Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[A]mos Porter dreaded the voyage, but determined to make it anyway, he boarded the ship Amethyst in Boston and set sail on April 1, 1802.
“This day embarked for Canton, in Asia,” he wrote in his journal, “leaving a land of freedom and ease for the Cabbin of a Despot & the dangers of the rolling billows.”
By the next day, his anxiety had been justified. “Makes me sensible of the effects which I have long feared,” he wrote. “My bowels yearn within me, and give frequent proof of their distress.”
The Vermont farmer was finding himself ill suited for a life at sea.
Things didn’t improve. By the end of the month, Porter was reporting that the ship was still facing rough weather that “operates on me as though my bowels would seperate from my body. The distress is excruciating. When I shall be at ease God only knows. The disorder is said to be little dangerous, But I fear its to(o) stubborn for me. I am already reduced to a skeleton. Should I not return … Then pitty and seal with a tear, the remembrance of true friendship. I wait a virtuous resignation to the will of fate.”
Fate spared Porter. Porter was banking his future on this voyage. He had sold his farm in Brownington and set sail for China, where he hoped to get rich by selling the ship’s cargo.
Porter was trying to cash in on a new market, China’s openness to Western trade having increased in recent years. He and other merchants believed that the Chinese market had an almost insatiable demand for America’s wild ginseng. Porter had purchased great quantities of the stuff, presumably with proceeds from selling his farm, and was hauling it to China.
Before departing, Porter had taken orders from friends and acquaintances for all sorts of Chinese-made consumer goods, including monogrammed china sets, silk shawls and umbrellas, fishing rods, fans, cotton fabric and walking sticks. He would sell and trade his ginseng to obtain these goods.
But first he had to weather the journey. As a merchant, several rungs up the social ladder from a common seaman, Porter expected to be treated with respect on board. He was soon disappointed. Porter complained that he was not given enough wine, cheese, butter, ham or drinking water. Worse, he was expected to doff his hat to the captain, as if he were merely a member of the crew.
Still, the crew’s life was harder. Porter described the shipboard punishment of a sailor. For his unspecified offense, the man “was flogged 150 lashes tied up by the rists at the spare Main yard arm with a Cat o nine tails,” Porter wrote. “(T)he Captain struck him 3 times with his fist and kicked him etc. holding (him) at the same time by the hair.”
But Porter also recorded lighter moments, like when the ship crossed the Equator five weeks into the voyage. Crewmembers, he wrote, “never forget in crossing the line to indulge themselves in ancient customs which consists in dressing up a sailor in the supposed habit of Neptune armed with a trident.” Neptune would demand to see any sailors had never before crossed the Equator. Those men were “handled rough by being kept blind folded, and to close the fuss a few words of good advice is administered. Then a bucket of water (is) turned upon him and he is sett free.”
As the ship sailed south, Porter entered a strange world. He even had to leave familiar stars behind. Soon, he wrote, they had run the North Star “out of sight.”
Porter scanned the seas and the skies overhead and was forever spotting odd creatures. In his journal, which the Greensboro Historical Society published in 1984, he painstakingly described the wonders of the natural world he witnessed. Along the voyage, he wrote about sharks of unidentified species being hauled aboard by the men; albatross, with their 10-to-12-foot wingspans, flying overhead; and whales swimming nearby that he estimated were 80 to 100 feet long.
The ship dropped anchor for the first time, after four months at sea, on July 28 near Java. Porter jumped in the water and led a foraging party toward a nearby island. While wading in waist-deep water, he saw “large quantities of shell fish and some of a frightful appearance.” When a “water snake,” which he later described as a Conger eel, began swimming around him, he clubbed it to death with a ramrod.
He had more pity for other animals, particularly the flying fish. “Those fish appear to have allotted them by Providence a double portion of enemies,” he noted. “They are constantly hunted by all larger fish underwater, and their only escape is on the wing, when closely pursued. When out of water (they) are sensible of danger, and gard well against being darted upon by their winged foes.” But he confessed to having once eaten the fish himself. A flying fish flung itself on board one day “as a Spy,” he wrote. “(I)t was sentenced to be hove (heaved) into boiling fat.”
Arriving in China did little to ease Porter’s sense of alienation. The land was as foreign to him as life at sea had been. In this case, Porter’s lack of familiarity bred contempt. He disliked Chinese music (“the worst in the world to a foreign ear”), Chinese food (“(t)he Chinese eat any animal with out scruple, Whether it die by accident or disease”), even Chinese women (“(a) mans heart will not fly from its warm recess at the sight of one of these … But falls back with a loathsome disgust”).
He was also disoriented by the non-Christian culture. “(A) great difficulty would arrive here in distinguishing the days of the week,” he wrote, “had one no other criterion to govern himself by than that of the postponement of business by Foreigners” on Sundays.
For their part, the Chinese were equally suspicious of outsiders. They set regulations to keep foreign traders from becoming a rooted part of Chinese society, including establishing a trading season of several months starting in early fall. Foreign trade was not permitted outside that season. Foreign traders were forced to pay a fee for entering Canton and restricted in their movements once there. They could not bring their wives, ride in sedan chairs or hire maids. They could only visit temples or formal gardens on several set days each month. And they were prohibited from learning Chinese languages.
Porter picked up a few phrases nonetheless and passed them along in his journal, spelling them phonetically: “Mosquee is No Matter; Serva is I understand; Frucca is Friend; Cumehaw is give me…”
Porter wasn’t completely among strangers when he reached Canton. He was greeted by a fellow Vermonter, Marmaduke Wait, who was a member of a prominent New England family. His father, Joseph, for whom the Waits River is named, died in action during the Revolution when his son was only 2. Marmaduke also lost his mother when he was young, so he grew up with his uncle, Benjamin Wait, a Revolutionary War veteran for whom Waitsfield is named.
Wait had grown up in Windsor, where he met and married Martha Curtis. It was through Martha’s brother Zebina, a ginseng merchant in town, that Wait got into the China trade. It was also Zebina Curtis who had also convinced Amos Porter that he could make a fortune in ginseng (and who had bought Porter’s farm to finance the endeavor).
Wait seems to have had all the good fortune that Porter lacked. As a longtime member of the Marines, Wait was more accustomed to the sea and presumably found his China voyage less distressing. Also, his timing was better.
Wait had arrived in Canton before Porter and had exchanged his ginseng cargo at a good rate. In exchange for it, he received $25,000 worth of tea and 23 bales of cotton fabric. He also purchased china for 16 New England clients, who wanted as many as 170 pieces of china each. His surviving account book, written in a clear hand, includes orders for such items as “Bake Plates,” “Tea Pots,” “Beef Steak dishes,” “Fruit Baskets,” “Curry dishes,” and “Custard Cups.”
When Porter arrived in Canton later that same trading season of 1802, he found the market flooded with American ginseng. Worse, he was advised by another American trader not to try to wait for the price to rebound. Ginseng would quickly rot in Canton’s humid weather. So he sold his cargo at a distressingly low price.
Porter at first blamed one of his business partners for his bad luck, but later admitted that he was the victim of the market’s vagaries and “(t)his astonishing quantity of Gensing (that) has this season been poured in at Canton upon a full market…”
He arranged passage home on another ship. As part of the cargo he would take with him, Porter bought bales of cotton fabric at a steep price. After his purchase, but before he’d left Canton, the price of cotton fabric had fallen nearly 15 percent and was expected to fall further.
Porter was disheartened by his voyage to China. His dream of making a fortune in ginseng had proved elusive. Upon returning to the United States, he sold his cargo and distributed the goods he had bought. It was perhaps no coincidence that he spent the rest of his life far from the sea, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
