and conveyed as a passenger a kindred spirit, young Nathaniel
Shaler, whom he took into partnership. At Hamburg these two
bought a fast brig, the Lelia Byrd, to try their fortune on the
west coast of South America, and recruited a third partner, a
boyish Polish nobleman, Count de Rousillon, who had been an aide
to Kosciusko. Three seafaring musketeers, true gentlemen rovers,
all under thirty, sailing out to beard the viceroys of Spain!

From Valparaiso, where other American ships were detained and
robbed, they adroitly escaped and steered north to Mexico and
California. At San Diego they fought their way out of the harbor,
silencing the Spanish fort with their six guns. Then to Canton
with furs, and Richard Cleveland went home at thirty years of age
after seven years' absence and voyaging twice around the world,
having wrested success from almost every imaginable danger and
obstacle, with $70,000 to make him a rich man in his own town. He
was neither more nor less than an American sailor of the kind
that made the old merchant marine magnificent.

It was true romance, also, when the first American shipmasters
set foot in mysterious Japan, a half century before Perry's
squadron shattered the immemorial isolation of the land of the
Shoguns and the Samurai. Only the Dutch had been permitted to
hold any foreign intercourse whatever with this hermit nation and
for two centuries they had maintained their singular commercial
monopoly at a price measured in terms of the deepest degradation
of dignity and respect. The few Dutch merchants suffered to
reside in Japan were restricted to a small island in Nagasaki
harbor, leaving it only once in four years when the Resident, or
chief agent, journeyed to Yeddo to offer gifts and most humble