Charlotte at Sea: An Atlantic Odyssey on the Eve of Revolution
2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/tneq_a_00991
ISSN1937-2213
Autores Tópico(s)Colonialism, slavery, and trade
ResumoTHE brig Charlotte was one of thousands of vessels that worked the overseas trade of British America in the century and a half before the American Revolution. On the surface, there was nothing remarkable about this workaday ship riding at anchor in the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1766. Among the hundreds of North American merchantmen active in Atlantic trade in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the square-rigged forty-ton brig and its crew of nine would have passed unnoticed. Built in 1761, the Charlotte was small but not tiny, and she was not exceptionally fast, agile, or seaworthy. Unlike the well-documented great warships of that time, for which good detail exists, we have only a rough idea of the dimensions of trading ships like the Charlotte. She was a brig—that is, a double-decked “merchant-ship with two masts,” and based on her tonnage, she may have had a deck as long as forty-five feet, with a beam (the width of the vessel at its widest point) of perhaps fourteen feet.1Seen in the aggregate, however, vessels like the Charlotte were the tools that built the American economy. They operated in a challenging commercial environment notable for its volatile markets, scarcity of financial resources, fragile long-distance relationships, and dependence on the enslaved labor of captive Africans. Mounting a transatlantic voyage required access to capital on an impressive scale by the standards of mid-eighteenth-century British America. In addition to the cost of purchasing and outfitting the vessel, Charlotte’s owner bore the expense of manning his ship, procuring its cargo in local markets—typically with cash—and meeting unexpected contingencies that were a feature of every trading venture. And without ready access to credit, it would have been impossible to do business with correspondents abroad and acquire cargoes in distant ports. To succeed, merchants in Atlantic trade needed a keen understanding of markets, always unpredictable and constantly in motion. Decisions about what (and when) to buy and sell were based on information typically months out of date. Merchants like the owner of the brig Charlotte were fortunate if they could move their vessels (at least partly) through kinship networks in places far from home, places where goods, services, and financial resources were typically exchanged by traders who had never met face to face.Importantly, Charlotte’s voyage illustrates the extent to which slavery was woven into colonial New England's commercial life. By the mid-1760s, Aaron Lopez, the vessel's owner, had grown to prominence among the slave traders of Newport, Rhode Island, North America's preeminent slave-trading port. Between 1756 and 1774, he invested in fourteen slaving voyages to the Guinea coast of Africa.2 Not all of Lopez's voyages were profitable, but earnings from those that were contributed to the growing pool of capital he drew upon to purchase and outfit ocean-going ships like the Charlotte. Furthermore, in preparing his vessels for their long voyages, Lopez benefited from the labor of an enslaved workforce—a significant presence in Newport—whose members served as carters, warehousemen, dock hands, and a variety of skilled craftsmen. Slavery was likewise evident in the vessel's cargo which included sugar and mahogany (products of the slave-based Caribbean economy), as well as camwood, an African hardwood likely acquired on a slaving voyage. Well into their journey, the officers and men aboard the Charlotte saw firsthand the viciousness of a slave regime in the aftermath of a violent uprising on Grenada, a small island in the eastern Caribbean. Finally, Charlotte herself became a direct participant in the slave trade when she carried twenty Africans from Jamaica to the Bay of Honduras in the spring of 1767.3Like every ship that crossed the world's oceans, Charlotte had a story to tell. However, narrative accounts of mid-eighteenth-century trading voyages are exceedingly rare. The serendipitous survival of bits and pieces of scattered evidence in archives on both sides of the Atlantic allows us to fill in detail and put a human face on Charlotte’s adventure. What follows is a microhistory of that adventure: a journey exemplifying both the potential for gain and the array of unforeseeable risks that were features of the Atlantic economy on the eve of the American Revolution.Charlotte’s year-long voyage began in July 1766 when the brig cleared the coast of New England and spanned the Atlantic to the port of Bristol in the West Country of England. From there, after emergency repairs at Milford Haven in Wales, she moved on to Cork in southern Ireland where she took on a cargo for the eastern Caribbean. In those warmer waters, Charlotte called at Grenada, Dominica, and St. Vincent, islands recently