1843: China Operations
Brandywine went back into commission on 16 February 1843, Lieutenant Charles W. Chauncey in command, and set sail for the East Indies on 24 May. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, she reached Bombay, India on 24 October to pick up the special envoy to China, Caleb Cushing, and took him to Macau where he went ashore and began negotiations for a treaty.
While Cushing was working to develop contacts with the Chinese government, Brandywine visited Manila, Hong Kong and Whampoa. On 16 June 1844, the high commissioner appointed by the Chinese emperor to deal with Cushing, Ch'i-ying, arrived at Macau; and negotiations opened on the 21st.
Following 12 days of discussions, the Treaty of Wang Hsia was signed on 3 July providing for the establishment of five American treaty ports in China. It also granted protection to American sailors shipwrecked on Chinese shores and guaranteed that both civil and criminal law cases involving Americans would be adjudicated in consular courts. In effect, the treaty extended to the U.S. the privileges that Great Britain had extracted from China in the Treaty of Nanking that ended the Opium War, though with one important exception. The American treaty expressly forbade the opium traffic, but the British treaty did not.
Cushing set sail in the brig Perry on 29 August to return to the U.S. with the new treaty. Brandywine, on the other hand, remained in the Orient until departing Macau for Honolulu, Hawaii on 2 December, carrying word of the Chinese privy council's approval of the treaty.
From Hawaii, she sailed to the west coast of South America where she made calls at several ports before setting out to double Cape Horn on her way home. At the end of a long and successful cruise, Brandywine stood into Norfolk, Virginia on 17 September 1845, and was decommissioned there eight days later.
Read more about this topic: USS Brandywine (1825)
Famous quotes containing the words china and/or operations:
“In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)