# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 5/Representative men: Merchants - The Polos, Sir Josiah Child, Sir Dudley North, the Rothschilds, John Jacob Astor

The people discussed in this article are Marco Polo (1254–1324), Josiah Child (1630–1699), Dudley North (1641–1691), Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), and John Jacob Astor (1763–1848).
REPRESENTATIVE MEN. Merchants. the polos : sir josiah child : sir dudley north : the rothschilds : john jacob astor.
In the study of human life, as in ordinary human intercourse, we find fun and mournfulness always together; and there is scarcely a trait of human character which has not at once an amusing and a pathetic side. For one instance, very striking to an observer of modern English society, there is something as ridiculous as it is melancholy in the contempt which the vulgar of the professional classes parade for commercial occupations. To any one who knows what commerce has done for the world, and what sort of citizens the great merchants of the world have made, there is something ludicrous and painful at once in hearing the family of a provincial surgeon, or lawyer, thanking Heaven that they are not connected with anybody “engaged in trade.” Youths and maidens of such families, and not only they but their elder relatives, escape from the charge of pride by alleging that commercial people are narrow-minded and money-grubbing; that their occupations tend to keep them ignorant, and to make them selfish, underbred, and unpatriotic. The landed interest, as we used to call it, had an equally contemptuous notion of the merchants, some time ago, though not on exactly the same grounds. The prejudice has given way, partly through the family alliances entered into by landed dignity and commercial wealth, and yet more by the introduction of the principles and methods of business into the practice of agriculture. Since our great landowners have learned that agriculture is the manufacture of food and other original products, they have begun to perceive the value and beauty of those economical principles and methods which are supposed by apothecaries’ sons and attorneys’ daughters to vulgarise the mind, and render traders of any rank unfit company for classes which have no interest in saleable commodities. If any one of my readers should be disposed to doubt whether such a view is really entertained in English society, let him take pains to learn what is felt and said in classes outside of his own,—whatever that may be : and he will find that Bonaparte’s declaration that we are “a nation of shopkeepers,” is still considered the most cutting thing he could have said; and that there is everywhere, from Belgravia to the village of two or three hundred inhabitants, an assumption of gentility and enlightenment on the part of divinity, law, and physic, which commerce finds it hard to despise. It is not to be denied that the aristocratic illusions of the professional classes are kept up by the characteristic faults of the commercial order, as, for instance, the political cowardice which is the conspicuous vice of the manufacturers and merchants of many countries at this day; but, when it comes to picking holes in one another’s coat, every class has some success against its neighbour, and there is no profession which has not its besetting sin. The one which seems to beset them all is the ignorant pride with which they regard a vocation which wise men of all orders know how to respect.
It may help some of us to a right point of view to glance at two or three of the Representative Men of the commercial class, and see what they were like, and what they did.
The first who gives us any full and clear impression of the European merchant of the Middle Ages is particularly interesting to us just now, as the first European who ever entered China Proper. The Venetian family of the Polos afford an admirable example of their order; and Marco is the one we care most about, because he recorded what he did and saw.
In 1255 Marco Polo was playing about in the halls and balconies of one of the beautiful palaces of proud Venice,—the great city by which Europe itself was known at the ends of the earth. The boy was becoming old enough to be told about his father, whom he had never seen. He had an uncle Marco; and he had a mother who told him, as he grew able to understand, that his father and his other uncle, Maffio, were men of noble minds, who wished to extend the commerce of Venice, and to make out whether some fresh countries might not be visited, and induced to exchange commodities with a people who could fetch and carry the productions of all known lands and seas. In 1250, the father and uncle had gone to Constantinople, where they had bought precious stones, as the most convenient article to carry into unknown regions; and from thence it was understood that they had gone into Scythia. Beyond this, there was nothing to tell. Scythia meant everything beyond the route that commerce took on the Euxine. Nobody knew what it was like, or how far it spread, or what was the end of it. Ghengis Khan came forth from it; and there was a prevalent belief that a magnificent potentate dwelt in a country of singular wealth where the world ended in that direction; but there were no means of knowledge, and there was no use in going over such maps as there were at that day. Land and sea were set down by guess; and nobody yet dreamed of a passage by the south of Africa, or of the existence of the western half of the globe. Little Marco and his mother could only put together all they had heard of wild animals and strange birds, and wonderful commodities, and terrible warriors, with armies of horses (horses being almost as strange as elephants to the people of Venice;)—the Polos could only speculate and imagine, and desire and pray that the ​brave merchants might come home soon. They were hardly looked for while Marco was a child; for, when people went exploring, they expected to be gone for a term of years; and merchants especially found it answer to sit down in a favourable place for months or years together,—besides its being usually difficult to get away in safety, except at rare intervals. But Marco grew into boyhood and youth; and still his father did not return. He was well taught and trained, so as to be fit for whatever destiny his father might be intending: but his poor mother could not wait for the end of her long suspense. When the father, Nicolo Polo, returned at last, Marco was nineteen, and had for some years felt himself an orphan.