acquired from France under the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War. Then, sailing over a thousand miles west to Jamaica, the battered vessel and her crew arrived at Savannah La Mar on the far west of the island, from where, after refitting, they crossed into the Gulf of Honduras and entered contested Spanish territory. From the tropical coast of Central America, the final leg of Charlotte’s odyssey brought her home to Newport, Rhode Island, in July 1767.Charlotte’s 12,000-mile journey is a case study illustrating the market-driven imperatives that bound together the versatility of the New England carrying trade, the slave-based productivity of the West Indies, and the early stages of England's consumer-driven industrial revolution. It captures, as well, the free-flowing character of Atlantic trade, elements of which operated beyond the reach of the commercial legislation of European maritime states, in this case the British Navigation Acts.4 But most of all, Charlotte’s wooden world was a stage upon which a human story unfolded, one of trust and resourcefulness, but also of infidelity.We begin in the spring of 1766. In May of that year, as the brig Charlotte inched closer to the North American coast on her return from a trading venture to England, word arrived in Newport that the British Parliament had at last repealed the hated Stamp Act of 1765. American non-compliance and passive resistance in the form of non-importation agreements had brought “a total stagnation in shipping goods to any part of the American colonies,” reported an English newspaper. Newport celebrated the news: “All the bells in the town were set a ringing, drums were beat, music played, and guns were discharged,” wrote the Newport Mercury. Repeal raised the prospect of a reinvigorated Atlantic trade after years of postwar depression and political strife.5Map 1.—Departing Newport, Rhode Island, on the southern New England coast in July 1766, the brig Charlotte began her year-long odyssey with an uneventful North Atlantic crossing. Bill Nelson Cartography, Accomack, Virginia.In Great Britain, a broad front of commercial interests had worked tirelessly to achieve repeal of the Stamp Act. “I was three weeks in London, and every day with [a] member of Parliament,” wrote the Bristol merchant Henry Cruger Jr. in January 1766. “It is surprising how ignorant some of them are of trade and America.” At the outset of the crisis, British lawmakers were determined to hold their ground, but unemployment in the manufacturing towns and the mounting losses of merchants in London, Bristol, and Liverpool were inflicting serious pain on the British economy. By the end of February, odds-makers in London were offering two-to-one in favor of repeal.6 “Immediately upon hearing . . . that a bill was to be brought in the House of Commons for a total repeal,” Cruger told Aaron Lopez, the brig's owner in Newport, “I set about providing your orders, all which I hope to have shipped on board the Charlotte.”7It was mid-April before the brig departed Bristol for her home port in North America. There had been delays completing repairs, delays stowing the cargo, and delays brought on by a spring snowstorm, “thought to be the greatest that has happened for above forty years past.” They ruined any chance of a quick getaway. The articles stowed aboard the Charlotte were typical of the output of English West Country workshops suitable for the American market. There were dozens of casks, crates, bundles, and hampers filled with metal goods, glass, earthenware, sailcloth, cordage, hats, shoes, beer, and “wares” of all kinds. At last in Newport, on the evening of Tuesday, June 10, 1766, “arrived the brig Charlotte, Capt. Brown, in eight weeks from Bristol,” announced the Mercury.8In Bristol, Henry Cruger had invoiced the cargo at £2,510:9:2 sterling, roughly four times the value of the goods that Charlotte had carried from New England to Great Britain in October 1765. Lopez, the brig's thirty-five-year-old owner and the star of Newport's Jewish trading community, had purchased a “choice assortment of European goods” taking advantage of liberal commercial credit extended at the British end. The enormous flow of British manufactures into North America was typically supported by twelve months credit, sometimes even longer. Lopez, in turn, was expected to offer similarly favorable terms to his American customers. Pressed hard to find the means to repay debts across the Atlantic and continue the flow of trade, Lopez wasted no time refitting his vessel for a return voyage.9“The brig Charlotte, now loading at Mr. Lopez's wharf,” announced the Mercury on June 23, 1766, “will sail for Bristol with all expedition.” Captain Thomas Brown, a tough and experienced veteran of Newport's Atlantic trade, received his sailing orders from Lopez on Wednesday, July 2nd: “The brig Charlotte now under your command being ready fitted for the seas you are to embrace the first fair wind and proceed directly to Bristol,” delivering