attempting to break the maritime monopoly claimed by the Spanish for its American possessions. British whalers had been forced off the South American coast in the 1780s, and in 1789, Spanish warships seized two British vessels at Nootka Sound, leading to the Nootka Crisis of 1790 and the brink of war.50 On the other hand, at Canton, the British East India Company strictly enforced its monopoly on the China trade, requiring all British-flagged ships to sell to it at listed prices. In addition, it imposed a punitive tax on the sale of any British vessel to foreigners to avoid the restrictions. Samuel Shaw, supercargo on the first American ship to Canton, the Empress of China, in 1784, and later US consul there, noted that these rules “strongly favor the suspicion” that the United Kingdom aimed for a monopoly on tea exports to Europe. Instead, what it built was a situation tailor-made for smuggling. British tea consumption in 1784 was fourteen million pounds, yet the company’s receipts “did not exceed six.” The remainder was shipped by rival countries or by British ships flying flags of convenience—“Renegado Englishmen,” Shaw sniffed. The upside for monopoly-breakers was too good to ignore. “Since the year 1784, the trade here has been constantly tending to the disadvantage of the Europeans. The imports, collectively taken, hardly defray the first cost, and the exports have increased in a ratio beyond all possible conjecture. . . . Such is the demand for this article, that the Chinese hardly know how much to ask for it; and, should the rage for purchasing continue only another year, it is not improbable that its price may be doubled.”51
Shaw recognized an opportunity for American traders. The United States, its economy devastated by the revolutionary war, British blockades, and a crushing specie crisis, desperately needed markets. Shaw suggested that “if it is necessary that the Americans should drink tea,” they pay for it with “the produce of her mountains and forest” as the Empress of China had, with ginseng. Ships left New York with ginseng, but many more sailed to the northwest coast for sea otter furs. Within a few years, New Englanders had taken over the trade. By 1800, one hundred US ships anchored at Canton.52
The traders’ own success drove them to look beyond the fur trade “and this in consequence of the animal’s being almost annihilated.”53 Economical sources of domestic ginseng, too, were soon tapped out. US traders searched out new commodities and diversified markets, but their customers adapted nearly as fast as they did. The Chinese, famously, would look at little besides top-quality furs or silver; Northwest Indians kept careful control over their own sources of furs and salmon, demanding ever-increasing prices; and Spanish officials punished smuggling stiffly, if unevenly.54 From 1810 onward, Americans found that good quality Hawaiian sandalwood fetched good prices in Canton, and a new dimension was added to the circuit. Hawaiian chiefs, allowed progressively by Kamehameha to trade on their own accounts, became prodigious consumers of foreign goods, as conspicuous consumption became an arena of furious social competition between factions of the chiefly class. US captains might leave Boston or New York with cargoes of guns and ammunition for South American rebels and silk dresses, pianos, and bone china for Hawaiian nobles and then pick up furs, salmon, or lumber on the northwest coast; dried beef, hides, and tallow in California; copper in Peru; and sandalwood at Honolulu before sailing for home full of tea from China. As the markets matured, enterprising “gather” merchants combed the Pacific for goods: “Beche-de-mer, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, shark fins, edible birds nests, grain, fish, salt, coal, sandalwood and other exotic woods, and crude construction lumber for Asiatic and Australian markets. Copra, copper, cowhides and tallow, arrowroot, vanilla, spices, and guano they delivered to American and European markets.”55 On the horizon the whaling fishery loomed, slowly building from the 1820s toward its golden age from the 1840s to the 1850s.
Kamehameha himself underwent a gradual evolution from warrior to trader, then governor, that is representative of the dynamics of the period. For decades, from Cook’s landfall until the cession of Kaua‘i in 1810, Kamehameha’s control of trade was aimed at acquiring arms, ships, and naval supplies for his conquests. At first he proceeded by direct purchase but quickly got the point of European behavior and instituted a native mercantilism of sorts—asking or demanding that ships leave behind expert European and American carpenters, armorers, and shipwrights to build a fleet of European-style vessels in Hawai‘i. His shipyards bustled with activity, and the skill of the Hawaiian workmen trained by foreigners was frequently remarked upon.56 By 1806 Kamehameha had fifteen vessels, including three-masters, brigs, and cutters; by 1808 he counted more than thirty ships, most under forty tons, built in Hawai‘i, plus the two-hundred-ton Lelia Bird.57 At the height of the buildup, he was said also to have had a fleet of peleleu war canoes up to eight hundred strong.58 After the capitulation of Kaua‘i, the king turned his attention to other things. An 1812 invoice of goods he purchased includes “chairs, lamps, tables, fireworks, velvets, satins, silks, fifty paper parasols, fifty silk hats, 135 pounds of large glass beads, and the like.”59 The same year he participated as stakeholder in sending a cargo of sandalwood to Canton; while the voyage was not a financial success, the port charges levied by Chinese authorities at Canton inspired him to impose an eighty-dollar- per-ship harbor duty at Honolulu plus a twelve-dollar piloting fee.60
From the first European landfall in the eighteenth-century Pacific, control of trade was the name of the game. Cook strictly regulated which members of his crews were allowed to carry on trade. By the third voyage, he could write: “Knowing from experience, that if every body was allowed to traffick with the natives according to their own caprice, perpetual quarrels would ensue, to prevent this I ordered that particular person(s) should manage the traffick both on board and ashore, and prohibited the trade to all others.” On approaching Tahiti, Bligh wrote in his log: “2:00 PM. The Surgeon examined the Ships Company to discover those that were tainted with the Venereal disease. 5:00 PM. Took an Account of every Man’s Cloaths to prevent them trafficking them away.”61 If one were not vigilant, capricious trade would break out, just like venereal disease, and was equally unhealthy for the body of the mercantilist empire.
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