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The Recent Rediscovery of John Leslie Breck, Boston Impressionist

John Leslie Breck was a gifted artist on the verge of fame when he took his own life at the age of 39. His sunny Impressionist paintings give no hint of whatever might have caused him to commit suicide.

There are, however, his other pictures: the nocturnes. Those canvases painted by moonlight suggest dark nights of the soul.

Breck brought Impressionism to Boston, but he died before the style took firm hold in America.

His many unsold paintings, which passed through his family, reappeared in several American museums starting in 2021 – for the first time in 120 years.

John Leslie Breck

He was born on a clipper ship in the South Pacific on April 10, 1860, the son of Joseph Berry Breck, a shipmaster in the China trade, and his second wife, Ellen Frances Newell.

John Leslie Breck was still a toddler when the Civil War broke out. His father volunteered for military service and advanced rapidly, ending his service as lieutenant commander. But shortly after the war ended, he came down with tuberculosis and died in San Francisco.

Poppies by John Leslie Breck

The couple had twin daughters who died in infancy and a younger son, Edward, born in San Francisco. Edward became a scholar, a journalist, a spy and a golf champion.

After the death of Joseph Breck, the family moved to Newton, Mass., and John Leslie attended Governor Dummer Academy for a while. In 1878, Ellen Breck brought her two sons to a gymnasium in Leipzig to study. John Leslie went on to study art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

He returned to the United States in 1882. His mother remarried the next year at the age of 43. Her second husband, Frederic William Rice, was a native of Newton, Mass. He was 10 years younger than she and only 10 years older than John Leslie. Frederic, though, died two years after the marriage. She usually accompanied her son on his travels.

Move to Giverny

By 1886 John Leslie Breck was studying at the Academie Julian in Paris. In the spring of 1887, he and some of his fellow students were trying to find someplace new to go in the summer. They decided to try Pont del-Arche and off they went. They had to change trains at Vernon, but from there they spied a lovely little village with white houses and a Norman church — Giverny. They came back the next day.

Farmhouses at Giverny by John Leslie Breck

Four years earlier, Claude Monet had moved to Giverny just as he started to find success as a painter. After a while, the artists who followed him there began to annoy him. He once said,

…When I first came to Giverny I was quite alone, the little village was unspoiled. Now, so many artists, students, flock here, I have often thought of moving away…

He had Breck to blame, for he promoted the village among his fellow American students.

It took just one summer for the nascent art colony to attract notice. That October, a critic for The Art Amateur recognized “quite an American colony has gathered, I am told, at Givernay [sic].” Along with John Leslie Breck, the anonymous critic mentioned Monet, Willard Metcalf and Theodore Robinson.

“ A few pictures just received from these young men show that they have got the blue-green color of Monet’s impressionism and ‘got it bad.'”

More Monet

Unlike the others, Breck stayed the winter in Giverny, and Monet invited him to paint in his garden. Monet said to him,

I won’t give you lessons….we’ll wander about the fields and woods and paint together.

And just as Monet did, he painted a series of haystacks.

Morning Fog and Sun by John Leslie Breck

But then he had a falling out with the great artist because he fell in love with his step-daughter, Blanche Hoschede. Monet forbade the relationship and Breck left Giverny.

By 1889, he was living in Paris with his mother.

Back in the USA

He returned to Boston in 1890, where he was called the head of the Impressionists. He held a one-man show credited with bringing Impressionism to Boston, which gave the old guard a chance to make fun.

Breck and his friend Ross Turner set up a studio in Turner’s home in Salem. A story in the 1890 Boston Transcript suggests the dim view the Boston establishment took of Impressionism. “Ross Turner and John Leslie Breck have returned to this country from foreign parts, and threaten to form a class for out-of-door work in painting at Salem during the month of June,” reported the Transcript.

[W]e may as well be prepared for anything and everything when he lets loose a flock of sweet girl graduates, duly inoculated with the impressionistic visual virus, whose landscapes may blend the charms of amateurishness with those of other kinds of incoherence, “till all is blue.”

In the Valley of the Seine by John Leslie Breck

That same year, he held a one-man show at the prestigious St. Botolph’s Club show. He did it with help from his friend Lilla Cabot Perry, another expatriate who had lived in Giverny and who Monet actually liked.

