The Silver Lotus (2 page)

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OF ALL THE FOREIGNERS, and there weren't that many, who were allowed the privilege of being entertained under Master Yee's roof, the one that fascinated and intrigued him most was a young Yankee ship captain who traded on his own behalf and was as vigorously honest and forthright as Master Yee himself. He was handsome, for a round-eye, with long curly auburn hair, which he oiled and clubbed at the back in the style of British tars. His name was Captain Jeremiah Macy Hammond, and he was one of the last of a long line of the great Nantucket seamen. He was heir to a great tradition of whalers, but whale oil being no longer in fashion for fuel, those Macys who still clung to the sea went into trade with the distant ports that were already familiar on their charts. But Captain Hammond was unique in many respects. Not the least of his peculiarities involved his mode of trade and transport.

In an age when steamships had started to dominate transoceanic trade, Captain Hammond still transported his cargos under sail. He had made enough money in the first few years to purchase a small fleet of older wooden four- and five-mast gaff-rigged schooners. What they might have lacked in speed, they more than compensated for by their dependability, generous cargo capacity, and economy of operation. The crews required to sail these great ships were a fraction of what was required to man the great square-rigged clippers of an earlier
generation, and they carried every bit as much cargo. Accepting the utility of the age, when Captain Hammond refurbished his ships for the Eastern trade, he equipped each with a gasoline-powered cutter that was powerful enough to service the ship as a small tug to help it enter and exit port if necessary. They could also tow the mother ships when the winds went slack, or when faced with a dangerous lee shore and contrary winds and currents. But in any event, Captain Hammond was saved the expense of feeding gluttonous steam engines tons of fuel from spacious coal bunkers. The space that the large steam engines and coal supply occupied might otherwise be better used to carry cargo. His schooners had one other substantial advantage: The chances of boiler explosions and fire were substantially reduced; subsequently his insurance costs were held to a minimum.

Captain Hammond also stuck to a traditional Yankee method of making profits under the axiom of “a penny saved is a penny earned.” He carried only relative nonperishables and sold his cargos at reasonable prices. Yet he still made better profits than his steam-powered competition, and without the added expense of having to sign on a gaggle of engineers, mechanics, and stokers to run his ships. In some cases these engineers made better wages than most ship's officers, and for doing less work.

The captain was also a very pragmatic and insightful trader. He carried into China only those goods the Chinese really wanted, and in that regard he became well-known for his cargos of medicinal goods so prized in Chinese pharmacopeia. For instance, when he discovered the highly prized value the Chinese doctors placed upon an herbal root called ginseng, and was told that a wild species of the plant grew deep in the deciduous forests of eastern America, he decided it must become a staple of his trade. So he sent his cousin, Jonathon Macy, east as a purchasing agent to make bargains with various eastern Indian tribes to hunt, gather, and dry the wild roots. Captain Hammond put forward a
generous offer of five dollars a pound paid in silver or currency. It cost him twenty cents a bushel to ship the ginseng by rail to San Francisco, and another dollar a bushel to ship the cargo all the way to China. The captain paid little or no export duties because the American customs agents deemed the product useless, and valued it as such. The captain might have realized substantially more money on Mexican bird guano, but the malodorous guano lingered and polluted the holds with a cloying stench that permeated all other cargo long after the guano sacks had been off-loaded. And nobody in his right mind would lay down hard cash for a cargo of fabrics, spices, or anything else that smelled like guano.

The captain studied his subject well, and even made inquiries of noted Chinese pharmacists. He was told that the wild ginseng plant is a crafty master of invisibility. When seen from above, ginseng looks like a most unremarkable little plant. Nothing about its structure, leaf shape, or color stands out at all; even its diminutive flowers are difficult to see because they only bloom late in the day and blossom fully into the night. Morning light finds the buds closed again. To hunt these innocuous little plants requires that the searcher focus closely on the ground in dense and overgrown forests, no easy task at the best of times, especially in the lengthening shadows of twilight.

