“These are a Few of my Favorite Things” – Part 1

Lately I’ve been re-reading books I’d read in my youth, just to see how they hold up over time. Catch-22 was a total flop. The same joke over and over. The Great Gatsby seemed like a vast, sweeping drama when I first read it. The second time around it was a sad, skinny tale. On the other hand, Young Men and Fire remained magnificent, as did James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce – the Great American Novel nobody knows about!

After a while, though, I ran out of novels and memoirs that sparked my interest. But why stop there? I began looking into books about maritime history. I’m not talking about Patrick O’Brian – I know those books are still good. Nor am I talking about maritime potboilers, bodice rippers, or rare voyages and pirate narratives costing tens of thousands of dollars. What I decided to reexamine were those good, solid 20^th century books about particular aspects of maritime history, the ones I read as a young man trying to learn his trade. The first one to come to mind… actually, it leapt off the shelf into my hands, was Thomas Layton’s The Voyage of the Frolic, which I regard as the clearest and best explanation of the complex workings of the China Trade.

Layton’s tale begins in 1984, when he and a group of his archaeology students are investigating the ancient remains of a Pomo Indian village, about 100 miles north of San Francisco. In among the buried remains of these people they are surprised to discover fragments of Chinese porcelain. The question of how China Trade goods wound up in an Indian settlement is what drives the tale.

Layton begins his investigation much as a rare book cataloger might have done. He delves into old newspapers, port registries and correspondence and business records held in such repositiories as Harvard’s Baker Business Library. By this means he determines that the Baltimore clipper Frolic, built specifically for the Asian opium trade, had wrecked in 1850 on the Mendocino coast, a few miles from the Pomo village. He unearthed the business records of its owners, A. Heard & Co., which traced the exact mechanics of the opium trade – where it was grown and how it was shipped and sold – in a manner unmatched in clarity and simplicity. In describing the design, construction, and outfitting of the Frolic, the author was aided by a stroke of luck–a slave named Fred Bailey, later known to the world as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, worked in the Frolic‘s shipyard in 1836 and wrote detailed descriptions of the building of such ships.

The Frolic, under Captain Edward Faucon (who was depicted as the “good” captain in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast) plied the opium trade from Bombay to China between 1845 and 1850. The author describes the political, financial, and logistical aspects of the profitable enterprise before 1849, when the introduction of steam vessels into the opium trade made the Frolic obsolete as an opium clipper. However, the California gold rush created a lucrative market for Chinese goods, and the Heard firm dispatched the Frolic to San Francisco with a diverse cargo that included silks, porcelain, jewelry, and furniture. When the Frolic wrecked on the Mendocino coast, the Pomo Indians salvaged its cargo, and the vessel’s history passed into folk tradition.

In terms of the information it contains, and the manner in which this information is presented, The Voyage of the Frolic is an invaluable resource. In terms of its “commercial” value, copies can be obtained online for as little as $3.