the cargo “to Mr. Henry Cruger, Junior.” Charlotte’s lading, invoiced by Lopez at £620:19:3 sterling, consisted of North American and West Indian produce (spermaceti oil, turpentine, sugar, mahogany boards, pine boards and joists, lignum vitae, camwood, and bark). It was exactly the kind of cargo that had been anticipated by the English Navigation Acts, seventeenth-century parliamentary legislation that structured the Empire's Atlantic commerce. That is, the produce of American forests, fisheries, farms, and plantations in exchange for British manufactured goods of all sorts.10Lopez envisioned three possible scenarios for the brig Charlotte once it reached Bristol. In the first, the vessel would return directly to Newport with another cargo of British manufactured goods; in the second, Charlotte would call at Cork on the southern coast of Ireland to take in a lading of salted provisions as freight to the West Indies. The third scenario contemplated putting the brig up for sale in Bristol where there was a well-established market for American-built ships. “If so, and she goes off,” Lopez told his captain, “I will provide you another more suitable vessel for the trade upon your return.”11Early in July 1766, after clearing customs at Newport, the brig Charlotte entered Narragansett Bay, moving through Rhode Island Sound into the Atlantic Ocean. Thus began her year-long, 12,000 mile odyssey. “With the westerlies pushing her and the North Atlantic Drift assisting,” the heavily laden brig set a course northeast along the coasts of New England to Newfoundland and then east across the North Atlantic. Five weeks later—nudged along by “light airs” in fair August weather—the American brig worked her way up the Bristol Channel to a mooring at King Road near the mouth of the River Avon where vessels doing business at Bristol “dropped anchor in sheltered waters.”12Bristol, with a population of about 100,000, was “universally allowed to be the largest city in Great Britain, next after London,” wrote a visitor in the mid-1760s. The West Country city was the gateway to the Atlantic, with about eighty vessels a year entering from ports in North America (an eighth of them from New England), and another seventy-five from the West Indies. In spite of the setback brought on by the American Stamp Act crisis, the years from the end of the Seven Years’ War to the British credit crisis of 1772 saw growth in Bristol's Atlantic trade. Most of this activity, however, was concentrated in the city's commerce with the Middle Colonies, the Lower South, and Jamaica, rather than New England, where it was more difficult to assemble cargoes suitable for the English market and the re-export trade.13Aaron Lopez's correspondent in Bristol was a native of New York City where his uncle, John Cruger Sr., served as mayor in 1766. At twenty-seven years old, Henry Jr., was both a savvy merchant and an astute politician. As a commission agent in the service of Lopez, Cruger was responsible for entering the brig Charlotte’s cargo at the Bristol Custom House, paying the appropriate duties and fees, facilitating the off-loading and warehousing of goods in cooperation with Captain Brown, finding buyers for the cargo, and remitting payment to North America, all the while assisting Brown to prepare the vessel for the next leg of her voyage. Map 2.—Charlotte's voyage in ballast from Bristol in the west of England to Cork in southern Ireland in late August 1766 was interrupted by severe weather and urgent repairs at Milford Haven in Wales. Bill Nelson Cartography, Accomack, Virginia.Cruger went to work immediately. “The joists will turn out to as great a profit,” he wrote on August 24, “and expect £5 sterling per thousand feet.” Mahogany, however, “continues very low and in vast plenty, but as you bought yours very cheap, I have no doubt but it will pay the Charlotte a good freight.” The six hogsheads of Jamaican sugar carried aboard faced a glutted market: “They are pouring vast quantities upon us,” he said. Naval stores were also in oversupply. “Such large quantities of turpentine have lately arrived the price is fallen from 15/ per Ct. to 7/. Indeed no buyers appear. I housed yours with about 2 or 300 more under my care,” adding, “It will do better toward fall.”Cruger had miscalculated the market for spermaceti oil, a product of the fast-growing New England whaling industry. “As the demand for oil was very dull, the day the Charlotte arrived,” he told Lopez, “I sold all her brown oil at £16:10 per ton, in order to avoid the expense of warehouse waste, etc.” Two days later news surfaced of orders from abroad, and the price recovered, Cruger lamenting, “I then of course repented my having sold yours, but it was too late; if I cry my eyes out it can't be helped. Trade will take such turns.”14The prospects for trade with North America had dimmed considerably since the euphoria over repeal of the Stamp Act. “We have not yet quite got the better of the late stagnation in trade,” he wrote Lopez; “money