their vessels on the most distant voyages. Indeed, so early as 1789, the merchants of Boston and Salem sent various ships direct to the East Indies and China, and, many years before the "Free Traders" of Great Britain could enter upon this trade, then monopolised by the ships of the East India Company, so far as regards Great Britain, the merchants[1] of Massachusetts supplied, not merely their own people with the bulk of the teas, spices, silks, sugar and coffee from the East as well as with nankeens and other cotton clothes, but reshipped them from Boston to Hamburg and the Northern ports of Europe in their own vessels, thus deriving large profits from a trade with our possessions, from which the great bulk of our ships were long excluded by the stringent restrictions of a pernicious monopoly.[2]*
- ↑ Among the leading merchants of Boston and Salem then engaged in this lucrative trade may be mentioned the names of Russell, Derby, Cabot, Thorndike, Barrell, Brown, Perkins, Bryant, Sturgis, Higginson, Shaw, Lloyd, Lee, Preble, Peabody, Mason, Jones, and Gray. From 1786 to 1798, Thomas Russell was one of the most enterprising and successful merchants of Boston. His charities were extensive; he was a warm friend to the clergy, and a liberal supporter of all religious institutions. Curiously enough, a member of the families (by the father and mother's side), of Perkins and of Bryant and Sturgis (Russell Sturgis), now fills the place which Joshua Bates so long occupied as a leading partner in the house of Baring Brothers and Co., of London; Joshua Bates himself having first come to London as agent for Gray, the last name on the list I have given. Towards the close, however, of last century, Brown and Ives of Providence, Peabody of Salem, and T. H. Smith of New York, with Perkins and Co., and Bryant and Sturgis of Boston, carried on nearly all the trade with China.
- ↑ Stephen Girard, the rich and eccentric American shipowner. Though altogether unlike Mr. Russell and the other shipowners and merchants of Boston I have just named, I cannot omit to mention, in connexion with the early history of the Merchant Shipping of the United States, the name of Stephen Girard, one of the most prosperous and eccentric of men, who was long known as the "rich shipowner and banker of Philadelphia." Born near Bordeaux, in 1750, of obscure parents, he, at the age of ten or twelve years, embarked as a cabin boy,
