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global tr ade and visual arts
in feder al new england
[ Global Trade and
Visual Arts in Federal
New England
——————
]
edited by
patricia johnston
and
caroline frank
——————

University of New Hampshire Press

Durham, New Hampshire

University Press of New England

Hanover and London
 University of New Hampshire Press
An imprint of University Press of New England
www.upne.com
© 2014 Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by April Leidig
Typeset in Granjon by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book,

contact Permissions, University Press of New England,
One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766;
or visit www.upne.com

Hardcover isbn: 978-1-61168-584-8

Paperback isbn: 978-1-61168-585-5
Ebook isbn: 978-1-61168-586-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014934745

5 4 3 2 1

frontispiece
John Payne, A new and complete system of universal geography;
describing Asia, Africa, Europe and America, Vol. 1, New York, 1798.
American Antiquarian Society.
 [ contents ]

Acknowledgments ix

one
Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics in
Federal New England —An Introduction
1
———
part one
Political Geographies
———
two
Caroline Frank
The Art of Tea, Revolution, and an
American East Indies Trade
27
three
David Jaffee
West from New England:
Geographic Information and the
Pacific in the Early Republic
50
four
Amanda E. Lange
The Forgotten Connection:
The Connecticut River Valley
and the China Trade
71
 ———
part two
Commodities
———
five
Jessica Lanier
Salem’s China Trade:
“Pretty Presents” and Private Adventures
99
six
Madelyn Shaw
“Shipped in Good Order”:
Rhode Island’s China Trade Silks
119
seven
Nancy Davis
The Story of A’fong Moy:
Selling Chinese Goods in
Nineteenth-Century America
134
———
part three
Domesticating Asia
———
eight
Judy Bullington
Cultivating Meaning:
The Chinese Manner in
Early American Gardens
157
nine
Thomas Michie
“Lavish Expenditure, Defeated Purpose”:
Providence’s China Trade Mansions
180
 ten
Paula Bradstreet Richter
Fabrics and Fashion of the India Trade
at a Salem Sea Captain’s Wedding
195
———
part four
Global Imaginaries
———
eleven
Patricia Johnston
Drawing the Global Landscape:
Captain Benjamin Crowninshield’s
Voyage Logs
209
twelve
Mary Malloy
Capturing the Pacific World:
Sailor Collections and New England
Museums
231
thirteen
Florina H. Capistrano-Baker
Beyond Hemp:
The Manila-Salem Trade, 1796–1858
251
———
part five
Global Productions
———
fourteen
Elizabeth Hutchinson
Osceola’s Calicoes
267
 fifteen
Anna Arabindan-Kesson
From Salem to Zanzibar:
Cotton and the Cultures of
Commerce, 1820–1861
288
sixteen
Alan Wallach
Luxury and the Downfall of Civilization
in Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire
304

Contributors 319
Index 323

Plates follow page 150

 [ acknowledgments ]

a book such as this is the result of much intellectual exchange and collab-
oration. We are thankful to the many people in our personal and professional
lives who suggested topics and sources, debated ideas, and generously shared
their research in the course of this project.
Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England emerged from a con-
ference supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art in Salem, Mas-
sachusetts, in 2010, and we are especially grateful to Carrie Haslett, Peter J.
Brownlee, Amy Zinck, and Elizabeth Glassman at the Foundation for their
support of that project. Several of the essays in this volume were presented there.
We are also thankful to Salem State University for sponsoring the conference.
It was conceptualized by an organizing committee consisting of Patricia John-
ston, Jessica Lanier (Salem State University), Emily Murphy (Salem Maritime
National Historic Site, National Park Service), and Jean-­Marie Procious (Salem
Athenaeum). The Peabody Essex Museum and the Salem Athenaeum gener-
ously provided space, and the Athenaeum brought out some of its rich historical
collections for an accompanying exhibition. At the Peabody Essex, we thank
especially Lynda Hartigan, Josh Basseches, Jay Finney, Susan Bean, and Karina
Corrigan for inspiring presentations and support with logistics. At the Salem
Athenaeum we thank Elaine von Bruns for her expert guidance through the
collections. Many colleagues at Salem State University were enthusiastic and
supportive of the project, including Lucinda Damon-­Bach, Elizabeth Duclos-­
Osello, Elizabeth Kenney, Benjamin Gross, and Jude Nixon. Pamela Poppe,
Kayleigh Merritt, Josilyn DeMarco, and Rosie Kenney provided the essential
attention to every detail that made that conference a success.
As the conference evolved into a book, Caroline Frank joined as coeditor,
and we invited additional essays to make the present volume more representa-
tive of the range of media that were traded in the federal period and to suggest
the number of distant ports that participated in the exchange with the new
United States. We are grateful to our authors for participating, for their will-
ingness to work with us though many drafts of their essays, and for going the
extra mile in securing images that convey the diversity and extent of the aes-
thetic impact of global trade. Many people at museums and libraries across the
[x] Acknowledgments

country have assisted us with obtaining images and permissions for reproduc-
tion, especially Christine Bertoni at the Peabody Essex Museum, Jaclyn Penney
at the American Antiquarian Society, Sionan Guenther at the Rhode Island
School of Design Museum of Art, Emily Murphy at the Salem Maritime His-
torical Site, Kelly Cobble at the Adams National Historical Site of the National
Park Service, and many others who have extended courtesies to the authors of
the essays. Allison Bennett provided vital assistance in gathering images and
permissions in the final stages, and Gerald Hersh took on the task of designing
the charts.
At the College of the Holy Cross, Patricia Johnston is very thankful for the
support of her colleagues in the Department of Visual Arts and an award from
the Research and Publication Committee. We both thank Arlette Klaric, Jo-
anne Lukitsh, and Lucinda Damon-­Bach for their perceptive reading of the
manuscript. At Brown University, we are grateful to Jim Egan, whose 2009 So-
ciety for Early Americanists conference panel, “Oriental Shadows: The East in
Early America,” confirmed the importance of this topic and gave us initial crit-
ical feedback. Evelyn Hu-­DeHart has supported Caroline Frank’s transpacific
projects at Brown since 2010, and Evelyn’s work on Asia and Latin America
offers an important transnational perspective on our subject. Caroline thanks
the staffs of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the John Hay Library, and
the John Carter Brown Library.
At the University Press of New England, Richard Pult has been an expert
guide through scholarly publishing in the digital era. We also thank the copy
editor, Beth Gianfagna, and the book designer, April Leidig, for their work in
making this a more readable and visually compelling book. Finally, we espe-
cially thank our families for tolerating so many “work weekends.” We hope
the book is worth their many sacrifices. Our sincerest wish is to the keep the
conversation on this topic going.
Patricia Johnston
Caroline Frank
 [ ]
chap ter one

Emerging Imperial Aesthetics in

Federal New England — An Introduction
———
patricia johnston and
caroline fr ank

Securing American Trade with the East Indies

D
ramatic shifts in national identity and international relations
characterized the federal period in the new United States of America.
Perhaps nowhere was this as marked as in New England, where ship-
ping was the backbone of the economy and contact with foreign merchants —
essential for acquiring both necessities and luxuries — challenged prevailing
ideas about the new nation and its place in the world. Before the Revolution,
British navigation laws had restricted American commerce and limited Amer-
ican identity to that of colonial subject. During the early republic, Ameri-
cans, free to style themselves as citizens of a rising imperial state — masters of
commerce — sent ships to Asia.
American leaders urged their countrymen to look to the Eastern Hemi-
sphere. In 1785, John Adams sent letters from Paris advising colleagues in the
new constitutional government to set up an official East Indies trade, on the
model of the English and Dutch East India trading companies. The East Indies
referred to a vast region of the globe east of the Cape of Good Hope, includ-
ing India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, China, and extending into the Pacific. To
foreign secretary John Jay, Adams stated: “There is no better advice to be given
to the merchants of the United States than to push their commerce to the East
Indies as fast and as far as it will go.”1 Adams was expressing a widespread
sentiment during the years immediately following the Revolution. The new
U.S. government encouraged citizens to develop new markets and make their
presence felt beyond the Atlantic.
Others were cognizant that this contact would lead to cultural change as well
as economic advancement. Before independence was even sealed, Ezra Stiles,
[2] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

figure 1.1
Samuel King, Portrait of
Ezra Stiles, 1771. Yale
University Art Gallery,
1955.3.1. Bequest of Dr.
Charles Jenkins Foote,
B.A., 1883, M.D., 1890.
Oil on canvas (34 × 28 ×
1 ¼ inches). (Plate 1)

then president of Yale College, gave a sermon announcing with pride the en-
trance of the United States of America, a new sovereign state, onto a global stage
of great imperial powers. Stiles contended, “This great American revolution,
this recent political phenomenon of a new sovereignty arising among the sover-
eign powers of the earth, will be attended to and contemplated by all nations.”
The 1783 speech contained more than sixty references to India and East Asia.
Rather than looking backward to the bitter war just fought against Britain,
Stiles looked forward, and it was Asia that drew his attention: “Navigation will
carry the American flag around the globe itself; and display the thirteen stripes
and new constellation at bengal and canton, on the indus and ganges, on the
whang-­ho and the yang-­tse-­kiang; and with commerce will import the literature
and wisdom of the east.”2
Stiles, like other educated Americans, was knowledgeable in world history
and the classics. His 1771 portrait by Samuel King depicted the academic and
minister in front of four specific texts: Greek, Hebrew, and Roman classics,
along with a Jesuit volume titled A History of China (figure 1.1). Thus, his choice
of ancient civilizations to represent his intellectual core included China. Other
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [3]

educated gentlemen of the period held Chinese culture in similar regard. The
first volume of Philadelphia’s Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
recommended that Americans model their agriculture and industry after that
of China, “a place of great antiquity, splendor and riches,” for greater efficiency
and results.3
Colonial Americans had great appreciation for Chinese aesthetics and were
drawn to trade with East Asia for access to its luxury goods, but they also saw
the political and economic benefits of interactions with Asia. If Americans
produced or imitated Chinese goods, particularly plant materials suited to the
environment, the Transactions of the Philosophical Society argued, the colonies
would prove “more useful to our mother country” with industries of cotton,
silk, spices, coffee, and sugar. Including the Caribbean within its American
identity, the Philosophical Society hoped that if “the continental colonies can
supply her with the rarities of China, and her illands can furnish the rich spices
of the East-­Indies, her merchants will no longer be obliged . . . to traverse three
quarters of the globe, encounter the difficulties of so tedious a voyage, and,
after all, submit to the insolence, or exorbitant demands of foreigners.”4 After
the Revolution, U.S. merchants were motivated by financial gain, certainly, in
sending these luxuries to England, but simultaneously, each sought to enhance
his own personal and national prestige in owning and displaying Asian fineries.
North Atlantic countries, “the West,” had long been fascinated by Asian
goods, and when the originals proved too elusive or expensive, they manufac-
tured substitutes. Chinoiserie aesthetics swept European workshops and salons
from the late seventeenth century onward; wallpaper, furniture, ceramics, and
other decorative arts imitated Asian, particularly Chinese, materials and mo-
tifs. Colonial Americans followed suit. Boston, in particular, became a center
of japanning, the fashionable technique of creating faux lacquer finishes on
furniture in imitation of an ancient Chinese art also practiced by the Japanese.5
Elite New Englanders readily adopted local chinoiserie as an expression of
global sophistication. Josiah Quincy (b. 1709) owned an elaborate japanned
high chest constructed of native New England timber — red maple, red oak,
and white pine — fashioned by a Boston cabinetmaker around 1740 then dec-
orated by local painters, perhaps in the workshop of Robert Davis (figure 1.2).6
Chinese-­inspired birds and mythical beasts punctuate a landscape filled with
small figures, bridges, and pavilions. These designs were painted gold on raised
gesso forms, spread over a tortoiseshell-patterned background painted vermil-
lion and black. Such motifs originated from Chinese porcelains, lacquers, and
other arts, sometimes spreading to Anglo-­American craftsmen through Euro-
pean pattern books (see figures 2.3 and 2.4).7 In such furniture, the structural
[4] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

figure 1.2
Japanned High Chest, Boston,
c. 1740s. Owned by Josiah
Quincy (b. 1709). Historic
New England, 1972.51. Gift of
Edmund Quincy. Red maple,
red oak, white pine. (84 7⁄8 ×
42 ½ × 23 ¼ inches).

components of the body wholly retain their Queen Anne styling, but are in
effect clothed by the Chinese decoration.
Josiah Quincy was a distant relative of Abigail Adams. The Boston-­based
Quincys built country houses in Braintree, near the Adamses in the 1750s and
then, after a fire, again in 1770, and Quincy’s probate inventory of 1784 records
this chest as furnishing his country house. The Quincys associated with the
Adamses, as Josiah Quincy II (b. 1744) was a leader of the Sons of Liberty and
John Adams’s co-­counsel during the Boston Massacre trials. Adams himself is
known to have furnished his home in Braintree with two japanned high chests
similar to the Quincy chest — an early-­eighteenth-­century flat-­topped William
and Mary chest and a bonneted midcentury Queen Anne one. Both were likely
inherited from previous generations, indicating that the taste for Asian motifs
remained strong throughout the eighteenth century.8
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [5]