is almost as scarce here as it is in America.” Sending more British manufactured goods to Newport was out of the question, he asserted. With Cruger for the time being unwilling to ship additional goods on credit—and with no buyers in Bristol for the American ship—there was little choice about what to do with Lopez's vessel. “She sails tomorrow in ballast for Cork,” wrote Cruger on August 24, 1766. “To be obliged to go away in ballast, unable to procure a freight for love or money is the very devil,” he told a merchant in Boston, “the loss of time is what a ship cannot nowadays support.”15In contrast to the fair weather she had enjoyed on her approach to Bristol, Charlotte’s departure less than a fortnight later came in the midst of driving rain and “strong gales.” “At the vernal and autumnal seasons of the year, especially in the autumnal,” wrote a traveler familiar with the Irish Sea, “the winds are frequently very high and tempestuous, and the channel . . . rough and dangerous.” Caught in a dangerous storm, the battered and bruised Charlotte ducked into Milford Haven, a port in southern Wales where Captain Brown signed on an additional sailor and supervised temporary repairs. Although the brig had sustained damage, Brown and his crew arrived “all well” at Cove in Cork's lower harbor on Monday, September 22, 1766. The following day, as Brown made his way to Cork City, the busy harbor erupted in cannon fire from anchored British warships, “[it] being the anniversary of his Majesty's coronation.”16“Cork is very nearly, or altogether, as large as Bristol in the west of England, but infinitely better situated as to its navigation at the bottom of a large, capacious and well sheltered bay or cove.” The prosperity at Cork—“judged to be the richest city in Ireland, except Dublin”—was based on its role as Europe's leading exporter of salted beef, pork, and butter. Specialization, low wages, and advanced techniques of processing and packaging combined to allow more efficient production at Cork than in any other Atlantic port. “‘Tis amazing the quantity of beef that is killed here from Michaelmas to Christmas,’” observed a visitor in the mid-1760s.17Lopez had a long-standing relationship with the Cork firm of Lane, Bensons, and Vaughan, one of the city's best known provisioning houses. At his shop in Newport, Lopez sold their “choice Rose Butter [and] best Irish beef,” and negotiated contacts for Irish indentured servants, “many of whom are able tradesmen.” The Cork firm was primarily a commission house serving clients in the West Indies and North America. “Messrs. Lane & Co. of Cork have repeatedly advised me that freight from Cork can always be obtained for the West Indies from the month of October until December,” Lopez told Cruger in August. But all markets are subject to change.18Just days before Charlotte dropped anchor, “five French ships [were at Cork] loading with fresh provisions for Martinique and Guadeloupe.” Such peacetime visits to take in Irish “cow beef” for enslaved African laborers in the French Islands were commonplace. It was a trade fostered by the dietary requirements enshrined in the French “Code Noir” of 1685, a legacy of the reign of Louis XIV. But the effect on local inventories was severe. “We are sorry to tell you that freights for the West Indies were never so scarce,” Lane, Bensons & Vaughan told Cruger. “It is a doubt with us whether we shall be able to get anything worth while for the vessel.” “If there is no prospect of a freight,” Cruger told Brown, “my advice to you is to sail without loss of time in ballast for Savannah La Mar.” Then Brown's luck changed. “For your vessel Charlotte,” the Cork firm told Lopez, “with much difficulty we procured within about 80 barrels of a full loading for Grenada and Dominica.”19It was a typical Irish cargo. The rich pasturelands of Munster in the southwest of Ireland, the largest of the kingdom's four provinces, provided ladings for hundreds of such Caribbean-bound ships. The skillfully preserved foodstuffs they carried—Irish beef, butter, pork, herrings, salmon, and tongues, together with lesser quantities of candles, soap, cheese, and potatoes—found legal markets in every British West Indian seaport. They found, as well, receptive markets in the Caribbean ports of France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Spain in clear violations of the British Navigation Acts, exactly the kind of commerce Parliament had intended to block. Both the legal and illegal dimensions of this trade were initiated by individual merchant firms roughly similar to those of Lopez in Newport, Cruger in Bristol, and the Bensons in Cork. Though the Irish provisions trade catered to local conditions in the West Indies, it was driven by a single powerful imperative: the dependence of the slave-based sugar-producing economies of the Caribbean for supplies of food, building materials, and manufactured goods from abroad.20Near the end of October 1766, the brig began the long passage from Cork to the West