CHAPTER III
THE VOYAGE TO CHINA

1843

On April 23, 1843, Olmsted sailed from New York for China as an apprentice seaman aboard the bark Ronaldson. Crammed with a cargo of ginseng and what Olmsted called “Yankee notions,” the bark rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Indian Ocean to Java Head, then sailed north to Hong Kong and Canton. The four-month voyage was a miserable one. The captain, Warren Fox, so kindly and pious on shore, proved a tyrant with little concern for his crew’s welfare at sea. Soon after leaving port he made the crew throw overboard many of the barrels of salt beef that the ship was required by law to carry, to make room in the hold for freight he had stored in the cabin. At the same time he put the crew on short rations of water for half of the hundred-day passage to Java. On the Ronaldson, Olmsted later judged, he was “worked harder and bedded more gloomily” than a horse in a coal mine.

Although miserably seasick at the beginning of the voyage, Olmsted recovered and took up his duties, including the dangerous work of handling sails aloft. Toward the end of the voyage, however, he was temporarily disabled again with paralysis in one arm.

After the Ronaldson arrived at Canton in September 1843, Olmsted’s ambitions to see Chinese society were thwarted by a siege of sickness, probably typhoid fever. During the four months that the bark lay at anchor below Canton waiting for its cargo of tea, he made only three brief visits ashore. Despite these meager opportunities for observation, his letters to his family were full of the same vivid description that were to make his literary reputation in his travel books on England and the American slaveholding states. Already he was showing an eye for Significant detail and a knack for capturing the flavor of the speech he heard. He learned all he could from the [133] Chinese who came aboard the ship, and carefully recorded the manners, customs, and dress that he saw when he went ashore.

The politeness and forbearance of the Chinese toward his boisterous shipmates was all the more impressive to Olmsted in face of the sufferings inflicted on them by other foreigners in the Opium War of 1839–1842. During the war the British captured four ports and blockaded Canton, killing thousands of Chinese and committing atrocities against thousands more.

Olmsted saw China at an important time of transition in that country’s relationship to the West. Before the Opium War the Chinese had restricted foreign trade to a few merchants in Canton, but the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the war, opened five ports to foreign merchants and ceded Hong Kong to Britain. When the Ronaldson sailed up the Pearl River to Canton, British warships were there to enforce the treaty. The Americans at this time were in the process of securing their trading rights in the aftermath of British success, and in February 1844, a month after the Ronaldson sailed for New York, the U.S. commissioner to China, Caleb Cushing, arrived in China with a squadron of U.S. Navy ships to negotiate the opening of additional Chinese ports to Americans.

Olmsted did not write letters during his harrowing voyage home from China, but he later recounted some of the incidents in an anonymous article, “A Voice from the Sea,” for the American Whig Review in 1851 and in a letter of 1891 to the philosopher and psychologist William James.

The Ronaldson was short-handed on the return voyage, and there were no passengers aboard to witness Captain Fox working his crew around the clock. The food was so poor that Olmsted and his shipmates suffered from scurvy. Near the end of the voyage the crew almost mutinied because of the brutal flogging of a boy, George Ryckman, mistakenly accused of swearing. As the crew looked on, the first mate whipped the boy while the captain held and kicked him. Olmsted described the response of his shipmates as follows:

“How long are we to let that go on?” asked one, while another counted aloud the lashes—“Twenty-three, twenty-four”—“We are no men if we stand it longer.” With this, he sprang forward, and nearly every man snatched a handspike or drew his sheath-knife. I fully expected to see the officers thrown overboard, when in a moment, almost before a step was made, our oldest and best man exclaimed, “Avast! avast! Come back, you fool; put down your knife; what do you want to run your head into a halter for? Can’t you wait till we get home and let the law serve them out?” This interruption led to more deliberation, and finally a single man went aft, unarmed, with a remonstrance, which fortunately was heeded.

When the Ronaldson arrived in New York, George Ryckman’s father charged Captain Fox and first mate Jason Coghlin with assault and [134] battery, and brought them to trial. Olmsted and other members of the crew testified against the captain and mate. Particularly effective was the testimony of the “oldest and best man” of the crew who had stopped the mutiny by urging the men to go to the courts for justice, and who asked to be locked up in the Sailor’s Home to keep from getting drunk before the trial. The court ruled against the captain and mate and ordered them to pay damages to the Ryckmans.

The experience of the China voyage had a life-long influence on Olmsted. It gave him a continuing concern for the lot of the merchant seaman and led him to outline a program for proper education and discipline in the merchant marine. Having seen a Yankee sea captain at work, he had an image of physical suffering imposed by arbitrary authority that made the’ conditions forced on American Negro slaves seem hardly unique, and less brutal than he might otherwise have found them. Captain Fox’s actions remained for him a touchstone of harsh assertion of authority. Forty years after his China voyage, he thought the attitude of New England factory owners toward their employees was similar: “They are generally taking the sea captain’s view,” he said, “and regard every grievance and aspiration of the working man as unreasonable and unnatural.”

Despite his hardships aboard the Ronaldson, Olmsted retained his love of the sea. He frequently used seafaring terms in his writing and he greatly enjoyed his many later Atlantic crossings. Still, at the very end of his life the nightmarish quality of the China voyage returned to haunt him. In 1899, lost in the half-real world of senility, he dreamed that he was back in his forecastle bunk on the Ronaldson, exhausted and sick, with the cold rain and spray dripping down on him.