He returned to France around 1890-91 and painted in England for a while. Then he resettled in the Auburndale village of Newton.

John Leslie Breck in Venice

In 1897, he visited Venice with his mother and his brother, first stopping in Germany to watch his brother compete in a fencing competition. He showed his work in Berlin in 1897, then went to Venice. His time in Venice resulted in more than 25 paintings.

After Venice, little is known about Breck until he took his own life on March 18, 1899. His obituary stated a show of his work was scheduled to open the next day. But Royal W. Leith, in The Magazine Antiques, doubts anyone ever planned such an exhibit.

Giudecca Canal with Fish Baskets, by John Leslie Breck

[A]s Breck appeared to have taken his own life, his friends and family were at pains to dispel rumors of suicide by implying that he was looking forward to a bright future.

Some of those paintings were shown in the two memorial exhibitions after his death, the first at the St. Botolph Club in Boston and the second at the National Arts Club in New York.

Santa Maria Della Salute by Moonlight

A large-scale exhibition of Breck’s work, the first in 120 years, was held at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., in 2021; then the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis from Jan. 22-March 27, 2022; and the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, May 28-Aug. 21, 2022.

Thanks to Anonymous, “Boston Art and Artists,” The Art Amateur, 17, no. 5, October 1887, p. 93, as quoted in R.H. Love, Theodore Earl Butler: Emergence from Monet’s Shadow, Chicago, Illinois, 1985, p. 59. Thanks also to Streets of Salem.

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John William Sterling, a Well-Respected Man With a Secret

John William Sterling was a corporate lawyer during the Gilded Age, a conservative, upper-class businessman, the kind of man the Kinks describe as “a well-respected man about town.”

John William Sterling

In 1911, his name and resume appeared in Distinguished successful Americans of our day. From it we learn he graduated with honors from Yale College and Columbia Law School. He advised railroad barons in building and dismantling railroads, and he served on the boards of nine large banks and gas companies. Appropriately for a man of his stature, he devoted his time to philanthropy—prestigious charities, the kind people noticed. Eminently clubbable, he belonged to the exclusive Metropolitan, Union and American Yacht clubs.

Like the Kinks’ well-respected man, John William Sterling lived in a world built around punctuality. A Wall Street Journal correspondent described him as, “almost taciturn, and excessively devoted to his profession. He sat before his desk every morning, not later than eight o’clock, and was usually the last one in the office to close the desk and go home.”

That same correspondent also noted he had an unusual relationship that was ‘often spoken of and commented upon.’ That relationship was with a cotton broker named James O. Bloss.

John William Sterling

He was born in Stratford, Conn., on May 12, 1844. His father, also John William Sterling, was captain of the Splendid, one of the largest clipper ships during the China Trade. His mother, Catherine Plant, belonged to a prominent Stratford family; her father, David, served as a U.S. congressman and as the state’s lieutenant governor. His parents both had ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower.

Sterling Homestead

He studied at Stratford Academy, where he probably knew another young man who would lead his entire life as a bachelor, James Buchanan Mitchell. Graduating as class valedictorian, he entered Yale as the Civil War broke out.

Jonathan Ned Katz, a historian of human sexuality, notes in an essay that Sterling slept with Mitchell at Yale. His journal in September-October 1862 records: “I slept with Jim Mitchell last night an.” Katz suggests they had an ongoing relationship, as Sterling and Mitchell both chose to attend Columbia Law School.

Sterling and classmate at Yale.

His sleeping with Jim Mitchell may not have aroused much comment, wrote Katz, or at least it didn’t arouse much suspicion about what went on.

At Yale, Sterling belonged to Skull and Bones. He graduated with honors from Yale in 1864 and then from Columbia Law School in 1867 as class valedictorian.

Soon after his admission to the bar that year, he met a young cotton broker about his own age, James O. Bloss. Bloss also came from an old New England family, though he grew up in Rochester, N.Y.

Three lines of poetry clipped from the New York Times and pasted into the back of his Commonplace Book suggest Sterling’s feelings toward the man he called “Blossy.”

Once more I give me body and soul to thee,
Who hast my soul for ever: cliff and sand
Recede, and heart to heart once more are we.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote those lines in his poem “In Guernsey / To Theodore Watts.”