Indies. Leaving Ireland behind, the vessel dropped south through the Celtic Sea into the open waters of the Atlantic where the captain took advantage of the prevailing westerlies to reach the dominant Northeast Trades. Off the Cape Verde Islands, following a route well known to eighteenth-century mariners, Brown picked up the North Equatorial Current which moved Charlotte steadily west toward the Windward Islands in the sprawling archipelago that defined the eastern perimeter of the Caribbean Sea.21Situated between Guadeloupe and Martinique, Dominica (along with Grenada, St. Vincent, and Tobago) had been ceded by France to Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763. “The island, properly speaking, has no harbours,” according to a contemporary description, “but there is safe and convenient anchorage in the bays and coves, which indent the whole coast.” Dominica's principal ports (Roseau, on the southwestern coast, and Prince Rupert's Bay to the north—along with selected ports in Jamaica) had been granted freeport status by an act of the British Parliament in 1766.22Charlotte arrived at Roseau the third week of December. So many “English vessels have arrived there since its being made a free port” that “provisions and lumber of all kinds were become exceeding plenty, and mere drugs.” Shippers in Great Britain, Ireland, and the American colonies had expected the island's free-port status to bring a flood of orders from the French. However, “few foreign vessels” called at Dominica, complained an American newspaper; “the French in particular doing all they can to prevent their vessels from going to that island.”23Map 3.—Arriving in the Ceded Islands (Dominica, St. Vincent, and Grenada) in December 1766 with salted provisions from Ireland, Charlotte encountered overstocked markets, a slave rebellion, and crisis aboard ship before sailing west to Jamaica. Bill Nelson Cartography, Accomack, Virginia.In frustration, the brig Charlotte moved on to Grenada, 224 miles to the south, arriving at its most frequented port, St. George's, on Monday, December 29, 1766. The American ship was in a sorry state, with the crew much reduced by fever and the captain disabled by illness. “I Labour under a poor Estate of Health,” wrote Brown, “the Climate not agreeing with me.” At St. George's, Brown delivered his cargo of “35 barrels herrings, 200 barrels beef, 10 half barrels pork, 40 half barrels beef, [and] 66 firkins butter” to Philip Beavier, a resident merchant, and collected £176:3:6 (St. Christopher currency) in freight charges “paid upon the delivery of said goods.”24Charlotte’s appearance coincided with a violent slave uprising and its brutal suppression. In late December 1766, according to a contemporary, “the new British colony of Grenada was threatened with total destruction by a formidable insurrection of the Negroes.” Following the French departure at the end of the Seven Years’ War, hundreds of enslaved Africans fled to the mountains of Grenada where they lived as maroons in isolated communities. The maroons, together with enslaved Africans remaining in subjugation—“to the number of six or seven hundred”—rose up, committing “terrible devastations upon their masters, many of whom they had killed.” The insurgents took “possession of some inaccessible mountains, from whence they made frequent sallies,” according to the New-York Gazette.The response of the governor-general of the Ceded Islands, Robert Melville, was a mixture of harsh repression and conciliation. Troops under Melville's command rounded up leaders of the uprising. The “most notorious” were beheaded, and their heads “placed in different parts” of the island. Others were made an example in vicious public whippings and mutilations. In the end, Melville succeeded in persuading the rebels “to accept the pardon he offered them, and to return to their work.” But the maroon communities of the interior mountains remained steadfast.25Trouble of another kind was brewing aboard the brig Charlotte. With no prospects of an outward cargo, Brown attempted to sell the vessel at Grenada. He was prevented from doing so by the intervention of the first mate, Jonathan Wheeler, who informed “the gentlemen there he was under some apprehensions [that] Captain Brown from his behavior had no intentions of accounting to his owner for either the freight, money of the cargo or the vessel.” Weeks earlier, Brown had drawn heavily against Aaron Lopez both at Bristol and Cork and, according to Wheeler, appeared intent on pocketing cash that had been provided to cover ship-related expenses.26On Saturday, January 10, with her business complete but tensions running high, Charlotte cleared customs at St. George's and sailed northwest in the direction of Jamaica. But the following Friday, January 16, Captain Brown interrupted the voyage and put in to Kingstown, St. Vincent. Two days earlier, he had written to Abraham Lopez in Savannah-la-Mar, Jamaica, revealing his intention to leave the ship and “make the best of my way for