Though Connecticut farmers and law-givers looked with timid and unfavoring eyes on the possibilities and dangers of Oriental commerce, Connecticut merchants were not to be left behind in the race for the golden prizes of India. A great ship was fitted out in New Haven, and the story of her first voyage in 1799 and of its rich results reads like the wonder-tales of the East. The ship was manned by thirty-five Connecticut men, sons of respectable and well-to-do families; many of them were graduates of Yale. In its provisioning and furnishing merchants of New Haven, Hartford, Weathersfield, Farmington, Stamford, and other neighboring towns joined or “ventured.” The ship took no cargo. She sailed to the Falkland Islands. The crew killed 80,000 seals, packed away the skins in the ship’s hold, and then sailed to Canton. The Neptune was the first New Haven ship that furrowed the waves of the Pacific. The sealskins were sold to Canton merchants for $3.75 each. With $280,000 of the profits the Connecticut boys laid in a rich store of Oriental goods, tea, silks, and 467 boxes of fine china. These goods were sold in New Haven at enormous profits. The ship paid to the Government, on the results of that single voyage, import duties which amounted to $20,000 more than the entire State tax for the year. Mr. Townsend, the builder of the ship, cleared $100,000 as his share of the profits; the super-cargo, that useful and obsolete officer, took $50,000, and the thirty-five Yankee sailors and the Yankee merchants all tasted the sweets of this phenomenal venture. Thirty-six other Connecticut merchants joined at once in a venture in another ship, and the Cowles Brothers, of Farmington, fitted out three vessels for Canton, and vast amounts of Lowestoft porcelain were brought back by them to New Haven. It is only recently, and even now only among china collectors and what a Newburyport dame called “city folks and Yorkers” (that is Bostonians and New Yorkers—or city people in general), that the pieces spoken of in the last few pages would be called Lowestoft. In country homes all are still Chinese or India porcelain. It is the favorite tradition told of nearly every piece, even of undisputed English wares of the last century, that “my grandfather brought that bowl to us from Hong Kong,” and even when you point out the Caughley or Staffordshire marks, the owners are unconvinced and openly indignant. Chinese porcelain evidently denoted much higher aristocracy than English ware in early Federal days, and the sentiment lingers still among simple folk. Crests, arms, and initials are very common, “put on for us in China,” and the “China” or “India” tradition, must in such cases never be openly doubted.