1 6 Kenneth S. Latourette, 



In 1787 he helped to send out the "Alhance," Thomas Reid, 

 master, on a voyage which attracted much attention at the time, 

 both because of the size of the ship and because of the course 

 followed.-^ An old frigate, she was much larger than the ordi- 

 nary American Indiaman. She left Philadelphia June, 1787, and 

 returned September 19, 1788, with a cargo said to have been 

 worth half a million dollars. She has been popularly reported to 

 have sailed with no chart but a map of the world, without letting 

 go her anchor ropes from the time she left Philadelphia until 

 she reached Canton, and to have been the first American ship to 

 go to China by way of the south cape of Australia !'^'^ Her 

 return temporarily saved Robert Morris from bankruptcy.''^ 



Still other voyages were undertaken. Stewart Deane, an old 

 privateersman, after consulting with Captain Green of the 

 "Empress of China," sailed for Canton in the latter part of 

 December, 1785, in a sloop of eighty-four tons. So small was 

 the vessel that when it reached China it was mistaken for a 

 tender to a larger ship.^- Shaw went out again from New York 

 in February, 1786, as supercargo of the ship "Hope," James 

 Magee, master, and carried with him a commission from Con- 

 gress as Consul at Canton. This office was rather an empty 

 honor ; the occupant was not "entitled to receive any salary, 

 fees, or emoluments," but merely hoisted a flag, did a little 

 routine business, and was looked upon by the Chinese as a head 



-'For accounts and mention of this voyage see Letters of Phineas Bond, 

 Oct. 2, 1788, p. 578. Wain, Life of Robert Morris in Sanderson, Biog- 

 raphy of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, 

 1823, 5:368. (He was copied with slight changes by Oberholtzer, Robert 

 Morris, p. 224.) Parliamentary Papers, 1821, 7:122; C. Dixon, Voyage 

 Round the World. More particularly to the Northwest Coast of America. 

 London; 1789. p. 298; Freeman Hunt, The Library of Commerce, Prac- 

 tical, Historical, and Theoretical. New York, 1845. 1:118; Abraham 

 Ritter, Philadelphia and her Merchants as constituted Fifty to Seventy 

 years ago. Philadelphia, i860. 



^" Her course is certain. 



^'Sumner, Financier and Finances of the Am. Rev., 2:22y. He quotes 

 for his authority a letter of one of the English agents in the United 

 States to Lord Dorchester, 1788, given in Canadian Archives, 189a. 104. 



'"Timothy Pitkin, A Statistical View of the Commerce of the United 

 States of America. New Haven, 1835. p. 245. 



