Or, Ain’t No Party Like a Synchronized Bird Release Party
Some folks make it look easy, but really, international commerce can be a lot of work – and mightily dull at the same time (all those currency conversions, ugh!). But let it never be said that China traders didn’t know a good time when it flew at them in a panic.
(Okay, I’m not sure that it has ever been said, and besides, we’ve covered similar ground before — but just go with me here).
While doing business at Canton and Macau during the 1786/1787 trading season, Major Samuel Shaw – revolutionary hero, pioneer merchant in the China trade, and official U.S. Consul – took some time out to party.
A circumstance that occurred at the entertainment given us by the Portuguese ought not to be omitted. The dessert, which was very elegant, was prepared in a room adjoining that in which we dined, and the tables were ornamented with representations, in paper painted and gilt, of castles, pagodas, and other Chinese edifices, in each of which were confined small birds. The first toast was Liberty! and in an instant, the doors of the paper prisons being set open, the little captives were released, and, flying about us in every direction, seemed to enjoy the blessing which had just been conferred upon them.
How’s that for an evening’s entertainment? This flighty soirée comes up in Shaw’s posthumous memoir-cum-biography, as a footnote in a section kvetching about how the English merchants being, well, bitchy. They hadn’t invited Shaw or any other Americans to dinner, you see, and that was breaking some serious social coding (a breach of, cough, cough, food diplomacy, if you will – though I suspect in this case “food” meant “copious amounts of Madeira and/or rum”):
On [the English’s] arrival at Canton from Macao, the usual visits were made to them by us, and by them returned; and while every other nation paid us the customary civility of giving and receiving a dinner and supper, the English alone omitted that attention, not only to us individually, but to the Americans generally.
Shaw was an old hand at the casual snub, and beyond that, a professional – and so he assures his reader that such bad behavior “did not prevent or interrupt that intercourse which will ever exist among gentlemen.” Ahem.
In classic Early American style, though, he adds a final note of paranoia, suggesting that the lack of keggers was an order from on high:
It is true, that the Court of Directors [the governing body of the English East India Company], in their instructions to the supercargoes…enjoined it upon them to use every endeavor to prevent the subjects of Great Britain from assisting or encouraging in any shape the American commerce ; but if this prohibition was intended by the directors, or construed by their servants, to extend to the civilities heretofore paid the Americans, it cannot be denied that such conduct was extremely illiberal.
Illiberal indeed. Given the weight that Shaw and his compatriots back home gave to the treatment of Americans abroad, such behavior probably only confirmed their worst suspicions about Britons’ incorrigible arrogance.
But at least the Portuguese had the courtesy to stockpile pigeons, right?
Source: Josiah Quincy, ed., The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw: The First American Consul at Canton: With a Life of the Author (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1847), 234. [Bold emphasis mine, rest in original.]
Dael A. Norwood 