The
Cozens/Byrnes Merchants Networks Project
- Updated 23 March 2010 The
Cozens/Byrnes Merchants Networks Project
- Updated 23 March 2010 
A project seldom if ever developed for the Internet ... a website to return to ...
A website intended to be of greatest use for anyone interested in economic history ... maritime history ... This file is an update section.
For 2010, for any website navigation question here (depending on which page you landed on via a search engine if you did not land on the index page), go first to the sitemap. The sitemap presents a complete and hyperlinked list of files comprising the website in alphabetical order - Editor
The approach of this website is to examine merchants in terms of the networks they are part of, where concentration on individual merchants is reduced. Merchant networks tend to work in an organic way. They behave, they adapt or die. They expand or contract, or change in response to new opportunities, in response to the loss of old opportunities. They can act to exclude members who behave badly. They can actively recruit new members or passively ignore those who want to become new members. They can fade away as technology changes. Members of networks can engage in political activity to advance their interests. Merchant networks can also, as shown by The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars (circa 1839, as those tragedies have been called), cause serious conflict on the world stage, if not prevented by the responsible foreign policies of their home nation(s). -Ed
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Before embarking on any excursion of critiquing a clutch of today's unhealthily-popular American political conspiracy theories, which by omissions are highly misleading on world maritime history, it would be remiss to overlook the sourcing of their popularity. It seems to be The Myth of the Essex Junto, which arose out of fierce debates in the early career of American Republicanism/Federalism from 1798 or so. To the modern, non-American reader, The Essex Junto Myth seems to be the result of a social search for someone to blame for difficulties arising; whoever seems to be getting in the way. Getting in the way of exactly what or whom? is perhaps the question.
(This series from File One is continued at the next file.
Wisely, it seems, Fischer remarks in his treatment about the infant American body politic, “Many years ago, when the Republic was young and republicanism itself was still experimental, American statesmen were rarely able to accept the idea of a loyal opposition. There was an unhappy tendency to conceive of critics as conspirators, to confuse dissent with disaffection.” (Note 1)
Note 1: David H. Fischer, 'The Myth of the Essex Junto', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 1964., pp. 191-235. (This article is continued at a next file in regular series.)
Whereas, in Britain, a far healthier idea had taken root; that of the role of a recognised opposition to an existing government. An agreement that those not in government, but helping to manage Parliamentary business in line with the rules of a constitutional-monarchical government (inherited from England's Glorious Revolution and William III's negotiations so innovative in terms of the traditions of European monarchy) had the right to form His Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Thus grew the Whigs versus Tories, slowly developing British party politics).
It was agreed that men in opposition had the right to attack government men, policies and actions perceived as less-than-useful. The king's ministers were not synonymous with the king himself; they were finally to be seen as, if necessary, culpable individuals or members of a culpable party. A critic of those in power was not to be seen as a non-patriot. Indeed, if the government became misguided, a member of the Opposition – and perhaps even the monarch in his or her secretly-revealed sympathies - has a clear-and-present duty to criticise or oppose the government, to clarify issues, to help resolve problems. And in the timeframe considered here, the British monarch in question, George III, had three wars to ponder; the Seven Years War, the American War of Independence, then war with France/Napoleon, Napoleon having hijacked the outcome of the French Revolution. George III's American War was quite unpopular; Britons had much less ambivalence about war with Napoleon.
Fischer adds, that as Federalists confronted the Jeffersonians from 1798, Federalists complained there was an allegedly Jacobin plot (by the Jeffersonians) to work against the Constitution and the common good. The Jeffersonians prevailed for a time, and a group of recalcitrant New England Federalists (and more or less, Anglophiles), retaliated by claiming it was the Jeffersonians who would subvert the system and the common good. Perceived as less than-hostile to Britain, many New Englanders became perceived as a weird species of post-Revolutionary Loyalists, ergo, subverters of the American way. Jefferson himself was a noted Francophile and anti-Anglophile.
To the modern international reader on such matters, it seems that from 1800, America's New Englanders were aware of the compromising necessities of conducting international trade, which cannot be said of the Jeffersonians. By 1800, America's most effective traders lived north of Virginia, they were Eastern Seaboarders or New Englanders. The Essex Junto Myth as it lives on today in the USA is merely a continuation of this raw American political immaturity, and relative inexperience with considering the implications of international trading relations.
The Essex Junto was named as such since all its alleged members except Judge Reeve came from Essex County, Massachusetts, north of Boston. They were (as listed by Chaitkin, p. 92) Massachusetts Senator George Cabot, Judge John Lowell and his son John “The Rebel”, former secretary-of-state Timothy Pickering, merchant Stephen Higginson, Massachusetts Supreme Court judge Theophilus Parsons, plus Aaron Burr's brother-in-law, Judge Tapping Reeve of Litchfield, Connecticut. Chaitkin goes on to claim that one of the motives of the conspirators was anti-Federalism, inspired by plots laid by a British spy (or, British interests), to form the northern states into a confederation separate from the southern planters who imagined themselves “aristocrats”. Long later, this sort of (British-inspired) conspiracy helped to foment what became the American Civil War - it is claimed.
Suffice to say, behind The Essex Junto Myth, and uses of it, has been a basic and long-term regional rivalry, north versus south. Suffice to add, various conspiracy writers have added to the cooking pot, Isolationism (or not) plus an anti-Manifest Destiny attitude (or not). Extra populist spice is provided by anti-British/anti-European diatribes drizzled at will over the conspiracy pot as it cooks. It all becomes political moonshine, a heady brew based on American resentiment. and it produces very bad history. Whether or not the persons blamed really are "oligarchs" or not. Certainly, there are some interesting genealogies to be inspected!
The concept of resentiment
To explain the popularity of today's US conspiracy theories as seen on websites, it is helpful to invoke a psychological notion – resentiment. (Sometimes spelled, ressentiment.) A French word, probably derived from a need to explain why and how the French Revolution had occurred. Nietszche helped to popularize the notion for the modern world. Resentiment is not mere resentment, which in English is defined as: a feeling of displeasure or indignation at something regarded as an injury or insult, or against the author or source of it. Resentment, more as a personal feeling, can be directed however at one's superiors, equals or even inferiors. Duelling in the eighteenth century was probably the most refined expression of resentment. Resentiment is a group feeling, can be widely shared, and is directed only at the powerful in society. As a group feeling, resentiment helps explain the joy of the populous as the tumbrils of the French Revolution were filled.
(This article is continued at a next file in regular series.)
Resentiment is more a psychological than a political feeling, but is quite share-able. It is more part of “the mathematics of the heart” than of the head; it can become a hatred that can only be expressed psychologically. Basic to resentiment – which confusingly can be diffuse or focussed – are feelings of frustration, and perhaps jealousy also. There is a need to assign blame for the experience of frustration, and to direct hostility at those to blame, and this invokes an urge to moralism. Convictions arise about a sense of inferiority (that has to be rejected), plus a sense of morality. Convictions arise, such as: that good people are seen less amongst the powerful than amongst the powerless. The sense of morality arising helps exculpate those in the grip of resentiment from feelings of culpability for certain kinds of action which may finally be taken.