Intense desire for Asian commodities, particularly porcelain, silk, and tea, led
to direct Asian trade immediately after independence. In the colonial period,
transshipment through London had been the only legal means to obtain these
expensive luxuries; smuggling them hidden among legal products from the Ca-
ribbean was a less costly avenue. No sooner was peace with Britain concluded
than American ships embarked for China and other ports in Asia and around
the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Within months of Stiles’s sermon, owners of at
least four U.S. vessels had already obtained the capital required for the long
journey to Asia. Within only six years of American independence, U.S. ships
made fifty-­two recorded voyages (probably more unrecorded ones) beyond the
Atlantic basin. By way of comparison, there were only fifty-­six British vessels
recorded in Asian waters in those years, indicating the strong showing by the
United States in Asia immediately following the war. Recent data indicate that
at least 618 American vessels, and likely more, stopped at Canton and Macao
between 1785 and 1814. By 1806, Americans were shipping more than twelve
million pounds of tea from Canton, a quantity greater than what Britain im-
ported that year.9
Benjamin Carpenter of Salem was one such sea captain who made two voy-
ages to India between 1790 and 1794. His portrait, painted in Italy in 1785 while
waiting in harbor for trading to commence, shows a confident young com-
mander with his hand placed firmly on top of the globe (figure 1.3). Dressed
formally, with his linen neckerchief tucked neatly into his mustard-­colored
waistcoat covered by a scarlet woolen frock coat, Carpenter’s gaze engages the
viewer. He was an avid collector of exotic natural history specimens, and an im-
portant founder and donor to the East India Marine Society, the ancestor of the
Peabody Essex Museum. Carpenter’s 1823 obituary relates the legend that he
was the first American commander to carry the new American stars and stripes
beyond the Cape of Good Hope; he then displayed them at St. Helena on his
return. Like other captains of the period, as he carried on international trade, he
exhibited nationalistic “pride of country”; others saw “Undeviating Republican-
ism [that] marked his sagacious and manly character.”10 Indeed, manliness was
strongly associated with Yankee ventures to the East. No longer were Ameri-
cans slavishly consuming expensive Asian luxuries via overlord middlemen such
as the English East India Company merchants. Federal New Englanders had
tremendous pride in U.S. seamanship and unbounded enthusiasm for Asian
imports carried by captains such as Carpenter — qualities that lent the “Old
China Trade” the romantic aura it retains even today.
Carpenter’s voyage logs reveal his geographic and commercial interests. He
noted carefully the best way to enter and leave harbors, the customs of dealing
[6] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

figure 1.3 Portrait of

Captain Benjamin Carpen-
ter, Italy, c. 1785. Peabody
Essex Museum, m351. Gift
of the family of Benjamin
Carpenter, 1880, Oil on
canvas (45 × 36 inches).

with pilots in each locale, the provisions readily available, and their costs. His
goal was the improvement of American commerce, and he tried new routes in
an attempt to find more favorable winds and currents. Carpenter noted that
while English vessels might reach India in four months, Americans experienced
trials of anywhere between six and eleven months in sailing to Calcutta. He
commented, “This I think must be intirely owing to their being unacquainted
with the prevailing Winds. I have indeavored to make my self acquainted and
thus far from experience I will venture to advise vessels from America bound to
India to take a rout rather more advantageous than that which has been gener-
ally followed.” His advice was to stay further out to sea and avoid the “perpetual
Calms” along the coast of Africa.11 Carpenter was convinced that Americans
would build strong trade relations with India and even advocated establishing
a permanent American factory (that is, a foreign factor’s counting house within
a trading post) about thirty miles from Calcutta at the French stronghold of
Chandernagore, which he believed would soon be abandoned in the wake of
the French Revolution.12
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [7]

figure 1.4 Benjamin Carpenter, View of Praya Bay, July 26, 1792, from the log of the ship
Hercules. Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.

Carpenter illustrated his logs with lovely, informative drawings of some of

the harbors where he stopped for trading or provisioning. On his way to India,
he praised the trade opportunities in Madeira and Tenerife for acquiring wine
to sell in the Asian markets, but he could not recommend a stop at Port Praya
(now Praia) on St. Jago (now called Santiago, the largest island of the Cape
Verdean archipelago) unless necessary for provisioning. There, while his crew
repaired a rudder and refilled water, Carpenter recorded the most notable
features of the landscape — the mountain peaks and the fort — in his journal
(figure 1.4). Carpenter’s linear drawing style and alphabetic labeling recall Eu-
ropean maps and engravings of the period. His explanatory caption below the
drawing reinforces his topographical intent. Carpenter’s image was intended
to aid his fellow American mariners, but because he made unique manuscript
images, they necessarily had a limited, though targeted, audience. His work
should be understood as part of a larger geographic education movement,
which many saw as essential to the new American state becoming a significant
player in world commerce.
This “geographic revolution” took hold in federal New England as the United
States sought to strengthen its economic and political place in the world.13 The
postrevolutionary decades saw a flood of maps and geography books come to
[8] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

market, printed both in America and in London, a more established center of

publishing with greater capabilities for larger and better quality engravings.
Geographic knowledge was incorporated into multiple forms: maps, atlases,
geography texts, children’s books, surveying and navigation manuals, histories,
travel narratives, and even literature. Some American China trade merchants
took great pride in their global knowledge. William Fitz Paine of Worcester,
Massachusetts, who traveled all over East Asia in the first two decades of the
nineteenth century, noted scornfully in his journal that, “the hong merchant
seemed as little acquainted with other parts of China . . . as with the Terra
del Fuego.”14
Geographic knowledge became integral to New England education in the
early republic. In the Morse Family portrait, twenty-­year-­old Samuel F. B.
Morse painted his family assembled around a globe in a federal-­style parlor
characterized by classical detailing above the fireplace and along the sides of
the Roman-­style arches (figure 1.5). That the globe was central to this mini­
ster’s family gathering was no accident, as the young artist’s father, Jedidiah
Morse, became a key figure in the geography movement, supplementing his
small church salary with a substantial income from writing. Reverend Morse’s
work ranged from the children’s text Geography Made Easy to the extensive,
heavily illustrated American Universal Geography, or, A view of the present state
of all the empires, kingdoms, states, and republics in the known world, and of the
United States in particular. Morse also wrote histories and relentlessly politicized
theological tracts, but it was his geographies, which appeared in many editions
and remained in print for decades that provided his greatest success as an au-
thor. In the Morse family portrait, the globe and the fold-­over hemispheric map
pulled out from the book — no doubt one of Jedidiah’s compendiums — are the
source of a lesson.
For the Morse family, geographic knowledge was literally the center of their
family activity; the sons often assisted with editing, proofing, and administra-
tive tasks for Jedidiah’s publishing enterprises. But geographic knowledge was
central to others as well. As Martin Brückner has observed, in this image “the
textual tools of geography are highlighted as essential to the education of Anglo-­
American citizens, adults and children” because “geographical literacy served
a symbolic, cognitive, and pedagogic role in the representation of early Anglo-­
American identity.”15 In the federal period, as many scholars have demon-
strated, a primary aspect of that identity involved perceiving oneself as citizen
of an independent American republic. But as Samuel F. B. Morse’s painting
indicates, there was also an intensifying understanding of the new American
nation as not just independent, but as a full participant in a global economy.
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [9]

figure 1.5 Samuel F. B. Morse, The Morse Family, c. 1810. Division of Political History,
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Watercolor on paper (12 × 15 inches).

Jedidiah Morse gently touches a point on the globe, while sons Samuel, on
the left, and Richard and Sydney, on the right, gaze at the topic of discussion.
Mother Elizabeth has put down her sewing to participate, indicating the neces-
sity of geographic education for both men and women.
A sampler embroidered in 1800 by Laura Hyde, a thirteen-­year-­old school-
girl from Franklin, Connecticut, visualizes the exotic locales suggested by the
Morse globe (figure 1.6). No doubt she had studied some of the illustrated ge-
ography texts of the period, as well as literary descriptions of life in faraway
lands. Hyde’s sampler is a fascinating blend of topographic information and
romantic imagination. The two emblems on the upper corners set the theme.
On the left is the symbol of the new United States, based on the Great Seal
of the United States adopted by the Constitutional Convention in 1782. An
eagle with outstretched wings holds a shield with thirteen red and white stripes,
above it a cloud (likely blue before fading) with thirteen stars, and in the eagle’s
talons, arrows (simplified in the needlework from thirteen to three) and a laurel
branch. At the right upper corner is a mythological beast with a long neck, two
horns, and striped mane, framed by a flowering vine and a tree wrapped in ivy.
The lower registers of this sampler continue this bifurcation between the
geographic and literary worlds. On the left is an architectural study of “India
[ 10 ] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

figure 1.6 Laura Hyde, Sampler, c. 1800. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.
Rogers Fund, 1944, 44.113. Embroidered silk on linen (13 × 13 ¼ inches). Image source:
Art Resource, NY.

within the Ganges,” and below the crowded geometric buildings, a lovely land-
scape view of the “Bay of Bengal,” busy with figures in small boats piloting
ships from around the world, one of which — the largest three-­masted vessel —
flies a flag of red and white stripes that may refer to American commerce. On
the right side of the sampler, Laura stitched text and images likely based on
reading the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British am-
bassador to Turkey, who detailed her experiences and observations of women’s
lives in the Ottoman Empire. The sampler’s text tells the viewer that the “Brit-
ish Embassadors Lady accompanied by a Grecian Lady” visited a harem, as
Montagu did many times during her Middle Eastern years. In the right corner
is the image of a woman elaborately dressed in European clothing with two
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [ 11 ]

attendants viewing a line of Ottoman women (three of whom are covered by

an umbrella, a common generic visual symbol for exoticism) and accompanied
by two small black figures, probably slaves. Montagu provided the earliest Eu-
ropean woman’s eyewitness description of women’s lives in Turkey, because as
a female, she was able to gain greater access than other travelers. Though Mon-
tagu resided in Constantinople from 1716 to 1718, her letters were published
after her death in 1762, and in many editions in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Their content would have been current and exciting for
Laura Hyde as she stitched their words and images, and proudly signed and
dated her sampler in the center. Laura’s sampler represents the world as Amer-
icans thought of it in the early republic: a place with great opportunities for ex-­
citement, adventure, and romance, and a place with great opportunities for
commerce and power.

in 1813, Yankee captain David Brown, Bostonian and former commander of

the USS Constitution, claimed the Pacific island Nukahiva for the United States,
naming it after President Madison and, one could argue, becoming the young
nation’s first imperialist. Brown argued that the United States, in fact, “bor-
dered” on China, Japan, and Russia, just as it did on the West Indies. He con-
tinued, “it would be a glory beyond that acquired by any other nation for us, a
nation of only 40 years standing,” to bypass the Europeans and “secure to our-
selves a valuable trade, and make that people [Americans] known to the world.”
Decades of pressure on the U.S. government from New England mariners like
Brown — whalers, traders, and navy men alike — instigated the mid-­nineteenth-­
century official state expeditions into Asian and Pacific waters, but New En-
glanders had been there since the early 1780s.16 John Adams himself had advised
U.S. merchants “to push their commerce to the East Indies” in 1785.
The federal-­era United States, led by New England mariners, forged the
greatest critical mass of transoceanic seafarers the Pacific had ever known, and
they developed a competitive presence in the Eastern Hemisphere immediately
on the heels of independence, just as Stiles had predicted at the close of the war.
New England merchants did not wait for the formalities of European imperial
politics or the crush of postwar economic depression to ready China trade ves-
sels.17 New Englanders’ full participation in global commerce was immediate,
and their success was extraordinary. This swift achievement was made possible
in large part by the Napoleonic Wars. British and French vessels attacked each
other, as did their allies and enemies. American vessels flew a neutral flag and
quickly dominated the global carrying trade, though neutrality was suspect and
[ 12 ] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

did not offer complete immunity from European harassment or pirate attacks.
What it did provide was a unique moment in the history of global capital when
most international competition was sidelined.18

Neoclassical Aesthetics: Republicanism and Imperialism

This new conceptualization of empire was subtle yet deeply entwined with early
American republican values. Americans in the federal period frequently used
the rhetorical language of revolution — desiring to protect hard-­won American
“liberty” and “free trade” at all costs.19 They saw themselves as modeling their
new civil society on the perceived democratic values of the Roman republic, as
referenced by Thomas Jefferson in his designs for Monticello and the University
of Virginia campus. In Jefferson’s view, “Roman taste, genius, and magnificence
excite ideas.”20 As contact with China increased over the federal period, New
Englanders began to class the empire of China with that of ancient Egypt and
Rome, that is, China before a perceived decline. Admiration for everything
Chinese in the late colonial era became more limited as Chinese culture was
increasingly esteemed as “antique,” as suggested by the books lined up behind
Ezra Stiles in his portrait (figure 1.1). Worcester’s Paine wrote in his journal on
Canton, “The Chinese in my opinion have become, whatever they may have
been, much inferior to Europeans. . . . Like ancient Egypt they have made great
advances in knowledge and halted.”21 Like ancient Rome and Egypt, ancient
China symbolized imperial power. These ideas were slowly incorporated into
American visual arts, where republican and imperial imagery began to blend.
Gilbert Stuart’s celebrated Landsdowne portrait of George Washington de-
picts a moment when the world beyond the Atlantic was opening up to Ameri-
cans and the country was beginning its shift from a provincial to global power.
The painting represents the first president in the civilian black velvet suit he
wore for public occasions rather than his general’s uniform, and many of the
symbolic attributes in the painting reference the new American republic, par-
ticularly the stars-­and-­stripes shield on the back of the chair and the eagles with
arrows in their claws on the table, which are derived from the Great Seal of
the United States and placed on invented furniture (figure 1.7). Other aspects
show awareness of Roman imperial conventions. The fasces, that is, the bundled
reeds that make up the table’s leg, symbolized unity, power, and authority. And
the president’s pose with outstretched arm recalls the representation of Roman
emperors as orators; Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, and Augustus Caesar were rep-
resented in a similar pose.
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [ 13 ]

figure 1.7 Gilbert Stuart,

George Washington (Lansdowne
Portrait), c. 1797. White House
Historical Association, White
House Collection, 800.1290.1.
Oil on canvas (95 × 59 ¾ inches).

