Friendship, and Mr. Roberts was selected and dispatched on his mission in the United States ship Peacock, accompanied by a naval schooner, in 1832. Trade had already been established with Siam and Muscat, but was conducted under embarrassing conditions. As early as the middle of the seventeenth century a liberal monarch of Siam had entered into relations with the English, Dutch, and French. Louis XIV. of France had sent imposing embassies to Siam and negotiated with the king treaties of amity and commerce;[1] and when the United States attained independence its adventurous seamen profited by this established commercial intercourse, but the trade was subject to pecuniary extortions and vexatious impositions. It was determined that the first efforts towards treaty negotiations should be with Muscat, Siam, and possibly Annam, leaving China and Japan to a later and more propitious time.
Clothed with full powers to negotiate treaties and bearing autograph letters from the President of the United States to the sovereigns of the countries named, Mr. Roberts passed the Cape of Good Hope and sailed first for Manila and Canton, and thence to the countries to which he was accredited. Upon his return to the United States he writes that the unprotected state of the trade from the Cape to the eastern coast of Japan was painfully impressed upon him. Not a single man-of-war was seen waving the national flag over its extensive commerce in that wide region; the merchantmen
- ↑ Relations de la France et du Royaume de Siam, Lanier, Versailles, 1883.
