The West family and other preserve owners

A survey from 1807 shows only eighty buildings of all types in Lewes. Over the next fifty years, no significant population growth occurred in the small town. Apart from a few oyster-shell lanes, the roads remained dirt through the early twentieth century.

By 1818, David Wiltbank, the family’s fifth generation owner, had sold the preserve to Robert West. That year, the Lewes commissioners were rushing to incorporate and expand the town’s boundaries, to forestall an attempt by Sussex County to claim all the land surrounding Lewes, including Cape Henlopen and the Great Marsh.

Some 238 Blacks (23% of the local population) lived in Lewes in 1830, including both slaves and others who had been freed. Six Black families lived along the preserve’s canal bank in 1833. Two of those were a former West family slave, Peter “Cato” Lewis and his adult son, also named Peter—perhaps, whimsically, after the Wests’ piratical ancestor.

On his father’s passing in 1833, Lewis West inherited the preserve where he and Elizabeth had been living and farming. One of his first acts was to convey two acres of land at the far right corner of the preserve to Cato Lewis. The land was to be used for Cato’s house and as a Black cemetery.

Lewis and Elizabeth West had two children: a daughter, Mary, and a son, Robert West. Like most of their relatives, they belonged to the tall Presbyterian church recently built on Kings Highway in 1832 for the recently arrived Reverend Cornelius Mustard.

After happily finding Mary in his congregation, the Reverend Cornelius married Lewis West’s pretty daughter in 1834. Their first child, David Mustard, was born later that same year, and a second son, Robert West (R.W.) Mustard, so named for Mary’s brother, came along in 1839.

When Lewis West died at age sixty-eight in 1857, Robert, forty-five, also inherited the preserve. That same year, Robert hired his nephew, Robert West Mustard, the son of his deceased sister Mary, as a clerk and partner in his firm.

In 1859, a cousin of Robert West’s, William Arthur West, twenty-six, was working as a third-generation river pilot. He had recently completed five years of arduous training under his father, Bailey Art, which included forty-eight trips up the Delaware to Philadelphia and back.

William was navigating the windjammer Sultan downriver from Philadelphia. They had just approached the Delaware Bay when a massive storm forced the ship far out into the Atlantic. The Sultan was on its way from Philadelphia to Shanghai, loaded down with coal. Once en route, Captain Berry would not turn back. And so William West found himself on a four-month voyage to China, from the South Atlantic through the Indian Ocean to the China Sea.

In 1859, few Americans lived and worked in Shanghai, though more would arrive soon. In short order, William West found employment with a British trading firm, Augustine Heard & Co. First, he was given command of a heavily armed clipper ship, the Wanderer, which he sailed along the coast from Hong Kong to Peking, avoiding pirates while his employers plied the illegal opium trade. In 1861, after West had proven himself, Heard assigned him as captain of a freighter. In time, by then with another firm, West was captaining a large steamship, the Kiang-loong, ferrying up to five hundred passengers at a time down the one-hundred-mile Yangtze River.

Back in Lewes, by 1861, West’s young clerk, R.W. Mustard, was growing nervous over the Civil War and pending Union army draft, both of which he intended to avoid. Within the year, with help from his brother David and uncle Robert, R.W. Mustard joined a group of young men fleeing by ship to Europe. After a spell in Europe, Robert West Mustard traveled to Shanghai to look up his second cousin. William put Mustard to work as a purser on his riverboat.

R.W. Mustard was determined to make his fortune in China’s thriving import/export business, earning commissions from deals he could broker between Chinese and U.S. companies. He left William’s employ after several years to start his own small company, which was dwarfed by much larger British firms that had their own ships and warehouses and offered many more services.

In 1866, his former employer in Lewes, Robert West, departed the Preserve and his ship chandler’s store in Lewes for a trip to Shanghai. It can be assumed his trip had at least two purposes: first, to see for himself, and for the Reverend Mustard, how his namesake, R.W. Mustard, was faring and second, to discuss with William West the prospect of marriage to Robert’s daughter Maggie. Having failed to sire a son, Robert appears to have been shopping for a worthy heir.

R.W. Mustard and William West returned together to Lewes in 1869, four years after the Civil War ended. West visited his parents and, likely by prior arrangement, briefly courted and married his second cousin, Maggie, Robert West’s oldest child.

R.W. Mustard’s reason for returning to Lewes was to liquidate $3,000 in assets, which, combined with a loan from William West, helped replenish his business accounts. He promised his father he would use the money wisely. Once back in China, however, R.W. started an ill-fated effort to process, can and sell dried, condensed (and inedible) eggs, modeled after the Borden Milk Company’s more successful new condensed milk product.