Connected Points Ep. 1 – Winter Storms and Abolition

History is generally thought of as a narrative of our past, but it’s also an infinite series of interconnected points. Disparate people, places, things, and events are all connected through a vast network of relationships spanning time and place. Shoes, ships, candle wax, cabbages and kings are all connected points, once you abandon a linear narrative and dive down the rabbit holes of history.

In this issue, what does a series of violent winter storms have to do with opium and a famous abolitionist? Let’s connect the dots.

Between December 14th and 27th, 1839, a series of three severe winter storms blew ashore  on the New England Coast. These storms caused the loss of more than 200 vessels, around 200 deaths, and damage to hundreds of other ships and port facilities. Loss in commercial shipping alone was estimated at $1,000,000, a 2024 equivalent of over $30 million. The storms also inspired at least two poets, but those are connections for another time.

One of the ships lost was the brig Pocahontas, bound for Newburyport, MA from Cadiz, Spain with a cargo of domestic goods. Tragically, she may have avoided being a victim of the storm, but when she left Cadiz in September, she was run into by a Spanish ship and forced to return to port for repairs, finally sailing for America—and into the series of gales—in late October. Her captain, James G. Cook was an experienced mariner, and she had a crew of 12 or 13.

The Pocahontas’ arrival on the Massachusetts coast on December 22nd coincided with the second of these  gales. Capt. Cook anchored near the mouth of the Merrimack River and planned to wait out the storm. Hurricane force winds and  extreme sea conditions caused the anchor to drag, and by morning the brig was grounded on the sandbar off Plum Island and being smashed apart by the waves. Though three men were seen alive on deck, they were all swept away and perished before conditions allowed rescuers to reach them.

The Pocahontas was owned by John Newmarch Cushing (1779 – 1849), a successful ship captain, merchant, wharfinger (harbormaster), and ship chandler. He owned a number of vessels involved in the European trade. He and his family were influential in Newburyport for generations, and his Federal style mansion today houses the Museum of Old Newbury.

As important in the maritime trade as John Newmarch Cushing was, one of his sons extended the family name into politics. Caleb Cushing (1800 – 1879) served in the Massachusetts House and Senate, as a U.S. Congressman, as Minister to China and Spain, as the 23rd U.S. Attorney General, and as mayor of Newburyport.

In 1843, President Tyler appointed Cushing Ambassador to the Imperial Chinese Court, with the mission of opening the Chinese trade to American merchants. He negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia, which established diplomatic and trade relations between the United States and the Qing Dynasty.

The treaty established tariffs, granted the United States most favored nation status similar to that of the British, and provided for extraterritoriality for American citizens. The treaty also included provisions stripping protections from Americans engaging in the opium trade.

The opium trade in China was big business in the 19th century, and by mid-century the clipper ship had been perfected. Fast, but with smaller cargo capacity, the clippers engaged in high-value cargoes, such as tea, ginseng, silks, and — to fund the acquisition of these luxury goods — opium.

The Frolic was one of those clippers. Built in Baltimore at the Gardner Brothers shipyard for a group of socially-elite but ethically-tenuous Boston investors, the Frolic plied the opium trade from 1845 to 1850, when the combination of competition from steamships and the growing market for luxury goods in the newly wealthy, gold-fueled California economy shifted emphasis to importing goods for the new monied class.

So in 1850, the Frolic’s owners dispatched the vessel to San Francisco, loaded with porcelain, silks, furniture and other luxuries. It never arrived, wrecking on the coast north of San Francisco. The local Pomo villagers salvaged part of the cargo, and silks and porcelains passed into local folklore – and archaeology. In the 1980’s, excavations at the site of the Pomo village uncovered Chinese porcelain shards, which led to the rediscovery of the story of the Frolic.

We know something of the working conditions and racial tensions in the Baltimore shipyards and the construction of ships like the Frolic in part because of the recollections of a slave who worked in the yards, and African Americans, both enslaved and free, greatly contributed to the growth of Baltimore as a major shipbuilding port. Fred Bailey worked at the Gardner Brothers shipyard both as a general laborer and later as a caulker, one of the skilled craftsmen charged with sealing the vessel’s seams to make them seaworthy. He spoke of the work done at the yards, and of the racial conflict, as when white carpenters threatened to walk out if the yard continued to employ free blacks in that trade.

Bailey later escaped to the North and took a new name. He became involved in the abolition movement and spoke powerfully of his experience as a slave and for for the rights of the emancipated. He remained an activist for reform causes throughout his life.

We know him better as Frederick Douglass.

One final connection to bring us back to our start – Douglass and his wife were living in New Bedford, MA in 1839, and would have experienced, if not the full force that pummeled the Atlantic coast, the severe winter storms of that December.