Captain Crowell Hatch of
Cambridge, Samuel Brown, a trader of Boston, and John Marden Pintard of
the New York firm of Lewis Pintard Company were also of the little
coterie.
[Illustration: Departure of the _Columbia_ and the _Lady Washington_.
Drawn by George Davidson, a member of the Expedition. Photographed by
courtesy of the present owner, Mrs. Abigail Quincy Twombly.]
If Captain Cook's crew had sold one-third of a water-rotted cargo of
otter furs in China for ten thousand dollars, why, these Boston men
asked themselves, could not ships fitted expressly for the fur trade
capture a fortune in trade on that unoccupied strip of coast between
Russian Alaska, on the north, and New Spain, on the south?
"There is a rich harvest to be reaped by those who are on the ground
first out there," remarked Joseph Barrell.
Then the thing was to be on the ground first--that {212} was the
unanimous decision of the shrewd-headed men gathered in Bulfinch's
study.
[Illustration: Charles Bulfinch.]
The sequence was that Charles Bulfinch and the other five at once
formed a partnership with a capital of fifty thousand dollars, divided
into fourteen shares, for trade on the Pacific.
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