a husband and father.
Ecstatic at their father’s return, Lucretia and her sisters and brother begged Thomas Coffin to tell and retell the story of his journey. Like Captain Swain, Coffin may have believed he had been “robbed, plundered, and put into prison, set at liberty and ordered to leave the country without ever finding out what we had done to cause them to treat us in this manner.” But, strikingly, the trip only enhanced the family’s sense of tolerance. After boarding with a family in Valparaiso, Thomas Coffin offered a “warm-hearted defense of the Catholics of South America” on his return. He also taught his children to say “good morning” and “good night” in Spanish.45 Coffin’s return imbued the young Lucretia with a sense of optimism that came in handy in the long battle against slavery; Frederick Douglass later described one of her speeches as among the most “hopeful” he had ever heard.46 More speculatively, the loss of her father’s ship may have convinced Lucretia to privilege morality over profit. Throughout her adult life, Lucretia insisted her Quaker brethren renounce the consumption of and trade in slave goods like cotton and sugar. She aimed at replacing Melville’s “sanguinary,” greedy Quaker with something more consistent.
Even after her father’s return, the seizure of the Trial brought the Coffins into the political and legal struggle to dismantle slavery and elevate free labor in northern states. In 1804, Stephen and Joshua Hall sued Thomas Coffin, Paul Gardner, Jr., and Thomas Starbuck for $200 in damages following the Trial’s confiscation. The plaintiffs, the Halls, had not sailed on the Trial, but their indentured servant James Mye, of Mashpee Wampanoag and free African American ancestry, had been hired by Coffin and his partners for 1/100th of the ship’s profits, also known as a lay. After the court of Common Pleas ruled against them, the ship’s partners appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The Halls asserted that Coffin had only pretended to hunt seals, intending instead to “take on board” and trade illicit (probably British) goods in the Spanish colonies of South America, knowing full well that his ship might be condemned. Deceived by Coffin, the Halls had thus been “wholly deprived of the expected and stipulated benefits and profits of a hundredth part of the skins which might have been acquired and sold aforesaid, and have lost the time, labor and service of the said James Mye from that time to this.”47
As with whaling and sealing, Quaker traders managed to reconcile their religion to their business. Though the discipline of the Society of Friends forbade “fraudulent trade,” this testimony did not prevent Quakers like Swain (or possibly Coffin) from smuggling, especially in a foreign land. The disciplinary assertiveness of Quaker elders on Nantucket, combined with the politics of the American Revolution, made many sea captains ambivalent about any authority except their own. And given their economic experiences during the Revolution, most Nantucket merchants abhorred any restrictions on their ability to trade. In their attempts to traffic with Spanish colonies, they became early missionaries of free trade, recently popularized by Adam Smith, deliberately violating Spain’s mercantile restrictions in favor of their economic interests.48
Ultimately, the case rested not on the intricacies of international trade but on state laws regarding the status of Native Americans and the nature of indentured labor. In their appeal, Coffin and his partners cited a 1789 Massachusetts law placing the Mashpee Indians under the care of overseers and guardians. As the court interpreted the law, only the board of overseers of the poor had the power to apprentice Indian children. The guardians of the Indians, answerable to the overseers, also had the right to bind out impoverished Mashpee children. The Hall brothers produced a 1793 apprenticeship agreement between their father and the guardians of the Mashpee that bound Mye for the next ten years, until he reached age twenty one. Upon his death, Joshua Hall, the father, assigned his wife and sons “all right and title conveyed to him by the indenture to the service of James Mye.” The Supreme Court ruled strongly in favor of Coffin and his partners. The judges objected to the Hall brothers’ assumption of the terms of an indenture that they had not personally signed. They ruled the assignment “a nullity.” But, the judges continued, even if the Hall brothers did have a formal indenture agreement with the Mashpee guardians, “they would not have had the right to send him [Mye] to the south pole, to the end of the globe, in their service.” The court speculated that the guardians might have had this right, but then only if instruction in navigation was part of the agreement.49
In the decision, the judges, and by extension Coffin and his partners, objected to the idea that a person’s labor (indeed the entire individual) could be owned by another, to the extent that labor could be traded, inherited, or hired out. In the view of the court, the Halls’ proposed attempt to profit from James Mye’s labor was akin to slavery. In challenging this illegal indenture, Coffin, Gardner, and Starbuck aided the triumph of free over slave labor in the North.50 Whether young Lucretia was aware of her father’s actions, the issues in Hall v. Gardner—race, native rights, slavery, patriarchal authority—remained at the very
