South Sea Company

“ The British legislature, by exempting the produce of the Greenland Seas from existing duties on the condition of its being imported in British ships, held out encouragements to the company similar to those offered to former adventurers. The South Sea Company caused a fleet of twelve new ships, about 306 tons’ burden each, [Pg 26] to be built in the river Thames, equipped each vessel with the necessary supplies of cordage, casks, and fishing instruments, and engaged for their use the duke of Bedford’s wet-dock at Deptford, where boiling-houses and other conveniences were constructed. ”

“ Import duties were to be paid for the slaves and goods. This privilege was conveyed by the British government to the South Sea Company, formed to work it. The privilege, to which an exaggerated value was attached, formed the solid basis of the notorious fit of speculative fever called the South Sea Bubble. Until 1739 the trade in blacks went on without interruption, but amid increasingly angry disputes between the Spanish and the British governments. ”

“ Southmoulton street, Hanover square.
South Sea alley, in the Mint, Southwark.
South Sea Company. This company had the following origin: in the glorious and successful war against France, in the reign of Queen Anne, due care was not taken of the regular payment of seamen employed [46] in the royal navy; for those necessitous and useful men, had tickets granted them instead of pay; which they were frequently obliged to get discounted at 40l. and sometimes 50l. per cent. to avaricious men, who taking advantage of the necessities of those brave fellows, raised great estates upon their ruin. ”

“ By various devices, in which the principles of the Word of God were outraged, the managers of the South Sea Scheme excited expectations of the most visionary kind. The mania seized upon the nation through all its borders. The stock of the Company rose till it was eagerly bought at a premium of 1000 per cent. Catching the general spirit, joint-stock companies sprang up everywhere as rapidly as the Prophet’s gourd; DELUSIONS
BELIEVED. and so willing were men to be deceived, that schemes which should have been put down on their first appearance were eagerly embraced. ”

“ The stock of the South Sea Company rose from one hundred to a thousand, and an army of future victims crowded the offices of the company, anxious to invest in what they believed would suddenly enrich them. ”

“ At this tremendous premium the directors sold five millions of stock.
By this time the extraordinary success of the South Sea Company had produced a crowd of imitators, and the result was a wild mania of speculation, and its inevitable end—a crash. Hundreds of companies were formed, some of them being fortunate enough to secure the active support of royal and titled personages; thus the prince of Wales, afterwards George II., became governor of the Welsh Copper Company. ”

“ Their bonds were in such discredit, that a run commenced upon the most eminent goldsmiths and bankers, some of whom having lent out great sums upon South Sea stock were obliged to shut up their shops and abscond. The Sword-blade Company, who had hitherto been the chief cashiers of the South Sea Company, stopped payment. This being looked upon as but the beginning of evil, occasioned a great run upon the Bank, who were now obliged to pay out money much faster than they had received it upon the subscription in the morning. ”

“ A few years later a gigantic enterprise was undertaken by the South Sea Company, a body of merchants originally organized as a company trading in the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. A Scotchman named Law had started a similar project in France, known as the "Mississippi Company," which proposed to pay off the national debt of France from the profits of its commerce with the West Indies and the country bordering on the Mississippi River. ”

“ The Dutch East India Company held from the Government the exclusive privilege of trading in the Great South Sea,—all private citizens being prohibited from entering those waters by the Cape of Good Hope on the east or the Strait of Magellan on the west. This prohibition stimulated rather than checked [333] the commercial ardor of the country, and it soon became the study of navigators and merchants to discover some safe means of eluding the law, it being hard, they said, that Government should close up the channels which Nature had left free. ”

“ Now all this we are given to understand is for the sole benefit of the South-Sea; and if they have not sense to conceive it aright, a worse thing may befall them: We all know, what directors and their old patrons carry halters about their necks, though they have millions in their pockets; and who would not give away a little of other people's money, to save a great deal of their own, with their lives into the bargain? ”

“ To this arrangement parliament acceded, and an act was passed to ratify this contract, and containing full powers to the company accordingly. In March following South Sea stock rose from 130 to 300, gradually advanced to 400, declined to 330, and on the 7th of April was at 340. This so encouraged the directors, that on the 12th they opened books at the South Sea house for taking in a subscription for a portion of their stock to the amount of 2,250,000l. every 100l. ”

“ The search for the northwest passage to Asia, as it had been begun by the English under Cabot in 1497, was also the last of all the endeavors to isolate the continent. The creation of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670 was ostensibly to promote "the discovery of a new passage into the South Sea," but the world knows how for two centuries that organization obstinately neglected, or as far as they dared, the leading purpose for which they pretended to ask a charter. ”

“ But what now, if, after all, there should be a little job in a corner; and if any gentleman, of remarkable merit, should have amends made for his services, sufferings, and losses of late years? Why, there is nothing uncommon in it; for, who will serve the Lord for nought? This certainly can be no reason for rejecting a project, which will restore publick credit, fill the Alley again, raise South-Sea stock to three or four hundred, and help the present proprietors to new bubbles ”

“ At that time the most extravagant ideas prevailed concerning the riches of South America. "If," it was said, "the Hudson's Bay Company can make vast moneys out of the frozen North, what can be done with lands flowing with milk and honey?" The South Sea Adventurers carefully fostered all the current notions, spreading likewise the belief that Spain was ready to admit them to a share of its South American commerce.
In 1717 this Company advanced to the English Government five more millions sterling, at an interest of six per cent. Their shares rose daily. ”

