Part 12

As an indication of the vast amount of Lowestoft wares to be found in America, let me state that in the Governor Lyon sale there were forty-nine lots labelled Lowestoft, and many more among the historical pieces, while there were only six of Delft, three of Bristol, five of Chelsea, etc. As Governor Lyon collected nearly all his pieces of English porcelain in America this might be thought to be a fair means of judging of the proportionate prevalence of china called Lowestoft, but I think the number is hardly high enough. In the Trumbull-Prime Collection are at least a hundred and fifty pieces of Lowestoft, to which, however, Mr. Prime does not definitely assign that title, but explains the doubts and questions as to the ware. There are no rice-pattern or basket-work pieces among them.

In New England seaport towns, where there has been during past years a large direct trade with China, vast quantities of Lowestoft ware are found. It would, of course, be argued from this fact that such porcelain is Chinese, and in truth it is Chinese in nine cases out of ten. And I presume the reason that I am so incredulous about Lowestoft china, is that I have really seen so little, my Lowestoft studies having probably all been in Chinese porcelain. Then, too, the Lowestoft factory, had it sent all its wares direct to America, could never have furnished our vast supply, from which we still have plenty of specimens to dispute and quarrel over.

And is it not strange that we have no record of this vast trade in English porcelain? Who ever knew of a vessel arriving in an American port from Lowestoft? Who ever saw an advertisement of Lowestoft china in an old American newspaper? On the other hand, we know well how Chinese porcelain could have been brought—nay, was brought—in vast quantities to New England; for though New York took the lead in sending a single ship direct to Canton in 1784, the question of the China trade had been agitating Salem for a year previously, and in Connecticut, state aid had been asked to further direct commerce with the Orient. This aid had been at once refused by the prudent home-staying farmers in the Legislature. Providence, Newport, and Boston quickly awakened to the rich possibilities of the new commercial opening with the Orient, but Elias Haskett Derby, of Salem, known as the “Father of the East India Trade,” crowded his great vessels across the ocean to Canton and brought home rich stores of Oriental products. His fine Grand Turk sailed from Salem in 1785, and the return cargo doubled the money invested; and in the rooms of the East India Marine Company at Salem is a great Lowestoft bowl bearing paintings of the Grand Turk and the date, Canton, 1786, which proves that that piece positively was neither made at Lowestoft, painted at Lowestoft, brought to Lowestoft, nor exported from Lowestoft. From that year to 1799, of the hundred and seventy-five voyages made by Derby’s stanch ships, forty-five were to India and China. He had four ships at one time at Canton. In 1793 three Indiamen brought into New England ports $14,600 worth of “China-ware;” one of these ships, the Rising Sun, landed at Providence. And Billy Gray, of Salem, the largest ship-owner in the world at that date, sold many a hogshead of chinaware from the cargoes of his great ships, the Light Horse, the Three Friends, the Lotus, the Black Warrior.

Though Connecticut farmers and law-givers looked with timid and unfavoring eyes on the possibilities and dangers of Oriental commerce, Connecticut merchants were not to be left behind in the race for the golden prizes of India. A great ship was fitted out in New Haven, and the story of her first voyage in 1799 and of its rich results reads like the wonder-tales of the East. The ship was manned by thirty-five Connecticut men, sons of respectable and well-to-do families; many of them were graduates of Yale. In its provisioning and furnishing merchants of New Haven, Hartford, Weathersfield, Farmington, Stamford, and other neighboring towns joined or “ventured.” The ship took no cargo. She sailed to the Falkland Islands. The crew killed 80,000 seals, packed away the skins in the ship’s hold, and then sailed to Canton. The Neptune was the first New Haven ship that furrowed the waves of the Pacific. The sealskins were sold to Canton merchants for $3.75 each. With $280,000 of the profits the Connecticut boys laid in a rich store of Oriental goods, tea, silks, and 467 boxes of fine china. These goods were sold in New Haven at enormous profits. The ship paid to the Government, on the results of that single voyage, import duties which amounted to $20,000 more than the entire State tax for the year. Mr. Townsend, the builder of the ship, cleared $100,000 as his share of the profits; the super-cargo, that useful and obsolete officer, took $50,000, and the thirty-five Yankee sailors and the Yankee merchants all tasted the sweets of this phenomenal venture. Thirty-six other Connecticut merchants joined at once in a venture in another ship, and the Cowles Brothers, of Farmington, fitted out three vessels for Canton, and vast amounts of Lowestoft porcelain were brought back by them to New Haven.