Being far more emotional than rational, the notion of resentiment helps explain the annoying aspects of US conspiracy theories, how and why they can come from the left or right of politics, sometimes almost interchangeably, how they can be diffuse (about "Freemasonry" or "Jesuits") or focused (on individuals or small groups). The basic point about resentiment is that it is a feeling of hostility which arises due to an unwelcome sense of inferiority, and powerlessness, which morally, allows anyone in its grip to try to occupy a moral higher ground. Thus, feelings of resentiment may or may not be suffused with standard perceptions of class conflict (and the justice of outcomes). The conviction may arise that the powerful in society are chronically incorrect morally and in other ways; and perhaps it is in all likelihood that the problems arise since they are powerful. And so, it may be some people begin to feel that it is power itself which needs to be attacked. (At which point, Americans routinely remind themselves about the Jeffersonian distrust of government and Jefferson's remarks on the need for continued vigilance in the protection of liberty.)
Various examples of resentiment can be given. Nietzsche, who adopted the term, was a noted critic of Christianity, which Nietzsche thought promotes feelings of resentiment in-built. Scriptures spring to mind: “the meek shall inherit the earth”. By definition, the objects of the more formal feeling of resentiment are those who are powerful, often since they are powerful, not merely those who are objectionable, such as criminals-in-power (as law courts might finally find them to have been). This is why, in the US, right-wingers express resentiment about left-wingers (liberals) they feel are too powerful; why US left-wingers so consistently deplore Republicans. Resentiment is what UK prime minister Thatcher had in mind when she spoke of tendencies to socialism as “the politics of envy”. On today's world stage, the president of Zimbabwe is powerful in his own society, which is now ruined, but he evidently feels resentiment as he walks the world stage. In later 2007, US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was talking of “a massive right-wing conspiracy” that had to be resisted. On today's world stage, radical Islamism seems to have institutionalised resentiment in the Muslim world, internationally, which in turn helps explain why the US term, “the war on terror”, rings so hollow. To conduct a war on terror might be rational, but we intuite, that feelings of resentiment need not be rational at all, so war is not the most useful tactic.
And as with the French Revolution, any large-group feelings of resentiment are likely to induce the group to overlook their country's foreign policy positions, at least until troubles are settled (which is also why current radical Muslim unrest is trans-national). This is why the USA's resentiment-critics of US political life are so careless of US foreign policy, in the past, or the present; why they are so careless about perceptions of the US that are generated outside the US. Importantly, during the American Revolution, the colonial elites did not feel resentiment, since they did not feel powerless.
It is helpful here to unfold resentiment as a notion of a third major force in nineteenth and twentieth century American political culture. Egnal in A Mighty Empire notes that soon after the American Revolution, a major division occurred in American political views, the choice between Isolationism versus Manifest Destiny. The continued popularity of conspiracy theories in American life moves the present writer to posit a third force in American political culture, where up to forty per cent or more of registered voters do not vote. (Only about 58 per cent of registered/eligible voters voted in the US 1996 Federal elections.) We take it that American non-voters feel extreme resentiment, that is, they feel powerless,so they do not vote. Resentiment then is an underside of political life in America, and it takes its tolls of both formal and popular history, as we discuss here. In particular, resentiment explains the profound hatred that – as we shall see here - so many of the US' conspiracy theorists express about Britain – Britain remained powerful, whether or not it lost the American War of Independence.
For almost two centuries, the USA's Eastern Seaboarders have been objects of resentiment in their nation's political culture. The Eastern Seaboarders as seen in this webpage are not so much as Anglophile, or pro-British, as realistic about international trade and America's trading prospects (even if that involved "trade without diplomacy", which is probably yet another zone where some genuine problems did set in for US foreign policy).
These Eastern Seaboarders were not unwilling to co-operate with British interests, which after all served an acknowledged empire and benefited from that empire. This was anathema to more parochial Americans who were less realistic about international trade, less accepting of British interests. The Eastern Seaboarders, who produced America's best mariners, were willing to accommodate British interests, their enemies were not. This alone is one source of the remarkably anti-British hostility residing in today's US websites on such matters. And as Americans moved west (“Go west, young man”), some took their anti-Eastern Seaboarder prejudices with them, covering the entire United States; whereupon this old set of arguments re-settled in Hollywood, in California, and the rest is seen in much of the history of American movie scriptwriting and cinema popularity!
It could be said in overview, that before Democrats and Republicans separated into distinct political parties, a raw new American Republic feared subversion, or failure, and had to invent a view of any kind of internal enemy that might arise; and the Essex Junto gentlemen, if they didn't actually exist, could be invented to provide such a spectre and fuel such a fear. (Note 2)
Note 2: Somehow in the context of the brutal turbulences of the American Revolution, the men of The Essex Junto, New Englanders or not, seem to have resided in an idealistic cloud of unknowing about the human reality of their new political system – which is perhaps a good way to regard those who in today's cyberspace wish to demonise them; and are so confused and confusing on such matters, especially Chaitkin and LaRouche.
When Fischer wrote in 1964, he regarded The Essex Junto Myth as finally insignificant, but he could not have foreseen the way this spectre, of a disastrous takeover of the American system by nefarious figures, might be re-canvassed on an amazing invention such as The Internet.
The spectre of The Essex Junto (“conservatives of the English type”) first arose from 1796-1798, when John Adams first thought they worked against him. Fischer has found, The Essex Junto Myth is a conflation of three semi-related myths, all of which bore little relation to reality. In any case, The Essex Junto ended up being a group of old, musty, conservative New Englanders who had their own quaint views of how the American system should operate; views shared by few others. They were in essence a mere rump of opinion and most Americans had no empathy with them, and vice-versa. Writing against the spectre of their rump-opinion has become a sub-genre of today's popular American political feeling. Their essentially inconsequential Essex Junto legacy – as a lightning rod for collecting political unhappiness - has become super-amplified by the addictions that today's American population has to mass media and the fruits of modern information technology. Much of this modern American population dislikes their nation's foreign policy(s), and the base point for many such American critics of America has become – The Essex Junto Myth. The Junto Myth, or some personally-acceptable variation of it, has been used and re-used as circumstances dictate in American life. It has become a grab-bag, a kind of multi-dimensional, multi-frequency megaphone, for the expression of otherwise disparate and contradictory disgruntlements with domestic American politics.
Just who were the original Essex Junto gentlemen? It is often, in these sub-genre writings, as though they were the demonically pro-British children of The American AntiChrist, responsible for all acknowledged public evils – and many private evils - including hijacks and domination of the political system, megalomania in American foreign policy, and including the legacies of slavery in the USA. They were a mere 12 men, allegedly: Fisher Ames, George Cabot, Francis Dana, Nathan Dane, Benjamin Goodhue, Stephen Higginson, Jonathan Jackson, John Lowell, Theophilus Parsons, Timothy Pickering, Israel Thorndike, Nathaniel Tracy. (Note 3) (Note 4)
Note 3: This list is from Fischer, p. 195. Some so-called fellow-travellers with the Junto were: Tristram Dalton, Christopher Gore, Benjamin Greenleaf, Stephen Hooper, Rufus King, John Lowell Jnr., Harrison Gray Otis, Theodore Sedgwick, Caleb Strong. In contrast, the group tending to be demonised by the LaRouchian position, arising a generation later in real life, are the political and commercial groupings typified by the associates of merchant Thomas Handasyd Perkins. It will of course be noted that, as is suggested in Part 1 of this article, if Rufus King was a fellow-traveller of the Essex Junto, and if he invited Barings to participate in American financial business at government levels, then according to the propositions of the conspiracy theorists, Barings became fellow-travellers of the Essex Junto.
