Britain's East India Company [EIC] commanded over half of world trade during the eighteenth century. The EIC was a private company, but with strong government backing, it was able to command a fleet of armed ships and even private armies.  Force of arms and shows of power allowed the EIC to get its way with brute strength. Learning the languages of the territories where the Company traded was not necessary to reap a profit. In China, for much of that century, the EIC saw “only limited utility in learning the language,” and by 1790 it had become openly hostile to the training of employees as Chinese interpreters.[14] In India as well, the Company exhibited little interest in local languages until Warren Hastings became Governor-General of Bengal in 1773. Hastings was one of the first to see the limits of power based on brute strength, and he promoted interest, albeit paternalistically, in studying Indian languages and culture.[15] Hastings suffered the embarrassment of impeachment forcing him to leave India in 1788 to defend himself in London. Though he was acquitted after nearly a decade of conflict, his removal from India left to others the promotion of Indian culture and language among EIC employees.

EIC authorities in China had occasionally had the benefit of officials who knew Chinese. In 1736 it happened that James Flint, a teenager, was left in Canton after travelling there on an EIC ship. Flint studied Chinese on his own and, with a self-propelled start, then persuaded his superiors to pay for additional instruction. This led to Flint’s appointment as the Company’s official interpreter.  Flint and his compatriots felt the EIC needed to expand its trading privileges beyond Canton, where for centuries Sino- European  commerce had been concentrated.  Expeditions to negotiate with officials in Ningpo and other northern cities had occurred in 1755-57.  The travels of Flint’s delegation offended the regional authorities in Canton, who imagined these initiatives would end up reducing their power and their profits from trade.  Complaints from officials in both Ningpo and Canton led the Emperor to restrict by law all European trade to Canton. 

Flint continued, however, to press Qing officials, next complaining that he had been cheated in a transaction with officials in Canton. The complaint reached the Emperor, in spite of established practices prohibiting direct communication between commoner and Emperor. Singled out for the most severe punishment were the Chinese who had assisted in translating Flint’s complaint. Both of these men were executed and subsequently the teaching of Chinese to foreigners became a capital crime. As for Flint, he was imprisoned for three years in China and then deported.[16]

Though learning Chinese had not been a problem for the Christian missionaries, who had been working in China since the sixteenth century, the denouement of the “Flint Affair” cast a shadow for decades. Britain’s Macartney Mission, mounted in 1794, lacked experienced translators, and this is often cited as a cause of its failure. Nevertheless, in 1798 another Chinese speaker did join the EIC staff, but he remained rare within the Anglo-speaking community. 

When American ships began to arrive in Canton in 1795, their business was transacted through "linguists," a monopolistic guild engaged by the Chinese officials and foreign traders for their fluency in China coast pidgin, an amalgam of Chinese, Portuguese, and English. The linguists command of foreign languages was otherwise limited. Importantly these officials acted as mediators as much as translators.[17] The measure of their success was smooth running trade, not necessarily accurate translation. 

In spite of the language teaching prohibition, traders still needed to communicate. Traders developed a language purposed for the situation: Chinese Coast Pidgin, an amalgam of Chinese, Portuguese, and English. The Chinese elements in China Coast pidgin offered one linguistic bridge; and in many ways it was good enough for all practical purposes, a spoken language used in everyday business. The sounds could be alphabetized and even transliterated to Chinese. Official interactions could be left to the government appointed linguists, but pidgin gave the commercial principals on either side a way to talk directly to each other. Still the Chinese written language evinced such a separate world that it inspired curiosity. In the effects of the young Benjamin Page aboard the Ann & Hope (the elder was captain and the younger was a cabin boy) there was a counting chart with numerals and Chinese characters with the sounds they represented.  Further indication of curiosity in the language comes from the legacy of Samuel Ward, Jr. who was supercargo aboard the General Washington when she went to Canton; he bequeathed to Brown University a book, 漢字西譯終, a partially completed Latin-Chinese dictionary.