It is only recently, and even now only among china collectors and what a Newburyport dame called “city folks and Yorkers” (that is Bostonians and New Yorkers—or city people in general), that the pieces spoken of in the last few pages would be called Lowestoft. In country homes all are still Chinese or India porcelain. It is the favorite tradition told of nearly every piece, even of undisputed English wares of the last century, that “my grandfather brought that bowl to us from Hong Kong,” and even when you point out the Caughley or Staffordshire marks, the owners are unconvinced and openly indignant. Chinese porcelain evidently denoted much higher aristocracy than English ware in early Federal days, and the sentiment lingers still among simple folk. Crests, arms, and initials are very common, “put on for us in China,” and the “China” or “India” tradition, must in such cases never be openly doubted.

Much specially decorated porcelain did come to us from China; there is plenty of proof in old letters, bills, diaries, and shipping receipts, that persons in both America and England ordered services of porcelain such as we now call Lowestoft, to be made and decorated for them in China. These orders were sometimes filled in a manner which was vastly disappointing. Miss Leslie, the sister of the eminent painter, related that she ordered a dinner service to be made and painted for her in China. She directed that a coat of arms should be placed in the centre of each plate, and made a careful drawing of the desired coat of arms and pasted it in the centre of a specimen plate, and wrote under it, “Put this in the middle.” What was her dismay when, on the arrival of the china, she found on every piece not only the coat of arms, but the words, indelibly burnt in, “Put this in the middle.”

Another person ordering porcelain in China sent out a book-plate as a guide for outline in decoration, and was much disgusted when the service arrived to find it painted by the literal-minded Chinese artist in lines of funereal black like the book-plate, instead of the gay colors the china-buyer had desired, and which were then so fashionable.

But I feel that in all this about the questionable Lowestoft I am neither quite fair nor quite liberal to the claims of the far Orient. We do not regard with doubt or with question of English co-operation all the contributions of China to our early table furnishings. About the pieces just described, many collectors are reckless in judging and naming, and too often unjust to our Asiatic ceramic purveyors; but much porcelain came to America which is known and acknowledged to be Chinese, and which has never for a moment had the shadow of suspicion of Occidental manipulation cast over it—I mean “blue Canton china.” A hand whose clear and perfect touch made beautiful, yet rendered truthfully everything she described, wrote thus of such porcelain:

“The china here, as in all genuine Salem cupboards, was chiefly of the honest old blue Canton ware. There were shining piles of these plates, which while they are rather heavy to handle, always surprise one by being so thin at the edges. There were generous teacups like small bowls, squat pitchers with big noses, and a tureen whose cover had the head of a boar for a handle. And in all this the blue was dull and deep in tint, with a certain ill-defined vaporous quality at the edges of the lines, and the white of the cool greenish tinge of a duck’s egg. You can buy blue Canton to-day, but it is not old blue Canton.”

The stanch ships of Elias Haskett Derby, of William Gray, of Joseph Peabody, brought to Salem hogsheads and boxes and crates of this old blue Canton china; it still lingers close-hidden and high-shelved in Salem cupboards; it has been crushed grievously under foot in Salem attics; has been sold ignominiously to Salem junkmen, and also proudly and eagerly bought by Salem collectors.