In 1872 John William Sterling and James O. Bloss went house-hunting, and they settled on 21 West 25^th St. They would live together for nearly 50 years.

Partners

John William Sterling rocketed to the top of the then-burgeoning corporate world. He went to work as a clerk in a New York law firm and made partner in 1870. Three years later he had his name on the door as a partner in Shearman & Sterling. He advised another close friend, James Stillman, chairman of the board of National City Bank, then the nation’s largest. (Stillman’s great-grandson, Whit Stillman, is an Academy Award-nominated film director.)

Sterling also advised William Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil and H.H. Rogers, whose firm merged with Standard Oil, as well as railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.

He once said the ideal client is ‘a very wealthy man in very great trouble.’ His clients paid him handsomely for his advice, and he made a fortune.

The Sterling mansion, now a community center

In 1886, Sterling built a stately mansion, Sterling House, in Stratford, presumably a weekend house he shared with his sisters. Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the Sterling mansion, now the Sterling House Community Center.

By 1890 he and Blossy moved uptown to 221 East 47^th St., where they had four servants. Eventually they moved to 912 Fifth Ave., overlooking Central Park.

Neuroticism

Sterling clearly valued his reputation as a man of means and prominence in society. And so as Katz points out, ‘his contravention of society’s marital standard, and, perhaps, its sexual proprieties, would have been a profound source of conflict and anxiety.’

His mother was said to be happy her son didn’t inherit his father’s love of the sea. Actually, he had more than a touch of hydrophobia. He had a ‘deep-rooted antipathy to the ocean,’ wrote John Anson Garver in a biographical sketch of Sterling. He didn’t even like to take ferries, and never traveled abroad.

Anson Phelps Stokes, secretary to Yale after 1899, recalled that Sterling wouldn’t go to bed until the housekeeper poked the closet with a stick and looked under the bed to make sure there were no burglars. He had iron bars on his bedroom window and an iron door with an electric lock he controlled with a button by his bedside. Bloss slept in the room with him and his valet in an adjoining bedroom.

In Harriman vs. Hill, author Larry Haeg describes Sterling as a chain-smoking, fast walker with a fear of public speaking and a penchant for scheduling meetings at odd minutes, like 3:17 p.m. He ate dinner in the same chair at the same table six nights a week at the Union Club.

He also locked his office at work and always paid for his investments in cash. That made him a very wealthy man.

A Strange Postscript

John William Sterling died suddenly in Canada on July 5, 1918. He left $18 million to Yale and the rest to Blossy, who he named as executor of his estate.

That caused a bit of trouble. Bloss died five months later, on Dec. 15, 1918, without having completely executed the will.

Further, Sterling had died before he could execute the will of another wealthy man, his friend James Stillman, who died March 15, 1918. And Stillman had been named executor of the estate of James Gordon Bennett, who died May 14, 1918.

The first three men who died left $75 million.

Eventually Yale got its money, the largest bequest to a university up to that time.

Sterling’s gift was used to build Yale’s Law School, the Divinity School quadrangle, a School of Medicine, the Hall of Graduate Studies and the Sterling Memorial Library. He also endowed the Sterling professorships, who have included such notables as William O. Douglas, Wilbur Cross, Harold Bloom, Edmund Morgan and Paul de Man.

With thanks to Jonathan Ned Katz, “An Understanding…Held Them Together“

NRHP: Sterling Homestead By Doug Kerr – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/6439034575/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44722867; Sterling House Community Center By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/all-towns-and-cities/stratford-ct/stratfordsterlinghouse.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29522854. This story was updated in 2022.

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Why Connecticut Sent Henry Obookiah Back To Hawaii, 175 Years After He Died

Henry Obookiah, a young Hawaiian, caused a stir in the spring of 1815 when he sat in front of the white worshippers at the Church of Christ Congregational in Torringford, Conn. Parishioners preferred Henry to sit in the slave pews high up in the back gallery, where the white people wouldn’t have to see people of color.

Henry Obookiah

The Rev. Samuel Mills, however, insisted that Henry Obookiah remain seated up front. He had taken the young man under his wing and loved him like a son. Henry found solace in Christianity after leaving his native land suffering tremendous guilt. Twice he had survived when his family met cruel, violent deaths.

