John Henry Cox
| John Henry Cox | |
|---|---|
| Born |
circa 1750 London, United Kingdom |
| Died |
(aged 41) Whampoa |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | Explorer |
John Henry Cox (c. 1750 – 5 October 1791) was an English explorer who charted Great Oyster Bay, Maria Island, and Marion Bay on the east coast of Tasmania in 1789, aboard his armed brig HMS Mercury.
John Henry Cox was born c. 1750, the son of a rich jewellery merchant in London. His father James had a factory in Shoe Lane, which specialised in the manufacture of clocks and automatons (known as "sing-songs" in pidgin English), designed as bribes for Chinese mandarins who were in control of the native merchants with whom Europeans were obliged to deal in trade negotiations in Canton. He even published a work on his activity. When his father died towards the end of the 1770s, Cox turned to the East India Company for permission to stay in China for three years to sell the residue of his father's stock of clocks, and ostensibly "for his health's sake". In May 1780 he was given permission to stay for two years and February 1781 saw him installed at Canton as a merchant, but privately and not under the control of the company.
When the two years had passed, he applied for a year's extension, which was granted because of his "good bearing" and because he had been of special help to certain company chiefs. Cox then found it advantageous to move to Macao, where he was in association with a Scot, John Reid – who from 1779 had been Austrian consul and a naturalised Austrian subject – together with another Scotsman, Prussian consul Daniel Beale. All of their subterfuges were, of course, aimed at bypassing the East India Company's restrictive regulations.
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