Many a “venture” was sent out by New England dames to “far Cathay” in these East India trading-ships, and many a pretty blue Canton teapot and cups and saucers, or great ringing punch-bowl came home from China in return for the hoarded egg-money, the inherited Spanish dollars, or the proceeds of the year’s spinning and weaving. Do you know what a “venture” was a hundred years ago? It was a gentle commercial speculation in which all Puritan womankind longed to join, just as all New England ministers legally and soberly gambled and revelled in the hopes and disappointments of lottery tickets. An adventurer in those days was as different from an adventurer of to-day as was an undertaker of 1792 from an undertaker of 1892. When a ship sailed out to China in the years following the Revolutionary War, the ship’s owner did not own all the cargo (if cargo of ginseng it bore), nor send out all the contents of the bags of solid specie that were to be invested in the rich and luxurious products of the far land. There were no giant monopolies in those days. All his friends and neighbors were kindly and sociably allowed to join with the wealthy shipmaster in his risks and profits, to put in a little money on speculation—in short, to send out a sum large or small on a “venture.” Sometimes orders were given that this “venture” should be invested in special forms of merchandise; sometimes it was only placed in the supercargo’s hands to share in its proportion the general profit. Complicated books must Elias Haskett Derby have had to keep through all these petty “ventures,” but good profits did that honest man render, though he left at his death the largest fortune of any American in that century. Women, fired by these alluring profits and assailed by a gambling obsession, sold their strings of gold beads, their spring lambs, their knitted stockings, and eagerly sent out the accumulated sum by the ship’s purser, and received in return tea, spices, rock-candy, crapes, china, anything they coveted for their own use or fancied they could sell at a profit. Men, too, sent out a “venture” as a gift to their new-born children, or to fill their own pockets; fair maids bought through a “venture” their bridal finery. From Bristol one young miss sent in to a ship-owner her gold earrings to “venture” for “a sprigged and bordered India muslin gown of best make,” and she got it too, thin and sheer, close-sprigged and deep bordered, just as well selected and carefully conveyed as if she had “ventured a hundred pound.”

The newspapers of the times abounded in advertisements of blue Canton china, such as this from the _Columbia Centinel_ of December 19, 1792:

“Superfine Nankin blue enamelled landscape and fancy pattern China-ware direct from China: among other articles are complete dinner setts, tea coffee & breakfast do; Teacups & saucers & Teapots separately do; dinner breakfast & dessert flat & Deep Plates; Punchbowles Mugs & Pitchers.”

Frequently the china was sold direct from the vessel, or from the wharf alongside. How truly Oriental that old Canton china must have been to Boston and Providence and Salem dames when they had tiptoed down on the rough old wharf in wooden clogs or velvet-tipped golo-shoes, their fair faces covered with black velvet masks if the weather waxed cold or the wind blew east; when they had seen the great weather-beaten ship, with its stained sails and blackened ropes and cables—the ship that had brought the fragile porcelain cargo to port—the Lively Prudence, the Lively Peggy, the Lively Sally, the Lively Molly, or any of the dozen great ships named by Yankee shipmasters and ship-owners for the lively young women of their acquaintance. They had been on board the Indiaman, perhaps, and smelt its bilge-water and its travelled stale ship-smells; had watched the strange picturesque foreign sailors, barefooted and earringed, as they brought the packages and spread out the boxes on deck, or carried in their brawny arms the great crates on Scarlett’s or Rowe’s Wharf, and with their bronzed tattooed hands took out the precious porcelain from its rice-straw packing and rice-paper wrapping. How that old blue Canton must have savored forever to the fair buyers of the “bloom raisins,” the cinnamon, the ginger, palm-oil, gum-copal, and ivory, the tea, the otto-of-roses, that had been fellow-travellers for months in the good ship’s hold; and have spoken, too, of far-away lands and foreign sights, and of “the magic and mystery of the sea.” Truly, we of to-day have lost all the romance, the sentiment, that brightened and idealized colonial shopping, when we know not the ship, nor scarcely the country from whence come our stores.

