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America’s Last Emperor: Sherman
Chapter Ten
January 15th, 1853
Norton threw the newspaper down on his roll-top desk in exasperation.
It was a month since he’d negotiated a contract for two hundred tons of rice at twelve cents a pound. The day after he had signed that contract, another boatload of unmilled rice came in and was sold for eleven cents a pound. Norton expected that someone bought it in speculation to ship to China.
The day after that, another boatload of rice came in, except this was two hundred thousand pounds of unmilled rice and five hundred thousand of milled rice.
Every day since saw the arrival of a new boat with rice by the thousands of pounds. As it turned out, Peru had discovered that rice was perfect to grow in their climate the previous year. Day after day, rice came in and Norton’s mill sat unused. The price of milled rice dropped to about three or four cents a pound. For a brief period one week it dropped to a single penny a pound. Most of it was snapped up and sent onward to China, where the price was solidly four to five cents a pound.
Norton went from imagining a profit of thirty cents a pound to realizing a loss of six cents a pound. The contract he signed (after dumping an entire fortnight’s receipts into a $2000 deposit) indebted him to pay more than $23,000…