Note 4: Chaitkin, Treason in America, p. 92. (This article is continued at a next file in regular series.)
In terms of American religious sensibilities to 1812 or so, these men all came from families whose New England ancestors had been some of God's “visible elect” in society, a supra-political status. They arrogated to themselves the role of God's gift to the new American political system. Genealogies – always important to the oldest New England families of immigrants since the Mayflower voyage - have across centuries become very important to the critics of the so-called pernicious Essex Junto influence.In particular, re the 12 New Englander surnames listed, attention has largely been focussed on relatives and associates (and in turn the relatives of the associates) of the Cabots. Part of this disapproval from twentieth century writers has been the discovery that a variety of notable New Englander traders of the nineteenth century had (moral shock-horror) been engaged in opium trading to China, particularly Russell and Co. In some ways, politico-culturally, as Americans pushed west in go-west-young-man fashion, creating new states, the rest of America ganged up on select groups of damned-Anglophile New Englanders who hadn't budged, and who allegedly ran things; ran the entire country, so it was said. (Which going back as far as 1700, might be termed a disastrous outcome of an initially witty debate between Virginians versus New Englanders.)
And it so happened that a twentieth-century easterner US political dissident of a left-politics persuasion, Chaitkin, and his father, had conducted Essex-Junto-Myth-believing researches on these matters that later inflamed a multi-failed US presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, son of a French-Canadian man and a New Englander mother.
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
An odd man, LaRouche's career is outlined in Wikipedia entries. His parents, who leaned to Quakerism, took him when young to Massachusetts, where he became disaffected with the Quakers and their New Englander outlooks. He became acutely politicised, flirted with Marxism, and long later produced an extraordinarily anti-establishment book, Dope Inc. (See below.) LaRouche in effect took on board the Chaitkin version of The Essex Junto Myth and redeveloped it into a moralistically hydra-headed, politico-literary propaganda vehicle designed to damn and indict many of the power-wielders of C20th American society. LaRouche made much of the problem of early nineteenth-century New Englander traders trading in opium (at the time not illegal to do, except in China.)
However, anyone knowing anything of nineteenth-century merchant networks might agree, that trading opium or not, the New Englanders here had done nothing that was by international standards of the day, unusual. The Chaitkin-LaRouche conflations of a variety of in-house and involuted American political myths, ignorance of history, especially world maritime history, and ignorance of the wider genealogies of the so-called Essex Junto gentlemen (or their descendants), helped to produce a view of US maritime history that purports to relate variously to the ills of American capitalism, foreign policy and ... so on. In fact, any real facts about US merchants trading opium to China cannot be understood without knowledge of US merchants trading seal fur taken from north-west America to China. And the "father" of the seal-fur trade of north-west America was an American, John Ledyard, who had sailed with Cook (The famed British explorer, Captain James Cook, whom LaRouche never mentions in his diatribes).
Oddly enough, one key to unravelling these misuses of a pernicious political myth (Essex Junto) lies with LaRouche's own family history. His New Englander mother has in her genealogy, the name Lucretia Ledyard, a relative of John the Traveller, “the father of the seal-fur trade to China”, who had sailed with Captain Cook's third voyage. LaRouche's view of American maritime history, involving opium trading, or not, indicates that as he wrote, he failed to notice his own Ledyard descendancy. His over-heated political enthusiasms outweighed his knowledge of his personal heritage. This suggests that today's misuses of The Essex Junto Myth that owe anything at all to LaRouche's writings are badly based in history, Which is why we present what we do, in the material to follow here. (Note 4a)
Note 4a: The claim here is re-verified on the genealogy database used by the present author with a descendancy from Weld (rin 276365), which entry as a common ancestor provides descendants to Lucretia Ledyard (born 1756) and also to Lyndon LaRouche. Partly as follows. General Horatio Gates Stevens (1778-1873) was son of Lucretia Ledyard (1756-1846). Lucretia had married married Major-General and merchant Ebenezer Stevens (d 1823), and their son Byam Kirby Stevens (1792-1870), married Frances Gallatin a daughter of Albert Gallatin (d. 1849) US Secretary of Treasury and much-excoriated by Chaitkin as "a British agent". The genealogical connections here are via the ancestry of Jessie Weir, the mother of Lyndon LaRouche. This was discovered accidentally by way of an initially separate task of examining in detail a genealogical file on the ancestry of the incumbent US Senator, John Kerry, compiled by US genealogist William Adams Reitwiesener, at www.wargs.com. Other US-produced genealogy files from John Marshall, and D. Hogg confirm the finding across a wide selection of related genealogies. A full treatment of the Ledyard genealogy has been posted on this website, as has a Weld genealogy indicating the ancestry of the mother of Lyndon LaRouche. See notes 37++ below.
In their explorations of the ills of the American political system – the Chaitkins decided especially to excoriate post-1776 examples of state treason against the US – the Chaitkins and LaRouche both oddly enough overlooked a great many genealogies of New Netherlanders, descendants of the Dutch of New York (except for individuals they excoriate in the background of the Roosevelt politicians/presidents). They overlook much information relating to Americans who remained Loyalist during the Revolution, as well as overlooking many Britishers who were pro-American during and after the War of Independence. They overlook also, as a social demographic, how seldom the New Englanders married south into the higher plantation society of the southern states. In fact, they overlook facts relating to how well-knit American colonial society actually was, and grumble mindlessly about British rule or not, before the Revolution became an actual war of independence.
A great many of the New England merchant names excoriated by the conspiracy writers came from families with names arriving in America from the 1630s, meaning, they were already long-established by 1775-1800, and had long enjoyed opportunities to prosper - and to consolidate their ideas on how to prosper. Why did LaRouche and the Chaitkins overlook the careers of so many New Netherlander descendants in American economic life from 1783? Why did the resulting “historical explanation” in search of “business oligarchs” ala “Boston Brahmins”, overlook so much pre-revolutionary history – and so many other genealogies? Some of their writings seem to be part of the forces behind the current (2005-2007) US web propaganda about the post-2000 evils of the Skull and Bones Club at Yale University. The Essex Junto Myth gave ex-Marxist LaRouche the opportunity to demonise American Capitalism, and then later, on spluttering moral grounds, to discuss criminal and semi-criminal activity as he proceeded.
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
To an Australian, the Chaitkin-Larouche strands of The Essex Junto Myth happen incidentally to seem so involuted regarding merely outcomes, in terms of flaky definitions of American patriotism, they deflect useful attention from much that is substantive in world history, not easily forgivable. In particular, they entirely obscure earliest connections in world history between the USA and early colonial Australia. Which is a not a matter that any Australian writer can wish to forgive. Here, the focus for new attention to such matters is a particular gem of the American eastern seaboard - Rhode Island.
