Dudley Leavitt Pickman

Among the wealthiest Salem merchants of his day, Pickman used his own clipper ships to trade with the Far East in an array of goods ranging from indigo and coffee to pepper and spices,[2] and was one of the state's earliest financiers, backing everything from cotton and woolen mills to railroads to water-generated power plants.

[5] After working briefly for Hiller, Dudley Leavitt Pickman left the Customs Service in 1799 to go to sea as a ship's supercargo – business agent for the owner.

In 1799–1800, for instance, Pickman noted that the Belisarius had traveled first to the island of Tenerife, back to Salem, then on to Madras and Tranquebar, India, before returning to the Massachusetts port loaded with her bounty.

[10] The following year, Pickman kept the journal of the voyage of the ship Anna, captained by Benjamin Swett, which sailed from Boston to Sumatra and back in 1801.

Before the ship went to pieces in a gale in the Bay of Tunis in April 1810, the 94-foot (29 m) clipper made repeated voyages to India and Sumatra with several captains in command and Pickman acting as supercargo.

He and his partners owned an array of clipper ships including the brig Endeavor, the Malay, the Borneo,[12] the Belisarius, the Herald,[11] the Coromandel, the Persia, the Friendship and others.

[17] Pickman was an active merchant, writing to politicians such as Henry Clay to promote his mercantile interests and arguing for the need for protective tariffs.

His portrait is owned by the Peabody Essex Museum, where it forms part of a collection of the founders of Salem's East India Marine Society in 1799.

[31] His son Dudley Leavitt Pickman Jr. attended Noble and Greenough School,[32] Harvard College, where he was president of the Hasty Pudding Club,[33] and Harvard Law School,[34] practiced law in Boston and lived in a 40-room granite mansion, staffed by five servants and designed by architect Stanford White at 303 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, as well as in Beverly, Massachusetts.

[39] Born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1885, Dudley Leavitt Pickman Jr. also became a noted mountaineer and porcelain expert,[40] who published several books on the subject.

[41] Along with his friends Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, Francis Bacon and Frederic Allen, Pickman played the first game of contract bridge in its modern form.

Pickman's tombstone reads: "A successful merchant, distinguished for his sound practical good sense and an inflexible regard to truth and justice.