Qianlong, slim in build, aquiline of face, serene and majestic, dressed in ‘a loose robe of yellow silk, a cap of black velvet with a red ball on the top, and adorned with a peacock’s feather’, received Macartney, who presented gifts to show off British technology: a telescope, barometer, air pump, planetarium and six Wedgwood pots. Qianlong mocked the air pump – ‘enough to amuse children’ – but it was the Wedgwood that should have alarmed him. With the British sending china to China, the world had changed, yet Qianlong rejected British pretensions, reflecting the worldview of his prime: ‘Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance,’ while Britain’s ‘evil request’ was a ‘flagrant infringement of the usage of my empire’. For now the British looked irrelevant in China.
Britain could no longer deport criminals to America, but Captain Cook’s naturalist Banks suggested that New South Wales was ideal for a new penal colony. Pitt and his home secretary Viscount Sydney dispatched a fleet of eleven ships under Captain Arthur Phillip to secure the colony on the vast continent of Australia, the home of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples, most of whom had had no contact with Europeans except for a few Dutch and British sailors over the last century.
In January 1788, Governor Phillip raised the flag on the coast, naming the settlement Sydney Cove and delivering the first 732 convicts, thieves from London. By 1792, when Phillip returned to London, 4,221 Britons – of whom 3,099 were convicts – were settled in New South Wales. Its convicts worked in chain gangs, while its indigenous peoples were culled by diseases and broken by settler land grabs.*
The British were not the only conquerors carving out a Pacific realm. In 1790, it was the predations of an American family of fur traders who unknowingly helped Kamehameha create a Hawaiian kingdom. An American trader, Simon Metcalfe, sailed his
On a nearby island, his father Simon waited and sent a boatswain ashore to find out what had happened to Thomas. When the sailor was taken prisoner, Simon sailed away to China.
The two British sailors were invited by Kamehameha to operate his newly acquired cannon: wisely they not only agreed but became his intimate courtiers. Isaac Davis from Wales and John Young from Lancashire began as his gunners, then helped command his armies and ultimately married into the dynasty. After buying guns from British and American traders and learning how to manufacture gunpowder from saltpetre – easily found on Hawaii – Kamehameha, assisted by Davis and Young, stormed Maui. Five years later, in May 1795, he led 1,000 war canoes and 10,000 troops, along with cannon operated by his Lancashire and Welsh artillerymen, to seize Oahu, winning a battle at Nu’uanu and then sacrificing its ruler. Next this remarkable conqueror would take on American and European traders at their own game.
In December 1793, Jefferson resigned from Washington’s cabinet, leaving the field to his rivals from the conservative Federalist Party, Hamilton and Vice-President Adams, claiming disingenuously, ‘The little spice of ambition … has long since evaporated,’ while plotting remorselessly. ‘He’s as ambitious’, noted Adams, ‘as Oliver Cromwell.’ Jefferson hated direct confrontation, assuming an Olympian gentility, at the same time manipulating newspapers to destroy Hamilton – and refusing to denounce Robespierre’s Terror. In Monticello, he pulled down and restarted his domed mansion and resumed his relationship with Sally. In 1795, still only twenty, Sally gave birth another daughter, who also died young.
After two terms, Washington returned to Mount Vernon to salvage his fortunes.* Jefferson’s ‘retirement’ was short-lived and illusory: he carefully transformed himself from Parisian–Virginian aristocrat into austere man of popular virtue and ran against Adams, who won the presidency. As vice-president, his reward for finishing runner-up, Jefferson spent as little time in the capital Philadelphia as possible and as much as he could at home, where in 1797 Sally gave birth to a son, Beverly. While Adams’s presidency deteriorated, Hamilton, high-handed, brilliant but self-destructive, had ruined himself by admitting an affair with a married woman, Maria Reynolds. Jefferson doubtless revelled in the implosion of these Federalist rivals, but as he got closer to the presidency his own secrets became political dynamite.
