Page 280 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

266.
agents. At the Outer Anchorages the English transshipped

their cargoes onto American vessels for the trip up to Wham­

poa. Americans at Canton completed the business transactions,

loaded their vessels with teas and despatched them back to

Hong Kong to transship the outward cargo. Americans engaged

in this carrying trade charged enormous frieght rates, but

the English were eager to pay them to get their goods up to

W'nampoa. Russell & Co. obtained the bulk of consignments,

with the house employing its former opium receiving ship as

a freighter. But virtually all Americans at Canton, includ­

ing the smaller agents, agreed with Gideon Nye that ''we Can-

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t on gen s were ma ing rapi f th C ommissions. 11 84
Chinese profits were also large and the Hong merchants
were as anxious to trade as the foreigners. Lin Tse-hsli
failed to understand the English refusal to send their ships
to Whampoa after he reopened the trade. American cooperation

with Chinese policy did not go unnoticed by Commissioner Lin.

An incident in early July indicated that Lin had begun to dis­

tinguish Americans from their English counterparts and reward

the former with preferential treatment. On July 6 a group of

seamen from two English ships went ashore to Chien-sha-tsui,
a village near Hong Kong. They became involved in a drunken

84
Journal of R.B. Forbes, Aug. 17, 1839, Forbes Family
MSS. Letter, J. Coolidge to A. Heard, Dec. 13, 1839, Heard MSS�
Coolidge listed American agents and the English houses that con­
signed to them. Gideon Nye, jr., Peking the Goal (Canton, 1873),
pp. 43-44. Hunter, 'Fan Kwae' at Canton, pp. 146-47, stated Amer­
icans charged rates of $30-40 per ton for British manufactures and
$7 per bale for Indian cotton. Vessels only carried cargoes that
had been consigned to a specific }\merican house at Canton. To
facilitate its freight business, Russell & Co. opened an office
aboard an English ship at Kowloon.