The narrative moment in the painting may also reference America’s new im-
perial ambitions. Based on careful dating and analysis of the business dealings
of the artist’s patrons, the prominent portrait historian Ellen Miles has argued
that this painting represents the signing of the Jay Treaty of 1794, which ex-
pelled the British from the Northwest Territories, and perhaps more important,
opened up global trade with British possessions in India and the Caribbean.22
The Lansdowne portrait was copied many times by Stuart and others, and it
was widely distributed through engravings. A full-­scale copy of the painting
by William Winstanley was taken to India in 1801 and presented to Calcutta
trader Ramdulal Dey by a group American merchants in order to emphasize
their country’s independence from the British.23
As American arts incorporated imperial with republican motifs, Chinese
references were sometimes blended with the Roman. Components of the Great
[ 14 ] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

Seal of the United States made another appearance in statesmanlike (self-­)

representation in the set of Chinese porcelain John Adams ordered with his
initials (figure 1.8). The primary decorative motif on the set shows the eagle
holding the familiar arrows and branch, but with Adam’s own monogram
clearly occupying the center of the shield where stripes usually appear (figure
1.9). What is strikingly new about Adams’ personal emblem is that the rising
sun from the east spreads from wing to wing, forming an arch over the eagle
with its head pointed west — perhaps a reference to the rise of a new Western
empire and the place of the East in the initial course of empires.

Refashioning the Asian Exotic as American Classical Antiquity

Americans had always viewed themselves as the Europeans viewed them, as
inhabiting the margins and residing in an exotic location. This is evident in
colonial-­era visual culture, in which map cartouches sometimes depicted Amer-
ican landscapes with palm trees, and prints often personified the continent as
Native American even in the late eighteenth century. This identity as an alien
intensified during the war with Britain, and following independence, Amer-
icans worked collectively and regionally to refashion their identity(ies). In a
climate fueled by commercial imperatives and competition with Britain, Amer-
ican shipping-­based communities sought to capitalize on their “proximity” to
Asian exotics — evident in Brown’s vision that the United States bordered on
eastern Pacific nations or in Stiles’s sermon referencing Asia as often as Brit-
ain. New Englanders crafted a Yankee self-­identity that still characterizes the
region today. A Yankee represents an amalgam of ascribed colonial traits and
new aspirations. He is an upstart, a wily enterprising mariner who lacks preten-
tion, but importantly, always comes out on top. In the wake of independence,
this new federal identity recognized America as it always had been, necessarily
global.
Yankee merchants and whalers led the route to Asia, and shiploads of
Asian goods returned with them, comprising in Massachusetts port towns up
to one-­fifth of household effects.24 Such trade goods replaced and augmented
the former rococo chinoiserie aesthetic. They also blended with and informed
neoclassicism, which was the dominant characteristic of federal-­era aesthetics.
Americans had eagerly adopted this style, in fashion in Britain and on the Eu-
ropean continent since the 1760s, likening themselves to Roman republicans,
surrounding themselves with neoclassical architecture and furnishings, and
imbuing the forms with their own meanings. Art historians have usually in-
terpreted such an aesthetic as an American affinity for patrician simplicity and
figure 1.8 (Left)
Milk Pot, China, part of John
Adams’s tea service, c. 1790.
National Park Service, Adams
National Historic Park. Clear
glaze on white porcelain, over-­
glaze gilt (5 ¾ inches high).
figure 1.9
(Below) Monogram on milk pot,
detail of figure 1.8. (Plate 10)
[ 16 ] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

virtue. But Romans were also well known to enlightened late-­eighteenth-­

century Americans for their ambitions and imperial victories.
As a global people, New Englanders could carry their admiration of imperial
prowess beyond classical Roman antiquity to, for a ready example, the Chinese.
This is one of the themes that links the essays in this volume: New Englanders
seamlessly blended Roman and Greek neoclassicism with Asian aesthetics in
their homes, dress, and decorative styles. Their admiration of ancient antiquity
did not stop on the shores of the Mediterranean, but followed their voyages
around the world and reflected a new imperial sensibility that included admi-
ration of very old Asian empires as well, as we have seen in the Stiles portrait.
Federal styles are characterized by clean, conservative lines, subtle forms,
geometric shapes, polished wood veneers, and decorative inlays — a stark con-
trast to the lithe and twisting, carefree and feminine rococo forms of the pre-
revolutionary decades.25 While federal forms reflect classical aesthetics, they em-
body Asian approaches as well. A shift in the dominant style between colonial
and federal design can be seen by comparing two small silver nutmeg graters.
The first tiny object, fashioned by Joseph Kneeland in Boston between 1720 and
1740, advertises its exoticism (figure 1.10). It is heart shaped, a common motif in
the colonial period, found everywhere from painted chests to gravestones. On
this organic form is engraved a leaf border, initials, and a parrot, a reference to
the exotic, perhaps to trade with the Caribbean and South America, places that
were the sources for the household birds. Though nutmeg had been known
in European medicinal and culinary arts since perhaps the medieval period,
and certainly onward from the sixteenth-­century age of exploration, when the
Portuguese, Dutch, and English vied over Indonesian supplies, it was still rela-
tively rare and expensive. This sweet object reflects the exoticism of its purpose
with the exoticism of its form, and its function is easily seen when the hinge is
opened to reveal the grating surface.
A federal-­period nutmeg grater illustrates the shift in style (figure 1.11).
Crafted in the shape of an urn — a very typical federal-­period motif that origi-
nated from classical funerary customs but was used widely in federal America
for its elegant shape and antique references — this object hides its unusual cu-
linary function under a removable cover. Its use to prepare the Asian spice for
the table domesticates the exotic into a classical form rather than playing on its
foreignness as the earlier silver object does. At this time, unlike in the colonial
period, we see an ownership of the Asian aesthetic and its integration into the
overall aesthetic impact of such objects in the early republic. Formerly foreign
exoticism, marginalized on the outer edges of decor as chinoiserie, it is now
figure 1.10 Joseph Kneeland, Nutmeg Grater, c. 1720–40. Photograph © 2014 Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, 55.114. Gift of Mrs. Leslie R. More. Silver (13⁄8 × 1 ¾ inches).

figure 1.11 Nutmeg Grater,

American, c. 1775–1800. Metro­
politan Museum of Art, New
York, 33.120.241. Bequest of
Alphonso T. Clearwater, 1933.
Silver and steel (31⁄8 × 17⁄16 × 11 ⁄8
inches). Image source: Art
Resource, NY.
[ 18 ] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

incorporated, aligned next to the neoclassical styles as itself of a relevant, not

alien, antiquity.
Some decorative objects of the federal period bring the Euro-­American and
the Asian together into dialogue, even if in opposition, as we saw in Laura
Hyde’s sampler. A tilt-­top table from the 1820s, created by Eliza Anthony (who
was probably from New Haven, Connecticut), clearly emphasizes both her
Eastern and Western interests (figure 1.12). The outside border is painted with
familiar general Chinese motifs — pagodas, pavilions, rocky garden landscapes,
and others. The inside medallion and circle is painted with motifs based on the
long tradition of European embroidered floral designs. Anthony’s combination
of two seemingly disparate decorative traditions did not seem jarring to her
audience, for her work won a prize for New York’s American Institute Fair
held at Masonic Hall in 1830.

Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England

The essays in this volume investigate a wide variety of new materials, forms, im-
agery, and aesthetics of both imported arts and those produced at home reflect-
ing the place of Asian aesthetics within federal arts. Though colonial Ameri-
cans had been familiar with some Asian styles and precious objects, the scale of
contact with the Eastern Hemisphere and their imports increased radically in
the federal era. Foreign goods were deployed in many new and different man-
ners. The contributors to this book work in the interstices of global commerce,
visual culture, and domestic tastes in early national New England. Our section
titles organize the material and insights presented by our contributors, but these
headings are somewhat fluid. Indeed, each essay in this volume addresses “po-
litical geographies,” “commodities,” “global imaginaries,” “global productions,”
and ways in which Asian aesthetics were “domesticated” by federal-­era New
Englanders.
In “Political Geographies,” the three essays move us from the colonial period
to the early republic, and from New England seaports to its hinterlands, all the
while connecting with the other side of the globe. Caroline Frank argues that
an event as homespun as New England’s very own Boston Tea Party cannot
be divorced from Asian trade. Only in asserting mastery over the valuable East
Indies commerce could Americans cease being threatened by it and by other
commercial empires. Federal Americans adopted East Indies commodities,
therefore, as a symbol of confidence not conflict. As Captain Brown pointed out
in 1813, U.S. Americans, in becoming a state, gained new neighbors. Whether
they were in Boston, the Connecticut River Valley, or Vermont, they lived as a
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [ 19 ]

figure 1.12
Eliza Anthony, Tilt-Top
Table, late 1820s. Dallas
Museum of Art, The
Faith P. and Charles L.
Bybee Collection, DMA
1985.b.53. Gift of Mr. and
Mrs. Duncan E. Boeck-
man. Eastern white pine,
ash, cherry (28 ½ × 32 ½ ×
32 ¼ inches).

“new sovereignty arising.” David Jaffee’s essay demonstrates that the making of
an American global empire became a matter of geographical definition. The
New England public visualized their place among world empires with maps
and globes, as Jaffee illustrates with his study of a Vermont globe-­maker. For
many Yankees, moreover, settling comfortably at home meant first proving one-
self through firsthand knowledge of “the great sea.” Amanda E. Lange reveals
the depth of penetration of global aspirations in rural New England. By the
close of the federal period, the “Chinese taste” had become thoroughly integral
to fashionable styles in the Connecticut River Valley, as the region’s merchants,
supercargoes, and sailors traded goods and captured impressions of Asian cul-
tures in travel journals.
The “Commodities” section focuses on goods and the process of global trade.
Formal descriptions of the items traded, along with biographical tributes to
American merchants, have dominated the writing on federal-­era foreign trade,
especially the “Old China Trade,” which has been as sanctified as much as the
[ 20 ] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

old New England institutions it bankrolled. With new critical perspectives,

Jessica Lanier, Madelyn Shaw, and Nancy Davis seek more precision in describ-
ing the global movement of ceramics and silk, as well as the marketing needed
to maintain an enticing aura amidst the flood of Asian commodities. Lanier’s
study of Salem, Massachusetts, argues that the economic realities of the China
trade proved more challenging than anticipated. Costs were high, and local
markets were soon flooded with tea and other Chinese goods. Yet everyone
from cabin boys to captains traded in the Eastern aesthetic, to the point that
Salem’s very identity was built around the trade. Shaw’s essay demonstrates
the deep networks of imported textile exchange in New England, circumvent-
ing commercial markets, and thus obscuring easy assessments today of typical
styles considered “Chinese.” Davis’s essay further probes how retailers exploited
American ideas of Chineseness to sell goods. Early in her career, Davis wrote
about the goods exchanged in the Old China Trade, and here she studies the
plight of a Chinese woman paraded before American audiences, sold as living
visual entertainment to market goods by promoters riding on the wave of early
U.S. foreign expansion.
In the section titled “Domesticating Asia,” Judy Bullington, Thomas Michie,
and Paula Bradstreet Richter bring us into the gardens, onto the doorsteps, and
inside the parlors of East India traders, showing clearly the interplay in the fed-
eral period of neoclassical and Asian aesthetics. Michie’s use of the architectural
term compradoric is, perhaps, the most literal example — merging the term for
Chinese house servant, comprador, with doric — to describe the Ionic and Corin-
thian columns on Edward Carrington’s two-­story porch as architecturally evoc-
ative of the hongs in Canton. Bullington makes a similar gesture in discussing
the integral place of the “Chinese manner” in the garden aesthetic of classical
ruins. Commercial interests conditioned New England designers and patrons
to view the Chinese temple as an expression of another “classical” ideal that,
Bullington argues, like its Greco-­Roman counterpart, was associated with an
ancient and enlightened, yet lost, people. The antiquity of China’s culture gave
it equal legitimacy as an imperial state in matters of taste. In the 1801 Salem
wedding of Captain George Nichols and Sarah Peirce, Richter disentangles
the Indian aesthetics and textiles seamlessly present in the otherwise perfectly
neoclassical display in the Nichols mansion on, none other than, Federal Street.
When humanities scholars probe these far-­flung commercial exchanges
deeply, they often come upon more profound expressions of human cross-­
cultural confrontation. That is the case of the three contributors in the section
titled “Global Imaginaries.” Patricia Johnston analyzes Benjamin Crowin-
shield’s logbooks of the 1790s to examine how his writing and drawings offered,
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [ 21 ]

beyond the story of a specific journey, a record of acquired geographic and

cultural knowledge that would be later shared with other mariners to advance
American commercial goals. The drawing conventions the captain employed
derived from a long history of European exploration, but they were used by
New England mariners to convey new knowledge. Mary Malloy’s essay de-
scribes the pioneering voyages into the Pacific and the development of transpa-
cific trade routes connecting the coasts of North and South America, Hawaii,
and China. Boston ships dominated these routes, which exchanged furs, san-
dalwood, and other products for Chinese goods. On these voyages, mariners
collected “natural” and “artificial” curiosities for emerging New England mu-
seums. Florina Capistrano-­Baker analyzes syncretic cultural interactions pro-
duced by the Philippines hemp trade, evident in Hispano-­Chinese textiles and
artwork ordered by Massachusetts merchants residing in Manila who imagined
themselves “gentlemen of the world.”
While the “Old China Trade” has often been narrated as U.S. merchant
mariners combing distant seas for foreign-­produced products to bring home,
often for decorative use, the section “Global Productions” underscores more
integral American participation in global commerce through the cultural and
industrial uses of these imports. The result is layering of cultural interactions
and aesthetics. Elizabeth Hutchinson analyzes George Catlin’s painting of Os-
ceola, a Seminole Indian, and finds New England calicoes made in East Indian
style and ostrich feathers in a turban, exposing an aesthetic globalization that,
she argues, implicated all populations of the Atlantic world. Anna Arabindan-­
Kesson’s essay focuses on the important and oft-­forgotten African cotton
trade, which was a fundamental and ancient part of so many transoceanic
trade networks, including the Atlantic slave trade. In particular, she argues
that the Zanzibar cloth trade, based on New England cotton textiles, shaped
a relationship between America and Africa registered through visual culture.
Kesson demonstrates the raw materials brought back to New England from
Zanzibar contributed to the region’s industrialization. The final essay by Alan
Wallach uses Thomas Cole’s series, The Course of Empire, to explicitly interro-
gate the United States’s own identity as an empire. He concludes that the new
commercial culture, made all the more rich and decadent by foreign imports,
worried many Americans. How could the ideal of a virtuous agrarian republic
be maintained in the face of rapidly expanding global commerce?
In the early years of the republic, direct trade made raw materials, products,
and visual arts less expensive and more available to Americans. Imports from
this trade — lacquerware, ceramics, painting, sculpture, furniture, silver, wall-
paper, textiles, and other media — had a dramatic impact on the early Ameri-
[ 22 ] patricia johnston and caroline fr ank

can culture and politics. Global objects provided styles and themes that eventu-
ally permeated American decorative arts, becoming visual signs of experience,
social status, and economic success. The essays in this volume examine how this
international visual culture help shaped Americans’ sense of their place in the
world, contributing to the nation’s developing identity as a commercial empire.