By the time Captain Hammond's cousin returned from his first trip back east, he had done a good deal of research on his own. He wrote that though it was called by several different tribal names, there were some eastern American Indians who also used wild ginseng in their own medicines. The natives said that in some places the root was plentiful, and would remain so if not overharvested, but it was time-consuming and difficult to hunt and gather. Great care had to be taken not to damage the tuberous root, for that was where the treasure lay.

American ginseng roots were smaller than their Asian cousin, but what they lacked in size they more than made up for in profit when sold
in the right Asian market. The first year's cargo was modest in weight, only 890 pounds, but all of the best quality. And when it came time to sell his cargo in China, Captain Hammond was just as canny. Rather than flood the market and lower the value of his cargo, he stored the bulk of his ginseng in one of Master Yee's warehouses and had him sell it off a few pounds at a time at the best possible prices. After all expenses, duties, and commissions had been paid, Captain Hammond still realized a profit of 280 dollars a pound. The following year he did even better, for he shared the wealth and increased the price he was willing to pay the Indian gatherers to fifteen dollars a pound.

On the Arabian coast he traded iron tools for frankincense and other exotic resins, and did the same in Madagascar for rare hardwoods, baroque pearls, and medicinal compounds concocted from rare jungle flora, and in some cases fauna as well. One Chinese physician even asked for dried Indonesian fruit bats and emerald tree lizards. Captain Hammond regretted that he was unable to fulfill this request, but he did manage to make quite an impression with a half ton of candied Jamaican ginger and twenty-five barrels of very dark sweet Jamaican rum he purchased in San Francisco from a steamship captain whose vessel had been badly damaged in port by fire. The Chinese physicians who purchased the cargo used the rum to create tinctures of normally unpalatable oral medications, and the candied Jamaican ginger was a popular remedy for seasickness and morning distress in pregnant women. By always allowing Master Yee to broker his cargo to the right customers, Captain Hammond usually realized a profit of 600 percent after expenses. It wasn't until much later that he discovered that Master Yee had the rum and ginger repackaged with Chinese labels, which made it far easier to sell to the normally suspicious markets in the provinces. The profits were far better than expected, and Captain Hammond saw to it that Master Yee was rewarded beyond his expectations.

For a barbarian, the captain was insightful enough to realize that being able to cultivate a trusting and equitable relationship with a successful Chinese commercial agent was extremely problematical for most foreign traders. Such arrangements between Western and Eastern commercial factors had a tendency to lean toward the adversarial, with one element or the other working with an eye on one-upmanship. However, for Captain Hammond, having once established such a lucrative relationship, maintaining its impartial and candid foundation was imperative to success. Besides, it was the only way the captain knew how to conduct business. He once laughingly told Master Yee that having been raised by strict religious moralists, his ability to dissemble with any skill whatsoever had been discouraged. So naturally, in a pique of childish rebellion, he came to embrace a strong ambition to become a famous pirate. Unfortunately he never got the encouragement he needed from his family, so he settled for a more mundane and transparent vocation. He smiled and said that it wasn't that he couldn't tell a lie, but that he'd never had enough real practice to do it with any confidence, which for all intents defeated the purpose of the exercise. It was sentiments of this humorous and self-deprecating caliber that so amused and delighted Master Yee, and it came to pass that Captain Hammond soon became one of his preferred dinner guests.

