PROTESTANT CEMETERY IN MACAO
explore trade possibilities outside the Americas.
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The New England states especially took the lead in this expansion of maritime trade, and towns like Salem and Boston soon became busy ship-building and overseas ports. Boston ships sailed east to the Pacific via the Cape of Good Hope, while those from Salem sailed west round the Horn; when, as was inevitable on a globe, east met west in the Far East, they agreed to an east-west boundary line which ran south of Canton and the Philippines; the area of South China was thus in the Salem sphere, and hence most of the early American traders in this area belonged to early Salem, Beverly, and Danvers families.
The procedure that had to be followed by foreign ships trading with Canton was briefly this. They made their first China landfall amongst the Ladrone Islands; here they took on a pilot from a junk, and he brought them to Macao; anchoring in the roads off Taipa, they made contact with the Chinese officials who were at that time established on the Praya Grande at Macao; on being cleared by them for Canton, the ships were allowed to proceed to Bocca Tigris at the river mouth, where, after a further delay, they were eventually given a Grand Chop, which was the permit to sail up river. The ships anchored at Whampoa, and the almost endless negotiations for discharging their cargoes and reloading with their purchases began. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the foreign floating population of Whampoa ran into thousands, and the sickness, accident, and mortality rates were very high.
Up river, disposal of the dead was one of the easiest of all local business transactions; the Chinese had no such things as enclosed cemeteries, and neither had the foreigners; burials involved no legal or civil procedures; one merely negotiated with a Chinese landowner for a hillside plot and hired a few labourers. On Danes Island, French Island, at Whampoa, Lintin, Capsingmoon, and Cumsingmoon, there lie buried thus hundreds of foreigners whose frail memorials, if they ever existed, have long since disappeared.* In westernized Macao, however, the situation was different. There were enclosed cemeteries there, but they were consecrated by the Roman Catholic Church and therefore were not available to the other Europeans who were
*For a map of the Pearl River estuary see p. 93.