Notes
1. Quoted in Memoir of the Life of Henry Lee and His Correspondence (Philadelphia: H. C.
Carey and I. Lea, 1825), 2:142–44; and Donald Dalton Johnson with Gary Dean Best, The
United States and the Pacific: Private Interests and Public Policies (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1995), 13.
2. “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor,” sermon given before the Connecticut
General Assembly in Hartford, May 1783.
3. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 1 (1771): xix.
4. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 1 (1771): xxll–xix.
5. The European art of japanning was developed by the Dutch in the seventeenth century
before spreading to England and America. The Dutch had more contact with Japan than
China, hence the term japanning.
6. The attribution and provenance of this chest is discussed in Nancy Carlisle, Cherished
Possessions: A New England Legacy (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England
Antiquities, 2003), 30–33.
7. The best-­known of the pattern books is Stalker and Parker, A Treatise of Japaning and
Varnishing (London, 1688). Twenty-­four pages of engravings of patterns are appended to the
text.
8. The older chest was apparently given to Abigail Adams’s sister Mary Smith Cranch and
descended in her family until it was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1999. Wendy Moonen, “An-
tiques: Japanning Boston Style, Circa 1720,” New York Times, October 15, 1999.
9. James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-­American
Capitalism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 35–39. Jacques M. Downs,
The Golden Ghetto (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1997), 67. Sucheta Mazumdar,
“Slaves, Textiles, and Opium: The Other Half of the Triangular Trade,” and Alejandra Iri-
goin, “Westbound for the Far East: North Americans’ Intermediation of China’s Silver Trade,
1780–1850,” papers presented at the Asia-­Pacific in the Making of the Americas symposium,
Brown University, September 27–28, 2010.
10. Obituary of Benjamin Carpenter, Boston Patriot, September 26, 1823, clipping in Phil-
lips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA.
11. Benjamin Carpenter, Voyage Log of the Ruby, May 2, 1790, p. 146, Phillips Library,
Peabody Essex Museum. Carpenter was supercargo of the Ruby, commanded by John Rich;
he was both supercargo and commander of the Hercules, which left for India in 1792.
12. Susan Bean discusses Carpenter and transcribes the section of the journal of the Ruby
devoted to India in Yankee India (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001), 44–63.
13. Martin Brückner has applied this term to colonial and federal America; see The Geo-
graphic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Emerging Imperial Aesthetics: Introduction [ 23 ]

14. William Fitz Paine, “Desultory Remarks on Canton,” undated (c. 1804–12), Paine Pa-
pers, box 9, f. 6, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA.
15. Brückner, Geographic Revolution, 3.
16. See Allen B. Cole, “Captain David Porter’s Proposed Expedition to the Pacific,” Pacific
Historical Review 9:1 (March 1940); and Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1960).
17. While the Empress of China is credited as the first ship to sail to the East and was fi-
nanced and launched from New York and Philadelphia, the ship itself was built in Massachu-
setts, and the captain and supercargo were from Boston. The Harriet of Hingham, MA, left
for China before the Empress, but sold all its cargo at the Cape of Good Hope to the British,
who were nervous about American competition in China.
18. This is the central argument of Fichter, So Great a Proffit.
19. These terms were common in the early republic; for an example of their usage by mer-
chants and sea captains, see Patricia Johnston, “Global Knowledge in the Early Republic:
The East India Marine Society’s ‘Curiosities,’ ” in East–West Interchanges in American Art: A
Long and Tumultuous Relationship, Cynthia Mills, Amelia A. Goerlitz, and Lee Glazer, eds.
(Washington DC: Smithsonian Scholars Press, 2011), 68–79.
20. Jay Boehm, Monticello Research Report, September 1997. (Charlottesville, VA: Thomas
Jefferson Foundation, 2000).
21. Paine, “Desultory Remarks.”
22. Ellen Miles, “George Washington (The Landsdowne Portrait),” in Gilbert Stuart, Car-
rie Rebora Barratt and Ellen G. Miles, eds. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005),
166–175.
23. Bean, Yankee India, 72.
24. Jonathan Goldstein, Philadelphia and the China Trade (State College: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1978), 2.
25. Matthew Thurlow, “American Federal Era Period Rooms,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of
Art History (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), http:www.metmuseum.org
/toah/hd/fede/hd_fede.htm, accessed November 10, 2013.
 part one

[ ]
——————

Political Geographies
——————
 [ ]
chap ter two

The Art of Tea, Revolution, and an

American East Indies Trade
———
caroline fr ank

A
lthough many historians have noted that one catalyst of the Amer-
ican Revolution was the 1773 Boston rebellion, a confrontation trig-
gered by direct British shipments of Chinese tea, few historians have
asked, why tea? A rich body of visual material referencing both tea consumers
and the far-­off, fabled land of tea’s origin circulated in New England before and
during the outbreak of hostilities with Britain, offering powerful evidence for
a deep-­rooted anxiety aroused by trade with a place called the “East Indies.”
By the late eighteenth century, this term referred loosely to a vast geographic
region stretching from the Cape of Good Hope eastward to India, Indonesia,
Southeast Asia, and southern China, following early modern commercial routes
more than geography. Perceptions of these places drew inspiration from long-­
standing European prejudices and the visual imaginary of chinoiserie. But as
the American dispute with England and the English East India Company in-
tensified in the late 1760s and early 1770s, the art depicting tea and the East
Indies became increasingly political. During the eighteenth century, all legal
trade with Asia within the British Empire was filtered through the powerful
East India Company, a joint-­stock company that received its monopoly directly
from the crown in a royal charter. This essay refocuses attention on the role of
the East Indies trade, and its commodities such as tea, in the outbreak of the
American Revolution.
In a cartoon from early 1774, engraved just as the infamous British tea ships
approached ports south of Boston, Chinese tea chests figure prominently in the
foreground of the conflict (figure 2.1). The contest over the tea with East India
Company merchants, on the left, has transformed Anglo-­Americans, on the
right, from English to Native American — or, to another of the brown-­skinned,
ethnically different world peoples vulnerable to East India Company coloniza-
tion. Thus, losing a battle for the trade in tea, the most prized East Asian trade
[ 28 ] caroline fr ank

figure 2.1 Henry Dawkins, Liberty Triumphant, c. 1774, Pennsylvania Gazette. The John
Hay Library, Brown University Library.

commodity of the late-­eighteenth-­century, threatens to shift Anglo-­Americans

from colonizers to colonized.
Over the course of the first half of the eighteenth century, the English East
India Company’s imports of tea into the Anglo-­Atlantic basin rose 2,000 per-
cent, from a few thousand pounds to three million per year. This commodity
had become critical to the English commercial economy, and all the more so
for its role in promoting another key import, sugar. Tea not only maintained
the East India Company, which alone provided enough capital to the Crown to
sustain the Royal Navy, but it supported the British plantation economy in the
West Indies as well. American consumption of tea rose rapidly to at least match,
if not surpass, its per capita consumption in England. The British government
closely eyed the rise in tea drinking in America, understanding its importance
to the economic vitality of its treasured East India Company.1 Hence the Brit-
ish legislative maneuvers, detailed below, that led to revolt in Boston. But for
Americans, so attached to their teatime, Chinese tea carried more than just this
mercantilist political baggage. The hot debate in New England over tea drink-
ing, or not, carried moral and ideological implications, pitting patriots against
Tea, Revolution, and East Indies Trade [ 29 ]

merchants, republicans against tyrants, Westerners against Easterners, virtue

against hedonism, and ultimately self-­preservation against self-­destruction. In
the dispute over tea, the very rhetoric that would form the ideological basis and
identity of the new republican state was chiseled out.
Popular art played a role in forming those beliefs, and it allows us to see
what Americans envisioned might happen in a dispute with England over Chi-
nese tea immediately prior to a declaration of political independence. The first
part of this essay examines the idea of the “East Indies” in the colonial Anglo-­
American imagination, underscoring the North American colonists’ insecuri-
ties related to the consumption of Asian goods. The second part looks at the
angst surrounding the direct importation of Chinese tea by the English East
India Company. We will see that the anxiety about consuming Chinese tea and
the political resistance to its direct importation by England were closely related.

China in the Anglo-­American Imagination

In 1760, colonial merchant James Beekman itemized a china order over several
pages in his account book. In the margins he grouped items into two categories:
“English China” and “India China.” Beekman was a reputable porcelain dealer
with many years experience and a prestigious customer base that included New
England’s finest families.2 At the time he copied down this order, nearly all
porcelain — real “china”— circulating commercially in the Atlantic came from
China and Japan, never India. Here Beekman retains the sixteenth century’s
crude geographic term, Indies, in a time of exacting geographic knowledge a
century or two later. Eighteenth-­century New Englanders were a people of
maps, who survived through navigation. Yet many such unschooled geographic
conventions persisted in labeling refined Chinese products. “Coromandel
screens” and “Batavian wares” were popular Chinese commodities in Europe
and North America, but none carried the proper geographic descriptor. The
English name for exported Chinese screens was taken from their transshipment
location on the Coromandel Coast of India, and the name for brown-­washed
Chinese porcelain was derived from Batavia (today’s Jakarta), a colony of the
Dutch, who brokered boatloads of porcelain and tea to New England via the
Caribbean.3
Precise knowledge about the Chinese origin of all these products was avail-
able to Anglo-­Americans in, among other means, texts written by Jesuits resid-
ing in China. The History of China by the French Jesuit Jean Baptiste Du Halde
was a bestseller in the colonies and was found in many New England libraries.
Du Halde offered a sixty-­page firsthand description of the production of por-
[ 30 ] caroline fr ank

celain, pointing out, “One piece of China-­ware, before it is fit for the furnace,
passes through the Hands of above twenty Persons, and this without Confusion
. . . after it is baked, [it] has passed the Hands of seventy Workmen.” Yet de-
spite this testament of porcelain’s superior craftsmanship, Benjamin Franklin
proceeded to warn colonial consumers in his 1756 edition of Poor Richard’s Al-
manac, “When you incline to buy China Ware, Chinces, India Silks, or any
other of their flimsy slight Manufacturers . . . all I advise, is, to put it off.”4 The
well-­read Franklin not only carelessly elided Indian products with Chinese, but
he summarily and inaccurately wrote off Asian manufactures as “flimsy” and
“slight.” Despite all the firsthand textual and material evidence to the contrary,
erudite gentlemen like Franklin and Beekman, who owned porcelain them-
selves and knew well its exceptional qualities, obscured the reality of China in
their language.
Though colonial Americans had access to information about the physical
and cultural geography of Asia, they espoused an imagined cultural geography
that subverted accurate knowledge about China and that constituted an Anglo-­
American orientalism. The “East Indies” was an imaginary location created by
Europeans, and reimagined by Anglo-­Americans based on their own precari-
ous geopolitical identity. There had been a long tradition in the West focusing
on two aspects of East Asia, especially China, that distinguished it from other
supposedly tropical, exotic regions. These were wealth and danger, especially
bodily harm or bodily possession. To take a very early example, when Colum-
bus set out across the Atlantic in 1492, he carried with him a manuscript copy
of “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Columbus thought he was headed to the great
Cathay and wanted to be prepared. In the margins of his copy, he inscribed
annotations that highlight points of interest relating to the vast treasures to be
found in China and the extraordinary dangers, including cannibals and man-­
eating monsters.5 For early modern Europeans, such exotic risks were to be
found not only in the wild regions of the world, but as we see here, they could
also be associated with great non-­European civilizations such as China.
In Europe nearly a century later, this view of China, incorporated into the
term East India, had hardly changed. German artists Theodor de Bry and his
two sons completed a series of engravings on New World discoveries (“Indiam
occidentalem” in Les grands voyages) and Asian discoveries (“Indiam orien-
talem” in Les petits voyages), published the end of the sixteenth century. Of de
Bry’s ten images of China, two depict death, and two others show scenes of
idol worship (figure 2.2). Whipping and encaged people figure prominently,
while executed figures attached to high poles serve as background to one of the
torture scenes. That neither de Bry nor his sons had ever traveled to China is
Tea, Revolution, and East Indies Trade [ 31 ]

figure 2.2 Theodor de Bry, IVDICA criminalia & carceres apud chinenses, plate 30, Pars
Indiae Orientalis (known also as Petits Voyages, Pt. II), Frankfurt, c. 1599. The John Carter
Brown Library. Copperplate engraving.

