Radio Script #448

Little Talks on Common Things

February 21, 1960

Last week we left William Heath working in Wampon, between Hong Kong and Canton in China. The bark Clyde had sailed for San Francisco without him.

On August 26, 1850 William visited the ancient city of Canton for the first time. This is the way he tells of the journey: “We started in the schooner at 9 AM with little wind. First we loaded our armament, which consisted of four Colt’s repeating rifles, two blunderbusses, a cannon, and a pair of pistols, also two swords and a quantity of boarding pikes, which we did not exactly need but held ready for action. After an uneventful sail, we arrived off the fortress, where we anchored. As no Europeans appeared to be stirring in the city, we were forced to lie down on the schooner’s deck in the midst of a rainstorm.

There we managed to worry out the night and got up at 5 AM. We went ashore and saw Mr. Williams, the editor of the China Reporter. He has been in China a long time and can talk Chinese fluently. I went allover the city. Such a crowd I never saw before. When we started back, it was calm, but soon the wind increased to a gale. We arrived safely at Wampon at 8:30 PM, very tired.”

Suddenly on September 2nd William decided he would go home to Maine. He wrote: “I am starting home in the Fanny in about ten days. When I shall get home is another matter, but I hope it will be by the first of March. I believe I shall get along very well with Captain Swinton. I hope there will be some other passengers on the Fanny or I may be a little lonesome. At any rate I will give my journal more attention at sea than I can on land, and I will also woo the Muse.”

William paid his respects to a new bride in the foreign community at Wampon: “Mrs. Anson came down yesterday from Canton to rejoin the husband she married only three months ago. She is a queer woman, asks all sorts of questions, civil and uncivil, and pries into everyone’s business. She had been husband-hunting for a long time and spared no pains to catch Mr. Anson. She was lucky to get him. He has a thousand pounds a year from his company, which goes a long way in China or anywhere else.” William Heath was quite right. A thousand pounds was nearly $5,000 a year – a huge salary for 1850.

On September 11 William made one of his few references to affairs in the United States. He wrote: “The mail has just arrived and brings the sad news of the death of President Taylor. I have not studied American politics lately and know almost nothing about the new President except that his name is Millard Fillmore.”

In that diary entry we have an example of how long it took to get news into distant lands a hundred years ago. Today radio flashes news around the world in minutes. In 1850 Zachary Taylor had died on January 7, and the news reached China for the first time on the following 11th of September.

Just a week later William Heath was on board a ship out of China, but he does not tell us whether the immediate destination was San Francisco or some other port still far from the United States. He merely says: “Instead of being 200 miles from China we are anchored in the harbor of Macero. We left Wampon about 9 last evening. Just a few miles out the topsail yard broke short off and we had to run into Macero under reefed sails. We are now awaiting a new spar from Hong Kong.”

Just as he had done on his way out from California, William now found a chance for a lot of reading. He says he had begun Sam Jones by Fielding. He meant Tom Jones. He says that since they left Wampon he had read the Vicar of Wakefield and about 40 issues of the Living Age. Then he wrote: “I have just begun to realize that I am going home. I also have such a severe toothache that I can’t write any more now.”

Ten days later the toothache still continued. He wrote: “It seems ridiculous to make such a fuss over such a tiny thing as a tooth, but great effects often spring from little causes.”

As the ship drew away from the China coast, William’s longing for home increased. “I wonder if the folks at home will know me when I walk in. I must have changed very much. Well, if we arrive safely at port and I do get home, I shall certainly have to study harder than I ever did before.”

All this time William was taking advantage of what must have been a very good ship’s library. It had in it books by Gibbon, Macaulay and Locke, the novels of Fielding and Richardson, and many books of history, politics and religion. William was especially interested in a life of Henry Clay, although his own youthful sympathies were with the opposing Democratic party, which was then in control in Maine.

In Hong Kong William had bought a box of those Manila cigars, of whose fine quality he speaks often in the diary. He wrote: “I have determined not to open that box until I am married, or at least until I am thirty years old. I think if I am in single blessedness at that age, I bet I can stay single all my life.”

It would be interesting to know if William Heath kept that vow not to open the box of cigars until his wedding day. After his return to Maine, William graduated from Waterville College in 1855, and was admitted to the bar. At the outbreak of the Civil War he went to the front as Captain of the Third Maine Infantry. He was killed at the Battle of Gaines Mill in 1862. William Heath did not remain single until the age of 30. In fact he was only 28 when he died. He married Maria Moor, daughter of one of Waterville’s most prominent citizens, Wyman B. S. Moor, one of only three Waterville men who have ever served in the U.S. Senate. The other two have been Charles F. Johnson and Edmund S. Muskie.