A book arising [of which these files are an early version] is mostly concerned with merchant networks based in London, or, deferring to Britain. In the timeframes considered here, from the 1780s, as the British Empire underwent its “second founding”, Australia and New Zealand appeared on horizons new to economic historians. British hegemony over both India and China was expanded. American ships appeared more frequently in the Pacific, in the waters of South East Asia. (Note 5)
Note 5: See Norman Bartlett, Australia and America Through 200 Years, 1776-1976. Sydney, Ure-Smith, 1976., p. 23. Over 20 years, between 1 Nov., 1792 and the War of 1812, over 60 US ships visited Sydney, at least 20 bound for China, and later came American sealers and whalers.
Almost naturally, American ships visited Australia and waters near the island continent, although this has interested few writers.
As is already apparent, merchants involved in international trade often seem to form their own society, linked as they are in complex webs of capital investment, joint commodity-handling activity, views of the future.
If, for example, any researcher was wishing to consider how merchants of the “new nation”, the USA, made their way into international trade, they will encounter much material by Americans, and notably that of Holden Furber, who devoted great attention to the British East India Company. (Note 6)
Note 6: Holden Furber, ‘American Trade’, New England Quarterly, June 1938, pp. 255-256. Holden Furber, 'The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies, 1783-1796'; The Economic History Review, Vol 10, No 2, November 1940., pp 138-147> Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, c.1976. Holden Furber, 'The Beginnings of American Trade with India, 1784-1812’, The New England Quarterly, June, 1938., pp. 235-265. Holden Furber, John Company at Work. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1948.
Unfortunately, today on the Internet, the researcher will also meet the conspiracy theories of Lyndon Larouche and his ilk. LaRouche's “theory” is entertaining in the present context as it seems a good example of how not to approach international trade and the historical examination of merchant networks. (Note 7)
Note 7: Lyndon LaRouche, (By The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review), Dope Inc. The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy. Washington DC, Executive Intelligence Review, 1992.
LaRouche's views seem to form an apex for a wide range of disgruntled American writers on trade and finance matters commenting since about 1806, when “the financier of the American Revolution”, Robert Morris, died in Philadelphia. Many such writers are cited, quoted or commented on websites, and they now provide almost a genre of variously politicized popular history. LaRouche's writings apart, another notable title in this popular genre of American comment is Chaitkin, who was concerned about instances of treason in American life. (Note 8)
Note 8: Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman. New York, New Benjamin Franklin House, 1984.
The focus of this genre often seems to be to provide critique of US trading history, which is often disapproved due to the ways it reveals the linkages between US trade [ultra-capitalistic] and US foreign policy. Unfortunately, the ways the critiques are researched and developed seem remarkably inward-looking, highly involuted, lacking a sense of the outwardness of international trade. Yet for all the outrage and passionate denunciation, what is remarkable about the allegations made by these genre writers is the woeful lack of detail on events that they can muster! The real topic for discussion finally seems not to be economic history, or a curiosity about American style in relating to world trade patterns, but more the parlous state of the soul of the American body politic. More so as such soul-problems might be reflected in the histories of slavery in the US, the numerous oddities of US banking history.
LaRouche in particular seems to have no respect for the concept of – or the reality of – the national sovereignty of any country at all. (He hates what he wants to hate, and is uninterested in the socio-political realities of any country that US citizens might wish to deal with.) This is not just a strange strain of American isolationism, even by way of a a misguided adoration of American Exceptionalism; it is more a matter of an autistic isolationism.
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
Remarkably, the present writer has discovered that inasmuch as LaRouche's book, Dope Inc. (667 pages), purports to discuss a great many late eighteenth and nineteenth century merchant networks, LaRouche's research has ignored many shipping-history names related to his own own extended family, on his maternal side. (Note9)
Note9: The networks named in LaRouche's writings include: (1) Jardine-Matheson, but not any of its predecessors except the name Lancelot Dent, plus the names Rennie; Keswick and Swire of Jardine-Matheson (UK); (2) P&O, or Mackay / Lord Inchcape (UK); (3) The British East India Co. (hereafter, EICo) from the time of the Boston Tea Party, so broadly as to be meaningless; (4) Laurence Sulivan (of the EICo) and his opium-trading son in India (UK); (5) Barings bankers (UK); (6) Stephen Girard (US); (7) Thomas Handasyd Perkins and Russell and Co., which implied, various of families such as Cabot, Lodge, Forbes, Cunningham, Appleton, Bacon, Russell, Coolidge, Parkman, Shaw, Codman, Boylston, Runnewell (US); (8) John Jacob Astor (US then UK), (9) Joseph Kennedy, the father of President JFK (US); (10) Members of the Sassoon family (Armenians via India via Britain); (11) The Hudson's Bay Company via Canada (British); (12) Hans Seligman, of New York (US); (13) Rothschild (Britain-Europe). List drawn from LaRouche's Dope Inc., variously. Stephen Girard is difficult to research, but he can probably be placed with the first top ten of American millionaires appearing after 1783.
In Larouche's own genealogy appears the name Lucretia Ledyard, a relative of John Ledyard who first inspired interest in the North-west American fur trade (known in USA as John Ledyard The Traveller) (Note 10)Note 10: Note10: See James Zug, (Ed.), The Last Voyage of Captain Cook: The Collected Writings of John Ledyard. Washington DC, National Geographic Adventure Classics, 2005. (Copy courtesy of Paul Burns, Armidale NSW.) Also relevant is: James Zug, American Traveller: The Life and Adventures of John Ledyard, the man who dreamed of walking the world. Basic Books, 2005.
A patriotic Briton might have said, various matters went back to Captain Cook! John Ledyard of Connecticut was probably the first American to visualise a triangular trade linking New York, North West America and China. (Note 11)
Note 11: Yen-P'ing Hao, essay on Chinese Teas to America, A Synopsis, Part 1, Direct Trade without Diplomacy 1784-1843, in Ernest R. May and John King Fairbank, (Eds.), .America's China Trade in Historical Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance. ... Cited from Hao, p. 21.
Ledyard had been with Cook's third voyage of 1776, saw the Nootka Sound area, and later proposed Americans go there for furs - the idea was not realised till 1790, but Boston and Salem merchants saw the point… (Note 12)
Note 12: A relevant title here is: Jared Sparks, The Life of John Ledyard. Cambridge, Mass. Hilliard and Brown. 1828. (This article is continued at a next file in regular series.)
Thomas Jefferson was aware of Ledyard's views to exploit north-west American seal furs.
Note 13: Hao, p. 21. Boyd, Jefferson, Vol. 9, Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, Paris, 9 February, 1786, re John Ledyard, and a reference/passport for Ledyard provided by Jefferson, who wanted to to go through northern parts of Asia, Russia, and America, re promotion of furs, etc. Boyd as editor also usefully mentioned Ledyard's views on sealing and the Canton fur market. Ledyard was a citizen of Connecticut and died in 1789: See also Gibson, Otter Skins, pp. 23ff, pp. 38-39, and variously.