It must have been one of the strangest first meetings between parent and child that ever took place. It does not appear that Nicolo had ever heard, with any certainty, of the boy’s existence; for people who ventured into “Scythia” in those days gave up all hope of news from home: and now he found a fine manly young fellow, eager to hear of everything, from the traffic on the Volga to the grandeur of Kubla Khan. When on the Volga, the Polos had been warned of troubles to the west of the Caspian; so they tried to pass down by the east side, and lived for a time at Bokhara. They knew better than our poor countrymen of this century how to hold intercourse with Tartar potentates; and they were safe and prosperous where Wyburd and Stoddart and Conolly underwent captivity and death.
At Bokhara they won the admiration of a minister of the great Emperor of Tartary, who persuaded them to go with him to the Emperor’s court. For the chance of opening all Asia to Venetian commerce, and seeing what could be made of “far Cathay” and its reputed wealth, they agreed to undertake this journey of a whole year from the court of Bokhara to that of Kubla Khan, in Chinese Tartary. It was in 1265 that they arrived there. The great Khan knew about as much of the West as Europe did of the far East. He wished the Pope, as the head of Christendom, would send him a hundred wise men, to instruct his people in all sorts of knowledge. The Polos carried this petition to the Pope. By some means or other, they got passed through to Syria, from the coast of which it was easy to reach Venice.
They had achieved such a commercial success, and saw so much more in prospect, that they were eager to return to Tartary; and young Marco was eager to go with them. Owing to a change of Popes, it was some time before they could get on with their errand: and they started at last, at the end of two years, without any answer, dreading lest the Emperor should suspect them of bad faith. They had again left the coast of Syria when they were called back to receive credentials, and two monks laden with presents from the new Pope—all destined for Kubla Khan. The monks, however, turned tail on finding that the Soldan of Egypt was in force on their route. The Polos persevered, and reached Balkh, where young Marco was so ill that they stayed for a whole year. When we read of these long pauses, we must remember that the adventurers were trading all the time, or learning the commercial methods of each country and district. We must remember how small were the facilities for exchanging and transmitting money; and that, even at this day, time seems to be of no value in eastern countries. The promptitude and rapid action of Europeans, and yet more of Americans, is a subject of contemptuous wonder to orientals, who are never comfortable unless they lose as much time as possible over every transaction.
At last, however, the Polos were again on the march, climbing the snowy passes of the mountains, and traversing the windy steppes of central Asia. They were thirty days in crossing the desert of Kobi, and, after crossing Chinese Tartary, they presented themselves to their old patron. He was well pleased to see them again, and received the Pope’s presents very graciously. When Nicolo presented his son, the Emperor looked benignly upon him, and gave him an office in his household. Marco was young enough to be flexible in such circumstances. He lived like the Tartars, learned four languages presently, and, by his general cultivation, obtained a strong and wide influence. It suited his purposes well that the Emperor sent him here, there, and everywhere on State business—one of these journeys being to a province which it took six months to reach. He was all the time making himself master, for future use, of the geography of these lands and seas, and of their commercial capacity and condition; for he was not satisfied with growing rich and powerful, like Joseph in Egypt, but yearned after his own country and his father’s house. While he was acting as governor of a great city in China, his father and uncle were instructing the Emperor in the arts of war, and enabling him to take towns by the battering-ram and some new projectiles—the use of which was high military science in those days.
