fleet who were to leeward."



CHAPTER V. YANKEE VIKINGS AND NEW TRADE ROUTES

Soon after the Revolution the spirit of commercial exploration
began to stir in other ports than Salem. Out from New York sailed
the ship Empress of China in 1784 for the first direct voyage to
Canton, to make the acquaintance of a vast nation absolutely
unknown to the people of the United States, nor had one in a
million of the industrious and highly civilized Chinese ever so
much as heard the name of the little community of barbarians who
dwelt on the western shore of the North Atlantic. The oriental
dignitaries in their silken robes graciously welcomed the
foreign ship with the strange flag and showed a lively interest
in the map spread upon the cabin table, offering every facility
to promote this new market for their silks and teas. After an
absence of fifteen months the Empress of China returned to her
home port and her pilgrimage aroused so much attention that the
report of the supercargo, Samuel Shaw, was read in Congress.

Surpassing this achievement was that of Captain Stewart Dean, who
very shortly afterward had his fling at the China trade in an
eighty-ton sloop built at Albany. He was a stout-hearted old
privateersman of the Revolution whom nothing could dismay, and in
this tiny Experiment of his he won merited fame as one of the
American pioneers of blue water. 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