revealed in the European architecture and perspective in his illustrations, but

descriptions of Chinese torture circulated so widely in Europe that he had no
difficulty imagining the scene. European and American fascination with imag-
ined Chinese forms of punishment has persisted into present times and stands
as a pervasive, age-­old backdrop to the Western longing for Chinese products
and East-­West commerce in general.6
Chinese punishment scenes remained popular as integral to an imagined
East Asian aesthetic. This is evident in John Stalker and George Parker’s 1688
manual, A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing, used by amateur and profes-
sional furniture painters alike throughout the eighteenth century. “Japanning,”
a paint, plaster, and varnish treatment developed in Holland and England, was
perfected in the first half of the eighteenth century in Boston, giving furniture
the look of East Asian lacquer. The painter first laid down a very thick, shiny
black coat of paint, which he ornamented with decorative scenes in gold and
pigments, often on gesso relief. Appended to the back of the Treatise is a set of
patterns. One recommended for a lady’s “Comb Box” depicts an Asian official
figure 2.3 Japanning pattern from John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japaning
and Varnishing (London, 1688).

figure 2.4 Japanning pattern from John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japaning
and Varnishing (London, 1688).
Tea, Revolution, and East Indies Trade [ 33 ]

figure 2.5 Wall Murals, triptych of trompe l’oeil painted panels, c. 1720. Vernon House,
Newport, RI, owned by the Newport Restoration Foundation. Photograph by Warren
Jagger.

with a stick presiding over a man prostrate in stocks — a curious motif for the
boudoir! Another shows a Chinese man lying on the ground tied to a spearlike
stake while a European man flogs him with a bamboo pole (figures 2.3, 2.4).
The japanning arts flourished in eighteenth-­century New England, and the
astounding japan-­work of one Newport sign maker offers a fine example. Wil-
liam Gibbs (d. 1728) had never traveled farther than Boston, but he was clearly
knowledgeable about the Chinese aesthetic and made his own contribution to
the prevailing East Indies imaginary. He painted the walls of his front parlor
[ 34 ] caroline fr ank

in the japanning technique, perhaps to show off his skills to potential custom-
ers (figure 2.5). His murals comprise sixteen faux-­lacquer chinoiserie scenes
framed within trompe l’oeil bolection molding and marbled woodwork. They
were painted directly on the walls of the original one-­and-­a-­half-­story house in
dark palate oils and gilding, characteristic of furniture japanning. Three of the
nine longer panels, each placed directly over smaller ones, represent narrative
content with human figures; the remaining panels depict birds, beasts, rocks,
and flowers that are stylistically seventeenth-­century Chinese.7
Gibbs’s murals drew from a variety of sources remarkable in their global
scope, including obviously the Chinese-­made “Coromandel” folding screens.
During the seventeenth century, imported Chinese lacquer and porcelain were
used as integral elements of room decoration in elite European country homes
and palaces. With shiploads of Asian commodities arriving in the West, this
room-­decorating trend spread to merchants, sea captains, company clerks, and
many other people in the middle economic strata of society.8 As surprising as it
may seem, even a middling sign painter in colonial Newport, a small town on
the western shores of the Atlantic, was an active participant in this cosmopoli-
tan trend in interior design.
Unlike some chinoiserie, Gibbs’s scenes are not playful, and even the symbols
considered auspicious by Chinese artists, such as scholars’ rocks and little beasts,
here appear sinister. Coromandel screens in China were specifically designed
to express positive events and good wishes, usually depicting palace scenes in
which elite families gracefully moved between gardens and buildings, or officials
celebrated propitious events like a heroic soldier’s birthday, scenes often taken
from popular literary material.9 Gibbs’s images, however, are indeed dark —
explicitly agitated and violent. Two are perfect examples of Chinese punishment
scenes so popular in Europe. Directly opposite the room’s entrance, in the cen-
ter panel of a triptych, is a man impaled on a very tall pole with a spearhead.
Above him, the finger-­like clouds actually take the form of enormous hands
reaching out toward him. Below four men use spears and bows and arrows,
while another with a large cutlass strapped to his belt stands with his back to
the impalement, arms folded. On the same wall, in the double set of panels to
the left, we see a crowned, seated official presiding over a kneeling and naked
man about to be decapitated by another raising a large cutlass over his head
(figure 2.6). Several other men stand by with long spears. In the third scene
on the adjacent wall, a woman holds a fan out at what appear to be attackers,
approaching by boat and waving spears, bows, and arrows at her (not pictured).
Chinese punishment scenes, as integral to the Oriental aesthetic, were evidently
in popular demand in Newport.
figure 2.6 Wall mural panel detail, c. 1720. Vernon House, Newport, RI, owned by the
Newport Restoration Foundation. Photograph by Warren Jagger. (Plate 2)
[ 36 ] caroline fr ank

There are no Chinese prototypes for the impaling scene. Sinners in Bud-
dhist hells were often depicted in temple art, scrolls, and woodblock prints as
being poked by long spears or crushed by a wall of swords. In the spectacular
Baodingshan rock carvings, executed on a Sichuan mountainside and perhaps
seen by Europeans, a kneeling figure is pierced through by a spear. But he is
not impaled high on a pole. Gibbs’s image might be reminiscent of Southeast
Asian acrobats depicted in Dutch travel books and on export porcelain. Yet he
twisted these cheerful scenes into a threatening aesthetic motif that descended
directly from popular medieval European illustrations of sinister theaters of
punishment. Gibbs’s impalement image is more akin to early German wood-
block prints of Vlad Dracula, the fifteenth-­century Romanian prince who
impaled thousands of invading Ottoman Turks. Images of Dracula’s bodily
violence referenced the East — Eastern Europe and Ottoman Turkey — and
they still circulated widely in Gibbs’s time as characteristic of “the Orient.” The
legacy of such primeval prejudices intermingled with Enlightenment beliefs
in New England, surviving throughout the eighteenth century and beyond in
some corners.10
Despite scholarly intellectual interest in China’s philosophies, language, ge-
ographies, and real people, these subjects were crowded out in America by the
popular visual pastiche of a fairy-­tale East Indies, something at times out of
the Brothers Grimm. We need to take seriously the vision of Chinese cultural
geography implicit in New England japanned art’s gaudy display of random
exotic motifs, oversized animals, weeping palms, doll-­like Chinese fishermen,
pointy tilting pagodas, but also prostrate emasculated men and tyrannical des-
pots. Edward Said’s critique of orientalism has shown us that intimate knowl-
edge of a place becomes power, but at this point America’s role vis-­à-­vis the East
Indies was not yet established.11 In fact, America’s Anglo identity was seriously
in flux and threatened. These colonizers of the North American continent, a
vanguard of the British Empire for a century and a half, were about to be col-
onized themselves by Britain, or more precisely by the commercial East India
Company, making them, as they stated themselves, no better than East Indi-
ans. Until Americans could control Asian trade with the protection of state
power, they did not pay close attention to the physical and cultural geography
of Asia, and China remained a threatening land of despotism and effeminate
idol worshipers.
Tea, Revolution, and East Indies Trade [ 37 ]

Destruction of the Tea

The Boston rebellion against the East India Company tea ships was, in part,
a popular response to the imagined dangers of consuming — as opposed to
controlling — Chinese products, and tea in particular. For Americans, greedy
and powerful East India Company ministers were responsible for the corrup-
tion of the British state. Paul Revere’s widely circulated 1774 copy of an En-
glish cartoon supports such a view (figure 2.7). Here America, a female Native
American, is force-­fed the lethal brew by British ministers, who use tea as part-­
and-­parcel of sexual and military dominance. A goddess, representing their
once-­beloved Britain, shields her eyes from such imperial depravity, powerless
to stop them. American historians have argued that, in the American attack
on the commodity tea, tea was merely a coincidence. Colonists were rebelling
against the tax on tea, not the tea itself, they claim. Again, images such as Re-
vere’s cartoon lead us to question the assertion that tea had only a peripheral or
incidental role. A review of events leading to the so-­called Tea Party suggests
that “taxation without representation” may have been an ideological smoke
screen.
Beginning in the mid-­seventeenth century, the English Navigation Acts
had restricted colonial American trade. Duties on foreign commodities had
always been part of English trade, whether in the colonies or at home. Chinese
tea — and tea came only from China — had been taxed from its first appear-
ance on English soil. In the 1730s, England placed additional heavy taxes on
molasses imported from non-­British islands to protect British sugar planters.
New Englanders were dependent on this trade, and they got around the tax by
widespread smuggling. The Molasses Act was replaced in 1764 by the Sugar
Act, which resulted in some protest, especially in Boston, but the outcry was
relatively mild compared with that provoked by the Stamp Act the following
year. The Stamp Act was a direct tax and resulted in unsystematic street pro-
tests, house attacks, and boycotts of British goods. Notably, there were protests
in England as well as America, as merchants on both sides of the Atlantic stood
to lose money. Also notable was that the local patriots, the revolutionary Sons of
Liberty, disavowed this mob violence. This was a time of economic depression,
and people took to the streets in protests that rarely coalesced in any single
ideology. Patriots did not yet stand unified with mainstream Anglo-­America,
although their rhetoric invoked such popular support.
The Stamp Act was repealed and everyone celebrated, despite the simulta-
neous, unremarked passage by Parliament of the Declaratory Act, which gave
the English government even broader powers to oppress colonists. But no one
[ 38 ] caroline fr ank

figure 2.7 Paul Revere, The Able Doctor; or America Swallowing the Bitter Draught, for
The Royal American Magazine 1:10 (June 1774), Boston. The John Carter Brown Library.

protested. Even before the Stamp Act, other oppressive acts had come down
from London with no unified protests, including the Proclamation of 1763,
prohibiting the colonists from expanding westward; the Currency Act, outlaw-
ing the printing of colonial money; and the Quartering Act, forcing colonists
to house British soldiers and pay their expenses, including their tavern bills.
There had been isolated acts of resistance, but nothing colonywide and very few
protests that cut across class.12
In 1767, using power granted in the Declaratory Act, Parliament imposed
the Townshend Revenue Acts, which imposed taxes on paint, paper, lead, glass,
and tea. Dickenson wrote his well-­known “Letters from a Farmer,” debating
Parliament’s right to tax colonists, laying out a rhetorical structure that would
be used later for grassroots organizing by the patriot elite. Boycotts against
taxed items were initiated in several colonies, but by all accounts they were not
very effective. By 1770, when the duties were repealed, the non-­importation
movement had fallen apart altogether, with consumers quietly continuing to
purchase necessary English imports.13
Meanwhile, the increasing presence of British military, and the provision of
the Quartering Act requiring that Americans pay for soldiers’ bills, resulted in
the 1770 “Boston Massacre,” in which British soldiers threatened by a group of
Tea, Revolution, and East Indies Trade [ 39 ]

rabble-­rousers in the street fired on American sailors and dock workers, im-
mediately killing four young men (a fifth victim died two weeks later). John
Adams, a Son of Liberty, defended the British soldiers against American claims
in court, later calling this one of the most illustrious moments of his career.
The jury of Americans sided with Adams, and the soldiers were relieved of
a murder conviction and sent home. British soldiers could shoot and kill five
American men (one of whom, Samuel Maverick, was the son of a very old New
England family) not only without major protest, but with a concerted effort on
the part of elite colonists to defend them.14
In 1770, the Townshend Duties were repealed, except — curiously — the
duty on tea. Yet, between 1770 and the Tea Act of 1773, barely an angry word
was raised against the tea tax or tea. American tea consumption, and purchases
of Chinese porcelain, continued to climb steeply. Practically no one seemed to
care that tea, and only tea, was still taxed. Perhaps no one protested because, by
all accounts, between two-­thirds and nine-­tenths of the two million to six mil-
lion pounds of tea imported to the colonies that year were smuggled in by the
Dutch.15 Paying taxes to Britain was not the problem. English tea had always
been taxed. No one protested the retention of this tax.
The really big problem arose in 1773 with the Tea Act, which for the first
time allowed the East India Company to directly import tea into the colonies.
The merchants reacted, as they generally did to all navigation legislation. But
what was different here, and what caused the 1773 Tea Act to become the spark
of the Revolution, was the intense level of popular protest across all classes and
across all colonial regions. It was the unity of the emotional response by all
colonists that made the response to the Tea Act revolutionary. Comparatively
few colonists had called up images of despotism and slavery about the previ-
ous laws; they did not provoke meetings of thousands as did this act. Popular
protest and raucous, overflowing town meetings had long been part of colonial
American public life, with mobs sometimes reaching two hundred to three
hundred people.16 But the scale and diversity of participants in the meetings
over the tea ships, in several towns of several colonies, were unprecedented. Four
meetings of more than a thousand people each were held in Boston in late 1773
(November 29 and 30, December 14 and 16), and there were others in outlying
towns that drew more than five hundred people. In Philadelphia, eight thou-
sand people assembled when the tea ships sailed into the harbor (December 25,
1773), the largest single meeting in colonial American history.
Among a sizable lineup of villains in the colonial imagination in the decade
preceding the Revolution, Chinese tea holds the distinction of having been the
only commodity to ever be attacked, the only commodity suspected of sub-
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 "Hang it all!" expostulated the other feebly. "You can't go without
my revenge. It ain't fair!"

"You shall have it sometime, never fear. Good night, Miss Stuart;
we can't afford to peril such roses by late hours."

Again his words fell flat, their only result being that he looked at
her with a flash of real interest. When he had gone Belle knelt
beside her father's chair, timidly asking if he was angry with her for
sitting up.

