Page 329 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

315.
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and family, in whose house we met, attended. Bridgman did

not state who the persons were. Throughout his residence in

China he mentioned no American other than Olyphant as a bene­

factor to missionary endeavors.

As for American merchants, very few of them ever men­

tioned missionaries. The few whose references have not been

discarded or lost had negative opinions. Augustine Heard,

junior partner of Russell & Co. in 1833, wrote to his brother:,

1 .I would observe, from what I have seen of foreign mission-
1
aries I do not think incumbent on either of us to labour to

support them, so far as my observation goes they are Christians

11
only in speech. He noted that many of the letters and reports
they returned to the United States were false. The major charge

that Heard leveled against missionaries was their life-style,

which Heard termed luxurious. He complained that many of
11
our good hard working folks at home are credulous enough to

11 4 7
believe that they suffer every privation and hardship. The
1
validity of Heard s criticisms cannot be proven, except that
virtually every resident at Canton did live in luxury by New

England standards. Part of the reason was the cheap cost of

46
Journal of E.C. Bridgman, Aug. 1, 1831, in Missionarv
Herald, XXVIII, 7 (July 1832), 205. At the time Bridgman noted
this, he was at Macao along with virtually all the foreign
residents. July was the worst month of the surmner S2ason of
southwest monsoons.
47
Letter, A. Heard to G.W. Heard, Jun. 30, 1833, Harvard
Business School, Baker Library, Heard MSS. Augustine Heard was a
bachelor from Ipswich, Massachusetts, with very definite opinions.
He had begun his career as a seacaptain in the Salem trade to
India. His attitude towards missionaries may have been formed at
Bombay and Calcutta, where merchants and missionaries disliked
1
each other in the early 1800 s. Heard, and later his house,
never supported the philanthropic societies at Canton.