Meantime Kubla Khan was growing old: the Polos had been seventeen years with him, and they dreaded detention by his successor if they did not get away by his indulgence. He was hurt at the request, and conceived that they ought to be satisfied with such wealth as he could bestow: and he was willing to give whatever they might ask. Marco’s opportune knowledge released them. In his rovings he had discovered that there was sea where our ships are now always passing to and fro: and he engaged to carry by sea to Persia a young princess whose bridegroom was awaiting her there, while the land journey was too full of risks, at the moment, for her to attempt it. The Persian envoys so desired his escort, that Kubla Khan yielded the point, and sent off the party in grand style. Fourteen four-masted vessels, provisioned for two years, carried many hundreds of navigators. The few details we have of this return from China—from Fokien to Venice—show us something of what it was that adventurous merchants undertook in spreading commerce in the middle ages. In 1271 and 1272 the Polos had ridden and marched through dry steppes and over ranges of snowy mountains: and now, in returning twenty years later they braved other perils. They coasted almost every country, ​and probably took the diseases of all; for 600 men of their little fleet died on the way. The two Persian envoys also died; and when the expedition reached Ormuz, the bridegroom of their Tartar princess was no longer living; nor, as they soon learned, Kubla Khan. His death released the Polos from their promise to return and resume their offices, bringing with them other western Christians to improve his Tartar subjects. They were now free to do what they would with their remaining years.
It was in 1295 that three men of strange aspect appeared on the steps of the Polo Palace at Venice, and were going to enter it as their own, when they were ordered off. Two of them were old, and one middle-aged; they were dark-complexioned, and wore an outlandish dress, and their speech was difficult to understand. When they declared themselves Polos, they were treated as impostors. The absent Polos had long been supposed dead, and their relatives had inhabited the palace for many years. The applicants were evidently foreigners, and in no way resembling the Polos.
The strangers then named the families in Venice with whom their own had formerly associated, and induced them to assemble; and then, in a strange accent, and using many outlandish words, they related their adventures so as to be in part understood. Moreover, they unripped the folds and belts of their dress, and turned out such an enormous mass of precious stones as won the belief and veneration of all present. All Venice was soon at their doors, congratulating them. High offices were conferred on the old men, and Marco had no peace for the eagerness of the ladies to hear all about Kubla Khan and the land of Cathay. A population of millions was so wonderful an idea at Venice that the listeners gave the traveller the name of Marco of the Millions, and the family palace was known for centuries as the Court of the Millions—some, however, supposing that the emeralds, diamonds, carbuncles, and sapphires which were showered from the travellers’ clothes originated the title, causing the Polos to be regarded as millionaires, as we should say in our day.
The old men settled down at home contentedly; and Marco’s father married again, and had three more sons, when Marco was supposed to be lost. But Marco felt adrift at first, and as if he had passed from a familiar life into a strange one, so that he made no difficulty about accepting a naval command against the Genoese, a few months after his return. The Genoese were in that case the aggressors; Marco was called on as the most experienced navigator in Venice; and forth he went—only to be taken prisoner. He broke the enemy’s line, but was not supported, and surrendered when wounded. The Genoese were proud of their prisoner, and treated him well, only requiring from him perpetual narratives of the Great Khan and far Cathay. Marco had soon had enough of this, and he listened to the counsel of persons who insisted that these things should be written down. He was assisted to obtain from Venice the original notes of his travels; and he dictated to a zealous scribe that narrative which is the foundation of all our knowledge of the far East.
