The Servant Left Behind

I’ve been discussing the Chinese businessman Punqua Wingchong, who arrived in Nantucket in 1807 and left New York the following year under controversial conditions. When Punqua came to America, he traveled with a servant. What happened to that man?

According to Frances Ruley Karttunen’s The Other Islanders: People Who Pulled Nantucket’s Oars, Punqua left his servant Quak Te behind on Nantucket. That man kept “a sleeping bag and a very large wardrobe,” and as of November 1809 still had over $40 in cash. But Quak Te evidently despaired of adjusting to life on the island or getting home, and he hung himself in his rented room.

The probate record referred to him as “Quak Te, of Nantucket, a Black man deceased.” Another record labeled him as “colored.” I wondered if that opened the possibility that Punqua’s servant was actually of African descent; Quaco is an Akan name meaning “male born on Wednesday,” and its derivative Quock was not an uncommon name for enslaved men in America.

However, Karttunen quotes an 1809 entry from the Nantucket Atheneum: “Quack Te a Chinese hung himself it is supposed.” I therefore conclude that the island authorities probably had so little experience with Asian men in 1809 that they didn’t know if “Chinaman” was a legal category. They knew Quak Te wasn’t white or Indian, so they classified him with Negroes. Some laws in the early republic required racial classification, but the boundaries of those classes were slippery.

As for Punqua Wingchong, he returned to his business in China despite the imperial laws forbidding him from traveling abroad. Then again, those laws barred him from trading with westerners outside the authorized area of Canton, and he did that in his shop anyway. Perhaps the Chinese authorities were willing to look the other way if he brought back useful information about the young U.S. of A.

Punqua Winchong kept up his good relations with America. He sent a thank-you letter to the new President, James Madison, and a gift for his wife, followed by two more letters over the next couple of years. In 1811, Punqua advertised his Canton shop in New York newspapers. Dael Norwood concludes that he was in America at that time, but I suspect he was still in China and had an agent place that ad targeting American sailors.

Punqua definitely returned to Nantucket in 1818; Karttunen reports his name is on a boarding-house register. That year the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany also reported:

A Chinese merchant, Punqua Wingchong, of Canton, was lately in New York. The Tuscarora natives, who saw him, were so struck with his physiognomy, that they insisted he was one of their people. They made earnest inquiry who he was, and were astonished on being told that he was a Chinese. Such is the physiognomonical resemblance of these races of Americans and Asiatics.

Other Americans recognized Punqua from the political controversy of the previous decade.

I don’t know if Punqua once again went home to China, or if there are any Chinese sources to fill out his life. But he and his servant exemplify the expanding international trade of the early nineteenth century.

“He is no more a Mandarin than one of our shopkeepers”

Yesterday I noted Dael Norwood’s article about a Chinese businessman named Punqua Wingchong, who got special permission from Thomas Jefferson’s administration to sail home during the embargo. Jefferson’s critics complained that Punqua was just a front man for John Jacob Astor.

Punqua had come to the U.S. of A. on his own, however. In 1807 he arrived on Nantucket on the Favorite, accompanied by a servant. In The Other Islanders: People Who Pulled Nantucket’s Oars, Frances Ruley Karttunen writes that the local diarist Keziah Fanning described him as: “a Chinaman that came with Mr. Whitney last fall from Canton. He is a merchant there. He is the color of our native whites.”

After Punqua’s return voyage in August 1808 became a political controversy, a New Yorker wrote to Secretary of State James Madison under the pseudonym “Columbus” to warn the administration that they had made a mistake:

Mr. Winchong who is represented as a China Mandarin I know well and knew him before he left Canton. He is no more a Mandarin than one of our shopkeepers is for that is his occupation. That he came away from China and must return by stealth I am sure of, as it is the only way a Chinese can visit a foreign country in a foreign vessel and Mr. Winchong has frequently told me that he came away from Canton without any Mandarin knowing it and he expected to return the same way, and I believe that should the Mandarines become acquainted with his visit to this country when he returns they would strip him of every cent he is worth. . . .

Since I left NewYork (my place of residence) on my Journey to this place I have had continual enquiries respecting the great Chinese Mandarin and I have in several instances related what I knew concerning him and I have just learnt that the Ship Beaver of near 500 Tons is permited to carry him and his property to Canton. This the Feds & Tories with a sneer observe is another proof of the wisdom of Mr. Jeffersons administration. I have sir now only to add that the Ship Beaver belongs to the bitterest opposers of the present administration and should they succeed with their tool Winchong in accomplishing their object they will laugh at those that granted the favor by way of showing their superior wisdom.

