YANKEE VIKINGS AND NEW TRADE ROUTES

Soon after the Revolution the spirit of commercial exploration began
to stir in other ports than Salem. Out from New York sailed the ship
Empress of China in 1784 for the first direct voyage to Canton, to make
the acquaintance of a vast nation absolutely unknown to the people
of the United States, nor had one in a million of the industrious and
highly civilized Chinese ever so much as heard the name of the little
community of barbarians who dwelt on the western shore of the North
Atlantic. The oriental dignitaries in their silken robes graciously
welcomed the foreign ship with the strange flag and showed a lively
interest in the map spread upon the cabin table, offering every facility
to promote this new market for their silks and teas. After an absence
of fifteen months the Empress of China returned to her home port and her
pilgrimage aroused so much attention that the report of the supercargo,
Samuel Shaw, was read in Congress.

Surpassing this achievement was that of Captain Stewart Dean, who very
shortly afterward had his fling at the China trade in an eighty-ton
sloop built at Albany. He was a stout-hearted old privateersman of the
Revolution whom nothing could dismay, and in this tiny Experiment of
his he won merited fame as one of the American pioneers of blue water.
Fifteen men and boys sailed with him, drilled and disciplined as if the
sloop were a frigate, and when the Experiment hauled into the stream, of
Battery Park, New York, "martial music and the boatswain's whistle were
heard on board with all the pomp and circumstance of war." Typhoons
and Malay proas, Chinese pirates and unknown shoals, had no terrors for
Stewart Dean. He saw Canton for himself, found a cargo, and drove home
again in a four months' passage, which was better than many a clipper
could do at a much later day. Smallest and bravest of the first Yankee
East Indiamen, this taut sloop, with the boatswain's pipe trilling
cheerily and all hands ready with cutlases and pikes to repel boarders,
was by no means the least important vessel that ever passed in by Sandy
Hook.

In the beginnings of this picturesque relation with the Far East, Boston
lagged behind Salem, but her merchants, too, awoke to the opportunity
and so successfully that for generations there were no more conspicuous
names and shipping-houses in the China trade than those of Russell,
Perkins, and Forbes. The first attempt was very ambitious a