John Ledyard (1751-1789) became a kind of world citizen. He sailed on Cook's last voyage, the voyage leading to Cook being killed by Hawaiians, an incident which, if anything, popularised the existence of the Hawaiian Islands (Sandwich Islands), later much-visited by American mariners. He is credited with inspiring US merchants to exploit the marketing of seal fur from Nootka Sound, on the north west coast of North America - near what the British called "the North-west Passage" which Cook's third voyage had vainly sought. (Note 14)
Note 14: Much of the fur trade is discussed in Gibson, Otter Skins, see pp. 38-39. Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra: Voyager with Cook, American Loyalist: Servant of Empire. Melbourne, The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, 1995., p. 135. Popular American material on Ledyard arose as early as 1828! See also, Jared Sparks, The Life of John Ledyard. Cambridge, Mass., Hilliard and Brown. 1828. Glynn R. V. Barratt, 'The Russian Navy and New Holland', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 64, Part 4, March 1979., pp. 217-234.
To the end of his life, Ledyard found his services engaged by Britain's Africa Association. His task was to go west from the Nile in search of the Niger River; but he died, of all places, in Cairo, Egypt. In the background of Ledyard's “African connections” was the figure of the botanist on Cook's first voyage - Sir Joseph Banks.
Ledyard's popular book on Cook's third voyage is taken to be the first great travel story written by any American. (Note 15)
Note 15: Ledyard is credited with inspiring the US to engage in the Nootka fur trade in Gibson, Otter Skins, p. 38-39. James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1992 paperback edition of 1999. Alan Frost, , The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra: Voyager with Cook, American Loyalist: Servant of Empire. Melbourne, The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, 1995., p. 135. See Dickinson on Falklands sealing, p. 54. Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, 'The Empress of China's Voyage, 1784-1785', The American Neptune, Vol. 46, No. 1, 1986., pp 25-33. Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, 'The Empress of China'. Philadelphia, Philadelphia Maritime Museum, 1984.
John Ledyard was the eldest of his family and hard to control. He had a sense of adventure, a restless soul, enormous curiosity, immense energy, amazing reserves of physical stamina, excess imagination, and was an impractical, improvident dreamer. His father died when he was young, requiring the family to move. In his late teens he took off for a roving life, unaccountably abandoning his mother and siblings. Several themes seem lacking in information on him on websites as his reputation has enjoyed a cyber-resurgence, partly due to Zug's new writing on Ledyard. What seems to be lacking is awareness of how large his extended family was, since they alone were well-connected enough to have helped foster his remarkable (but black-sheep) reputation before he died. Even if they disapproved of his running off, avoiding the trials of family life, finding education, finding a job.
Ledyard is said to have inspired Jefferson to one-day commission the Lewis and Clark expedition west across America. He is also credited with inspiring US mariners to visit the Nootka Sound area to engage in the fur trade, to sell furs to the Chinese at Canton, since he was with Cook about Nootka Sound and had seen the prices the Chinese gave for furs. Ledyard's own wikipedia entry says he once had an abortive partnership with Robert Morris of Philadelphia. He also had an abortive partnership with John Paul Jones.
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| Lyndon LaRouche, the US "history theorist" and "political commentator" who can't find Australia in British history or on the world map. Well might he ponder. |
But it is here that Australian and American readers will part company, since an Australasian is far more likely to know that Cook also noticed useful fur seals about New Zealand, at Dusky Bay. It is also amatter ofrecord that very few US historians notice US mercantile firms sending ships about Australia and New Zealand before, say, 1812, when Britain was again at war with Americans. Americans – including LaRouche – are more inclined to speak only of the north-west American fur trade. The irony here is that the critic of the USA's mainstream historians, LaRouche, could have avoided this selectivity if he simply paid attention to figures in his own broader family history, and spied the story of Ledyard The Traveller. (So the present writer will fill in the gaps left by LaRouche here.)
Ledyard's last adventure saw him engaged by the English Africa Association (See below on Sir Joseph Banks) to go west from the Nile in search of the Niger River; and Ledyard died in Cairo, to be buried in an unmarked grave. (Note 16) (Note 17)
Note 16: Glynn R. V. Barratt, 'The Russian Navy and New Holland', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 64, Part 4, March 1979., pp. 217-234. See Boyd, Jefferson Letters, Vol. 9, Jefferson to Lafayette, Paris, 9 February, 1786. Thomas Jefferson's career provides several references about Ledyard, who wanted to go through Northern Parts of Asia and America, to Russia. See Dickinson on Falklands sealing, p. 54. See article by PCF Smith on Empress of China.
Note 17: See http://longislandgenealogy.com/Ledyard/MainLedyard.html - A relevant title here is: Clarence Ashton Wood, John Ledyard The Traveller.
Follows extra information on the Banksian background here ...
Odd things can still be said about Sir Joseph Banks. His biographer, Carter, has written: "The figure of Sir Joseph Banks is still only faintly etched on the historic records of the past two centuries. .... He remains to this day, therefore, a sort of historic ghost - a spectre that even at its best has been sensed only as a disarticulated mass and out of perspective. For this he was himself more responsible than anyone. He took few steps to ensure that his real shape and substance would survive ..." (Note 18)
Note 18: Harold B. Carter, Sir Joseph Banks, 1743-1820. London, British Museum (Natural History), 1988.
This partial obscurity is probably because Banks was a senior figure of English Freemasonry. He exerted much influence via Freemasonry, and he preferred that his modus operandus would remain shadowy. He also seems to have been confident enough to know that the record of his achievements, plus his connections with Cook's first voyage, and the continent of Australia, would ensure that posterity remembered him. Which means, Banks' "shadowiness" was simply a result of game he played, and result also of the status of the sciences of his times. The proof that Banks did play a kind of game is evident, oddly enough, from records of maritime history relating to convict transportation to Australia - and the Pacific more generally.
As a matter of course, Banks kept note of ship movements. He had an uncommonly good reputation with mariners and their employers, a reputation so good that mariners felt a a certain patriotism about his projects – and some such mariners were connected to the earliest shipping moving about Australia. Some examplea - by 2 September, 1787, Gov. Phillip at Rio de Janeiro with the First Fleet to Australia, consigned to Banks per an unnamed Southern Whaler per Mr Morton, late master of HM Sirius, various items including balsam and gum. (Note 19)
Note 19: Notes from pp. 560ff, Appendix xia , Carter's biography of Banks.
By 26 March, 1789, Francis Masson at Cape Town sent Banks 422 species of seeds and or bulbs, per the Alexander transport from NSW, a First Fleet ship on her way home.
On 27 May, 1790, Francis Masson at Cape Town sent Banks various seeds on a Dutch ship per Fryer, the late master of HMAV Bounty. (Note 20)
Note 20" Notes from pp. 560ff appendix xia, Carter's biography of Banks,
Most tellingly of all, by 2 June, 1790, Masson at Cape Town sent 41 and more species of seeds to Banks per Jackal Whaler, Capt. Raven. This was William Raven, who around 1786 was on sealing ships as part of South Whaler activity off the West African coast. Raven later became partner with the London South Whaler John St Barbe of Blackheath, and with the ship Britannia, the two became the first British operators to try sealing at Dusky Bay, New Zealand, Raven basing at Sydney for the ventures. Raven, who continued as an associate of the London whaling investor, John St Barbe, became well-known as an interesting man in pre-1800 Sydney. (If any of St Barbe's papers ever survived to the present day, no one seems to have ever noticed it.)