At the time, a debate raged over whether heathens like Henry Obookiah could comprehend the Bible. Henry ended that debate with his intellect, charisma and work ethic. His conversion to Christianity would inspire many New England Christians to pour money and effort into missionary work in Hawaii. That work would ultimately result in Hawaii’s annexation to the United States.

Henry Obookiah

Henry Obookiah was born around 1792 (though possibly earlier) in Ninole along the southern coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. His Hawaiian name, ‘Opukaha’ia, was Anglicanized to Obookiah when he lived in Connecticut.

He was descended from a family of Hilo chiefs, and his family ranked somewhere between royalty and commoner.

Henry grew up in the small village learning to fish, swim and memorize family lore. In 1796, King Kamehameha’s warriors invaded the island and slaughtered the village’s defenders. Henry Obookiah and his family fled to the mountains, but Kamehameha’s men captured and tortured his mother and father before his eyes.

King Kamehameha

Their blood spattered his body as he watched the warriors mutilate his parents with sharp knives. Suddenly he grabbed his infant brother and ran for his life. But a spear impaled the baby and knocked Henry to the ground. The warrior who murdered his parents captured Henry and took him home as his personal slave.

For years Henry wrestled with survivors’ guilt, tormented by the questions of why he survived and what he should have done differently.

Kahuna

Henry’s uncle, a kahuna, or priest, came upon his nephew while traveling around the island collecting tribute. The uncle’s authority outweighed that of Henry’s master, and he took Henry away with him to train as a kahuna. Henry studied hard and memorized long litanies to ask the gods for good weather and protection from tsunamis, volcanoes and earthquakes.

While studying for the priesthood, Henry Obookiah learned of an aunt in a nearby village. He didn’t know his aunt had angered a chief by breaking a taboo (kapu in Hawaiian). While visiting his aunt, the chief had Henry and his aunt seized and confined under guard in a hut.

Henry overheard two sentries discussing the chief’s plans to execute him and his aunt. Terrified, he found a small hole in the wall of the hut and escaped through it. No one noticed him and he hid in thick, tropical foliage nearby.

From his hiding place he watched as the chief’s men dragged his aunt to the edge of a cliff and threw her over. She crashed to her death hundreds of feet below.

Desperate, Henry ran from his hiding place toward the cliff, where he hoped to follow his aunt. The chief’s men caught him in time and took him to the chief, who finally realized Henry’s close relationship to a powerful kahuna. The chief returned Henry to his uncle.

But Henry Obookiah began to think about leaving Hawaii.

Kealakekua Bay

Connecticut

One day in 1808 the China trade ship the Triumph sailed into Kealakekua Bay from New Haven. Henry swam out to the vessel and asked, through a Hawaiian translator, to come aboard as a crew member. The captain agreed.

The Rev. Timothy Dwight IV

A Yale divinity student on board took a liking to Henry and began to teach him English on the voyage back to America. Upon arrival in New Haven, the ship captain took Henry Obookiah into his household as a servant.

One day Henry sat weeping on the steps of Yale College. Edwin Dwight, a divinity student and relative of college President Timothy Dwight, saw Henry crying. Dwight asked him what was wrong, and Henry cried, “No one will teach me.” Edwin Dwight thus agreed to tutor Henry Obookiah.

Henry learned quickly. His charm and his gift for mimicry soon endeared him to many at Yale, and he moved in with another tutor: President Timothy Dwight.

By 1815, the midst of the Second Great Awakening, Henry Obookiah converted to Christianity. He continued his studies in various Christian households, working through summers to earn his keep.

School for Heathens

Steward’s house of the Foreign Mission School.

One of the places he stayed was the home of the Rev. Samuel Mills in Torringford, Conn. His friends and benefactors thought it a good idea for Henry to leave New Haven, where he risked capture into the slave trade.

The Rev. Samuel Mills’ son, also Samuel Mills, wanted to organize a mission to Hawaii to convert the heathens to Christianity. Henry Obookiah, they believed, could bridge the gap between the Christian proselytizers and the pagans of the Pacific islands.