Of course it was inevitable that Captain Hammond would eventually be introduced to Master Yee's phalanx of beautiful daughters, and though deeply impressed with what he saw, he hadn't the slightest inkling that the youngest, most luminous, and loveliest of the three was charmed by the handsome Yankee captain upon the occasion of their first meeting. In fact, no one knew of her feelings for many months. The details of her growing affection remained at all times within the bounds and constraints of propriety. Lady Yee, though strong-willed, was not about to test the boundaries of tradition at the cost of her father's reputation and peace of mind. Like the training given to a fine
horse, Lady Yee very patiently used her considerable skills of persuasion to slowly introduce her father to the idea that his youngest daughter harbored a secret wish to be married to the handsome Yankee barbarian sea captain from the other side of the world. Master Yee knew Captain Hammond to be a man of wealth and principle, and yes, he could easily acknowledge that Captain Hammond was a dashing figure graced with good manners and civility, and the very model of a successful trader, but he was a round-eye barbarian after all. And the fact remained that Master Yee was not yet ready to be parted from his Silver Lotus. And when she did marry, her father would have nominally insisted that the groom be from an influential clan, be well educated and wealthy in his own right, be of modest and dignified deportment, and above all else, be Chinese. Unfortunately, though Captain Hammond qualified in several important categories, the last particular hurdle would prove almost insurmountable, even for someone as talented as Lady Yee. Needless to say, though Captain Hammond was indeed attracted to, if not smitten with, Lady Yee, he knew better than to betray even the slightest sentiment in that regard. And though his generous nature often inspired him to bring exotic presents when he came to call, he made sure that his gifts were equally shared out with all members of the family, showing no particular preference for one over the other, especially when it came to Master Yee's daughters. In fact, due to Lady Yee's well-practiced and perfected air of polite and demure ambivalence, Captain Hammond never had the slightest inkling that he already stood foursquare center in her sights.

However, about this time a festering political conflict born of ancient rivalries erupted unexpectedly, and Master Yee, despite his best efforts to stay above the fray, suddenly found himself between the proverbial hammer and the anvil. Accusations had been spread that Master Yee was in the habit of smuggling portions of his cargos upriver to avoid port duties. And though these claims were completely spurious,
no matter which way Master Yee turned he seemed to find political havens of refuge mysteriously closing to him. It soon became obvious that his old adversaries and competitors would soon make the best of every opportunity to assist in his downfall and disgrace. Even Captain Hammond had been secretly approached, as had other Yankee traders; each offered inducements to change their trading allegiances away from the house of Yee.

It was a deeply concerned Captain Hammond who spoke to Master Yee about this dangerous situation and, being a friend of some standing, took the opportunity to suggest that the only way to avoid the impending destruction was to secretly exit the field of conflict as soon as convenient, and hopefully take as much of his portable fortune with him as possible. He reminded his good friend that discretion was always the better part of valor. There were certainly other cities and countries where he already enjoyed substantial business contacts and affiliations; locations where he might set himself up comfortably and wait for the winds of the this present intrigue to blow themselves out in the usual vortex of political self-destruction, a cultural inevitability which always seemed to come to pass in Chinese affairs. Captain Hammond reminded Master Yee that the only certain way to avoid becoming either a partisan or a victim was to absent himself, his family, and his wealth as quickly as possible. Special care must be taken with his ledgers, of course. In an enemy's hands they could be easily forged to reflect the substance of the charges made against the house of Yee. Captain Hammond respectfully suggested that there would be plenty of time to prove his innocence at some reserve, and at a later date. He could then return as a totally vindicated figure of respect. The captain noted that men in prison who have been stripped of all their worldly possessions rarely find the wherewithal to employ respected legal advocates to speak for them. Master Yee was free to employ the best legal representation even at a distance. Hammond smiled and winked. “And
if matters turn really sour,” he said, “then it is preferable that a lawyer or two go to block, rather than their innocent employer.” Captain Hammond paused to gauge Master Yee's response, then added a codicil: “With your permission, Master Yee, and strictly for illustrative purposes, mind you, I would equate your present unpleasant situation with a duel of heavy artillery. It is by nature a dangerous military exercise, and best practiced at very long distances. Hopefully from behind thick walls.” Master Yee smiled broadly for the first time in weeks.

To that end, Captain Hammond said he presently had two ships in harbor unloading cargos of Indian wheat, mined salt, coconut oil, and high-grade copper ingots. He put both vessels at Master Yee's disposal with the promise that he would secretly transport the whole Yee clan, as well as his household servants and all his portable goods and wealth, to any destination he liked.