Page 33 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

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inhabited by seals. Seal skins at first were more profitable

at Canton than sea otter or beaver skins. Procuring seal skins,

furthermore, was relatively simple and easy. After a vessel

anchored in an island harbor, the crew went ashore to club and

skin as many seals as they could. Unlike fur trading off the

Northwest Coast, a sealing voyage through the South Seas met

little danger and yet secured a considerable profit. By the

1790's American vessels regularly sealed at the Falklands,

Massafuero, South Georgia, the Shetlands and the Island of

Desolation. The vessels often sailed from island to island

taking aboard pelts at each one. A sealing voyage might last

up to two years, but usually a vessel had a full cargo of seal

skins within a few months. Immediately the captain set a direct

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course across the Pacific Ocean to Canton.
Very successful in a strikingly short time, the trade

in seal skins reached a peak around 1800. American vessels were

returning from Canton with handsome profits made solely from

seal skins. Some Americans deemed the trade important enough

to be of interest to the American government. In proposals to

the Washington Administration these traders stated their belief

that the government had an obligation to support the sealing

trade by sendin,g exploring voyages to the South Seas and the

Pacific Ocean. These expeditions would discover new habitats
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of seals and therefore increase the trade. There was no

20
Latourette, "Early Relations between the United States
and China," pp. 38-40. Irving, Astoria, p. 515.
21
Edmund Fanning, Voyage to the South Seas, North and
South Pacific Oceans, China Sea, etc. (New York, 1833), pp. 117-18.