Mills and other Christian missionaries organized the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Conn., to train non-white missionaries. They, in turn, would serve as ambassadors for the white missionaries to their own people as missionaries, preachers, translators, teachers and health workers.

Sketch of Cornwall by John Warner Barber, 1835. The Foreign Mission School is to the right of the church at center.

Henry entered the school as the first, and quickly the model, student. He won local acclaim for his sincerity, his studiousness and his winning personality. Others, including Hawaiians and Native Americans, enrolled in the seminary, often called the School for Heathens.

Resignation

Henry Obookiah once visited the home of Lyman Beecher, an early supporter of the missionary effort. Beecher’s children, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, long remembered the visit. Henry helped persuade these two future abolitionists that all men were indeed created equal.

In 1816, Henry came down with typhus, an epidemic that swept New England during the Year Without A Summer. As he lay on his deathbed, friends and followers came to visit. He insisted that a Hawaiian be with him at all times, and they prayed together in their native language. Throughout his final illness, Henry remained cheerful, calm and resigned to the will of God.

Henry Obookiah died on Feb. 17, 1818, surrounded by his Hawaiian friends who he had told to love God or perish.

Repatriating Henry Obookiah

One night in 1992 in Seattle, Wash., a native Hawaiian woman named Deborah Li’ikapika Lee woke from a sound sleep with a restless, uneasy feeling she could not ignore. She rose from her bed, searching for the comfort of her Bible. And then she clearly heard five words: “He wants to come home.”

Thus Debbie Lee, a descendant of Henry’s first cousin, began her campaign to bring the body of Henry Obookiah back to Hawaii.

Nick Bellantoni, Connecticut’s former state archaeologist, chronicled the effort to repatriate Henry Obookiah, as well as a Lakota Indian, Albert Afraid of Hawk, from Connecticut. Titled The Long Journeys Home, it describes how Bellantoni and his team carefully disinterred Henry Obookiah in 1993 from his grave in Cornwall Cemetery.

They didn’t know what they’d find, but were surprised to find a largely intact skeleton, rare in Connecticut’s acidic soil.

Bellantoni’s team identified Henry’s remains in part by examining his skeleton and in part by the pattern of brass tacks on the coffin lid: H O AE 26, inside of a heart.

Tribute

Churches in Cornwall and in Hawaii then held services and tributes to Henry Obookiah. An airliner carried his remains to Hawaii, and two outrigger canoes lashed together carried his casket to Kona’s Kealakekua Bay. Then mourners buried him in the Kahikola Church cemetery overlooking the bay.

Kahikolu Church

His tombstone in Cornwall was replaced with a bronze plaque inscribed with his dying words: “Oh, how I want to see Hawaii!”

Twenty years later, Nick Bellantoni and his wife Angela visited Henry Obookiah’s final resting place. In his book, he explained why Henry Obookiah’s repatriation had such importance to Henry:

For years he had probed his mind for the reason he was the lone survivor of all the ferocity forced on his family and for the agonizing guilt associated with complicity in their suffering. He now had an answer and a joyous reason for his homecoming.

And why it was important to Deborah Lee:

He could serve the same inspirational role he provided the missionaries in the nineteenth century for young Native men and women of present-day Hawaii, who were striving to maintain cultural identity within their rapidly changing social world.

Image: Foreign Mission School Steward’s House By Bphil8835 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52913450. Kelakakedua Bay By Travis.Thurston at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10632640. Kahikolu Church By W Nowicki – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8151155. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Death of Chow in Boston Harbor, 1798

Among the graves of British and American Revolutionary War soldiers on Boston Common lies the body of a 19-year old Chinese teenager named Chow. The record of the death of Chow in 1798 is the first known documentation of a Chinese person in the United States.

His remains, just steps from Boston’s Chinatown, are also the first known of a Chinese national in this country.

Tombstone of Zhou Libei

Chow came to American in the early days of the old China trade. Another young man, John Boit, Jr., may have felt responsible for the untimely death of Chow. Boit probably ordered and paid for the gravestone, a durable, quality stone that reads:

“Here lies interred the body of Chow Manderien, a native of China, aged 19 years, whose death was occasioned on the 11th of Sept 1798 by a fall from the masthead of the ship Mike of Boston. This stone erected to his memory by his affectionate master John Boit Jr.”

