“Canada’s American, not English. We’re not going to war over Canada—she’ll join us of her own free will,” Cooper said, hiding his worry. He tugged at his muttonchop whiskers and pulled his frock coat tighter around his shoulders against the sharpening wind. He knew that war with the British Empire would be disastrous at this time, and would ruin Cooper-Tillman. God damn wars. Even so, he knew that the States would have to go to war over Mexico and Canada unless there was a settlement. Just as Britain had had to go to war with China.
“There won’t be a war,” Tillman said, trying to quiet Cooper diplomatically. He sighed and wished himself back in Alabama. A man can be a gentleman there, he thought. There you don’t have to deal with the damned British every day, or with blasphemous, foulmouthed scum like Brock, or a devil incarnate like Struan—or even with an impetuous young man and senior partner like Jefferson Cooper, who thinks Boston the center of the earth. “And this war’s over, for better or worse.”
“Mark my words, Mr. Tillman,” Brock said. “This godrotting treaty be no good for us’n and no good for they. We’ve to keep Chushan and open ports on mainland China. We be at war again in a few weeks. In June when the wind be ripe and the weather be ripe, the fleet’ll have to sail north to Pei Ho again. An’ if we be at war again, how we going to get season’s teas and silks, eh? Last year almost no trade because of war—the year before no trade at all an’ they stole all our opium to boot. Eight thousand cases from me alone. Two million taels of silver that cost me. Cash.”
“That money’s not lost,” Tillman said. “Longstaff ordered us to give it up. To ransom our lives. He gave us paper on the British Government. And there’s a settlement in the treaty. Six million taels of silver to pay for it.”
Brock laughed harshly. “Thee think Parliament be honoring Longstaff’s paper? Why, any Government’d be throwed out of office the moment they asked for the brass to pay for opium. An’ as to the six million—that be paying for the cost of the war. I knowed Parliament better’n you. Kiss yor half million taels goodbye be my advice to you both. So if we be at war again this year, there be no trade again. An’ if we baint trading this year, we be all bankrupt. You, me, every China trader. An’ even the godrotting Noble House.” He jerked out his watch. The ceremony was to have started an hour ago. Time be running out, he thought. Yus, but not on Brock and Sons, by God. Dirk’s had seventeen-year run of good joss, and now be time for change.
Brock reveled in the thought of his second son, Morgan, who capably—and ruthlessly—controlled all their interests in England. He wondered if Morgan had been successful in undermining Struan’s influence in Parliament and in banking circles. We be going to wreck thee, Dirk, he thought, and Hong Kong along with thee. “Wot the hell be the delay for?” he said, hastening toward the naval officer who was striding up and down near the marines.
“What’s the matter with you, Jeff? You know he’s right about Hong Kong,” Tillman said. “You ought to know better than to bait him.”
Cooper smiled his thin smile. “Brock’s so goddam sure of himself. I couldn’t help it.”
“If Brock’s right about the half million taels, we’re ruined.”
“Yes. But Struan will lose ten times that if there’s no payment. He’ll get paid, never fear. So we’ll get ours.” Cooper looked after Brock. “Do you think he knows about our deal with Struan?”
Tillman shrugged. “I don’t know. But Brock’s right about the treaty. It’s stupid. It’ll cost us a pretty penny.”
For the last three months Cooper-Tillman had been acting as secret agents for The Noble House. British warships had been blockading Canton and the Pearl River, and British traders were forbidden to trade. Longstaff—at Struan’s bidding—had put the embargo on as another measure to force the peace treaty, knowing that the Canton warehouses were bulging with teas and silks. But since America had not declared war on China, American ships could go through the blockade freely and thumb their noses at the warships. So Cooper-Tillman had bought four million pounds of tea from Chen-tse Jin Arn—or Jin-qua, as he was nicknamed—the richest of the Chinese merchants, and shipped it to Manila, supposedly for Spanish merchants. The local Spanish official, for a considerable bribe, had issued the necessary import and export licenses, and the tea was transferred—duty free—into Struan’s clippers and rushed to England. Payment to Jin-qua was a shipload of opium delivered secretly by Struan somewhere up the coast.