Biographer Carter lists the shipping used by Banks for such botanical deliveries, but saw no pattern in the shipping. The pattern was that many of the ship owners connected with the shipping helping Banks were contractors, or, connected with men living at Blackheath, London, or with Wapping, and the City of London, and/or with government's determination to transport convicts to Australia. Banks as scientific botanist was also a finder of botanical commodities useful for commerce. In retrospect, it would be surprising if Banks was not aware of who managed which shipping which was assisting him - but this is traditionally not how historians have seen matters.
As to Ledyard's African adventures … Carter's biography of Banks tells us that by 1785, ideas had arisen in London to form a society to explore the interior of Africa. Banks in 1785 had not long assisted with the formation of the The Linnean Society, which had emerged while Banks ("the Great Panjandrum", read, senior Freemason) was president of The Royal Society, the first scientific society with interests similar to Banks' in, broadly, "natural history". Banks enjoyed enduring interest in natural history and took continued interest in maritime discovery. The Pacific in 1770 had stimulated his geographic curiosity, and his interest in Asia and the Far East meant he remained interested in the activities of the East India Co. South Africa interested him as did New South Wales (New Holland). (Note 21)
On 27 May, 1790, Francis Masson at Cape Town sent Banks various seeds on a Dutch ship per Fryer, the late master of HMAV Bounty. (Note 20)
Note 20: Notes from pp 560ff Appendix xia, Carter's biography of Banks.Most tellingly of all, by 2 June, 1790, Masson at Cape Town sent 41 and more species of seeds to Banks per Jackal Whaler, Capt. Raven. This was William Raven, who around 1786 was on sealing ships as part of South Whaler activity off the West African coast. Raven later became partner with the London South Whaler John St Barbe of Blackheath, and with the ship Britannia, the two became the first British operators to try sealing at Dusky Bay, New Zealand, Raven basing at Sydney for the ventures. Biographer Carter lists the shipping used by Banks for such botanical deliveries, but saw no pattern in the shipping. The pattern was that many of the ship owners connected with the shipping helping Banks were contractors, or, connected with men living at Blackheath, London, and/or with government's determination to transport convicts to Australia. Banks as scientific botanist was also a finder of botanical commodities useful for commerce. In retrospect, it would be surprising if Banks was not aware of who managed which shipping which was assisting him - but this is not how historians have seen matters.
As to Ledyard's African adventures… Carter's biography of Banks tells us that by 1785, ideas had arisen in London to form a society to explore the interior of Africa. Banks in 1785 had not long assisted with the formation of the The Linnean Society, which had emerged while Banks ("the Great Panjandrum", read, senior Freemason) was president of The Royal Society, the first scientific society with similar interests in, broadly, "natural history", hence Banks' enduring interest in natural history and his continued interest in maritime discovery. The Pacific in 1770 had stimulated his geographic curiosity, and his interest in Asia and the Far East meant he remained interested in the activities of the East India Co. South Africa interested him as did New South Wales (New Holland). (Note 21)
Note 21: Carter, Banks, pp. 240-241.
Banks' interest in
Africa was
enlivened by
the
activities of Henry Smeathman. Banks had met Francis Masson in
Holland from 1773. The 1785 voyage of Nautilus to
Das Voltas
Bay, on government business to look into a possible destination for
transportable convicts, was partly stimulated by Henry Smeathman's
views. But Banks also had more commercially-confidential botanical
interests.
Note 23: Contractor. William Devaynes (c.1730-1809). He had a brother John (1726-1801) an apothecary to George III. Email of 7 December 2005 from David Daniell. Namier.Brooke, Vol. 2, p. 319. William Devanyes was part of a bank known as Crofts, Roberts, Devaynes and Dawes. Christie, in non-elite MPs, foundthat Devaynes had commercial and banker interests, was a government contractor), a leader in the EICo directorate after 1770. He was a large government contractor, 1776-1782 with John Hennicker and George Wombwell and Edward Wheler who had victualling contracts for 12-14m000 men in America (all except Henniker were directors of the EICo and friends of Hastings in India. Devaynes by 1777 was the only commissioner of the Africa Co. in Parliament, at a time when the EICo. was accused of allowing private trade to be set up tending to a monopoly. Devaynes had a mulatto daughter mentioned in his will. This man is a friend of Colonel William Dalrymple, Frost, Convics and Empire, pp. 99. On Devaynes and Laurence Sulivan of the EICo, re an expedition to South Seas. See Frost, Convicts and Empire, p. 62, on matters of strategic arguments. Sources other: www.sl.nsw.gov.au/ has an item on one William Devaynes died 1805 of the EICo, a letter to him from Sir Joseph Banks of 6 June 1794 (Series 17.04).
By later November, 1788, after further discussions with the East India Company, Banks found that the Company's deputy-chairman, banker Francis Baring, was inviting him to enlarge his views on growing tea from China in India. Earlier in 1788, Lord Hawkesbury had asked Banks if it was not possible to grow tea in any British dominions in the East or West Indies, so as to relieve Britain's dependence on China? Here, Baring was exercising dual interests as a private trader and a Company director. Henry Dundas (Lord Melville) was also prodding Hawkesbury to prod Banks.
Banks told Hawkesbury that given existing English failures to cultivate tea, and he recalled French attempts to cultivate tea in Corsica in 1785, he thought tea could be tried about Bengal's Assam area. (And as it turned out, Britain would not try tea there for another 50 years, after the first Anglo-Chinese Opium War, when Britain had found itself annoyed with China for a great many reasons. In fact, the establishment of the Bengal branch of the Assam Co. was in 1839. The provisional secretary was Mr. William Prinsep (born 1796), whose father John Prinsep (1746-1830), a pioneer of indigo production in India, had by 1800 returned to London, and become mildly interested in shipping convicts to Australia, and early prospects for wool production in New South Wales as per the promotions by John Macarthur of Parramatta near Sydney. (Note 24)
Note 24: Information on the Prinseps, a noteworthy family of British-India, including a genealogy, is given in other sections of this website.
(Is a botanical specimen a gift from God to all humanity or is it the property of the people of the region where it first grew? Does this also apply to sugar cane? Coffee? It may not even be clear that tea cultivation originated in China, the question is shrouded in myth. And so the British plan to thieve Chinese tea began from 1785. In 1834, or even as early as 1820, reports on websites regrettably differ wildly, the British adventurer Robert Fortune, tea expert, and tea thief, went undercover into China to obtain plants for India's production. Banks did not recommend tea be grown at Assam till the 1790s, and ironically, it appears a little-known variety of tea grew anyway in the jungles of Assam by the time Banks did make his recommendation - as a Scottish adventurer Robert Bruce found about 1824.) (Note 25)
Note 25: From Carter’s biography of Banks, variously. Banks by 27 December 1788 had delivered to Baring a 2000-word essay on tea culture. Some information also went to Lord Hawkesbury, mentioning tea possibly being grown at Bihar. An idea had arisen, could tea be transplanted from Hainan with the co-operation of renegade Chinese willing to work for the East India Company? Given the messagings involved, it is easy to see why Banks kept an eye on shipping movements. At Calcutta, the botanical gardener there, Colonel Kyd, would assist experiments, teaching Indians how to cultivate tea. But this would all need the support of the EICo directors in London; it might be unwise to mention the plan to the Company's supercargoes at Canton, as they might spoil such a plan.> Any plans would remain secret – Britain was planning to steal China's tea, to be less dependent on Chinese good will. And here was Banks, not the botanist as distinterested scientist, but the botanist as a planner of commodity production. Otherwise, if the Company directors approved the plan, Banks would put himself at the disposal of the company. Carter writes, Banks was "convinced that the objective was also of real importance to the country at large". Banks mentioned tea, also indigo as a possible production for India, adding coffee, chocolate, vanilla, cochineal and cotton, even sugar. (Cochineal not surprisingly produced a dye one imagines the correct colour red for British redcoats (the French called it Dutch Scarlet . Baring as a merchant already interested tea and cochineal is mentioned in Ziegler's book on Barings, pp 25-39.)