That narrative suggested new ideas to the minds of successive generations, so that out of it came the conception of a continuous voyage, and the discovery of the Cape passage, on the one hand, and, on the other, of a westerly access to China and the discovery of America. Meantime, the nature and aims of commerce were prodigiously raised and expanded, and those results were obtained which follow from the bringing face to face of various tribes and nations. The first copy of Marco Polo’s travels was made in 1298, and from that time more copies were made and circulated. The more his fame spread, the more decidedly did his captors refuse the great ransom offered by his father and uncle; but, at last, the citizens of Genoa began to be ashamed of so treating such a man, and they successfully petitioned the government for his release. He dutifully tended his father, and raised a monument to his memory; he was affectionate to his father’s second family, by whom the family name was for a short time supported, as Marco had no son by the marriage he entered into at Venice. He left two daughters, and the name died out with a grandson of his father’s. Marco’s will was made after he was seventy; but we do not know the date of his death. What we know about his death is, that his friends implored him, for the salvation of his soul, to confess the lies he had imposed upon the world under the name of his travels, and especially to separate the true from the false in his narrative; and that he swore by his salvation that he had not only told no lies, but reserved in his own breast many things which his countrymen could not be expected to believe. Even this solemn declaration failed to satisfy society at the time, and it has required centuries to establish the rightful reputation of Marco Polo, the travelling merchant of the thirteenth century. Even now there are obscure or unintelligible parts in his geographical statements; but we have learned from former generations to wait for light instead of accusing our instructor. Lapse of time has so confirmed and illustrated Marco Polo’s narrative that we are bound to respect where we cannot understand him; and he may not even yet have attained his full fame.
There cannot have been many other men who have so seemed to themselves to live two lives in one. His Chinese life,—the half of his mature years, must have been to him the most natural and familiar, as he took to it early, and formed his mind upon it, so that Venice must have seemed most like a foreign country. The link between the two was his commerce,—the character of commerce being,—at least in those days,—much the same all over the world; and everywhere it was honoured. It would not have been easy in the time of the Polos to find provincial, or even metropolitan people who congratulated themselves on not being connected with anybody “engaged in trade.”
It is enough to refer to “the Royal Merchant” to whom the traders of London owed the comfort of a shelter, instead of standing in Lombard Street in all weathers, to confer on their affairs. Sir ​Thomas Gresham is universally recognised as the model of a citizen, for enlightenment and public spirit. He had a university education; and then, as in natural sequence, served his apprenticeship as a mercer. It was his study and practice of trade that led him to those financial views which were a fortune to his country. He proposed and proved the policy of domestic, in preference to foreign loans; and this was a greater benefit than even the Royal Exchange. Queen Elizabeth could not have chosen him as the host of distinguished foreign visitors unless he had been a gentleman, as well as a man of extensive knowledge, and a skilled financier. It was a great thing for her, and for England, present and future, that there was a Thomas Gresham, three centuries since, “engaged in trade.”
A hundred years later, when the horror of the Plague hung over London like a pall, a merchant who was thus driven from his business, sat at his writing-table in his country house, recording his notions on commercial matters for the public benefit. This was Josiah Child, a London merchant’s second son. The national mind was beginning to grope about in need of some principles of political economy to lay hold of, and Josiah did his best to supply the want. No man could be expected to find the true standpoint at once; and Josiah Child proceeded on the then undisputed ground of the mercantile system, by which money is assumed to be something altogether unlike a commodity which has a relative value in the market. In spite of this fundamental error, there was so much that was wise, true, and fresh in Child’s writings, that he at once took a high place among the distinguished citizens furnished by trade. He might partly confound cause and effect in treating of the benefits of a low rate of interest: he might take a wrong ground in defending the commerce of the East India Company: but he enlarged the public notion of the scope and operation of trade, and took much trouble to communicate his own enlightenment to society. It was he who also put forth proposals about the relief of pauperism, which showed us in what direction to look when reform became necessary. He thought a union better than a parish, and would have made every pauper work; but, seeing the difficulty of the competition with independent industry, he would have sent all paupers to the colonies. It is remarkable that he advocated a plan of centralisation, and would have established a corporate body of Fathers of the Poor, who should have saved every parish the trouble of its paupers.
Josiah understood his own business so well that he grew vastly rich, and married his children into aristocratic families. He was made a baronet at eight-and-forty; and when his third wife died, thirty-six years after him, above fifty great families went into mourning for her. I sometimes fear that the high spirit of the middle class of Englishmen is not altogether what it was,—seeing how aristocratic connection is made an object of serious pursuit. However this may be, it appears that two centuries ago, as now, the highborn do not object to obtain wealth by becoming connected with persons “engaged in trade.”
