After the Treaty of Ghent, the Clipper design was re-rigged, so to speak, and many were constructed specifically for the African slave trade, which was, yes illegal.
In fact, the Act of 1794 had made it illegal for Americans to build ships for the international waters' slave trade. In the Act of 1794:
"Congress prohibited the use of any U.S. port or shipyard for the purpose of fitting out or building any ship to be used for the introduction of slaves. The law also prohibited ships sailing from U.S. ports from trafficking in foreign countries. Ships sailing from the United States to Africa, even if of foreign registry, were required to "give bond with sufficient sureties, to the treasurer of the United States, that none of the natives of Africa, or any other foreign country or place, shall be taken on board... to be transported, or sold as slaves in any other foreign place, within nine months thereafter." Penalties under the law included fines ranging from $2,000 for outfitting a ship to $200 for an individual working on such a vessel. The act provided that the ships could be confiscated, and half of all fines given to any informants, thus providing an incentive for ship captains and mariners to monitor the activities of anyone they suspected of being involved in the illegal slave trade."The most infamous of these Baltimore Clippers for the international slave trade was perhaps The Venus. Under false Portuguese registry, papers, flag and false name, la Duqueza de Braganza,* at the end of November, 1838 she left Lagos, Nigeria with 1,150 slaves chained in that terrible spoon fashion below her shallow decks -- meaning you could not even shift to your other side, unless the entire chain moved with you. The Venus arrived in Havana, January 7, 1839 with 800 + of her 'cargo' still alive. Many more died quickly thereafter. Further:
"In 1841, the role of the Venus in the illegal transport of slaves from West Africa to Cuba became the focus of a report by President Martin Van Buren to the United States House of Representatives." p.43, Layton, The Voyage of the Frolic. **A variety of ruses were quite openly employed to pretend these ships were not what they are, were not owned by whom they were owned, were not going to where they were going (think Prohibition and the transport of liquor into the U.S. from Europe and Canada). After the Brits abolished the African slave trade in 1807 it got more complicated, and even more so when Britain abolished slavery in the West Indies in the 1830's. But a large number of respected merchant houses, particularly in Boston, continued to finance the ever-evolving Clipper ships' designs for the incredibly lucrative slave trade from Africa to Havana to Brazil.
This was equally true for the opium trade, which was also illegal for Americans, and equally ignored by the great merchant houses who gained tremendous wealth in the China trade, by shipping opium from Turkey and India to China in exchange for those Chinese goods such as silk and porcelain so valued by Victorians in Europe and America.
It is on the American opium trade to China that archeologist Thomas N. Layton focuses in The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (1997) published by Stanford University Press. The opium ship Frolic's last voyage was from Hong Kong to Gold Rush San Francisco in 1850. Possessed of a faulty chart, her experienced captain's vision confused by low mist that concealed reef and rocks, she wrecked off the Mendocino coast. Through the history of this ship, the Frolic, Layton retells the era of the Baltimore Clippers all the way through to their end in that short period of the Tall Ship Clipper 1850 - 1858, when steam and the U.S. Civil War put a decisive end to the Baltimore Clipper ship yards.
Along the way we learn the history of the U.S. involvement in the African slave trade to Cuba and South America and the opium trade to China. He links the two trades, both illegal, both incredibly profitable, to the accumulation of northern capital that helped drive further technological, commercial and financial developments of the second half of the nation's nineteenth century.
The Frolic's Captain Faucon, was a second generation Haitian, the Fells Point shipyard where she was built was established by a refugee from the San Domingue Revolution, and Frederick Douglass worked there, from whence, employing the papers of a free black seaman, he shipped north to escape his enslavement. 1850 was the year of the Great Debate over the admission of California into the Union, whether as free soil (which the Americans already there voted to be free soil) or a slave state (some fire breathing slave power plantation owners had moved themselves and their slaves to California in attempts to outvote the free soilers. They failed. Moreover when they brought their slaves to the gold fields they were beaten by the free soiler miners who would brook no competition in their drive for gold from enslaved labor.) Good friends from pre-Gold Rush, sparsely populated California tallow-and-hide merchant ship days, Captain Faucon and Captain Richard Dana (Three Years Before the Mast) both captained ships for the Union naval blockade of the CSA coasts. So here, in one slim, easy reading, deeply researched book, is everything that will make the Civil War in another ten years.***
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* Typing "the Venus Duqueza" into google provides a google book page of Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons and Command, Volume 49 that describes the illegalities of the Venus in detail.
** This information becomes more pertinent in light of the trial of the Amistad escapees case of 1841 that now Representative, once President, John Quincy Adams argued -- and that Van Buren (1782 - 1862) grew up in a New York state family that owned six slaves themselves. This is one of those turning points in which it becomes more difficult for USians to be neutral about slavery, hardening opinion for or against.
*** To clarify what was asked elsewhere: These matters are not in The Voyage of the Frolic per se, but I know of these matters taking place at the same time because I have been studying all this for some years. As well, yes, as anyone who even briefly looks into the Baltimore Clippers knows, Howard I Chapelle is the classic researcher, builder and writer in the field. Everyone who writes anything about clippers acknowledges Chapelle, including Layton.
3 comments:
Though I went to this work to learn more about Clippers and the slave trade, what I learned about the scope of the Boston firms in the illegal China opium trade (a criminal activity in both China and the U.S.) has got me wondering about the mercantile shipping trade which has made the Campbell families' fortunes of Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. They had offices in both China, as we see in Eight Cousins, and in India, as we see in Rose In Bloom.
Now these books are chronologically set after the Civil War, and the illegal opium trade, like the age of the Clippers, was finished, at least for the Americans. But still, considering the generations of the Campbells in play in these books, they were very likely there during the heyday of the U.S. opium trade.
Love, C.
Elsewhere someone wrote: "So sad such beautiful creations were used for such terrible purpose."
Efficient weapons do project an elegant glamour don't they? These are sea swords. That's what the privateers were for originally, all along -- to steal, and then sail away more swiftly than a pursuer could manage. Guerrillas of the sea at their best, slaver pirates and drug dealers at their worst.
Pirates are not glamorous good guys -- or women. Pardon my preaching to the choir.
But the U.S. could never have conducted the slave trade after the Treaty of Ghent, if we hadn't had that war in the first place; the Brits were so determined not to create any incidents with the Americans after that, in favor of keeping the cotton trade open and so on. We were necessary to their industrial revolution. As well they were investing in the U.S. like mad until Old Hickory's -- and the Bank of England -- created the terrible Depression of 1837 that lasted about to the Mexican War (to make the more complicated story short). It was the worst Depression the U.S. went through in her constant cycle of booms and busts, until the Great Depression of the 1930's.
Love, C.
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