A Young Man in the China Trade

The record of the death of Chow can be found in the archives of the deceased of the Boston municipal government in 1798.

Other records tell us the story of Chow: the nautical records kept by John Boit, Jr., and Boit’s family history.

John Boit, Jr.

Boit helped pioneer the China trade, which began when in 1783 the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution. The British had controlled the tea trade until then. In 1784, The Empress of China sailed to Guangdong, opening the China trade. U.S. merchant ships brought otter skins, ginseng, wine, turpentine, Hawaiian wood and Turkish opium to China. Then on their return they brought tea, porcelain and silk from China.

Drinking tea in Chinese porcelain cups had become fashionable among the western upper class. The status-conscious George Washington bought a large amount of Chinese porcelain. His wife Martha ordered “beautiful thin cotton cloth” from China. The so-called old China trade lasted from 1783 to 1844 and created many millionaires in the United States.

Map of the United States at the time of the death of Chow.

John Boit, Sr., imported goods into Boston, one of the most important ports in the old China trade. The younger Boit’s brother-in-law owned a ship called the Columbia. At 16, Boit sailed the world in the Columbia, capturing and trading otter skins in the Pacific Northwest. The crew then traded the skins for tea and silk n Guangzhou. Along the way they discovered a large river, named the Columbia after the ship.

The Fabulous Voyage

At the age of 19, John Boit, Jr., sailed the world in his own vessel, a 60-foot sloop named Union.

Diagram of the Union

Historian Samuel Eliot Morrison described the voyage as, ‘the most remarkable youthful exploit in this bright dawn of Pacific adventure.’

He left Newport on Aug. 1, 1794 with a 22-man crew, 18 guns and a fullc argo. They sailed around Cape Horn in February, traded for otter skins in the Pacific Northwest, fought Indians in Puget Sound, sighted Hawaii in October and arrived at the Whampoa anchorage near Guangzhou in December. There he traded his otter for silk and nankeen, and picked up passengers. One of them was 17-year-old Chow.

Chow

They sailed through the China Sea, the Straits of Sunda and the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, where Boit picked up coffee and pepper. The crew had to repair the ship’s mast after passing Madagascar, and then ran into a four-day gale that stove in the vessel’s bulwarks. They rounded the Cape of Good Hope in May, caught the southeast trades and on July 8 sailed into Boston Harbor.

Chinese tea merchants

The Union was possibly the only single-masted vessel to circumnavigate the globe, wrote Morrison in 1922.

First Chinese Boy

Qian Huang produced a documentary about the death of Chow, Meihua History, The first Chinese boy who came to the United States.

In it, she imagines what the 17-year-old must have seen and heard once he left Guangzhou on Jan. 12, 1796.

Raging through the waves of the Indian Ocean, going around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. In how many ports did [the ship] berth, how many skin colors did he encounter? How many languages did he hear?

How did he react to the western scenery in Boston: majestic European buildings, open roads, gorgeous foreigners, everything from vegetables and fruits to kitchens, baths and furniture, Everything is so novel and fantastic. When his Chinese intestines and stomachs met Western food, he was accustomed to burning in the hot sun, and met the relentlessness of the snow and ice in Boston. Has he ever been homesick?

Foul, Leaky and Slow

While unloading the Union, young Boit’s brother-in-law bought a French privateer, a snow named George, to sail to Mauritius, a small island off Madagascar. There he would sell it back to the French. He hired Boit as captain.

The George, wrote Morrison, was ‘foul, leaky and slow.’ The sailors had to constantly pump water from the boat, which left them exhausted. They needed help from the French authorities to limp into port. Boit said he hoped he’d never sail in a ship like that again.

The Chinese teenager Chow appears in the family history written by the descendants of young Boit. When they arrived on Mauritius, Boit found a house on the shore, and Chow took care of him. Boit called Chow, “My faithful servant.” The family history gave him another name: Libei. Today his name would be written Zhou Libei.

Boit chartered a vessel from Mauritius and sailed back to South Carolina. From there they presumably took a coasting vessel to Boston.

The Death of Chow

Shortly after they returned to Boston, Chow died in a fall from a mast on the vessel Mike.