While Josiah Child was writing in his country house, in the intervals of news about the Plague, the person who was to correct some of his mistakes was entering on manhood under peculiar circumstances. Dudley North, then choosing his course in life, (or having it chosen for him) had lived among the gipsies in his childhood,—having been stolen when his nurse’s back was turned, and well hidden from search. Nothing could ever make a scholar of him, when he was at last found; but his whole soul was alive when there was any bargaining in hand. He was sharp enough at school about other things than his book: so his father bound him to a Turkey merchant, to be sent abroad. He went north and east,—to Archangel and Smyrna; and the world was much amused by the accounts he gave afterwards of what he had seen and observed. He learned the Turkish language, and gave his countrymen the first distinct notions they ever obtained of life in Turkey. More than this, he studied the course of commerce with such an open mind that he discovered the real function of gold and silver money in trade, and made some of his countrymen understand it when he came home, by answering Sir Josiah Child’s doctrine about interest. It was in 1691 that this revelation was made to the mercantile interest in the “Discourse on Trade,” which has placed Sir Dudley North among the early economists of our country.
It was partly at least to his parentage, and to his being brother to the Lord Keeper, that Dudley North owed his consequence in the city, and rose into some high municipal offices: but the same circumstances, and the political opinions which accompanied them, exposed him to vicissitude in the latter days of the Stuarts. If he had not been an enlightened merchant, he would not have been heard of now: whereas we hear of him, not merely as alderman and sheriff, and knight, but as one of those precursors of a great scientific period who, by sagacity, obtain a premature share of the wisdom which is to be disclosed. He stands in our history as the precursor by nearly a century of Adam Smith in one department of his researches; and this was not by closet meditation only, but by bringing strong observant and comparing faculties to bear on commercial topics; so that it was a blessing to his country that the mind early trained to sharpness by gipsy habits, was “engaged in trade.”
Within the last century the leading merchants of all countries have manifested the same characteristics,—the enlightenment, the brave and shrewd enterprise,—which have distinguished their class in all times; and they have obtained the same substantial power and social consideration.
When George III. came to the throne there was a little boy at Frankfort who did not dream of ever having anything to do, personally, with the sovereigns of Europe. He was in the first stages of training for the Jewish priesthood. His name was Meyer Anselm Rothschild. For some reason or other he was placed in a counting-house at Hanover, and he soon discovered what he was fit for. He began humbly as an exchange-broker, and went on to be the banker of the Landgrave of Hesse, whose private fortune he saved by his ​shrewdness, when Napoleon overran Germany. How he left a large fortune and a commercial character of the highest order, and how his five sons settled in five of the great cities of Europe, and have had more authority over war and peace, and the destinies of nations than the sovereigns themselves, the world pretty well knows. Despotic monarchs must be dependent on money-lenders, unless they are free from debt, and can command unlimited revenues for untold purposes,—which is never true of despotic sovereigns. Constitutional rulers are free from the responsibility and the difficulty, and our sovereigns are supplied by parliamentary vote, and need not stoop to borrow. Yet, there is room for a Rothschild in London, where loans are negotiated for all countries, and which is a kind of central office for the financial news of all the world. In London, then, one of the sons—Nathan—settled. Anselm remained at Frankfort, Solomon went to Vienna, Charles to Naples, and James to Paris. Nathan was the leader, to whom the others looked up with reverence and confidence. He had assisted his father by his admirable ways of investing the moneys lodged in his father’s hands; and he enriched his brothers by his wise guidance, and his generous extension to them of his knowledge and opportunities. He paid and provisioned our troops in the Peninsular War, and reaped the large profits which were his due for such a service; and from that time his fortune became colossal. He will be remembered in the financial history of the empire by his having introduced foreign loans into this country as a financial feature, as Gresham opened to our sovereigns the resource of domestic loans. Before the days of the Rothschilds, an Englishman here and there had invested his money abroad; but the difficulty of receiving the dividends, and the uncertainties caused by fluctuations in the exchange had confined the speculation to a very small number. Nathan Rothschild made the arrangements perfectly easy and regular, to the convenience of borrowers and lenders alike. Sovereigns and empires competed for his countenance, as his opinion decided their credit; and Spain has not yet got over the effects of his quiet steady refusal to enter into any money contracts with her or her dependencies. He was ennobled in Austria; but he preferred his personal consideration to any adventitious rank, and never used his title of Baron. The Member for London is his eldest son. Everywhere in Europe the Rothschilds are regarded as exemplars of the commercial character in its loftiest phase, in an advanced stage of civilisation. Their honour is proverbial, like the word of a king, or the gage of a soldier; their intellectual range is wide; their faculties are keen and sound; and their charities are in proportion to their wealth. Such are the results of a German boy having left the priestly calling to be “engaged in trade.”
