The “Canton” sailed from Philadelphia on December 30, 1785. She returned in May, 1787, having made the round voyage to Canton, Batavia, and home in a little over sixteen months. Her venture was highly profitable. From this beginning the far eastern trade grew steadily until, in 1805, Philadelphia alone owned twenty-seven ships plying in it, ranging from four hundred and twenty to seven hundred and five tons. Between 1805 and 1812, inclusive, the number of Philadelphia Indiamen and China ships increased to forty-two, notwithstanding the injurious effect of President Jefferson’s ill-advised embargo. In fact, that measure was not much observed by ship-owners in the India and China trade. President Jefferson did not attempt to enforce his embargo by either civil or military power, and very soon after he proclaimed it, the understanding became general among merchant ship-owners that if they chose to take the risks entailed by the British “Orders in Council” and Napoleon’s “Decrees of Milan and Berlin,” they could do so at their peril, with no recourse for protection or indemnity in case of misfortune. Under these conditions, ship-owning merchants, in other coast cities who traded with European or West India ports, for the most part hesitated to take the chances. But the Philadelphia merchant princes, who controlled the American trade with the British and Dutch East Indies and China, were not so easily foiled. They loaded and despatched their ships during the embargo, a period of nearly two years, almost as freely, if not as ostentatiously, then as they had done before or as they did afterward. This policy was founded upon the soundest judgment. The India and China merchants of Philadelphia understood perfectly that the titanic struggle between England and Napoleon involved conflicting policies and ambitions relating only to the commerce between America and Europe, not to that between America and the Orient. Occasionally an American ship bound for India or China or thence for home would be brought to by an English or a French cruiser and searched. But, as those ships never carried anything contraband of war, the worst that ever happened to them was the occasional impressment of parts of their crews by the English or the levying of a small tribute by the French. The voyages, as a whole, were seldom interrupted, and almost never terminated by detention or capture. These were the halcyon days of Philadelphia’s trade with the far East. From 1803 to 1815 the French could not trade to the Orient at all. And though the East India Company kept up the sailings of its fleet with more or less regularity, yet the war rates of insurance and the expense and inconvenience of constant convoy placed their traffic at signal disadvantage as compared with that of the neutral Americans.