In Newport, in Bristol, in Providence, in Boston—wherever ships could sail from port, and wherever favoring winds wafted them back again, vast stores of this old blue Canton ware have been and can now be found; “tall coffee-pots, with straight spouts, looking like lighthouses with bowsprits; short, clumsy teapots with twisted handles and lids that always fall off;” jugs, tureens, helmet pitchers, and sauce-boats. At the recent disbandment of the family and selling of the home of one of the old presidents of Brown University, a score of old Canton platters were found behind trunks and old furniture under the eaves in the garret. Too heavy, too cumbersome to be used on our modern tables, they were banished to the garret rafters, and there prisoned, were forgotten. In past years when roast-pig and giant turkeys were served on that hospitable board, these great platters proudly held their steaming trophies; but now we have changed all that—the turkey is cut up surreptitiously in some unseen corner, and the blue Canton platters, dusty and cobwebbed, lie forgotten in the garret.

These vast stores of blue Canton were doubtless part of the cargo of the Ann and Hope, the beautiful and stanch ship that in 1799 bore into Providence “one hundred and thirty boxes of chinaware in tea and dinner sets.” In 1800 she again brought into port three hundred and sixty-two boxes and one hundred and twenty-four rolls of chinaware, together with such other delightful Oriental importations as two bales of gauze ribbons, seven boxes of lacquered ware, five hundred Chinese umbrellas, sixty bundles of cassia and five boxes of sweetmeats, forty jars of rock-candy, and twenty tubs of sugar-candy. In 1802 came on the Ann and Hope one thousand and forty-eight boxes of chinaware, but, alas! no sugar-candy, or sweetmeats for Providence lads and lasses, but instead forty disappointing boxes of rhubarb.

Hot-water plates of Canton china did every well-regulated and substantial New England family own, deep hollow vessels, with their strong heavy bottoms and little open ears. Not very practical nor convenient of use were they—or, at least, so it seems to us nowadays. And another and common form of coarse blue and white Chinese ware which our grandmothers had by the score need not be despised by china collectors—the old, high-shouldered ginger-jars that fifty and seventy-five years ago were so good in color. Some are mammoth jars holding nearly a gallon, that are decorated with a chrysanthemum pattern in clear dark blue, and when set on the top of a corner cupboard need not fear even the proximity of a cabinet specimen of costly old hawthorn. A few members of the aristocracy of ginger-jars exist, not in common plebeian blue and white, but with a greenish ground covered with red and yellow enamelled flowers. These were never sold in China, but were used as presentation jars, being usually given by some Chinese grandee or trader to some Yankee sea-captain, or sent to America as a token of respect to some American merchant or ship-owner. They sell readily for $5 each in an out-of-the-way antique shop, for thirty in a fashionable one. Six shockingly dirty specimens were found in a hen-house on an inland farm on Long Island, and after being pumped upon for a long season at the horse-pump, and swept off vigorously with a birch-broom, they revealed their original glories of color, and after a thorough cleansing and disinfecting now grace teak-wood cabinets in New York homes.

A very dainty form of Oriental china was seen in many hospitable homes in the beginning of this century, a form now obsolete. I mean a “toddy strainer.” It was a shallow, circular saucer or disk of fine Oriental ware, blue Canton or Nankin, or white and gold Oriental porcelain, and was pierced with tiny holes. It was about four or five inches in diameter and bore two little projecting ears or handles, which were fastened to the body of the strainer by embossed leaves. On the edge of a flip-mug or a toddy glass the ears of the toddy strainer rested when used, and when the toddy was poured from the great punch pitcher into the glass, the strainer prevented the lemon- and orange-seeds from entering the glass below. These toddy strainers are no longer imported in our temperance-ruled and invention-filled days, and being of frail china, have seldom outlived the years when they were in such constant, jovial, and hospitable use. Nor have I seen them elsewhere than in the seaport towns of Narraganset Bay. I fancy some luxury-loving, toddy-drinking, money-spending old Newport merchant invented, explained to the Chinese, and imported to America these pretty porcelain toddy strainers.