The romance of the vocation has not vanished from society with the progress of civilisation. We find in America now the personal adventurousness of three or four centuries ago, combined with the speculative ability which is the common form of commercial courage in our own day. If any reader should here neglect geographical and other distinctions, and confound all American commercial speculators together, I must remind him that the merchants of New England enjoy as high a character for probity, in the widest sense, as any commercial class in Europe. There is an order of merchants in other Atlantic States of the same moral rank, though afflicted with neighbours more fit for a repudiating region, on the frontiers of barbarism: but seats of commerce which have the highest reputation for the virtues and accomplishments of their traders are still in New England. Salem, in Massachusetts, for instance, known in Europe chiefly for the hanging of witches, seems like a European port of three or four centuries ago. There a ship-master puts his elder children to school, and carries his wife and infants on board, to go round the world, seeking their fortune. He starts with his ship in ballast, and steers for some wild place, to see what commodity he can pick up; and he sells his first cargo where he can buy a second; and so goes trafficking round the world, coming home with a fortune in his hold. It entered the head of one of these men to carry ice instead of ballast, and run to Calcutta. The Calcutta people were so taken by surprise that before the ice could be distributed, one-fourth was melted; but the rest brought six cents per lb., which was better than ballast. The next time the customers were more ready; and the price rose to ten cents. Since that time, the exportation of ice has become a lucrative trade; and the lovely “ponds” of Massachusetts afford a field of industry in winter, as striking as the scene of pleasure when the young people go sleighing. The pick and the saw are heard on the ice, as well as the bells of the sleighs, and the laughter of human voices. The celebrated Salem Museum carries one back to old times. It is the pride of every skipper and supercargo to bring home something worthy of a place in the museum; and it used to be the aspiration of every master of a ship to become a member of the Museum Company by having doubled the Capes of Good Hope and Horn. That feat is now so common that some other qualification is probably added by this time. The Salem houses are peculiar in their adornments; rare and fantastic shells, Polynesian matting, shining hempen fabrics from the eastern archipelago, Chinese products in greater variety than the English have supposed to exist, Chinese caricatures of the Dutch in metal, Hindoo idols, and so on, without end.
The great Representative Man among American merchants was, however, not from New England; and we are accustomed to associate his name with New York. He was, however, a German by birth, though his reputation is altogether American.
John Jacob Astor was born near Heidelberg; and there seemed no reason why he should not live and die a German peasant farmer, except his own strong impression that he should be a great man some day. He was one of Nature’s speculators; and his mind shaped his destiny. He went, while still a youth, to London, and earned enough to purchase a handful of commodities with which to cross to America, at the close of the revolution,—a brother being already there. The particular direction of his enterprise was determined by his being delayed, like the passengers of ​several other ships, for three months by the ice in Chesapeake Bay. The passengers of the detained vessels visited each other; and Astor made friendship with one who had with him a venture of furs. Astor sold his own goods, and bought these furs. His mind was fixed on the condition of the fur trade: he visited Canada, and learned the whole history and mystery of the North-West and Mackinaw Companies. It was a great object in the United States to break up, or evade the British monopoly of the fur trade; and Astor was just the man to do it. When, by a treaty in 1795, Canada was permitted to trade directly with the United States, Astor entered into a contract in London with the Great North-West Company for its furs, which he received in America, and sold to all parts of the world. He had establishments on the Canada frontier, and there found that the Mackinaw Company was sadly in the way.
He proved this so clearly that the State of New York granted a charter of incorporation to “the American Fur Company,” so called, Astor being in fact the company. This was in 1809; and in 1811 he had, with some coadjutors from the rival British Company,—the North-West,—bought out the Mackinaw Company, and thrown together the elements under his command under the name of “the South-West Company.” He became the master of all the stations within the American frontier; the United States government countenanced all his plans; and he was building up a mighty commercial scheme when the war of 1812 overthrew everything. Congress would not let Canadians trade in furs within the American frontier; and the Company was dissolved.
