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A Merchant Adventurer in Brazil 1808–1818

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Herbert Heaton
Herbert Heaton
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

At thirty-seven John Luccock was looking forward with quiet assurance to a gentle transition into the comfortable middle age of a sedentary merchant. Napoleon and Jefferson spoiled his view, and before he was thirty-eight he had gone rolling down to Rio. There for ten years he imported and exported; watched a sleepy colonial outpost transform itself painfully into an imperial capital city; rambled, notebook in hand, around the almost trackless interior of Brazil, studying the remnants of an aboriginal culture and the way of life of those who had come to conquer. At forty-eight he returned home, leaving his health and middle age behind him. At fifty-six he died.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , May 1946 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1946

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References

1 The Annual Register for 1799, XLI, 401.Google Scholar

2 Printed by , Baines, Leeds Mercury office, 1805.Google Scholar

3 Tench Coxe referred to it more than once in his report to Congress on the prospects for the American woolen manufacture.—American State Papers, Finance, II, 670, 678.

4 Of 140 British alien enemy merchants in New York in 1812, 96 had no dependents living with them. Of these, 7 were under 21 years old, 60 were between 21 and 30, and 14 were from 31 to 35 years of age. Most of these 81 men were single. One of them had come from Leeds after a brief stay in St. Petersburg; he had one brother anchored in Norfolk, Virginia, and another who did five round trips between Yorkshire and America during the first six years of the nineteenth century, with visits to the Continent filling in the gaps.

5 Campbell, R., The London Tradesman (1747), p. 291.Google Scholar

6 For details of the treaties, see Manchester, Alan K., British Preëminence in Brazil, Its and Decline; A Study in European Expansion (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1933). For information concerning trading methods, the factory, and the gold traffic I am indebted to an unpublished thesis by Alan ChristelowGoogle Scholar.

7 For an account of the migration and its diplomatic aftermath, see Heaton, H., “When a Whole Royal Family Came to America,” in Report of the Canadian Historical Association, 1939. pp. 48–60Google Scholar.

8 Diary of Joseph Rogerson, scribbling miller, 1808-14, printed in Crump, W. B., The Leeds Woollen Industry 1780-1820 (Thoresby Society Publications, Vol. XXXII. Leeds: The Thoresby Society, 1931)Google Scholar.

9 Rogerson's Diary, February 22, 1808, in , Crump, Leeds Woollen Industry, p. 81.Google Scholar

10 These books, along with the letter books of the Luptons containing their letters to Rio and to clients who consigned goods to Brazil, are in the hands of Wm. Lupton and Co., now the oldest firm of cloth manufacturers and merchants in Leeds. I am grateful to the directors of the firm for permission to examine what is probably the largest collection of textile manuscripts extant in Yorkshire.

11 Luccock arrived in June, but the first letter book which has survived begins on September 14, with the entry, “Previous to this the copies were stolen with the writing desk.”

12 Other writers, such as the American Brackenbridge, comment on this prevalence of elephantiasis.