Sometimes a single odd or beautiful piece of Oriental china was brought to America in the olden times by those far-roving and home-bringing old sea-captains, and the single specimen still exists—a stranger in a strange land. Such is the graceful little ewer here shown, a piece of Persian shape, but of pure Chinese paste, and “with antick shapes in China’s azure dyed.” This design, with its “little lawless azure-tinted grotesques,” forms a piece curious enough to be worthy a place in any cabinet. Such also is a dull green enamelled and crackled bowl which I own, and a Chinese dish of antique earthenware, which has been mended and riveted by some Oriental china-mender with gold wire. A great blue and white tall jar with red lacquered cover is unique in size as it is in its contents—long strings of sugar-coated Chinese sweetmeats, sweetmeats so unpleasant and outlandish in flavor and so mysterious in appearance that they were regarded with keen disfavor by simple stay-at-home New Englanders, who invested the innocent sweets with alarming attributes, and laid them under suspicion of concealing within their sugary surfaces bits of all the heathenish edibles—sharks’ fins, birds’ nests, puppies’ tails, and other unchristian foods that had been seen and even tasted in foreign lands by bold travelled mariners. Hence there still lie at the bottom of the great jar a few silken strings of shrivelled, unwholesome-looking black knobs like some strange Oriental beads; despised by generations of sweet-toothed children of the Puritans, and now too adamantine in consistency to be tasted or nibbled even by the boldest gourmand or curiosity-seeker of to-day.

“Posy-holders” are found of India china with a rich decoration of red, blue, and gold, with little flecks of green, the cover pierced with holes to keep the stems of the flowers in place; “bowpots” also of similar porcelain and ornamentation.

I have not found in my china hunting any old blue hawthorn jars, nor any fragile pieces of “grains-of-rice” porcelain, nor sets of covered saki-cups in scarlet and gold, nor dainty translucent cups that seem naught but glaze, though I have been shown them in other collections as country treasure trove. I have seen a few tall green crackle vases and jars, of age and dignity enough to chill unspoken within our lips any inquiry regarding or suggesting purchase.

A few stray polychrome Chinese bowls of the description known as “real Indian” I have found, and I hear that whole dinner services of such wares were imported. General Gage had one in Boston, and a few of its beautiful plates escaped destruction at the “looting” of the Province House. But the old services of Oriental china that I have seen have all been blue Canton or Lowestoft. The graceful blue and white vase here shown I at first sight fancied to be Chinese, but now believe to be Persian. As the country owner of this oddly-shaped and rather curiously-decorated vase knew nothing of how it had been acquired by the members of her family, nor how long it had been possessed by them, nor whence it came, nor indeed anything, save that it had stood for many years on her grandmother’s best room mantel-shelf, it may be a comparatively modern piece of ware. I have woven about it and haloed around it an Arabian Nights romance of astonishing plot and fancy, in which a gallant Yankee sailor, a hideous Arabian merchant, and a black-eyed, gauze-robed houri fill the leading parts; and perhaps my imaginative story of the presence of the Persian outcast in a staid New England farm-house is just as satisfactory as many of the wondrous china tales we hear.

An everlasting interest rests in all Oriental china in attempting to translate the meaning of the Oriental stamps and marks. I have never deciphered any save a few of the hundred forms of _Show_—the Chinese greeting, “May you live forever,” and the marks on one old Chinese bowl, which signified _wan_, a symbol used only on articles made for talented literary persons; _Pŏ koo chin wan_ “for the learned in antiquities and old curiosities,” and the mark of the instruments used by authors—the stone for grinding ink, the brushes for writing, and the roll of paper. I was highly delighted, and indeed very proud, when I discovered the meaning of these Chinese letters. I tried to fancy that it was a significant coincidence—a friendly message from the old world to the new—that pointed out that I too belonged to what is in China the ruling class, the literati. But the more closely I examined my literary tickets, the more depressed I became. I found, alas, that these flattering marks were never placed on my bowl by the Orientals; they were skilfully painted over the glaze in oil colors by the base, jesting Occidental who gave the piece of old porcelain to me.