“ South Sea stock of 100l. sold for 1000l.; the Orkney Fishery stock rose from 25l. to 250l.; the York Buildings stock, whose shares were 10l., reached 260l. The latter, a company erected to cut timber for ship-building and other purposes in Scotland, in spite of a protectionist bounty, proved a ruinous failure. There were besides eleven fishing projects; ten insurance companies; two companies for the remittance of money; four salt companies; two sugar companies; eleven companies for settlements in, or trading to, America; two building companies; thirteen land companies ”

“ But despite this Christmas fare, there soon began quarrels, many and intricate, with Powhatan and his brother Opechancanough.
CHAPTER V. THE "SEA ADVENTURE"
Experience is a great teacher. That London Company with Virginia to colonize had now come to see how inadequate to the attempt were its means and strength. Evidently it might be long before either gold mines or the South Sea could be found. The company's ships were too slight and few; colonists were going by the single handful when they should go by the double. Something was at fault in the management of the enterprise. ”

“ Not only did he wish to see the English take a share in this vast trade of the South Sea, but he realised that it would be a fitting opportunity to attack the enemies’ commerce there, and so by cutting off her resources it would help to shorten the war, and enrich his own country. To quote his own words “necessity has frequently put private men on noble takings.” This was indeed a noble undertaking, and in the belief that it was both necessary and profitable to undertake such an expedition, he drew up a scheme which he presented to his friends, the merchants of his native Bristol. ”

“ Nowadays it is difficult to find any English deep-sea ship or steamer, in which half of the hands for'ard are not foreigners of some sort. And now practically the whole coasting mercantile marine of the Australian colonies is manned by Germans, Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians.
When I was a young man I sailed in ships in the South Sea trade which had carried the same crew, voyage after voyage, for years, and there was a distinct feeling of comradeship existing between officers and crew that does not now exist. ”

“ A journalist of the time writes: "Our South Sea equipages increase daily; the City ladies buy South Sea jewels, hire South Sea maids, take new country South Sea houses; the gentlemen set up South Sea coaches, and buy South Sea estates. They neither examine the situation, the nature or quality of the soil, or price of the purchase, only the annual rent and title; for the rest, they take all by the lump, and pay forty or fifty years' purchase!"
By the end of May, the whole stock had risen to 550. ”

“ And, in looking back, that old gent of the South Sea Organization seems to stand out, not so much as a wicked, eccentric individual, as he does of a type that represents nine-tenths of the men whom one is doomed to knock up against in one’s pilgrimage along this shore of hope and sudden chills, wrecks, and buffeted dreams. ”

“ Airships are not yet everyday affairs in our own country, so this one might well startle the natives of a secluded South Sea island which even ships do not sight. I am not certain which party was at first most bewildered, Joe and I or the Faytans ”

“ The beneficial practice of insurances, by which the merchant is exempted from the risks of the ocean, and is not exposed to the contingencies of an entire loss of his capital and fortune, is not known. Indeed, the very inconsiderable number of vessels trading in the South Sea, could not support this combination of industry, established with a view to the gains arising out of the repetition of the risks, and the diversity of the destinations. ”

“ But people who have very little money cherish the same ambition, often enough: There are thousands of men in the United Kingdom to whom a South Sea Island of their-own would be heaven—only they see no way of getting it. ”

“ Here dwell together, and share the comforts of a club (which may be enumerated as a billiard-board, absinthe, a map of the world on Mercator’s projection, and one of the most agreeable verandahs in the tropics) , a handful of whites of varying nationality, mostly French officials, German and Scottish merchant clerks, and the agents of the opium monopoly. There are besides three tavern-keepers, the shrewd Scot who runs the cotton gin-mill, two white ladies, and a sprinkling of people ‘on the beach’—a South Sea expression for which there is no exact equivalent. ”

“ I likewise expect to send the ships I have built on the South Sea, which vessels — our Lord being willing — will sail down the coast at the end of July of this year 1524 in search of the same strait; for if it exists it cannot escape both those who go by the South Sea and those who go by the North; for the South Sea Expedition will go till they either find it or reach the country discovered by Magellanes, and those of the North, as I have already said, until they reach the Bacallaos. Thus on one side or the other we cannot fail to discover the secret. ”

“ Not a score of them returned to their island homes—the rest perished under the lash and brutality of their cruel taskmasters.
Towards 1870 the demand for South Sea Islanders became very great. They were wanted in the Sandwich Islands, in Tahiti and Samoa; for, naturally enough, with their ample food supply, the natives of these islands do not like plantation work, or if employed demand a high rate of pay. ”

“ During the next few years she will be on her trial: if she governs her new dependencies wisely, keeping out the liquor traffic, and fostering the prosperity and contentment of her native fellow-subjects, she may prove herself fit to be entrusted with the government of a great South Sea confederation; but if she uses her new dependencies merely as a means of rehabilitating her declining South Sea trade, and is cynically indifferent to the interests of the natives, she will find herself with a new and more difficult Native Question on her hands, and her great scheme will be rudely shattered. ”

“ The interest and passions of South Sea Island life are neither numerous nor complex, and action is apt to be rapid and direct. A novelist of that modern school that fills its volumes, often fascinatingly enough, by refining upon the shadowy refinements of civilised thought and feeling, would find it hard to ply his trade in South Sea Island society. ”

“ In the closing years of the 16th century several private companies were founded in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Zealand to engage in eastern trade. These were combined in 1602 into the United East Indies Company, which sent large fleets to the Orient each year, easily ousted the Portuguese from their bases on the coast and islands, and soon established almost a monopoly, leaving to England only a small share of trade with Persia and northwest India. ”