"Angry!" cried the Colonel, already in a half doze. "No, child!

certainly not. Dear! dear! how like you are to your poor mother." The
thought roused him, for he stood up shaking his head mournfully.
"Go to bed, my dear. We all need rest. It has been a trying day, a
very trying day."

Belle, as she laid her head on the pillow, felt that it had been so
indeed; yet she was not disappointed with it. She was too young to
criticise kindness, and they had all been kind, very kind; even Charlie
had forgotten his first fright; and so she fell asleep, smiling at the
remembrance of the old ayah's bandy legs.
 CHAPTER III.

Early morning in the big bazaar at Faizapore. So much can be

said; but who with pen alone could paint the scene, or who with
brush give the aroma, physical and moral, which, to those familiar
with the life of Indian streets, remains for ever the one indelible
memory? The mysterious smell indescribable to those who know not
the East; the air of sordid money-getting and giving which pervades
even the children; the gaily-dressed, chattering stream of people
drifting by; but from the grey-bearded cultivator come on a lawsuit
from his village, to the sweeper, besom in hand, propelling the black
flood along the gutter, the only subject sufficiently interesting to
raise one voice above the universal hum, is money. Even the stalwart
herdswomen with their kilted skirts swaying at each free bold step,
their patchwork bodices obeying laws of decency antipodal to ours,
even they, born and bred in the desert, talk noisily of the ghee they
are bringing to market in the russet and black jars poised on their
heads; and if ghee be not actually money, it is inextricably mixed up
with it in the native mind.

All else may fade from the memory; the glare of sunlight, the
transparent shadows, the clustering flies and children round the
cavernous sweetmeat-shops, the glitter of brazen pots, and the
rainbow-hued overflow from the dyers' vats staining the streets like
a reflection of the many-tinted cloths festooned to dry overhead.
Even the sharper contrasts of the scene may be forgotten; the
marriage procession swerving to give way to the quiet dead,
swathed in muslins and bound with tinsel, carried high on the string
bed, or awaiting sunset and burial in some narrow by-way among
green-gold melons and piles of red wheat. But to those who have
known an Indian bazaar well, the chink of money, and the smell of a
chemist's shop, will ever remain a more potent spell to awaken
memory than any elaborate pictures made by pen or pencil.

On this particular morning quite a little crowd was collected round

the doorway leading to the house of one Shunker Dâs, usurer,
contractor, and honorary magistrate; a man who combined those
three occupations into one unceasing manufacture of money. In his
hands pice turned to annas, annas to rupees, and rupees in their
turn to fat. For there is no little truth in the assertion that the real
test of a buniah's (money-lender's) wealth is his weight, and the
safest guard for income-tax his girth in inches.

Nevertheless a skeleton lay hidden under Shunker Dâs's mountain

of prosperous flesh; a gruesome skeleton whose bones rattled
ominously. Between him and the perdition of a sonless death stood
but one life; a life so frail that it had only been saved hitherto by the
expedient of dressing the priceless boy in petticoats, and so palming
him off on the dread Shiva as a girl. At least so said the zenana
women, and so in his inmost heart thought Shunker Dâs, though he
was a prime specimen of enlightened native society. But on that day
the fateful first decade during which the Destroyer had reft away so
many baby-heirs from the usurer's home was over; and amid
countless ceremonies, and much dispensation of alms, the little
Nuttu, with his ears and nose pierced like a girl's, had been attired in
the pugree and pyjamas of his sex. Hence the crowd closing in
round the Lâlâ's Calcutta-built barouche which waited for its owner
to come out. Hence the number of professional beggars, looking on
the whole more fat and well-liking than the workers around them,
certainly more so than a small group of women who were peeping
charily from the door of the next house,--a very different house from
Shunker Dâs's pretentious stucco erection with its blue elephants
and mottled tigers frescoed round the top storey, and a railway train,
flanked by two caricatures of the British soldier, over the courtyard
doorway. This was a tall, square, colourless tower, gaining its only
relief from the numerous places where the outer skin of bricks had
fallen away, disclosing the hard red mortar beneath; mortar that was
stronger than stone; mortar that had been ground and spread long
years before the word "contractor" was a power in India. Here in
poverty, abject in all save honour, dwelt Mahomed Lateef, a Syyed of
the Syyeds;[1] and it was his hewers of wood and drawers of water
who formed the group at the door, turning their lean faces away
disdainfully when the baskets of dough cakes, and trays of sweet
rice were brought out for distribution from the idolater's house.

The crowd thickened, but fell away instinctively to give place to a

couple of English soldiers who came tramping along shoulder to
shoulder, utterly unconcerned and unsympathetic; their Glengarry
caps set at the same angle, the very pipes in their mouths having a
drilled appearance. Such a quiet, orderly crowd it was; not even
becoming audible when Shunker Dâs appeared with little Nuttu, the
hero of the day, who in a coat of the same brocade as his father's,
and a pugree tied in the same fashion, looked a wizened, changeling
double of his unwieldy companion. The barouche was brilliant as to
varnish, vivid as to red linings, and the bay Australians were the best
money could buy; yet the people, as it passed, took small notice of
the Lâlâ, lolling in gorgeous attire against the Berlin-wool-worked
cushion which he had bought from the Commissioner's wife at a
bazaar in aid of a cathedral. They gave far more attention to a hawk-
eyed old man with a cruel, high-bred face, who rode by on a
miserable pony, and after returning the Lâlâ's contemptuous
salutation with grave dignity, spat solemnly into the gutter.

This was Mahomed Lateef, who but the day before had put the
talisman-signet on his right hand to a deed mortgaging the last acre
of his ancestral estate to the usurer. Yet the people stood up with
respectful salaams to him, while they had only obsequious grins for
the other. Indeed, one old patriarch waiting for death in the sun,
curled up comfortably, his chin upon his knees, on a bed stuck well
into the street, nodded his head cheerfully and muttered "Shunker's
father was nobody," over and over again till he fell asleep; to dream
perchance of the old order of things.
 Meanwhile the Lâlâ waited his turn for audience at the District
Officer's bungalow. There were many other aspirants to that honour,
seated on a row of cane-bottomed chairs in the verandah, silent,
bored, uncomfortable. It is an irony of fate which elevates the chair
in India into a patent of position, for nowhere does the native look
more thoroughly out of place than in the coveted honour. As it is he
clings to it, notably with his legs; those thin legs round whose
painful want of contour the tight cotton pantaloons wrinkle all too
closely, and which would be so much better tucked away under
dignified skirts in true Eastern fashion. But the exotic has a strange
fascination for humanity. Waiting there for his turn, the Lâlâ inwardly
cursed the Western morality which prevented an immediate and
bribe-won entry; but the red-coated badge-wearers knew better
than to allow even a munificent shoe-money to interfere with the
roster. The harassed-looking, preoccupied official within had an
almost uncanny quickness of perception, so the rupees chinked into
their pockets, but produced no effect beyond whining voices and
fulsome flattery.

"Well, Lâlâ-ji! and what do you want?" asked the representative of

British majesty when, at last, Shunker Dâs's most obsequious smile
curled out over his fat face. There was no doubt a certain brutality of
directness in the salutation, but it came from a deadly conviction
that a request lay at the bottom of every interview, and that duty
bade its discovery without delay. The abruptness of the magistrate
was therefore compressed politeness. As he laid down the pen with
which he had been writing a judgment, and leant wearily back in his
chair, his bald head was framed, as it were, in a square nimbus
formed by a poster on the wall behind. It was four feet square, and
held, in treble columns, a list of all the schedules and reports due
from his office during the year to come. That was his patent of
position; and it was one which grows visibly, as day by day, and
month by month, law and order become of more consequence than
truth and equity in the government of India.
 The Lâlâ's tact bade him follow the lead given. "I want, sahib," he
said, "to be made a Rai Bâhâdur."

Now Rai Bâhâdur is an honorific title bestowed by Government for

distinguished service to the State. So without more ado Shunker Dâs
detailed his own virtues, totalled up the money expended in public
utility, and wound up with an offer of five thousand rupees towards
a new Female Hospital. The representative of British majesty drew
diagrams on his blotting-paper, and remarked, casually, that he
would certainly convey the Lâlâ's liberal suggestion about the
hospital to the proper authorities; adding his belief that one Puras
Râm, who was about to receive the coveted honour, had offered
fifteen thousand for the same purpose.

"I will give ten thousand, Huzoor" bid the usurer, with a scowl
struggling with his smile; "that will make seventy-five thousand in
all; and Tôta Mull got it for building the big tank that won't hold
water. If it cost him fifty thousand, may I eat dirt; and I ought to
know for I had the contract. It won't last, Huzoor; I know the stuff
that went into it."

"Tôta Mull had other services."

"Other services!" echoed Shunker fumbling in his garments, and

producing a printed book tied up in a cotton handkerchief. "See my
certificates; one from your honour's own hand."

Perhaps the District Officer judged the worth of the others by the
measure of his own testimonial, wherein, being then a "griff" of six
months' standing, he had recorded Shunker's name opposite a list of
the cardinal virtues, for he set the book aside with a sad smile. Most
likely he was thinking that in those days his ambition had been a
reality, and his liver an idea, and that now they had changed places.
"I am glad to see your son looking so well," he remarked with
pointed irrelevance. "I hear you are to marry him next month, and
that everything is to be on a magnificent scale. Tôta Mull will be
quite eclipsed; though his boy's wedding cost him sixty-five
thousand,--he told me so himself. Accept my best wishes on the
occasion."

"Huzoor! I will give fifteen thou--" British majesty rose gravely

with the usual intimation of dismissal, and a remark that it was
always gratified at liberality. Shunker Dâs left the presence with his
smile thoroughly replaced by a scowl, though his going there had
simply been an attempt to save his pocket; for he knew right well
that he had not yet filled up the measure of qualification for a Rai
Bâhâdur-ship.

While this interview had been going on, another of a very

different nature was taking place outside a bungalow on the other
side of the road, where Philip Marsden stood holding the rein of his
charger and talking to Mahomed Lateef, whose pink-nosed pony was
tied to a neighbouring tree.

The old man, in faded green turban and shawl, showed straight
and tall even beside the younger man's height and soldierly carriage.
"Sahib," he said, "I am no beggar to whine at the feet of a stranger
for alms. I don't know the sahib over yonder whose verandah, as
you see, is crowded with such folk. They come and go too fast these
sahibs, nowadays; and I am too old to tell the story of my birth. If it
is forgotten, it is forgotten. But you know me, Allah be praised! You
feel my son's blood there on your heart where he fell fighting beside
you! Which of the three was it? What matter? They all died fighting.
And this one is Benjamin; I cannot let him go. He is a bright boy,
and will give brains, not blood, to the Sirkar, if I can only get
employment for him. So I come to you, who know me and mine."

Philip Marsden laid his hand on the old man's shoulder. "That is
true. Khân sahib. What is it I can do for you?"

"There is a post vacant in the office, Huzoor! It is not much, but a

small thing is a great gain in our poor house. The boy could stay at
home, and not see the women starve. It is only writing-work, and
thanks to the old mullah, Murghub Admed is a real khush nawis
(penman). Persian and Arabic, too, and Euclidus, and Algebra; all a
true man should know. If you would ask the sahib."

"I'll go over now. No, no, Khân sahib! I am too young, and you
are too old."

But Mahomed Lateef held the stirrup stoutly with lean brown
fingers. "The old help the young into the saddle always, sahib. It is
for you boys to fight now, and for us to watch and cry 'Allah be with
the brave!'"

So it happened that as Shunker Dâs drove out of the District

Officer's compound, Major Marsden rode in. Despite his scowl, the
usurer stood up and salaamed profusely with both hands, receiving a
curt salute in return.

British majesty was now in the verandah disposing of the smaller

fry in batches. "Come inside," it said, hastily dismissing the final lot.
"I've only ten minutes left for bath and breakfast, but you'll find a
cigar there, and we can talk while I tub."

Amid vigorous splashings from within Major Marsden unfolded his

mission, receiving in reply a somewhat disjointed enquiry as to
whether the applicant had passed the Middle School examination, for
otherwise his case was hopeless.

"And why, in Heaven's name?" asked his hearer impatiently.

The magistrate having finished his ablutions appeared at the door

in scanty attire rubbing his bald head with a towel. "Immutable
decree of government."

"And loyalty, family, influence--what of them?"

 A shrug of the shoulders,--"Ask some one else. I am only a barrel-
organ grinding out the executive and judicial tunes sent down from
headquarters."

"And a lively discord you'll make of it in time! But you are wrong.
A man in your position is, as it were, trustee to a minor's estate and
bound to speak up for his wards."

"And be over-ridden! No good! I've tried it. Oh lord! twelve o'clock

and I had a case with five pleaders in it at half-past eleven. Well, I'll
bet the four-anna bit the exchange left me from last month's pay,
that my judgment will be upset on appeal."

"I pity you profoundly."

"Don't mention it; there's balm in Gilead. This is mail-day, and I

shall hear from my wife and the kids. Good-bye!--I'm sorry about the
boy, but it can't be helped."

"It strikes me it will have to be helped some day," replied Major

Marsden as he rode off.

Meanwhile a third interview, fraught with grave consequences to

this story, had just taken place in the Commissariat office whither
Shunker Dâs had driven immediately after his rebuff, with the
intention of robbing Peter to pay Paul; in other words, of getting
hold of some Government contract, out of which he could squeeze
the extra rupees required for the purchase of the Rai Bâhâdur-ship;
a proceeding which commended itself to his revengeful and spiteful
brain. As it so happened, he appeared in the very nick of time; for
he found Colonel Stuart looking helplessly at a telegram from
headquarters, ordering him to forward five hundred camels to the
front at once.