Rhode Island,” having “sent my mate in my stead to you with the brig Charlotte.” Then the conflict aboard the Charlotte boiled over. Perhaps there was more to the captain's departure than the state of his health and a disagreeable climate. Brown, Wheeler told Aaron Lopez, “left your brigantine Charlotte [on] January 16th at St. Vincent's” accompanied by a woman who had joined the ship at Cork, as well as “the freight money and every thing else he could lay his hands on.” Blame rested, he asserted, with the Irish woman—“the sole instigation of all his late behavior.”27Perhaps. Perhaps not. But as every merchant and mariner knew, a trading voyage in the mid-eighteenth century Atlantic was a relentless succession of challenges and incipient crises. What may look from a distance like the orderly movement of ships, men, and goods from one port to another, or one island to another, was instead a carefully balanced high-wire act. One miscalculation, one navigational error, one false step (apart from the ever-present dangers of injury, disease, and death; sudden and violent storms; and piracy) might usher-in a disastrous end to a promising trading voyage. Or they might, and often did, set the stage for resourceful action and recovery.As the brig Charlotte’s fate teetered on the edge of collapse, Jonathan Wheeler—now in command—steered 1,200 miles westward across the Caribbean Sea to Savannah-la-Mar on Jamaica's far southwestern coast. Jamaica was the largest, most populous, and most productive of Great Britain's sugar islands, the very model of the slave-driven West Indian plantation economy. In 1673, the population stood at just over 18,000, with roughly equal numbers of whites and blacks. “In 1768, they reckoned 17,949 whites, and 166,904 blacks,” wrote the geographer Thomas Jefferys, with about 6,000 enslaved Africans arriving annually compared to a tiny number of whites.28At the time of Charlotte’s visit, Savannah-la-Mar was the site of “a very flourishing trade,” in spite of its many inconveniences. “The water is shoal,” wrote Edward Long, a British official on the island, “and against the assaults of the sea it is defended only by reefs and sunken rocks, and a few sand banks, which are apt to shift.” Yet sixty to seventy vessels entered the port and cleared customs each year. The roadstead, for there was no proper harbor, was a gathering place for the produce of a wide region: “Here most of the sugars, rum, mahogany-plank, and other commodities of the neighboring estates, are put into boats, or lighters, to be carried on board such ships as are to export them.”29Charlotte’s arrival on Wednesday evening, January 28, 1767, presented a challenge for Abraham Lopez (Aaron's half-brother). Captain Brown “sent me the empty vessel by his mate Mr. Jonathan Wheeler,” complained Abraham. In the Atlantic trades, it was ruinous for a merchant to outfit and maintain a vessel, pay wages to a captain and crew, and cover the cost of marine insurance without the means to generate income. But Abraham was resourceful and well-connected, and from his counting house at Savannah-la-Mar, he worked closely with his family network in Kingston and elsewhere in Jamaica, as well as in ports on the North American mainland.30Map 4.—To salvage the voyage, in March 1767, Charlotte loaded supplies and twenty enslaved Africans at Savanna-la-Mar, Jamaica, destined for logwood cutting camps in the Bay of Honduras. From there, the brig made her way home to Rhode Island, arriving in July 1767. Bill Nelson Cartography, Accomack, Virginia.Abraham Lopez set to work to rescue the voyage. He attended to “the distressed situation the brig has arrived in” and appealed to his Sephardic kinsmen in Kingston for a cargo of molasses for the return voyage to Newport. It was Charlotte’s misfortune to arrive in Jamaica at a time of severe economic malaise. The scarcity of sugar, rum, and molasses was the consequence of a poor harvest, tight credit, and the opening of a few selected Jamaican free ports to ships “of all nations” searching for bargains. “This [is] the dullest place at present I ever was in,” wrote another North American ship captain in February 1767, “and [there is] a perpetual cry for money.”31The brig Charlotte had neither a cargo nor a captain. Success in the Atlantic trades—and all seaborne commerce—depended upon the skill, integrity, and resourcefulness of a ship's master and his relationship with a vessel's owners and their agents. “Mr. Wheeler in my opinion,” Abraham told Aaron in Rhode Island, “does not seem altogether a man calculated to have charge of so much of your interest as the brig when loaded (which I hope will be the case).” Although recommended by Thomas Brown on the eve of his departure for his “frugality & care,” Wheeler failed to gain Abraham's confidence. Retaining him as captain presented too many risks. “I shall therefore endeavor to procure some prudent man of good character to put on her,” he said. Providentially,
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