This marriage was a business partnership as well as marital
and proved a success in every way. Sarah was a worker, with
all the good old Dutch qualities of patience, persistence,
industry and economy. When her husband went on trips she
kept store. She was the only partner in which he ever had
implicit faith. And faith is the first requisite in success

Captain Cook had skirted the Pacific Coast from Cape Horn
to Alaska, and had brought to the attention of the fur-dealing
and fur-wearing world the sea-otter of the Northern Pacific

He also gave a psychological prophetic glimpse of the
insidious sealskin sacque.

In Seventeen Hundred and Ninety, a ship from the Pacific
brought a hundred otterskins to New York. The skins were
quickly sold to London buyers at exorbitant prices

The nobility wanted sea-otter, or ``Royal American Ermine,''
as they called it. The scarcity boomed the price. Ships were
quickly fitted out and dispatched. Boats bound for the whale
fisheries were diverted, and New Bedford had a spasm of
jealousy.

Astor encouraged these expeditions, but at first invested no
money in them, as he considered them ``extra hazardous.''
He was not a speculator.