Now the Faizapore office sent in the daily schedules, original,

duplicate, and triplicate, with commendable regularity, and drew the
exact amount of grain sanctioned for transport animals without fail;
nevertheless a sudden demand on its resources was disagreeable.
So, as he had done once or twice before in this time of war and
rumours of wars, the chief turned to the big contractor for help; not
without a certain uneasiness, for though a long course of shady
transactions had blunted Colonel Stuart's sense of honour towards
his equals, it had survived to an altogether illogical extent towards
his inferiors. Now his private indebtedness to the usurer was so
great that he could not afford to quarrel with him; and this
knowledge nurtured a suspicion that Shunker Dâs made a tool of
him, an idea most distasteful both to pride and honour. No mental
position is more difficult to analyse than that of a man, who having
lost the desire to do the right from a higher motive, clings to it from
a lower one. Belle's father, for instance, did not hesitate to borrow
cash from monies intrusted to his care; but he would rather not have
borrowed it from a man with whom he had official dealings.

Shunker Dâs, however, knew nothing, and had he known would

have credited little, of this survival of honour. It seemed impossible
in his eyes that the innumerable dishonesties of the Faizapore office
could exist without the knowledge of its chief. Bribery was to him no
crime; nor is it one to a very large proportion of the people of India.
To the ignorant, indeed, it seems such a mere detail of daily life that
it is hard for them to believe in judicial honesty. Hence the ease with
which minor officials extort large sums on pretence of carrying the
bribe to the right quarter; and hence again comes, no doubt, many a
whispered tale of corruption in high places.

"I shall lose by this contract, sahib," said the Lâlâ, when the terms
had been arranged; "but I rely on your honour's generous aid in the
future. There are big things coming in, when the Protector of the
Poor will doubtless remember his old servant, whose life and goods
are always at your honour's disposal."

"I have the highest opinion of,--of your integrity, Lâlâ sahib,"
replied the Colonel evasively, "and of course shall take it,--I mean
your previous services--into consideration, whenever it--it is possible
to do so." The word integrity had made him collapse a little, but ere
the end of the sentence he had recovered his self-esteem, and with
it his pomposity.

The Lâlâ's crafty face expanded into a smile. "We understand

each other, sahib, and if--!" here he dropped his voice to a
confidential pitch.

Five minutes after Colonel Stuart's debts had increased by a

thousand rupees, and the Lâlâ was carefully putting away a duly
stamped and signed I.O.U. in his pocket-book; not that he assigned
any value to it, but because it was part of the game. Without any
distinct idea of treachery, he always felt that Lukshmi, the goddess
of Fortune, had given him one more security against discomfiture
when he managed to have the same date on a contract and a note
of hand. Not that he anticipated discomfiture either. In fact, had any
one told him that he and the Colonel were playing at cross-purposes,
he would have laughed the assertion to scorn. He had too high an
opinion of the perspicacity of the sahib-logue, and especially of the
sahib who shut his eyes to so many irregularities, to credit such a
possibility.

So he drove homewards elate, and on the way was stopped in a

narrow alley by an invertebrate crowd, which, without any backbone
of resistance, blocked all passage, despite the abuse he showered
around. "Run over the pigs! Drive on, I say," he shouted to the
driver, when other means failed.

"Best not, Shunker," sneered a little gold-earringed Rajpoot

amongst the crowd, "there's a sepoy in yonder shooting free."

The Lâlâ sank back among his cushions, green with fear. At the
same moment an officer in undress uniform rode up as if the street
were empty, the crowd making way before him. "What is it, havildar
(sergeant)?" he asked sharply, reining up before an open door where
a sentry stood with rifle ready.
 "Private Afzul Khân run amuck, Huzoor!"

Major Marsden threw himself from his horse and looked through
the door into the little court within. It was empty, but an archway at
right angles led to an inner yard. "When?"

"Half an hour gone--the guard will be here directly, Huzoor! They

were teasing him for being an Afghan, and saying he would have to
fight his own people."

"Any one hurt?"

"Jeswunt Rai and Gurdit Singh, not badly; he has--seven rounds

left, sahib, and swears he won't be taken alive."

The last remark came hastily, as Major Marsden stepped inside

the doorway. He paused, not to consider, but because the tramp of
soldiers at the double came down the street. "Draw up your men at
three paces on either side of the door," he said to the native officer.
"If you hear a shot, go on the house-top and fire on him as he sits.
If he comes out alone, shoot him down."

"Allah be with the brave!" muttered one or two of the men, as

Philip Marsden turned once more to enter the courtyard. It lay
blazing in the sunshine, open and empty; but what of the dim
archway tunnelling a row of buildings into that smaller yard beyond,
where Afzul Khân waited with murder in his heart, and his finger on
the trigger of his rifle? There the Englishman would need all his
nerve. It was a rash attempt he was making; he knew that right
well, but he had resolved to attempt it if ever he got the opportunity.
Anything, he had told himself, was better than the wild-beast-like
scuffle he had witnessed not long before; a hopeless, insane
struggle ending in death to three brave men, one of them the best
soldier in the regiment. The remembrance of the horrible scene was
strong on him as his spurs clicked an even measure across the court.
 It was cooler in the shadow, quite a relief after the glare. Ah!...
just as he had imagined! In the far corner a crouching figure and a
glint of light on the barrel of a rifle. No pause; straight on into the
sunlight again; then suddenly the word of command rang through
the court boldly. "Lay down your arms!"

The familiar sound died away into silence. It was courage against
power, and a life hung on the balance. Then the long gleam of light
on the rifle wavered, disappeared, as Private Afzul Khân stood up
and saluted. "You are a braver man than I, sahib," he said. That was
all.

A sort of awed whisper of relief and amazement ran through the

crowd as Philip Marsden came out with his prisoner, and gave orders
for the men to fall in. Two Englishmen in mufti had ridden up in time
for the final tableau; and one of them, nodding his head to the
retreating soldiers, said approvingly, "That is what gave, and keeps
us India."

"And that," returned John Raby pointing to Shunker Dâs who with
renewed arrogance was driving off, "will make us lose it."

"My dear Raby! I thought the moneyed classes--"

"My dear Smith! if you think that when the struggle comes, as
come it must, our new nobility, whose patent is plunder, will fight
our battles against the old, I don't."

They argued the point all the way home without convincing each
other, while Time with the truth hidden in his wallet passed on
towards the Future.
 CHAPTER IV.

Had any one, a week before his daughter arrived, told Colonel
Stuart that her presence would be a pleasant restraint upon him, he
would have been very angry. Yet such was the fact. Her likeness to
her mother carried him back to days when his peccadilloes could still
be regarded as youthful follies, and people spared a harsh verdict on
what age might be expected to remedy. Then her vast admiration
gave a reality to his own assumptions of rectitude; for the Colonel
clung theoretically to virtue with great tenacity, in a loud-voiced,
conservative "d---- you if you don't believe what I say" sort of
manner. He also maintained a high ideal in regard to the honour of
every one else, based on a weak-kneed conviction that his own was
above suspicion.

He was proud of Belle too, fully recognising that with her by his
side his grey hairs became reverend. So he pulled himself up to
some small degree, and began to sprinkle good advice among the
younger men with edifying gravity. As for Belle she was supremely
happy. No doubt had she been "earnest" or "soulful" or "intense" she
might have found spots on her sun with the greatest ease; but she
was none of these things. At this period of her existence nothing
was further from her disposition than inward questionings on any
subject. She took life as she found it, seeing only her own healthy,
happy desires in its dreary old problems, and remaining as utterly
unconscious that she was assimilating herself to her surroundings as
the caterpillar which takes its colour from the leaf on which it feeds.
For a healthy mind acts towards small worries as the skin does
towards friction; it protects itself from pain by an excess of vitality. It
is only when pressure breaks through the blister that its extent is
realised.

In good truth Belle's life was a merry one. The three girls were
good-nature itself, especially when they found the new arrival
possessed none of their own single-hearted desire for matrimony.
Her stepmother, if anything, was over-considerate, being a trifle
inclined to make a bugbear of the girl's superior claims to her
father's affection. The housekeeping was lavishly good, and men of
a certain stamp were not slow to avail themselves of the best
mutton and prawn curry in Faizapore. Where the money came from
which enabled the Stuarts to keep open house, they did not enquire.
Neither did Belle, who knew no more about the value of things than
a baby in arms. As for the Colonel, he had long years before
acquired the habit of looking on his debts as his principal, and
treating his pay as the interest. So matters went smoothly and
swiftly for the first month or so, during which time Belle might have
been seen everywhere in the company of the three Miss Van Milders,
cheerfully following their lead with a serene innocence that kept
even the fastest of a very fast set in check. Once or twice she saw
Philip Marsden, and was rallied by the girls on her acquaintance with
that solitary misogynist. Mrs. Stuart, indeed, went so far as to ask
him to dinner, even though he had not called, on the ground that he
was the richest man in the station, and Belle's interests must not be
neglected though she was only a stepdaughter. But he sent a polite
refusal, and so the matter dropped; nor to Mrs. Stuart's open
surprise did Belle make any other declared conquest.

Yet, unnoticed by all, there was some one, who long before the
first month was out, would willingly have cut himself into little pieces
in order to save his idol from the least breath of disappointment. So
it was from Cousin Dick's superior knowledge of Indian life that Belle
learnt many comforting, if curious excuses for things liable to ruffle
even her calm of content.
 Poor Dick! Hitherto his efforts in all directions had resulted in
conspicuous failure; chiefly, odd though it may seem, because he
happened to be born under English instead of Indian skies. In other
words, because he was not what bureaucracies term "a Statutory
Native." His mother, Mrs. Stuart's younger sister, had run away with
a young Englishman who, having ruined himself over a patent, was
keeping soul and body together by driving engines. In some ways
she might have done worse, for Smith senior was a gentleman; but
he possessed, unfortunately, just that unstable spark of genius
which, like a will-o'-the-wisp leads a man out of the beaten path
without guiding him into another. The small sum of money she
brought him was simply so much fuel to feed the flame; and, within
a few months of their marriage, the soft, luxurious girl was weeping
her eyes out in a miserable London lodging, while he went the
rounds with his patent. There Dick was born, and thence after a year
or two she brought them both back to the elastic house, the strong
family affection, and lavish hospitality which characterise the
Eurasian race. Not for long, however, since her husband died of
heat-apoplexy while away seeking for employment, and she, after
shedding many tears, succumbed to consumption brought on by the
fogs and cold of the north. So, dependent on various uncles and
aunts in turn, little Dick Smith had grown up with one rooted desire
in the rough red head over which his sleek, soft guardians shook
theirs ominously. Briefly, he was to be an engineer like his father. He
broke open everything to see how it worked, and made so many
crucial experiments that the whole family yearned for the time when
he should join the Government Engineering College at Roorkee. And
then, just when this desirable consummation was within reach, some
one up among the deodars at Simla, or in an office at Whitehall,
invented the "Statutory Native," and there was an end of poor Dick's
career; for a Statutory Native is a person born in India of parents
habitually resident and domiciled in the country. True, the college
was open to the boy for his training; but with all the Government
appointments awarded to successful students closed to him by the
accident of his birth, his guardians naturally shook their heads again
over an expensive education which would leave him, practically,
without hope of employment. For, outside Government service,
engineers are not, as yet, wanted in India. He might, of course, had
he been the son of a rich man, have been sent home to pass out as
an Englishman through the English college. As it was the boy,
rebellious to the heart's core, was set to other employment. Poor
Dick! If his European birth militated against him on the one side, his
Eurasian parentage condemned him on the other. After infinite
trouble his relations got him a small post on the railway, whence he
was ousted on reduction; another with a private firm which became
bankrupt. The lad's heart and brains were elsewhere, and as failure
followed on failure, he gave way to fits of defiance, leading him by
sheer excess of energy into low companionship and bad habits. At
the time of Belle's arrival he was trying to work off steam as an
unpaid clerk in his uncle's office when a boy's first love
revolutionized his world; love at first sight, so enthralling, so
compelling, that he did not even wonder at the change it wrought in
him. Belle never knew, perhaps he himself did not recognise, how
much of the calm content of those first few months was due to
Dick's constant care. A silent, unreasoning devotion may seem a
small thing viewed by the head, but it keeps the heart warm. Poor,
homeless, rebellious Dick had never felt so happy, or so good, in all
his life; and he would kneel down in his hitherto prayerless room and
pray that she might be kept from sorrow, like any young saint. Yet
he had an all-too-intimate acquaintance with the corruption of
Indian towns, and an all-too-precocious knowledge of evil.

Belle in her turn liked him; there was something more congenial
in his breezy, tempestuous, nature than in the sweetness of her
stepbrothers, and unconsciously she soon learnt to come to him for
comfort. "Charlie tells such dreadful stories," she complained one
day, "and he really is fond of whisky-and-water. I almost wish father
wouldn't give him any."

"The governor thinks it good for him, I bet," returned Dick stoutly.
"I believe it is sometimes. Then as for lies! I used to tell 'em myself;
it's the climate. He'll grow out of it, you'll see; I did."
 Now Dick's truthfulness was, as a rule, so uncompromising that
Belle cheered up; as for the boy, his one object then was to keep
care from those clear eyes; abstract truth was nowhere.

The next time Sonny baba was offered a sip from his father's
glass, he refused hastily. Pressure produced a howl of terror; nor
was it without the greatest difficulty that he was subsequently
brought to own that Cousin Dick had threatened to kill him if he ever
touched a "peg" again. Luckily for the peace of the household this
confession was made in the Colonel's absence, when only Mrs.
Stuart's high, strident voice could be raised in feeble anger. The
culprit remained unrepentant; the more so because Belle assoilzied
him, declaring that Charlie ought not to be allowed to touch the
horrid mixture. Whereupon her stepmother sat and cried softly with
the boy on her lap, making both Belle and Dick feel horribly guilty,
until, the incident having occurred at lunch, both the sufferers fell
asleep placidly. When Belle returned from her afternoon ride she
found Mrs. Stuart in high good humour, decanting a bottle of port
wine. "You frightened me so, my dear," she said affectionately, "that
I sent for the doctor, and he says port wine is better, so I'm glad you
mentioned it." And Belle felt more guilty than ever.

