Each town had its special trade, and kept the
monopoly. Portsmouth and Newburyport ruled the trade with Martinique,
Guadaloupe, and Porto Rico, sending out fish and bringing back sugar;
Gloucester bargained with the West Indies for rum, and brought coffee
and dye-stuffs from Surinam; Marblehead had the Bilboa business; and
Salem, most opulent of all, usurped the Sumatra, African, East Indian,
Brazilian, and Cayenne commerce. By these new avenues over the ocean
many men brought home wealth that literally made princes of them, and
has left permanent traces in the solid and stately homes they built,
still crowded with precious heirlooms, as well as in the refinement
nurtured therein, and the thrifty yet generous character they gave to
the town. Among these successful merchants was Simon Forrester, who
married Nathaniel Hawthorne's great-aunt Rachel, and died in 1817,
leaving an immense property. Him Hawthorne speaks of in "The Custom
House"; alluding to "old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon
Forrester, and many another magnate of his day; whose powdered head,
however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain-pile of wealth
began to dwindle." But Nathaniel's family neither helped to undermine
the heap, nor accumulated a rival one. However good the forecast that
his immediate ancestors had made, as to the quickest and broadest road
to wealth, they travelled long in the wake of success without ever
winning it, themselves. The malediction that fell on Justice Hathorne's
head might with some reason have been thought to still hang over his
race, as Hawthorne suggests that its "dreary and unprosperous condition
.
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