Record of the death of Chow

Centuries later, Qian Huang visited the Central Burying Ground. She compared the tombstones in the storied cemetery from those of the same period. Chow’s tombstone is obviously good, she wrote. Boit chose a quality stone and lettering. Chow’s tombstone is as large as the tombstones of other captains of the same period. The lettering describing the death of Chow is even clearer than the lettering on other tombstones.

She notes that only an eighth of the deceased had tombstones in the 18^th century. The captain, she concluded, ‘was very satisfied’ with Chow.

The Boit family maintained its wealth and prominence in Massachusetts. A famous painting, two miles from Chow’s headstone, hangs on the wall of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The four girls in the painting are descended from Capt. John Boit, Jr. John Singer Sargent, the preeminent American portraitist, painted The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

Not the First, But…

Huang writes:

Every year, especially in the summer, the Boston Museum of Art welcomes many Chinese tourists, as well as Chinese students and parents. When our compatriots stopped in front of this famous painting, they did not know that the ancestor of the four little girls in this painting buried a Chinese in the distance with grief in the early autumn days 220 years ago.

Location of Chow’s grave

The teenager surnamed Chow was not the first Chinese immigrant to arrive in an American oceangoing vessel from China, wrote Huang. But because of the death of Chow in Boston Harbor, and the maintenance of the cemetery, heis the only one who left physical evidence and a written record. His cemetery is also the earliest Chinese cemetery discovered to date in the United States.

With thanks to Qian Huang, Meihua History, The first Chinese boy who came to the United States, and to Samuel Eliot Morrison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860. This story was updated in 2022.

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The New England Opium Trade

The New England opium trade in the early 1800s produced considerable wealth for America. As it was never seen as a wholesome pursuit, however, those who prospered from it tended to downplay its significance — much the way many family histories marginalized slave trading.

And in truth America’s trade in opium was insignificant compared to Britain’s role in promoting opium. For centuries, opium – harvested from poppy plants – made its way around the globe as a fairly insignificant product.

Wellcome Library, London
The boiling and testing of opium by Chinese men watched by a European man. Wood-engraving by F. Dadd, c. 1880.

Smoking opium took hold in China as a remedy for toothaches and other pains. But its addictive qualities quickly drove consumption for recreational uses. By the early 1700s, the damage done by opium addiction was readily apparent in China’s flop-houses and drug dens. As early as 1729 Chinese officials tried to enforce bans on the drug.

But Britain’s East India Company was becoming addicted to opium, too. Some historians argue that opium had replaced tea in importance to the East India Company because of its high profit margins. Demand was non-stop and competition was virtually non-existent. By 1793, Britain had a virtual monopoly in supplying Indian opium to China. Merchants used a precise system of harvesting, delivering and selling opium into the market.

But the politics of the drug remained complicated. By 1800 the Chinese government had outlawed opium yet again. Even in Britain it was viewed as unwholesome.

The New England Opium Trade

The East India Company, meanwhile, demanded Indian farmers sell their opium to the company, cutting out competition. The company would refine the opium and sell it to smugglers. The smugglers could deliver it freely to China’s markets rather than having to deal through China’s official Canton factory system. British ships themselves were strictly forbidden to carry opium into China.

This convoluted mechanism for selling opium left plenty of room for profit. That fact was not lost on New England merchants developing their own China trade.

The New England opium trade began as a necessary trade-balancing strategy. The Chinese had tea, porcelain and silk that Americans wanted. But America (as well as Britain) had far fewer goods that interested the Chinese.

China also demanded payment in silver. That demand burdened America and Britain, which had little access to silver. In looking for another commodity that could be traded with China, the British had identified opium as such a product. American traders decided to follow suit.

American vessels had been operating on the fringes of the opium trade prior to 1800, but in 1805 the trade blossomed. The Philadelphia firm Willings & Francis and James and Benjamin Wilcocks took the first leaps into opium. They sent ships to Turkey to purchase opium that the East India Company didn’t control for shipment to India.

But New Englanders were not far behind. Thomas Jefferson’s trade embargoes in 1807 and 1808 crippled New England merchants. With American-based vessels restricted to port and under the thumb of customs officials, the concept of trading products that never needed to enter American jurisdictions had immense appeal.

