HENRY PICKERING WANTS A SANSKRIT BIBLE:
American Trade with India (1785)
Colonial America was forbidden by English law to trade directly with India. But once we gained our independence, it didn’t take American merchants long to set off for India. In March 1784, just six months after the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, the United States sailed out of Philadelphia with the Star Trek-like directive to “explore the advantages of oriental commerce.” Though originally bound for China, the ship changed course and, and after nine months and a day at sea (with stops at the Madeira Islands and Sumatra), dropped anchor in the Bay of Bengal, the first American ship to reach India. The crew stayed six weeks in the French colony of Pondicherry, hosted by its commandant, the Marquis de Bussy, much to the annoyance of their English next-door neighbors.
The return trip was a disaster: the crew ran out of drinking water and many of them died of scurvy. Limping into English-held Barbados for succor, the governor gave the unwelcome Americans 48 hours to get out of town. After 15 months, the United States returned to Philadelphia, and despite the voyage’s modest financial success the American rush to Indian trade was on. By the end of the eighteenth century we were one of India’s biggest trading partners.
Doing business in India was definitely risky, not only for the investors, but also for the sailors. American merchants weren’t able to track the rise and fall of Indian markets, so ships’ captains and business representatives (called supercargoes) were allowed wide latitude on what to buy and sell, and for how much. American ships were attacked by pirates and seized by European powers like England and France. Sailors, like those on the United States, left their families for a year or more at a time, or left and never returned at all, dead from some strange tropical disease, at the hand of some unfriendly native, or scurvy.
But the promise of wealth beckoned to American businessmen. Salem resident and shipowner Elias Hasket Derby
dying in 1799, bequeathed an estate of a million and a half dollars to his sons. Israel Thorndike ... and Captain Simon Forrester, who came to Salem a poor Irish lad, each left about the same sum. “Billy” Gray ... was reputed to be worth three million dollars, and known to be the greatest individual shipowner in the United States.
And it wasn’t just rich merchants who tried their hand at Indian trade. Everyday folks launched small “private adventures.” For instance, when the Caravan left Salem in 1812 for India (carrying our first Protestant missionaries)
Captain Augustine Heard took two thousand silver dollars to invest for his father, the same for each brother, and from twenty to one hundred dollars for sundry maiden aunts and retired Ipswich sea-captains. Numerous friends requested him to purchase for their wives red carnelian necklaces, camel’s-hair shawls, pieces of cobweb Muslim ... straw carpets, bed coverings, and pots of preserved ginger. Henry Pickering wanted a Sanskrit bible, and three children gave him a dollar each to invest in Calcutta.
It’s said that the “bible” Pickering received was a copy of the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, made in 1785.
Colonial America was forbidden by English law to trade directly with India. But once we gained our independence, it didn’t take American merchants long to set off for India. In March 1784, just six months after the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, the United States sailed out of Philadelphia with the Star Trek-like directive to “explore the advantages of oriental commerce.” Though originally bound for China, the ship changed course and, and after nine months and a day at sea (with stops at the Madeira Islands and Sumatra), dropped anchor in the Bay of Bengal, the first American ship to reach India. The crew stayed six weeks in the French colony of Pondicherry, hosted by its commandant, the Marquis de Bussy, much to the annoyance of their English next-door neighbors.
The return trip was a disaster: the crew ran out of drinking water and many of them died of scurvy. Limping into English-held Barbados for succor, the governor gave the unwelcome Americans 48 hours to get out of town. After 15 months, the United States returned to Philadelphia, and despite the voyage’s modest financial success the American rush to Indian trade was on. By the end of the eighteenth century we were one of India’s biggest trading partners.
Doing business in India was definitely risky, not only for the investors, but also for the sailors. American merchants weren’t able to track the rise and fall of Indian markets, so ships’ captains and business representatives (called supercargoes) were allowed wide latitude on what to buy and sell, and for how much. American ships were attacked by pirates and seized by European powers like England and France. Sailors, like those on the United States, left their families for a year or more at a time, or left and never returned at all, dead from some strange tropical disease, at the hand of some unfriendly native, or scurvy.
But the promise of wealth beckoned to American businessmen. Salem resident and shipowner Elias Hasket Derby
dying in 1799, bequeathed an estate of a million and a half dollars to his sons. Israel Thorndike ... and Captain Simon Forrester, who came to Salem a poor Irish lad, each left about the same sum. “Billy” Gray ... was reputed to be worth three million dollars, and known to be the greatest individual shipowner in the United States.
And it wasn’t just rich merchants who tried their hand at Indian trade. Everyday folks launched small “private adventures.” For instance, when the Caravan left Salem in 1812 for India (carrying our first Protestant missionaries)
Captain Augustine Heard took two thousand silver dollars to invest for his father, the same for each brother, and from twenty to one hundred dollars for sundry maiden aunts and retired Ipswich sea-captains. Numerous friends requested him to purchase for their wives red carnelian necklaces, camel’s-hair shawls, pieces of cobweb Muslim ... straw carpets, bed coverings, and pots of preserved ginger. Henry Pickering wanted a Sanskrit bible, and three children gave him a dollar each to invest in Calcutta.
It’s said that the “bible” Pickering received was a copy of the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, made in 1785.