These afternoon rides were Dick's only trouble. He hated the men
who came about the house, and more especially the favoured many
who were allowed to escort the "Van" as Belle's three stepsisters
were nick-named. It made him feel hot and cold all over to think of
her in the company which he found suitable enough for his cousins.
But then it seemed to him as if no one was good enough for Belle,--
he himself least of all. He dreamed wild, happy dreams of doing
something brave, fine, and manly; not so much from any desire of
thereby winning her, but because his own love demanded it
imperiously. For the first time the needle of his compass pointed
unhesitatingly to the pole of right. He confided these aspirations to
the girl, and they would tell each other tales of heroism until their
cheeks flushed, and their eyes flashed responsive to the deeds of
which they talked. One day Dick came home full of the story of
Major Marsden and the Afghan sepoy; and they agreed to admire it
immensely. After that Dick made rather a hero of the Major, and
Belle began to wonder why the tall quiet man who had been so
friendly at their first meeting, kept so persistently aloof from her and
hers. He was busy, of course, but so were others, for these were
stirring times. The arsenal was working over hours, and all through
the night, long files of laden carts crept down the dusty roads,
bearing stores for the front.

To all outward appearance, however, society took no heed of

these wars or rumours of wars, but went on its way rejoicing in the
winter climate which made amusement possible. And no one in the
station rejoiced more than Belle. Major Marsden, watching her from
afar, told himself that a girl who adopted her surroundings--and such
surroundings!--so readily, was not to be pitied. She was evidently
well able to take care of herself; yet, many a time, as he sat playing
whist while others were dancing, he caught himself looking up to
see who the partner might be with whom she was hurrying past to
seek the cooler air of the gardens, where seats for two were dimly
visible among the coloured lanterns.

For the most part, however, Belle's partners were boys, too young
to have lost the faculty of recognising innocent unconsciousness. But
one night at a large ball given to a departing regiment, she fell into
the hands of a stranger who had come in from an outstation in order
to continue a pronounced flirtation which Maud Van Milder had
permitted during a dull visit to a friend. That astute young lady
having no intention of offending permanent partners for his sake,
handed him over to Belle for a dance, and the latter, failing to fall in
with his step during the first turn, pleaded fatigue as the easiest way
of getting through the penance.

Philip at his whist, saw her pass down the corridor towards the
garden; and, happening to know her companion, played a false card,
lost the trick, and apologised.
 "Time yet, if we look out," replied his partner; but this was exactly
what the Major could not do, and the rubber coming swiftly to an
end, he made an excuse for cutting out, and followed Belle into the
garden, wondering who could have introduced her to such a man. To
begin with he was not fit for decent society, and in addition he had
evidently favoured the champagne. Philip had no definite purpose in
his pursuit, until from a dark corner he heard Belle's clear young
voice with a touch of hauteur in it. Then the impulse to get her away
from her companion before he had a chance of making himself
objectionable, came to the front, joined to an unexpected anger and
annoyance.

"I have been looking for you everywhere, Miss Stuart. You are
wanted," said Philip going up to them.

"Hallo, Marsden! what a beast you are to come just as we were

gettin' confidential--weren't we?" exclaimed Belle's companion with
what was meant to be a fascinating leer. She turned from one face
to the other; but if the one aroused dislike and contempt, the air of
authority in Major Marsden's touched her pride.

"Who wants me?" she asked calmly.

"Who!" echoed her partner. "Come, that's a good one! We both

want you; don't we, Marsden?"

Luckily for the speaker Philip recognised his own imprudence in

risking an altercation. The only thing to be done now, was to get the
girl away as soon as possible.

"Exactly so;" he replied, crushing down his anger, "Miss Stuart can
choose between us."

Belle rose superbly.

"You seem to forget I can go alone." And alone she went, while
her partner shrieked with noisy laughter, avowing that he loved a
spice of the devil in a girl.

Philip moodily chewing the end of his cheroot ere turning in felt
that the rebuff served him right, though he could not restrain a smile
as he thought of Belle's victorious retreat. By that time, however,
subsequent facts had enlightened her as to Philip's possible
meaning, and the sight of her former partner being inveigled away
from waltzing to the billiard room by the senior subaltern, made her
turn so pale that John Raby, on whose arm she was leaning, thought
she was afraid.

"He won't be allowed to come back, Miss Stuart," he said

consolingly. "And I apologise in the name of the committee for the
strength of the champagne."

Belle's mouth hardened. "There is no excuse for that sort of thing.

There never can be one."

He looked at her curiously.

"I wouldn't say that, Miss Stuart. It is a mistake to be so stern.

For my part I can forgive anything. It is an easy habit to acquire--
and most convenient."

Belle, however, could not even forgive herself. She lay tossing
about enacting the scene over and over again, wondering what
Major Marsden must think of her. How foolish she had been! Why
had she not trusted him? Why had he not made her understand?

Being unable to sleep, she rose, and long ere her usual hour was
walking about the winding paths which intersected the barren desert
of garden where nothing grew but privet and a few bushes of
oleander. This barrenness was not Dame Nature's fault, for just over
the other side of the wide white road John Raby's garden was ablaze
with blossom. Trails of Maréchale Niel roses, heavy with great
creamy cups, hung over the low hedge, and a sweet English scent of
clove-pinks and mignonette was wafted to her with every soft, fitful
gust of wind. She felt desperately inclined to cross the intervening
dust into this paradise, and stood quite a long time at the blue gate-
posts wondering why a serpent seemed to have crept into her own
Eden. The crow's long-drawn note came regularly from a kuchnâr
tree that was sheeted with white geranium-like flowers; the Seven
Brothers chattered noisily among the yellow tassels of the cassia,
and over head, against the cloudless sky, a wedge-shaped flight of
cranes was winging its way northward, all signs that the pleasant
cold weather was about to give place to the fiery furnace of May;
but Belle knew nothing of such things as yet, so the vague sense of
coming evil, which lay heavily on her, seemed all the more
depressing from its unreasonableness. A striped squirrel became
inquisitive over her still figure and began inspection with bushy tail
erect and short starts of advance, till it was scared by the clank of
bangles and anklets as a group of Hindu women, bearing bunches of
flowers and brazen lotahs of milk for Seetlâs' shrine, came down the
road; beside them, in various stages of toddle, the little children for
whom their mothers were about to beg immunity from small-pox. Of
all this again Belle knew nothing; but suddenly, causelessly, it struck
her for the first time that she ought to know something. Who were
these people? What were they doing? Where were they going? One
small child paused to look at her and she smiled at him. The mother
smiled in return, and the other women looked back half surprised,
half pleased, nodding, and laughing as they went on their way.

Why? Belle, turning to enquire after the late breakfast, felt

oppressed by her own ignorance. In the verandah she met the
bearer coming out of the Colonel's window with a medicine bottle in
his hand. Did her ignorance go so far that her father should be ill
and she not know of it? "Budlu!" she asked hastily, "the Colonel
sahib isn't ill, is he?"

The man, who had known her mother, and grown grey with his
master, raised a submissive face. "No, missy baba, not ill. Colonel
sahib, he drunk."

"Drunk!" she echoed mechanically, too astonished for horror.

"What do you mean?"

"Too much wine drunk,--very bad," explained Budlu cheerfully.

She caught swiftly at the words with a sense of relief from she
knew not what. "Ah, I see! the wine last night was bad, and
disagreed with him?"

"Damn bad!" Budlu's English was limited but not choice. She
remarked on it at the breakfast-table, repeating his words and
laughing. None of the girls were down, but Walter and Stanley
giggled; and the latter was apparently about to say something
facetious, when his words changed into an indignant request that
Dick would look out, and keep his feet to himself.

"Was it you I kicked?" asked Dick innocently. "I thought it was the
puppy." Then he went on fast as if in haste to change the subject: "I
often wonder why you don't learn Hindustani, Belle. You'd be
ashamed not to speak the lingo in other countries. Why not here? I'll
teach you if you like."

"There's your chance, Belle!" sneered Stanley, still smarting from

Dick's forcible method of ensuring silence. "He really is worth ten
rupees a month as moonshee, and 'twill save the governor's pocket
if it goes in the family."

An unkind speech, no doubt; yet it did good service to Dick by

ensuring Belle's indignant defence, and her immediate acceptance of
his offer; for she was ever ready of tongue, and swift of sympathy,
against injustice or meanness.

So the little incident of the morning passed without her

understanding it in the least. Nevertheless Dick found it harder and
harder every day to manipulate facts, and to stand between his
princess and the naked, indecent truth. Her curiosity in regard to
many things had been aroused, and she asked more questions in the
next four days than she had asked in the previous four months;
almost scandalizing the Van Milder clan by the interest she took in
things of which they knew nothing. It was all very well, the girls
said, if she intended to be a zenana-mission lady, but without that
aim it seemed to them barely correct that she should know how
many wives the khansamah (butler) had. As for the boys, they
rallied her tremendously about her Hindustani studies, for, like most
of their race, they prided themselves on possessing but a limited
acquaintance with their mother tongue; Walter, indeed, being almost
boastful over the fact that he had twice failed for the Higher
Standard. Then the whole family chaffed her openly because she
had a few sensible talks with John Raby, the young civilian; and
when she began to show a certain weariness of pursuing pleasure in
rear of the "Van," insisted that she must be in love with him without
knowing it.

"I don't like Raby," said Mildred, the youngest and least artificial
of the sisters. "Jack Carruthers told me the governor had been
dropping a lot of money to him at écarté."

"I don't see what you and Mr. Carruthers have to do with father's
amusements," flashed out Belle in swift anger. "I suppose he can
afford it, and at least he never stints you,--I mean the family," she
added hastily, fearing to be mean.

"Quite true, my dear! He's a real good sort, is the governor, about
money, and he can of course do as he likes; but Raby oughtn't to
gamble; it isn't form in a civilian. You needn't laugh, Belle, it's true;
it would be quite different if he was in the army."

"Soldiers rush in where civilians fear to tread," parodied Belle

contemptuously. "I wish people wouldn't gossip so. Why can't they
leave their neighbours alone?"
 Nevertheless that afternoon she stole over to the office, which
was only separated from the house by an expanse of dusty, stubbly
grass, and seeing her father alone in his private room comfortably
reading the paper, slipped to his side, and knelt down.

"Well, my pretty Belle," he said caressing her soft fluffy hair, "why
aren't you out riding with the others?"

"I didn't care to go; then you were to be at home, and I like that
best. I don't see much of you as a rule, father."

Colonel Stuart's virtue swelled visibly, as it always did under the

vivifying influence of his daughter's devotion. "I am a busy man, my
dear, you must not forget that," he replied a trifle pompously; "my
time belongs to the Government I have the honour to serve." The
girl was a perfect godsend to him, acting on his half-dead
sensibilities like a galvanic battery on paralysed nerve-centres. He
was dimly conscious of this, and also of relief that the influence was
not always on him.

"I know you are very busy, dear," she returned, nestling her head
on his arm, as she seated herself on the floor. "That's what bothers
me. Couldn't I help you in your work sometimes? I write a very good
hand, so people say."

Colonel Stuart let his paper fall in sheer astonishment. "Help me!
why my dear child, I have any number of clerks."

"But I should like to help!" Her voice was almost pathetic; there
was quite a break in it.

Her father looked at her in vague alarm. "You are not feeling ill,
are you, Belle? Not feverish, I hope, my dear! It's a most infernal
climate though, and one can't be too careful. You'd better go and
get your mother to give you five grains of quinine. I can't have you
falling sick, I can't indeed; just think of the anxiety it would be."
 Belle, grateful for her father's interest, took the quinine; but no
drug, not even poppy or mandragora, had power to charm away her
restless dissatisfaction. Dick's office was no sinecure, and even his
partial eyes could not fail to see that she was often captious, almost
cross. It came as a revelation to him, for hitherto she had been a
divinity in his eyes; and now, oh strange heresy! he found himself
able to laugh at her with increased, but altered devotion. Hitherto he
had wreathed her pedestal with flowers; now he kept the woman's
feet from thorns, and the impulse to make their pathways one grew
stronger day by day. She, unconscious of the position, added fuel to
the flame by choosing his society, and making him her confidant.
Naturally with one so emotional as Dick, the crisis was not long in
coming, and music, of which he was passionately fond, brought it
about in this wise; for Belle played prettily, and he used to sit and
listen to her like the lover in Frank Dicksee's Harmony, letting
himself drift away on a sea of pleasure or pain, he scarcely knew
which. So, one afternoon when they were alone in the house
together, she sat down to the piano and played Schubert's
Frühlingslied. The sunshine lay like cloth of gold outside, the doves
cooed ceaselessly, the scent of the roses in John Raby's garden
drifted in through the window with the warm wind which stirred the
little soft curls on Belle's neck. The perfume of life got into the lad's
brain, and almost before he knew it, his arms were round the girl,
his kisses were on her lips, and his tale of love in her ears.

It was very unconventional of course, but very natural,--for him.

For her the sudden rising to her full height with amazement and
dislike in her face was equally natural, and even more unforeseen.
The sight of it filled poor Dick with such shame and regret, that his
past action seemed almost incredible to his present bewilderment.
"Forgive me, Belle," he cried, "I was mad; but indeed I love you,--I
love you."

She stood before him like an insulted queen full of bitter anger. "I
will never forgive you. How dare you kiss me? How dare you say you
love me?"
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