That Winchong does not possess 5000 Dollars in this country is my opinion for some time ago I recievd a letter from Mr. S. Whitney the gentleman that bro’t Winchong to this country stating that he wished me to be friendly to Winchong as he had not exceeding $500 Dollars with him and surely he ought to know. That Winchong holds notes of Shaw & Randall’s to a large amount and that he came to this country for the express purpose of collecting the same, is certain, but that House became bankrupts several years ago. Shaw is since dead and Randall with hard labour can scarcly support his indigent family. Therefore not a cent has been collected from them.

It would be cruel to the highest degree for any person to object to Mr. Winchong and the other chinese having permission to return to their native country but why is a ship of five hundred Tons necessary to carry them (and to return with a full Cargo). A small vessel certainly would be more expeditious (and particular at this season when they will have to take a circuitous and difficult route) and perhaps equally as comfortable.

By the time this letter reached the capital, Punqua’s ship had already sailed. But it points out some more connections between Punqua and Massachusetts.

When “Columbus” wrote, “the Ship Beaver belongs to the bitterest opposers of the present administration,” Norwood says he probably meant brothers James Perkins (shown above, courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum) and Thomas Handysyd Perkins, who were partners in that ship with Astor. The Perkinses were indeed Federalists—which is probably why they kept quiet and let Astor handle arrangements with his friends in the Jefferson administration.

Punqua’s “notes of Shaw & Randall’s” also have New England roots. Samuel Shaw had grown up in Boston and become an artillery officer during the Revolutionary War. He helped open the China Trade, first as supercargo on the Empress of China in 1784 and then as a trader and first American consul in Canton from 1786 to his death in 1794.

Thomas Randall’s background is harder to pin down, in part because there’s a prominent New York merchant of the same name. He was a lieutenant in the Continental artillery regiment as early as October 1775, when he was court-martialed for stabbing an enlisted man. (The panel recommended a reprimand.) In 1784 Shaw insisted that “Captain Randall, with whom he had formed an intimate friendship in the course of the American war, and who was as destitute of property and employment as himself, should be united with him and share with him the profits of the agency” in China.

That enterprise failed after Shaw’s death at the age of thirty-nine, and the notes Punqua hoped to collect on were worthless. No wonder he needed help to get back home.

TOMORROW: But what about his servant?

The Return of Punqua Wingchong

The Readex Report just published a very intriguing article by Dael Norwood about a political controversy in 1808. President Thomas Jefferson had imposed an embargo on American trade as a way to keep the country’s ships from being caught up in the wars between Britain and Napoleon’s France. But he made a special exception for one of John Jacob Astor‘s ships bound for China so that it could return a Chinese businessman who would otherwise be stranded in America.

But who was the man called Punqua Wingchong, who had come to Washington asking to be allowed to sail home? Norwood writes:

The terms used to refer to Punqua lay at the crux of the matter: was he a mere shopkeeper, an important merchant, or a powerful mandarin? In his letter of introduction, Senator Samuel L. Mitchill proclaimed Punqua a “Chinese merchant,” a term that implied both means and gravitas—but no diplomatic status. Secretary of the Treasury [Albert] Gallatin used the same construction in his orders authorizing the Port of New York to allow the Beaver’s voyage to proceed. Jefferson, however, promoted Punqua, naming him a “mandarin”—an official of the Qing Empire. It was the exalted rank bestowed by Jefferson that public supporters and critics alike picked up on when the Beaver’s voyage became more widely known.

Many of those critics and subsequent historians said Astor was behind Punqua’s petition to President Jefferson, grabbing an excuse to send a ship to China when everyone else was stuck on domestic voyages. Astor’s Beaver sailed with large amounts of specie, said to belong to Punqua, and Astor reportedly netted £200,000 after it returned with Chinese goods.

Perhaps Astor (shown above) was sincerely trying to help a fellow immigrant. He himself had been born in Germany, emigrated to Britain, and arrived in New York in 1784 as a flute salesman. But if he could make incredible profits while doing that good deed, Astor would have been all the happier.

TOMORROW: The Massachusetts connections.