Right on the wood oil, but I think it may have been soya bean cake, not salt.
Actually, if you have an idle moment, "John Swire, the Senior" is a good book and could serve as a handbook on how to set up and run any transport business, even today...
sample quotes:
"I write as I speak: to the point."
"The immediate crisis over, John Swire went back to his favourite pastime; drawing up his competitors' balance sheets."
He was originally a cotton merchant; he hitched a lift to Shanghai, in 1867, on one of Alfred Holt's revolutionary compound expansion steamers because he thought that the shortage of cotton due to the Union blockade of the Confederacy might be made up by importing from China. He found that he was wrong about that, but wrote to Holt saying his Shanghai agents were useless and he could do a better job: he was appointed and he did. He founded the China Navigation Company, with Holt as a shareholder, "for the carriage of passengers, troops, baggage mails and goods by land, sea and AIR" (!) in 1872.