er that the Indians might take her by boarding, that screens
of hides were rigged along the bulwarks to hide the deck from view.
Stranded and getting clear, warding off attacks, Captain Richard
Cleveland stayed two months on the wilderness coast of Oregon, trading
one musket for eight prime sea-otter skins until there was no more
room below. Sixty thousand dollars was the value of the venture when
he sailed for China by way of the Sandwich Islands, forty thousand
of profit, and he was twenty-five years old with the zest for roving
undiminished.

He next appeared in Calcutta, buying a twenty-five-ton pilot boat under
the Danish flag for a fling at Mauritius and a speculation in prizes
brought in by French privateers. Finding none in port, he loaded seven
thousand bags of coffee in a ship for Copenhagen and conveyed as a
passenger a kindred spirit, young Nathaniel Shaler, whom he took into
partnership. At Hamburg these two bought a fast brig, the Lelia Byrd,
to try their fortune on the west coast of South America, and recruited
a third partner, a boyish Polish nobleman, Count de Rousillon, who had
been an aide to Kosciusko. Three seafaring musketeers, true gentlemen
rovers, all under thirty, sailing out to beard the viceroys of Spain!

From Valparaiso, where other American ships were detained and robbed,
they adroitly escaped and steered north to Mexico and California. At
San Diego they fought their way out of the harbor, silencing the
Spanish fort with their six guns. Then to Canton with furs, and Richard
Cleveland went home at thirty years of age after seven years' absence
and voyaging twice around the world, having wrested success from almost
every imaginable danger and obstacle, with $70,000 to make him a rich
man in his own town. He was neither more nor less than an American
sailor of the kind that made the old merchant marine magnificent.

It was true romance, also, when the first American shipmasters set foot
in mysterious Japan, a half century before Perry's squadron shattered
the immemorial isolation of the land of the Shoguns and the Samurai.
Only the Dutch had been permitted to hold any foreign intercourse
whatever with this hermit nation and for two centuries they had
maintained their singular commercial monopoly at a price measured in
terms of the deepest degradation of dignity and respect. The few Dutch
merchants suffered to reside in Japan were restricted to a small
island in Nagasaki harbor, leaving it o