From Coleman, Peter. "The Maritime Economy" in The Transformation
of Rhode Island: 1790-1860.
Profits in Oriental commerce were on a grand scale. Cargoes were
commonly valued at between $200,000 and $400,000, and net profits
exceeding $100,000 were not unusual. The most spectacular voyage
was one organized in 1804 by the DeWolf family of Bristol.
Encouraged by teh profits James Phillips had earned on an expedition
to canton two years earlier, they acquired his brig Juno (in notes,
he shows that they acquired it for $7600 from a DeWolf syndicate
which had registered it at newport) and placed it under the
command of John DeWolf II, a young but experienced captain.
They planned a typical DeWolf enterprise designed to wring many
profits from a single three-legged voyage. The first was to be
earned by trading a mixed cargo for furs in the northern
Pacific; the second by exchanging pelts for Oriental goods in
Canton; the third by selling Chinese products in the American
market. Though the venture did not proceed according to plan,
when John returned to Bristol in 1808, he had crammed a lifetime
of adventure into four brief years, and he had parlayed his
employers' capital into a fortune.
Reaching Vancouver Island in April, 1805, John tried trading
with the Kolosh Eskimos, but, impatient to gather a cargo, he
soon pushed further north to New Archangel on the Gulf of
Alaska. There he sold a third of his trading goods to the
resident governor of the Russian-American Comapny, exchanged
another third with Eskimos for sea otter pelts, and finally, in
October, 1805, sold the Juno and the balance of its orginal
cargo to Baron Nikolai Rezanov, a visiting company official.
He received the equivalent of $68,000 made up of specie, a
company draft, furs, and a forty-ton sloop. DeWolf loaded the
sloop with pelts acquired since August (when he had sent a
thousand sea otter skins to Canton via the Mary of Boston),
and despatched her for China via Hawaii. Instead of accompanying
this cargo, he wintered in Alaska, planning to cross the Pacific
in the Juno as a passenger. But in June, 1806, when Rezanov showed
no signs of departing, he ired a tiny brig and sailed for the Siberian
port of Okhotsk. Delayed by a blizzard int he Kuriles, he
wintered on the Kamchatka peninsula, and did not reach his
destination until late in June, 1807. His taste for
adventure still unsatisfied, John now set off across Siberia
for the Baltic. The first American, and probably the first
non-Russian to make such a journey, he reached St. Petersburg
in October. There he learned that a duplicate of the draft on
the Russian-American Company, payable in Spanish milled dollars,
had alrady been cashed at a windfall premium of fifteen per
cent. Cramer and Smith, the DeWolf Baltic agents, had reinvested the
proceeds in a Russian iron and hemp cargo, which they had
shipped to Bristol. Thus, when John DeWolf finally reported to
his employers in April, 1808, the proceeds of this lengthy and
complicated venture were already at work adding to the family
fortune. In forty-two months he returneda net profit exceeding
$100,000 on an investment of only $35,000. The rate of
return was over seventy per cent."
Coleman said that Oriental ventures could only be carried out
by the largest mercantile houses because they required
considerable capital, carried heavy risks, huge losses involving
entire ships being common, and demanded skilled management.
A handful of Providence and Newport merchants dominated the
early trade, and after 1815, Providence's two greatest firms
almost monopolized the business.
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