Note 26: Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: Barings, 1762-1929 . London, Collins 1988.
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Baring became an EICo director in 1779 and became leader of its City Interest, which supported Pitt as prime minister. (The British East India Company, hereafter referred to as EICo).By 1786, due to some recent deaths of Company directors, Baring as the most experienced of the Court of Directors remained close to Pitt and Dundas. He became Company chairman in 1792-1793. In 1791 he had opposed Dundas as Dundas wanted to abolish the Secret Committee of the Company (an inner council of directors,) as well as to reduce the number of directors as part of reforming the Company structure. Baring was chief negotiator for the directors, and was given his baronetcy for his work on the Company's behalf. His private opinion was that many of the other Company directors were either fools or knaves, and as already discussed, he had two sons in the East, Thomas (1771-1848) in Bengal and Henry (1776-1848) in China, opium being one commodity they regularly handled.">
Carter writes, Banks wanted secrecy for any cochineal plan. The Spanish to date retained a monopoly on cochineal handling. Cochineal was of two kinds, a fine-refined type giving a richer dye, and sylvester cochineal. The noted British wool dealer John Maitland had samples of both kinds of cochineal. Banks had been in communication since February 1787 with Dr James Anderson, (later physician-general of the East India Company at Madras), about a potential cochineal insect possibly native to India? The Company directors, including Baring, remained very cautious - Banks was still dealing with their secret committee. (Note 27)
Note 27: Carter, Banks, pp. 273-275.
Banks, whose connections were impeccable, had arranged that the first governor-to-be of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, would collect samples of cochineal (nopal) with its attendant insects at Rio de Janeiro for transport to Botany Bay, and Phillip did succeed in keeping his samples alive while he was at Botany Bay.In January 1788, pressured by Baring, Banks sent a memorial to the Company directors on cochineal as "an object of national importance,". Banks employed his correspondent in Honduras, James Bartlet, to send samples of cochineal (fina) insects to London for later transportation to India. Banks by 11 March, 1790 sent to the EICo secretary, now William Devaynes, a proposal for a reward of £1000 for the procurement of the true cochineal from Spanish America. By 1792, this was uprated to £2000.
Note 28: Note still to come
Late in 1792, by 1 October, Banks had taken advantage of the sailing of Macartney's expedition and embassy to China - they would obtain at Rio the cochineal insects (sylvester) and these were shipped per the Enderby whaler Hero Capt Folger (Enderbys lived near John St Barbe at Blackheath) - these samples reached the Thames by 25 February 1793, but Banks' cultivation experiments here failed. (Yet another shipping firm with principals living at Blackheath at this time were the Larkins family, owners of Royal Admiral, a one-time convict transport to New South Wales before 1800. Banks by May 1793 had recommended Christopher Smith as a gardener for the botanical garden at Calcutta and early in September 1794 Smith sailed with assistant Peter Good from Kew on Royal Admiral Capt Bond with a consignment of useful plants for Calcutta botanic gardens, landed on 27 February 1795 and it appears, Royal Admiral was soon was go back to England, but before she did sail there arrived at Calcutta Capt Nelson of the 74th regiment with two small nopal plants from Rio with plenty of cochineal insects, sylvester.
Experiments resulted in a cochineal dye at least equal to the South American sylvester by 18 August 1796 it was reported to Sir Hugh Inglis that insects were being reared more effectively in India than in Brazil, now a lucrative trade could develop supplant that, but Banks felt that he had endured eight years of alternate enthusiasm and neglect from the EICo directors (there had earlier been a leak and the Spanish had found out about Banks' plans for cochineal transplantation. (Note 29) (Note 30)
Note 29: Sir Hugh Inglis (1744-1820). He was son of Robert Inglis a Signet Writer of Edinburgh, and Mary Russell, a sister of tobacco merchant James Russell (1708-1788) who was devastated by the outcome of the American Revolution. This James was father of Eleanor Russell who married tobacco merchant and British Creditor, William Molleson. Sir Hugh was good friends with Lord Sidmouth. Sir Hugh was three times a chairman of EICo.
Note 30: See Jacob Price, Lee-Clark-Russell Family, p. 217.
Carter writes, " Thus, in the record of those two months alone, we have a glimpse of the botanical returns arriving at Kew from three great voyages - the 'First Fleet' under Governor Phillip to Botany Bay; the Vancouver expedition to the N-W coast of America; and the second bread-fruit voyage of Bligh to Tahiti - with Banks somewhere at the centre and management of them all. [By 1807, Francis Masson was communicating with Banks from Upper Canada and with various governors of NSW.] (Note 31) (Note 32)
Note 31: Carter, Banks, pp. 283-284.
Note 32: Carter, Banks, pp. 283-284.
From 1785, Dundas had been concerned with Banks with Indian problems of mutual concern, such as EICo operations at Canton. Banks here was assisted by John Duncan and later his brother Alexander as resident EICo surgeons at Canton. (Note 33)
Note 33: Carter, Banks , pp 290ff.
Carter writes, "The combination of Banks and Dundas in mounting an embassy to China followed their regular association in the affairs of the (EICo) company and of the Privy Council Committee of Trade and Foreign Plantations. From Dundas, in harness with Pitt, came the political drive that set the [Macartney] embassy in motion and framed its official instructions. From Banks came the advice which gathered men and information for more technical purposes of this first real British adventure into the closed world beyond the precarious entrepot of Canton.
In late autumn 1791, Lord Macartney was appointed to lead an embassy to China, as a man with the best diplomatic and administrative experience to China, and in January 1792 Banks wrote to Macartney a hard-nosed letter concerned with the intellectual pillaging of China and its easily-learned philosophy, with an eye to the revenue of the British Empire. Banks gave Macartney 78 volumes which would assist him in his endeavours. (Note 34)
Note 34: Carter, Banks, pp. 290-294. Macartney's embassy for China set sail from Spithead on Wednesday 26 September, 1792, with Macartney and his entourage on HM Lion Capt Erasmus Gower. A guard was attending on the Indiaman Hindostan Capt William McIntosh, plus the slow-sailing brig Jackal. The embassy reached Chusan Roads on 3 July, 1793, and later went up to Peking (Beijing) – where the Chinese emperor dismissed these European strangers with some contempt. Banks kept in touch by mail sent via every useful ship, and some plants such as nutmeg and mangosteen plants had been sent via homing Indiamen Royal Admiral and Sulivan p. 295 by Banks' colleague, Staunton. (Note 35)
Note 35: Carter, Banks, p. 295 And at the time were other issues for Britishers - re naval stores from Russia, with the Russia Co. in London, whether trade should be entirely in British bottoms ... re naval stores, timber, pitch, tar, hemp, sailcloth, iron and steel. Britain needed to sell wool to Russia as a defence against Silesian competition, especially as British export trade was one third of woolens, and the trade balance was one-third against Britain. On the other hand, Russia remained almost entirely dependent on British merchants and on British shipping for her own export income and a steady flow of money. (Note 36)
Note 36: Carter, Banks, pp. 295-303.
