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 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.
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