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 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. 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
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, 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.
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