PDF The Voyage of the ‘Frolic’: New England Merchants and the
Opium Trade Full Online Audiobook
Book Synopsis
In the late summer of 1984,
the author and a group of his
archaeology students
excavated fragments of
Chinese porcelain at the site
of a Pomo Indian village a
hundred miles north of San
Francisco. How did these
ceramics, which were more
than a hundred years old, find
their way to this remote area?
And what could one make of
local legend that told of Pomo
women wearing Chinese silk
shawls in the 1850 s? The
author determined to find the
answers to these questions,
never dreaming that his quest
would eventually involve the
lives of nineteenth-century
Boston merchants, Baltimore
shipbuilders, Bombay opium
brokers, and newly rich
businessmen in gold rush San
Francisco.The author soon
learned that in 1850 the
clipper Frolic, a sailing ship
built specifically for the
Asian opium trade, had
wrecked on the Mendocino
coast, a few miles from the
Pomo village. He unearthed
the business records of its
owners, A. Heard &Co.,
which showed that
respectable Bostonians had
made their fortunes running
opium from India to China.
The family histories of the
firm s two most influential
partners are traced from the
American Revolution to their
joint decision to order a
custom-built Baltimore
clipper for the opium trade. In
describing the design,
construction, and outfitting of
the Frolic, the author was
aided by a stroke of luck?a
slave named Fred Bailey,
later known to the world as
the abolitionist Frederick
Book details
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Author : Thomas N.
Layton
Pages : 248 pages
Publisher : Stanford
University Press 199908-01
Language : English
ISBN-10 : 0804738491
ISBN-13 :
9780804738491
Douglass, worked in the
Frolic s shipyard in 1836 and
wrote detailed descriptions of
the building of such ships.The
Frolic, under Captain Edward
Faucon (who was depicted as
the "good" captain in Richard
Henry Dana s Two Years
Before the Mast) plied the
opium trade from Bombay to
China from 1845 to 1850.
The author describes the
political, financial, and
logistical aspects of the
profitable enterprise before
1849, when the introduction
of steam vessels into the
opium trade made the Frolic
obsolete as an opium clipper.
However, the California gold
rush created a lucrative
market for Chinese goods,
and the Heard firm dispatched
the Frolic to San Francisco
with a diverse cargo that
included silks, porcelain,
jewelry, and furniture. When
the Frolic wrecked on the
Mendocino coast, the Pomo
Indians salvaged its cargo,
and the vessel s history
passed into folk tradition.The
subsequent lives of those
intimately associated with the
Frolic are profiled. The
owners families preferred to
forget the source of their
fortunes, and prior to her
death in 1942, the daughter of
the Frolic s captain burned
her father s papers to preserve
his reputation. She could not
know that in 1965 sports
divers would discover the
remains of her father s opium
clipper, and that 134 years
after its wreck, the Frolic s
story would inspire an
archaeologist-anthropologist
to pursue its colorful history.