£20,000 by half. "The more I work", he confided to Lansdowne, "the greater the degree of jealousy and difficulty I have to encounter amongst the directors who are in general composed of either knaves or fools". Pitt rewarded Baring with a baronetcy on 29 May 1793, and he soldiered on as a director until his death in 1810, but increasingly he was disillusioned and absent from the court. As early as 1798 he had lost "much of that consequence ... which his superior knowledge, experience and abilities entitle him to". Transactions with Hope & Co. Throughout Baring's lifetime his good commercial intelligence, sound judgement, nimble-footedness, and instinct for speculative profit remained the hallmarks of his business style. Thousands of speculations detailed in his firm's ledgers attest to this, but his burgeoning business and rising confidence were graphically illustrated in 1787 when Hope & Co. introduced him to speculation on a grand scale. The two houses set about controlling the entire European cochineal market by secretly buying up all available stocks, one quarter for Barings and the rest for Hopes. Correspondents from Saint Petersburg to Cadiz spent £450,000 but prices remained static and in 1788, with a huge loss anticipated, the partners of Barings agreed "to forgo any participation of the profits of the trade for the last year". The resumption of war in 1793 provided new challenges and opportunities. The evacuation of Hopes to London between 1795 and 1803, when Amsterdam was occupied by France, and the availability of their expertise, contacts, and capital to Barings were of immense assistance. The two houses embarked on bold transactions—invariably with a quarter for Barings and the rest for Hopes. Their first adventure was entirely private and aimed to secure a substantial part of their capital from the dangers of European revolutions and wars. In late 1795 Baring dispatched his 22-year-old son, Alexander, to Boston to negotiate and execute the purchase of more than 1 million acres (4,000 km2) of land in Maine for £107,000. The investment was introduced by the land's owner, Senator William Bingham, son-in-law of Barings' Philadelphia correspondent, Thomas Willing, and yet another friend of Lansdowne. Francis Baring undertook the initial appraisal and commitment to the investment, and the negotiations were left to his son Alexander, who afterwards remained in North America as Barings' representative and who consolidated his position by marrying Bingham's eldest daughter, Ann Louisa. The link was