A perfect plan, Cooper thought. Everyone’s richer and gets the trade goods he wants. But we would have made a fortune if our ships could have taken the teas direct to England. And he cursed the British Navigation Acts that forbade any but British ships to bring goods into English ports. Goddam them, they own the world.
“Jeff!”
Cooper followed his partner’s glance. For a moment he could not pick out what Tillman wanted him to see in the crowded harbor. Then he saw the longboat pulling away from the flagship and in it the tall, redheaded Scotsman who was so powerful that he could twist Parliament to his purposes and put the greatest nation on earth to war.
“It would be too much to hope that Struan’d drown,” Tillman said.
Cooper laughed. “You’re wrong about him, Wilf. Anyway, the sea’d never dare.”
“Maybe it will, Jeff. It’s time enough. By all that’s holy.”
Dirk Struan stood in the prow of the longboat, riding the twist of the waves. And though he was already late for the ceremony, he did not hurry his oarsmen. He knew that there would be no starting until he arrived.
The longboat was three hundred yards offshore and the bosun’s “Steady as she goes” mixed nicely with the crisp northeast monsoon. Far aloft, the wind gathered strength and scudded cumulus off the mainland over the island and out to the ocean beyond.
The harbor was crowded with shipping, all British but for a few American and Portuguese vessels, merchantmen of every size. Before the war the merchantmen would have been anchored at Macao, the tiny Portuguese settlement on a tip of the mainland, forty miles southwest across the huge mouth of the Pearl River. Or off the island of Whampoa, thirteen miles south of Canton. This was the nearest that any European ship was allowed, by Chinese law, to approach Canton. By imperial decree all European trade was restricted to this city. Legend said that over a million Chinese lived within its walls. But no European knew for certain, for none had ever walked its streets.
Since antiquity the Chinese had had rigid laws excluding Europeans from their country. The inflexibility of these laws, the lack of freedom for Europeans to go where they pleased and trade as they pleased, had caused the war.
As the longboat passed near a merchantman, some children waved at Struan and he waved back. It’ll be good for the bairns to have their own homes at long last, on their own soil, he thought. When the war had begun, all British citizens had been evacuated onto the ships for safety. There were approximately a hundred and fifty men, sixty wives, eighty children. A few of the families had been aboard one ship or another for almost a year.
Surrounding the merchantmen were the warships of the British Expeditionary Force: ships of the line, 74-guns, 44’s, 22’s, brigs, frigates, a small part of the mightiest navy the world had ever known. And dozens of troopships with four thousand British and Indian soldiers aboard, part of the strongest army on earth.
And among these ships were the beautiful rake-masted opium clippers, the fleetest ships ever built.
Struan felt a glow of excitement as he studied the island with its dominating mountain that soared eighteen hundred feet almost sheer from the sea.
He had never set foot on the island even though he knew more about it than any man. He had sworn not to go ashore until it was British-owned. It pleased him to be so imperious. But this had not prevented him from sending his captains and his younger brother Robb ashore to survey the island. He knew the reefs and the rocks and the glens and hills, and he knew where he was going to build his warehouses and the Great House, and where the road would be.
He turned to look at his clipper,
China Cloud
, 22 guns. All of Struan and Company’s clippers were surnamed “Cloud” to honor his mother, a McCloud, who had died years ago. Seamen were painting and cleaning an already sparkling vessel. Guns were being examined and rigging tested. The Union Jack fluttered proudly aft and the company flag atop the mizzen.
The flag of The Noble House was the royal red lion of Scotland entwined with the imperial green dragon of China. It flew on twenty armed clippers scattered over the oceans of the world, on a hundred swift-sailing armed lorchas that smuggled opium up the coast. It flew on three huge opium supply depot ships—converted hulks of merchantmen which were presently anchored in Hong Kong harbor. And it flew over
Resting Cloud
, his vast semi-stationary headquarters vessel that contained bullion strong rooms, offices, luxurious suites and dining rooms.
You’re a bonny flag, Struan thought proudly.
The first ship that had flown the flag had been an opium-laden pirate lorcha that he had taken by force. Pirates and corsairs infested the coasts, and the Chinese and Portugese authorities offered a silver bounty for pirates. When the winds had forbidden opium smuggling or when he had no opium to sell, he had scoured the China seas. The bullion he gained from the pirates he invested in opium.