The Moor family were for many years Waterville’s principal ship builders. It was the firm of W & D Moor that, in 1842, launched the first steamer built in Waterville. It was a flat bottomed stern wheeler of 42 tons. The Moor shipyard was situated near the site of the present Hathaway shirt factory, formerly one of the buildings of the Lockwood Mills.

So we like to think that in 1856 there was passed around among Waterville men, to celebrate the marriage of William Heath to Maria Moor, a box of cigars purchased by William in Hong Kong, China.

William had a leisurely time on the first part of his voyage out of China. He had been using a quill pen, which he now threw away in disgust. He said: “I am going to try a steel pen, for a quill does not agree with me. Rather I do not agree with it. I am the only passenger on this ship, which is a great source of joy to me if to no one else. The Captain is a very pleasant, sociable gentleman. The officers are all clever and obliging, and to crown all I am enjoying myself very much. You may not call lounging on a sofa all day, with no one to talk to, very pleasant, but I like the sea and the solitude and a good book.”

William’s ship was by no means alone on the China Sea. On October 2 he wrote: “A brig passed us last night bound for Canton. There is another with English colors about two miles astern.” The next day there were at one time four other vessels in sight.

William admitted it was a lazy life for the ship’s lone passenger. “I am growing terribly lazy. All I do is sit and think, and eat and sleep ~ore like an than a member of the human race. Even writing in this journal is too much exertion.”

William does not say why his ship was heading so far south, if they had actually been bound for San Francisco. Hong Kong is situated 23 degrees north of the equator and 114 degrees east longitude. On October 8 William gave the ship’s position as 5 degrees north, 109 degrees east. That would place it far down in the South China Sea in the Natuna Islands northwest of Borneo and northeast of Singapore. That ship certainly wasn’t on its way to San Francisco. Every day William Heath was getting farther and farther from home.

William’s ship was the Barnstable, with whose officers he had become acquainted in Hong Kong, although the diary does not tell us how he happened to take this particular ship rather than the Fanny to start on his journey home, for he must have known it was headed toward Indonesia rather than California.

For a bit William turned his attention to ancient history: “I have been tracing on the map Alexander the Great’s conquests in India and Asia Minor. He was a truly great man, one of the best of warriors. I think he was unequal to his father, Philip of Macedon, in cunning, but his superior in boldness. If Philip had lived twenty years longer he would be esteemed as one of the most remarkable men who ever lived. But it is now supper time and I will forget Alexander the Great and turn my attention to a cup of tea.”

On October 22nd this was the diary entry: “We are now fifty miles from the Straits of Sunda.” Sunda Strait is the channel between Sumatra and Java, connecting the Java Sea with the Indian Ocean. That gives us the interesting information that the Barnstable was now headed directly away from San Francisco, not toward the California coast. William wrote: “We are now in the Indian Ocean and consider ourselves fairly started”, but he does not say for where.

Still reading constantly, William Heath reflected upon history considerably later than the time of Alexander the Great. He wrote: “I have been thinking that a history of our Revolution or a whole history of the United States is needed. It is much more interesting than the English revolution. It is a pity that Macaulay was not an American. He could have written it.” William had started to read Macaulay’s History of England and was at first enthusiastic about the author. A few days later he had changed his mind: “I do not like the tone of Macaulay’s History. It is too monarchial. I am much of the Spartan but too little of the Athenian. I have never read a history of England before, but I think this one bestows more praise on William of Orange than he deserves. How can a writer believe that any man who would make war on his uncle and the father of his wife and drive them from their kingdom is deserving of praise?”

By November 3 the Barnstable was 22 degrees south of the equator and 83 degrees east longitude, which would place it almost exactly on the Tropic of Capricorn, 1,500 miles due south of the island of Ceylon and about two thousand miles east of Madagascar.

On November 5 William gave the first hint that they were actually bound for the east coast, not the west coast, of the United States, through the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Atlantic to North America. He wrote: “I do believe I am fated always to make long passages. We ought to have been in the Atlantic Ocean before this. The worst is that the calm always influences my feelings and makes me gloomy. Perhaps the moon will bring us wind. Sailors believe that the moon effects the wind, and they have another superstition that is not generally known among landsmen. It is that the moon influences whales, and the best time to hunt the creatures is just after a new moon.”

Having said so much about superstition, William, with the wisdom of 16 years, puts down his own scientific explanation of the moon’s effect on whales. He says: “The currents in the ocean change with the moon. During the latter part of the moon’s monthly pilgrimage, the food of whales is drawn up to the surface. Consequently where the food is the whale is also. When the currents bring the food up, the whales follow it. There! I have made it, as Cicero says, ‘clearer than the day’.”

Here we must leave William Heath out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Next week we shall learn how disaster struck the Barnstable and what happened to William during many weeks before he would get around the Cape of Good Hope.

Year: 1960