Astor had been putting together some separate facts about furs; and out of his meditations grew one of the grandest schemes that ever occurred to a private citizen. A sea otter which had a very fine fur had been found to abound all along the coast of the Pacific. This was one fact. Another was that the Chinese were the best customers for furs in the world, and that they especially prized the skins of this sea otter. A third fact was that explorers, British and American, had made out the Columbia River and Vancouver’s Island. Astor seized on the idea of establishing a set of trading ports across the whole continent, following the Missouri, and lighting upon the sources of the Columbia, and following it down to its outfall into the Pacific, where a mart should be established which would bring Russian and Chinese custom. Small posts were to be distributed in the interior, wherever rivers ran and Indians dwelt; and a coasting traffic which would pick up all that was left. It was Astor who conceived the idea of carrying out an American population, with its resources and institutions, to the Pacific.
President Jefferson and his Cabinet were enchanted with the scheme. They promised such protection as they could afford; but it was a plan which must be worked out by the contriver; and it was little that anybody could do to help him. He had to struggle with the great British Company, and with the alarmed and treacherous Indians, in addition to the risks which always attend colonisation in a barbarous and ungenial territory. He could not be at both ends of his line at once; and his agents were such as he could get. As usual, some were wilful, some were stupid, some were jealous and discontented, some were the spies of the rival company. After a host of difficulties had been overcome, the settlement of Astoria was founded at the mouth of the Columbia; an expedition by land, and the dispatch of a fine ship, the Tonquin, with commodities and a company of traders, agents and interpreters, seemed to guarantee the establishment of a trading colony which would make the Americans masters of the Pacific margin of the continent. But there were cabals and quarrels on board the Tonquin: and, after reaching the Columbia, and proceeding on her coasting voyage, her ship’s company was massacred by Indians, admitted in too great numbers; her last surviving inmate blew up her magazine, with a hundred Indians whom he had tempted on board again, and the surface of the sea was strewn with wreck and mangled bodies. The tidings of the fate of the Tonquin affected Astor more than any other bad news that ever reached him. Yet he had plenty. The land expedition suffered dreadfully from thirst, hunger, and the Indians; and it was eleven months in reaching Astoria in woful plight.
All might have ended as Astor had dreamed and planned, if he could have been present where most wanted, or even have voyaged and communicated by methods familiar to us now. But his mishaps were taken advantage of by rivals and treacherous or ill-judging agents; and, after the persistence of years, after a vast expenditure, and many a rally from defeat and disaster, all was over. Astor’s property was sold to the North-West Company for a third of its value; and the British commander of a frigate was virtually welcomed to Astoria by Astor’s own agent, who had induced the Indians (from among whom he had taken a wife) to lay aside their arms. The British captain was as much disgusted at the whole transaction as anybody, and threatened to compel the North-West Company to restore the value of the precious furs they had conveyed away: but he did his professional duty, which was to take possession in the name of King George, and to change the name of the settlement, from Astoria to Fort George.
John Jacob Astor will not be forgotten there, however. He will be remembered as the proximate cause of our great colony of British Columbia. His furs opened the way to our gold finding. It is not for this that I have sketched his enterprise, but because he is a modern representative of the ancient and perhaps eternal order of enlightened and enterprising merchants, with their mingled romance and shrewdness, ardour and caution, poetry and economy.
He bore his disappointment and loss with dignity, though thoroughly convinced that he was betrayed, and, in that sense, dishonoured. He said he could have better borne an honest capture by an avowed enemy, “in which there would have been no disgrace.” There was no need for him to regret the pecuniary sacrifice; for he had more wealth than he could use. What he left to his family may be conceived of from the incident which happened the other day, when the ​President had sent out his appeal to the Northern States for support to the Government, when the citizen Astor of 1861 placed at the disposal of the Executive a million of dollars as a free gift, and as many more millions on loan as might be desired. One wonders whether the anecdote has reached the hamlet near Heidelberg, where the name of John Jacob Astor may be still remembered,—the boy who went away about a hundred years ago, confident that he should be a rich and great merchant some day.
Harriet Martineau.