American fur trading
Whatever Ledyard's earlier role as a promoter of ideas, US merchants finally took to fur trading with gusto. Some of the biggest names to be involved included: John Handasyd Peck, his grandson Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins, various of the Cabots, Dorr (Ebenezer) and Sons, William Sturgis, John and Thomas Lamb, Thomas Fairchild Magee, Ezekiel Hubbard of New York, Joseph Pierpont, and John Jacob Astor. (Not including the British-based Hudson's Bay Co.)
Here, the US conspiracy theorists also fail to realise that in the late eighteenth century, many US businesses were family-owned and/or had operated in both Britain and North America till 1775. Family participation in business shows as well in the operations of British firms in India and China, and by 1850, in Australian colonies as well. As a system, family engagement in commerce it was supported by an ideology of the time as espoused by the British Empire. The wadia shipbuilders of Bombay were almost a clan operation, passing skills on to family members. Given the state of society on the US eastern seaboard by 1800, it is hardly a surprise to find that any fur trading names were in fact involved at least partly on a family basis.
Earlier, young Ledyard had been taken into the house of a guardian, Thomas Seymour, a lawyer and brother-in-law of John's Grandfather Ledyard. The young John once lived with his cousin, Dr. Isaac Ledyard. (Note 37)
Note 37: It has proved difficult if not impossible to find out more on this Seymour family.
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The Old New England names in Larouche's own maternal genealogy include: Weld, Clapp, Whiting, Waldo; General Horatio Gates Stevens (1778-1873), Harbottle Dorr, (1696-1746), Clemence Dorr (1700-1766), and Lucretia Ledyard. Plus Abigail Perkins Weld (1799-1886, married to a banker with New Yrks'Ban of Commerce, John A. Stevens (1795-1874), who is of the same Perkins line as the merchant LaRouche condemns most roundly, that family of Thomas Handasyd Perkins (1764-1854). Ebenezer III Dorr, (1739-1809) was one of the first Boston men to try for furs from North-West America. (The name Dorr leads on to Brown and Ives, of Rhode Island, who sent ships to Sydney, Australia before 1800.) And so it seems that in writing his indictments of American Capitalism, using findings from maritime history as a tool, LaRouche, in avoiding using information from his own family history, and he managed also to avoid mention of the British settlement of eastern Australia. When in fact, if he had hearkened to his own family history, he'd have met John Ledyard (The Traveller), and so met a more traditional explanation basing on Ledyard sailing on Cook's Third Voyage.
Some relevant findings ... The Ledyard family ... John Ledyard (The Traveller)
Some descendants of LEDYARD John (the progenitor)
1.. LEDYARD John
sp: HILLIARD Elizabeth 2. LEDYARD Ebenezer (b.1668;d.1719) sp: LNOTKNOWN Miss 3. Mayor Hartford Connecticut LEDYARD John (b.1700;d.1771) sp: wife2 AUSTIN Mary (b.1715;d.1797) 4. LEDYARD Lucretia (b.1756;d.1846) sp: Major-General and Merchant STEVENS Ebenezer (b.1751;d.1823) 5. Unm, Lawyer STEVENS Samuel (b.1785;d.1844) 5. Dr MD, STEVENS Alexander Hogdon (b.1789;d.1869) sp: wife1 BAYARD Mary Jane sp: wife3 LLOYD Phoebe Coles sp: wife2 MORRIS Catherine (Catherine Morris who married Alexander HOgdon Stevens - a son of Lucretia Ledyard. Catherine was a relative of financier Gouveneur Morris (who charitably assisted the former "financier of the American Revolution", but at the time ruined, Robert Morris). One of her relatives also named Morris married a son of the early US government official and commentator on financial matters, Alexander Hamilton.) 5. Banker at Bank of Commerce, New York, STEVENS John Austin (b.1795;d.1874) sp: WELD Abigail Perkins (b.1799;d.1886) (Note 38) 6. STEVENS John Austin Stevens (b.1827) sp: MORRIS Margaret Antoinette 6. STEVENS Caroline Weld (b.1828;d.1904) sp: COLVILL Alfred 6. STEVENS Lucretia Ledyard (b.1830) sp: Banker, iron-steel merchant, HECKSCHER John Gustave Richard (b. Germany1822;d.1901 America) (Note 38a) 6. Unm STEVENS Laura Gibbs (b.1832;d.1898) 6. STEVENS Mary Emeline (b.1833;d.1895) sp: STRONG Peter Remsen sp: Of Paris, France, LIMOELAN Maurice Bonjour de 6. STEVENS Frances Ann (b.1835;d.1906) sp: Colonel NORRIS Joseph Parker 6. STEVENS Abby Austin (b.1836;d.1913) sp: Major-General, POTTER Robert Brown 6. STEVENS Gertrude (b.1841) sp: RICE William Bordman 6. STEVENS Julia Curtis (b.1843;d.1929) 5. Unm STEVENS William (b.1787;d.1867) 5. STEVENS Byam Kerby (b.1792;d.1870) sp: GALLATIN Frances (daughter of Albert Gallatin) (Note 39, see below) 5. STEVENS Henry Hewgill (b.1797;d.1869) sp: CROSBY Caroline Clarkson 5. STEVENS Mary Lucretia (b.1798;d.1877) sp: RHINELANDER Frederic William sp: SANDS Richardson 5. SANDS Austin Ledyard sp: HODGE Ann Maria 5. SANDS Richardson WilliamNotes 38-39: On the name Perkins in the context of the writings of Chaitkin and LaRouche, this website posts a genealogy mini-website on as many persons of the family as can be found. Note 40: The name Albert Gallatin, Secretary of US Treasury, is excoriated in Chaitkin's book cited above. Just why is not clear to an Australian. On Heckscher. Data from a US website on Marshall Genealogy by John Marshall.
It also appears, that LaRouche and his ilk, suffering moral outrage, never found the time to read Holden Furber's concerted, dedicated and useful work on the EICo! (Note 40)
Note 40: On Furber's excellent work see Note 6 above.
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Re Merchant Networks through the Ages: See Mrs Aubrey Richardson, The Doges of Venice. London, Methuen, 1914. Also on the Doges of Venice, D. S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380-1580. London, Thames and Hudson, 1970.
E-mail the Webmaster: Dan Byrnes
Click here to discover ... Who links to this Merchant Networks website?
Click here to read a new promotional page for this website translated into Chinese
The
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Byrnes
(Australia).
The Cozens/Byrnes team formed in late 2005 after prolonged e-mail discussions to pursue the idea of historians working on Merchant Networks. Not work on merchants as individuals, more on the networks they are part of ...
For more on the details of the approaches adopted by this website, see The About Us Page
Tech
update: 7 June 2007: This website is lately 
, as produced with a
Linux system running ... 