When Benjamin Carter arrived in Canton in December 1798, he seemed entirely focused on his duties as scribe, single-mindedly recording every transaction. The journal he kept reveals precious little of what he saw or what he thought about Chinese society. A letter written after his return to Providence simply observes: “I was much pleased with Canton. The Chinese as to their manners, customs, laws, religion & language are so different from us that they constitute a separate world by themselves…”[18]

Perhaps it was Carter’s curiosity about this “separate world” that triggered his fascination with studying Chinese. Fragments from his personal papers show the laboring strokes of a novice learner seeking to master the composition of Chinese characters. The months of long journeys back and forth to China would have been ideal times to practice his calligraphy. Many years later he recalled: “When I paid some attention to the [Chinese] language a few years ago I considered it as more an object of curiosity than utility as a very interesting language forming a part of general inquiry on which the busy mind of man for his own amusement and recreation might spend a few months of leisure if he chose.”[19] 

Since an early age Carter had studied language. In his day, boys with college ambitions needed to study Latin and Greek, as they were expected to recite lessons in these “learned languages” to qualify for admission.[20] Studies at Brown (then Rhode Island College) where he enrolled at the tender age of eleven, continued with courses in Latin and Greek.[21] Graduation ceremonies until 1786 included colloquies in Latin, a practice ceased then only because there was a shortage of time. 

In other words, what we today call the classical languages, were part and parcel of the expectations of the learned man circa 1800. Such learning was not necessarily for practical reasons. These languages were regarded as vehicles for moral and intellectual training. Be that as it may, in Carter’s world travels this knowledge proved useful. Latin allowed negotiations in Amsterdam, intellectual conversations in Leiden. Carter's knowledge of ancient Greek opened trading connections in St Petersburg.[22] Such knowledge signaled elite origins, smoothing the way to connections around the world. But Benjamin Carter’s interest in language learning went beyond its utility in entering college or its framing of a moral life. That fact that he had a deep and abiding interest in language itself is documented in the archives that trace his life: he had jottings not only in Chinese, but also in Hebrew, and Arabic, letters to friends composed in Latin, and recordings in his Ann & Hope journal of Australian aboriginal words, the first time so recorded in English. Linguistic curiosity characterized Carter’s worldview. 

As Carter was later to write to Jean-Pierre Remusat, the first Professor of Chinese in the College de France:

….I have made four voyages to Canton in China and resided a long time in that city. I have paid some attention to the language under the instruction of some friends & missionaries, being desirous to make further progress in Chinese literature I wish you to inform if there are any facilities here for the acquisition of that interesting language…

(signed)
Benjamin B. Carter, AM of Rhode Island College North America"[22]

Once Carter started on his quest to master Chinese he carried on with uncommon dedication. Carter made five voyages to Asia: four to Canton, and a fifth to Batavia, where a large Chinese merchant community had settled, and where he also might have encountered Chinese speakers. The loading and unloading of the ships commonly occurred over a couple of months. In the aggregate Carter spent as much as two years in Chinese speaking territory. He does not mention any Chinese lessons in the ship’s log of his first voyage. So probably at some point in his second or third stay in Canton Carter began to study. Carter identifies his Chinese tutor as Abel Xaverius who was “educated at the Jesuit College of Pekin."[23] Over this time it appears that Carter made considerable progress in learning Chinese, a development made possible by Carter’s earlier mastery of Latin, the only language that Carter and Abel Xaverius shared. 

The available evidence suggests that Abel Xaverius was a key figure in the Cantonese micro-zone of cross-cultural contact during the first decade of the nineteenth century. This conclusion emerges from several sources. Although the name Abel Xaverius does not seem to remain in any Jesuit record book, in the letters of the Robert Morrison, the sometime EIC translator and all-the-time Christian missionary, a teacher by the name of Abel Yun Kwang Ming comes into history.  The Hong Kong scholar, Man Shun Yeung, was the first to suggest that these two Abel’s are one and the same.[24  Morrison wrote:
 

Sir George Staunton proposes to introduce me to Abel Yun, a Roman Catholic Chinese from Peking, as an instructor.  Abel at present does business for the missionaries, and has some oversight of the Christians in the city and suburbs of Canton, who, according to Le Seensang, amount to about 3000.  The Jesuits have kept Abel drudging so closely at the Latin, that he has not had time to learn the characters of his native language.  All that he will be able to teach will be the pronunciation of the Mandarin tongue, which is common to the province where he is born."[25]

Carter’s introduction to Abel Xaverius came through a French acquaintance. We know little of how Carter’s instruction unfolded.  We do know however Abel Xaverius had other students. Carter notes on the back of leaf of his Chinese dictionary that the book’s transcriber was the “instructor of others, including Sir George Staunton."[26]

Abel’s pivotal historical role as tutor to George Staunton and others, and his role ministering to a community of 3000 believers, make one wonder how he could have escaped notice if officials wanted to enforce the prohibition against teaching Chinese to foreigners.   Even though foreigners frequently mention the need to learn Chinese in secret, Chinese lessons happened, quite often with Latin as a pivot language.[27] What we learn of Abel from Morrison’s letters and diaries complicate how to evaluate Abel’s ultimate role in Carter’s activities in Canton.