Page 151 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

137.

spring of 1828. He had planned to retire from the trade with

his young cousin Forbes to replace him. With Forbes' and
Monson's deaths there were no members of Perkins & Co. resident

at Canton. In preparation for such a circumstance Forbes had

left a letter instructing Samuel Russell to take over the busi­

ness of Perkins & Co. The value of this business totalled
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almost three million dollars.

Perkins & Co.'s first establishment had netted over

one and a half million dollars in seventeen years. Emphraim

Bumstead, a member of the house of J. & T.H. Perkins in Boston,

had sailed to Canton in 1803 as a partner to manage the Perkins'

China trade. Bumstead fell ill after only a few months' resi­

dence, so his seventeen-year-old clerk took over active manage­

ment of the business. Cushing, a nephew of the Perkins brothers,
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officially became a partner two years later. Perhaps the

most able American merchant ever to reside at Canton, Cushing

turned every investment he made into a profit for the partners.

The commercial skill his partners in Boston possessed complemented

63
Before he died T.T. Forbes had drawn up current accounts
to reach this estimated figure of their worth. Letter, T.T. Forbes
to J.P. Cushing, Jul. 10, 1829, Bryant & Sturgis MSS. For
accounts of Forbes' death, see R.B. Forbes, Personal Reminiscences
(Boston, 1878)� pp. 128-30, and Carl Seaberg and Stanley Paterson,
Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T.H. Perkins, 1764-1854 (Cam-
bridge, 1971), pp. 368-70.
64
Letter, Perkins, Burling & Co. to J.P. Cushing, Apr. 1,
1806, in Lloyd V. Briggs, History and Genealogy of the Cabot
Family, 1475-1927 (2 vols.; Boston, 1927), II i 529. In this
letter T.H. Perkins also admonished Cushing: "It is y'r duty to
warn the Chinese against the wiles of our Countrymen.'' Seaberg
and Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston, pp. 156-66.