Family Businesses

The Cabot family had launched the opium trade in the 18th century. Then in the next century, James and Thomas Perkins of Boston contacted their nephew John Cushing to urge him to investigate the business. Cushing. the Perkins’ representative in China, belonged to the first group of traders to set up a permanent post there.

Cushing would become a millionaire in his own right during his 30 years in China overseeing the interests of Perkins & Co. He would return to Boston as one of its wealthiest men and most eligible bachelors.

Other families that accumulated great wealth from the New England opium trade include the Cushings, Welds, Delanos and Forbes.

How much Perkins & Co. and the other New England China traders made from the trade in opium is unknown. They engaged in numerous lines of business, from loaning money to importing Chinese goods.

Volatility

Jacques M. Downs, an historian of the opium trade, notes the market became more volatile as New England and other American merchants rushed into the opium business. Unlike the precise approach of the East India Company, these independents would rush to Turkey for opium and back to China as fast as possible. The margins were so high at some points, traders would buy opium exported to London and return to China with it to sell at a profit.

However, when too many shiploads of opium arrived in Chinese ports, the price collapsed. One trader noted in 1807 that the opium trade had “disappointed many this past season” because of oversupply.

England began getting better control over opium sales with the end of the War of 1812 and the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. British interests began monopolizing a greater share of Turkish opium. By 1862, after fighting two wars with China (called the Opium Wars), Britain and France forced China to open its markets and legalize the opium trade.

America’s appetite for opium, meanwhile, had grown rapidly. With trade embargoes lifted after the War of 1812, opium imports skyrocketed. In 1840 New Englanders imported 24,000 pounds of opium. That was enough to draw the attention of the federal government, which quickly taxed the stuff.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Ebenezer Mix Makes His Last Stand (or Captain Eb Battles a Ghost)

Born in 1776 to John Mix, Capt. Ebenezer Mix belonged to the postwar generation that opened up the China trade. First as a seaman and later a sea captain, Ebenezer traveled to China to trade North American sealskins for Chinese tea, silk and other goods.

The Mixes were well known characters in Farmington, Conn. John Mix, a graduate of Yale, fought in the Revolution. Following the conclusion of the war he was active in the Society of the Cincinnati. He served as a judge and a Federalist politician in Farmington for many years.

Premonition by Henryk Weyssenhoff

Commonly known as Squire Mix, historians descried him as “Tall in stature, dressed as a gentleman of the time, with silver knee buckles, formal in manner, of quick temper, punctilious, very hospitable and a good neighbor.”

Late in life, as his politics fell out of favor and his eyesight failed, John Mix became something of a crank. “He is said to have sometimes longed for judicious use of the thunderbolts of the Almighty,” records one historian.

John’s son, Captain Ebenezer Mix (or Captain Eb, as he was universally known), made a fine living for himself procuring luxury goods in China and providing them to the wealthy Farmington elite.

Journeying for months at a time across the ocean gave Captain Eb a healthy exposure to the superstitions of sailors. Later in life he, too, became somewhat eccentric. On one occasion he let his superstitious nature get the better of him.

The story, enjoyed for generations in Farmington, involved an odd vision Captain Eb had one night in the cemetery next to his home.

Ebenezer Mix’s Ghost

Arthur Brandegee and Eddy Smith told the story in their history of Farmington:

A ghost had been seen several times in the old burying ground, and Captain Eb was not surprised, when, looking from his chamber window one dark night, he saw tall form clothed all in white and having two great white wings which it waved at intervals in ghostly fashion.

Captain Eb shouted to the apparition to be gone, but it moved not. He then proceeded to exorcise it with the rich expletives which sailors are wont to bring home from lands beyond the sea.

The waving of the ghostly wings was the only reply. As last resort Captain Eb seized an old queen’s arms, well loaded, which had seen service in Revolutionary days, and taking deliberate aim at the ghost, blazed away.

When the smoke disappeared the ghost was no longer to be seen. The next morning, when the sun lighted up the scene of the midnight encounter, there appeared one of the tall white slabs which were just beginning to take the place of the old red gravestones, and at its foot lay the remains of Deacon Elijah Porter’s old white goose.

This story updated in 2022.

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