In the meantime Captain Derby's young supercargo on the _Astræ_, Thomas H. Perkins, had established a trading house in Canton. He entered the northwest coast trade with success, and in the course of twenty-two years his ships made thirty round-the-world voyages from Boston, by the way of the Horn, the northwest coast, Canton, and the Cape of Good Hope. It is an interesting fact that in the years immediately following the War of 1812 "all the supplies for the British [fur-buying] establishments, west of the Rocky Mountains, were brought from London to Boston, and carried thence to the mouth of the Columbia in American ships; and all their collections of furs were sent to Canton consigned to an American house, and the proceeds shipped to England or the United States in the same vessels." (_Hunt's Magazine_, XIV, 538.) In connection with the stories that have been told of these voyages to the Far East, consider the following facts in the biography of Captain Nathaniel Silsbee:-- "Among the officers who rose most rapidly to distinction in the service of Mr. Derby, none is more prominent than the Hon. Nathaniel Silsbee, late Senator from Massachusetts. His father had enjoyed the entire confidence of Mr. Derby, and after his death Mr. Derby transferred that confidence to his son. "In 1790 he appears as the mate and captain's clerk of a small vessel bound to Madeira. In 1792 [when but nineteen years old] he is master of a sloop in the trade to the West Indies, which Mr. Derby impowers him to sell for $350. In 1793, at the early age of twenty years, he is on a voyage to the Isle of France in command of the new ship _Benjamin_, of 142 tons. From the Isle of France he proceeds to the Cape of Good Hope, returns to the Isle of France, and brings his ship home with large profits. "In 1796 Mr. Derby dispatches him in the ship _Benjamin_ to Amsterdam and thence to the Isle of France, with a credit of $10,000 for his own private adventure. After selling his ship and cargo at a great profit he purchases a new ship of 450 tons for his owner and returns to Salem with a full cargo of East India goods for his owner, and such favorable results for himself as to enable him to commence business on his own account, in which he soon achieved fortune." When Silsbee, at the age of twenty, was master of the _Benjamin_, on the way to the Isle of France, his first mate, Charles Derby, was nineteen years old, and his second mate, Richard J. Cleveland, was only eighteen. In 1799 this Cleveland made a voyage in a fifty-foot sloop from Canton to the northwest coast of America, and, though hampered by a mutinous crew, he secured there a cargo of furs which sold, on his return to Canton, for $60,000. The outfit had cost him $9000.