Fifteen men and boys sailed with
him, drilled and disciplined as if the sloop were a frigate, and
when the Experiment hauled into the stream, of Battery Park, New
York, "martial music and the boatswain's whistle were heard on
board with all the pomp and circumstance of war." Typhoons and
Malay proas, Chinese pirates and unknown shoals, had no terrors
for Stewart Dean. He saw Canton for himself, found a cargo, and
drove home again in a four months' passage, which was better than
many a clipper could do at a much later day. Smallest and bravest
of the first Yankee East Indiamen, this taut sloop, with the
boatswain's pipe trilling cheerily and all hands ready with
cutlases and pikes to repel boarders, was by no means the least
important vessel that ever passed in by Sandy Hook.
In the beginnings of this picturesque relation with the Far East,
Boston lagged behind Salem, but her merchants, too, awoke to the
opportunity and so successfully that for generations there were
no more conspicuous names and shipping-houses in the China trade
than those of Russell, Perkins, and Forbes. The first attempt was
very ambitious and rather luckless. The largest merchantman ever
built at that time in the United States was launched at Quincy in
1789 to rival the towering ships of the British East India
Company.
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