What I'm Reading - August 2026

Paul A. Van Dyke, Whampoa and the Canton Trade, Hong Kong University Press, 2020

Very few business records of 18th and 19th century merchants have survived, and when they do, they are intensively mined for their insights into commercial practices of that time.

Classic examples include the records of the Hancock family (the firm managed by John Hancock, one of America’s founding fathers); Michael Henley & Son, London shipowners in the period 1770 to 1830 (who were owners of the Botany Bayman, the Lady Juliana, after her return from NSW); and David Hancock’s work on the Madeira trade (having stumbled on ‘mountains of books and papers’ from the Madeira Wine Company while on a holiday on the island). [1]

It is sometimes possible to painstakingly reconstruct the history and operations of a firm by accessing documents in external archives, as Ken Cozens and I did with Camden, Calvert & King, the contractors for Australia’s Second and Third Fleets. [2]

The challenge of recreating the business affairs of the Hong merchants of Canton throughout the 18th and 19th centuries was much more challenging, since, in spite of their commercial significance to outsiders, they were not highly respected in Chinese society.

In the early 2000s. it occurred to Paul Van Dyke, a British historian then based at University of Macau, that he might reconstruct the world of the Hong merchants by drawing on the records of the various European East India Companies. They turned out to be a veritable treasure trove with the result that from 2005, Van Dyke produced a series of books and articles on the Canton trade. [3] Others have written about the China trade, but none compares with the detail and the colour of Van Dyke’s numerous publications.

I had learned something about the Hong merchants through my research on the Botany Bay ships which made their way to the Pearl River after unloading their convicts and stores at Sydney Cove, and I had acquired a basic understanding of the Canton trade from the journals of these ships. But Van Dyke explained the mysteries and inducted me into the workings of the Hong. He gave life to these men who had disappeared into obscurity two centuries ago.

Whampoa (or Huangpu) was the river port for Canton, located 20 kilometres downriver, and that was as much as the vast majority of the seamen ever saw of China.

‘View of Whampoa’, c.1783, in Paul A. Van Dyke, Whampoa and the Canton Trade, p.3, courtesy of Uppsala Auctions

I was fortunate to visit Whampoa in 2013, when I spoke at a conference at Sun Yet-Sen University in Guangzhou, organised by Paul, on ‘Private Merchants of the China Trade, 1700 to 1842’. Much has changed, of course, and the only places where the 18th and 19th centuries were still manifest were an old merchant’s house and the European cemetery on French’s Island.

Huangpu is the subject of Van Dyke’s latest work, Whampoa and the Canton Trade was released in 2020, just as Covid arrived, and it was perhaps for that reason that I only discovered it quite recently. Completing an analysis of the Botany Baymen which went to Whampoa, based on Paul’s research, provided me with an opportunity to reconnect.

For those wanting to understand the experience of European mariners at Whampoa in this period, the body of the book is an invaluable resource – management of the ships at anchor and the bankshalls (warehouses) on shore, healthcare and the burial of the dead, crimes and punishments, desertions and dismissals, prostitution and recreation.

By way of example, Van Dyke helps us to understand an otherwise enigmatic note by the surgeon of the First Fleet transport, the Lady Penrhyn, when the ship arrived at Whampoa on her way home to collect a cargo of tea: ‘Wash’g girls’. From Van Dyke, we learn that washerwomen visited the ships daily, and that many of them spoke English, Hindi and Portuguese.

Arriving vessels were quickly surrounded by washboats, each occupied by three or four girls, ‘their good-natured faces. . . peeping out of the matting, and always with a smile or a laugh at your service’. Smyth’s note was presumably an aide memoire (although he did not expand on it when he later wrote up the fair copy of his journal). Dressed in loose-fitting tunic and trousers of blue nankeen, their long black hair plaited with scarlet thread, the washing girls were subjected to flirtatious attention by the seamen - although the men’s venal desires were met on the lob lob boats which also frequented the river.

The most important part of the book (for me) is the first chapter and the associated tables, where Van Dyke provides a comprehensive list of all the Western ships which visited Whampoa between 1720 and 1816, their captains, their countries of origin, tonnages and cargoes, the dates of their arrival and departure, their previous port and their next destination.

While he was not able to identify all of those which had come from Port Jackson (because he didn’t have access to the NSW records), I was able to use his list to catalogue, with a high degree of confidence, 70 voyages from Port Jackson to Whampoa in the period 1788 to 1816.

Of these, 43 involved ships originally taken up by the British government as convict transports or supply ships, 19 were by American traders, four were merchantmen out of Sydney, two were out of India, and one out of China. Of all the convict transports in this period, one third were sent to Canton after they had unloaded their human cargo.

Just as importantly, I was able to confirm the ships which didn’t arrive at Whampoa, among them an 80-ton brig out of Rhode Island, which based itself out of the Spanish port of Manila, visiting Port Jackson twice and, contrary to what the NSW records led us to believe, Whampoa only once. (See Catspaw, The Voyaging of the Mercury)

It is only through painstaking research and analysis, such as Van Dyke has brought together in his ‘List of Ship Arrivals at Whampoa from 1720 to January 1816’, that we will be able to reconstruct European trading in the Pacific Ocean in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

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[1] W.T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724-1775, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1945; Simon P. Ville, English Shipowning During the Industrial Revolution, Manchester University Press, 1987; David Hancock, Oceans of Wine, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

[2] Gary L. Sturgess and Ken Cozens, ‘Managing a Global Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century: Anthony Calvert of The Crescent, London, 1777-1808’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 30 April 2013, pp.171-195.

[3] These books are The Canton Trade (2005), and Merchants of Canton and Macao, two volumes covering the 18th and the 19th centuries (2011 and 2016).

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