Godrot opium, he thought. But he knew that his life was inexorably tied to opium—and that without it neither The Noble House nor the British Empire could exist.
The reason could be traced back to 1699, when the first British ship traded peacefully with China and brought back silks and, for the first time, the peerless herb called tea—which China alone on earth produced cheaply and in abundance. In exchange, the emperor would take only silver bullion. And this policy had persisted ever since.
Within fifty-odd years tea became the most popular drink of the Western world—particularly of Britain, the major trading nation on earth. In seventy years tea was the single major source of internal tax revenue for the British Government. Within a century the outpouring of wealth to China had critically depleted the British treasury and the unbalanced tea-bullion trade was a national catastrophe.
Over the century, the British East India Company—the gigantic semiprivate, semipublic firm which possessed, by Act of Parliament, a total monopoly on Indian and Asian trade—had offered everything and anything with growing desperation—cotton goods, looms, even guns and ships—in place of bullion. But the emperors imperiously refused. They considered China self-sufficient, were contemptuous of “barbarians,” as they called all non-Chinese, and regarded all the nations of the earth as no better than vassal states of China.
And then, thirty years ago, a British merchantman, the
Vagrant Star
, had sailed up the Pearl River and anchored off Whampoa Island. Its secret cargo was opium, which British Bengal produced cheaply and in abundance. Although opium had been used in China for centuries—but only by the very rich and by those in Yunnan Province where the poppy also flourished—it was contraband. The East India Company had clandestinely licensed the captain of
Vagrant Star
to offer the opium. But only for bullion. The Chinese Guild of Merchants, which by imperial decree monopolized all Western Trade, bought the cargo and sold it secretly at a great profit. The captain of the
Vagrant Star
privately turned over the bullion to the Company’s officers in Canton and took his profit in bank paper on London and rushed back to Calcutta for more opium.
Struan remembered the
Vagrant Star
well. He had been a cabin boy aboard her. It was in this vessel that he had become a man—and had seen Asia. And had sworn to destroy Tyler Brock, who at the time was the
Vagrant Star’s
third mate. Struan was twelve, Brock eighteen and very strong. Brock had hated him on sight and delighted in finding fault, cutting his food ration, ordering him extra watches, sending him aloft in foul weather, baiting him, goading him. The slightest mistake and he had Struan tied to the rigging and lashed with the cat-o’-nine-tails.
Struan had stayed with the
Vagrant Star
for two years. Then one night she struck a reef in the Malacca Strait and went down. Struan had swum ashore and made his way to Singapore. Later he learned that Brock had survived too and this made him very happy. He wanted revenge, in his own way, in his own time.
Struan had joined another ship. By now the East India Company was secretly licensing many carefully selected independent captain-traders, and continuing to sell them exclusively Bengal opium at advantageous prices. The Company began to make huge profits and acquire vast quantities of silver bullion. The Chinese Guild of Merchants and the mandarins turned blind eyes to the illicit trade, for they too made huge profits. And these profits, being secret, were not subject to imperial squeeze.
Opium became the inbound staple of trade. The Company quickly monopolized the world supply of opium outside Yunnan Province and the Ottoman Empire. Within twenty years the bullion traded for smuggled opium equaled the bullion that was owed for teas and silks.
At last trade balanced. Then overbalanced, for there were twenty times more Chinese customers than Western customers, and there began a staggering outpouring of bullion that even China could not afford. The Company offered other trade goods to stem the tide. But the emperor remained adamant: bullion for tea.
By the time Struan was twenty he was captain-owner of his own ship on the opium run. Brock was his chief rival. They competed ruthlessly with each other. Within six years Struan and Brock dominated the trade.
The opium smugglers became known as China traders. They were an intrepid, tough, vital group of individualistic owner-captains—English, Scots, and some Americans—who casually drove their tiny ships into unknown waters and unknown dangers as a way of life. They went to sea to trade peacefully: to make a profit, not to conquer. But if they met with a hostile sea or a hostile act, their ships became fighting ships. And if they did not fight well, their ships vanished and were soon forgotten.