Johns Hopkins University Press
Available Autumn 2014
During the years between the Treaty
of Paris (1783) and the Treaty of Wangxi (1844), American travelers and
expatriates first voyaged “eastward of Good Hope,” from the ports of Algiers to
the bazaars of Arabia, from the markets of India to the beaches of Sumatra,
from the villages of Cochin China to the factories of Canton. Their “voyages of commerce and discovery”
introduced the new nation to the world and the world to what the Chinese and
other called the “new people.” True Yankees explores these early
American encounters in the South Seas and the ways in which their first
contacts with the East influenced the construction of a national identity.
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| Fan, depicting the Empress of China at Whampoa Reach, c.1785 Courtesy, Atwater Kent, Philadelphia |
The book traces America’s earliest
global engagements through the voyages of five Yankee travelers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade in
Asia, 1784-1794, scouring the marts of China and India for goods that would
captivate the imaginations of his countrymen, dying suddenly of tropical fever
off the Cape of Good Hope. Mariner Amasa Delano toured much of the Pacific as
an explorer and seal hunter in the 1790s and early 1800s. Edmund Fanning
circumnavigated the globe as another sealer, explorer, and trader, touching at
various Pacific and Indian Ocean ports-of-call well into the 1830s. Harriett
Low was a reluctant twenty-year-old when she accompanied her merchant uncle and
ailing aunt to Macao, residing there between 1829 and 1834 and recording her
observations of expatriate life. Merchant Robert Bennet Forbes’s last sojourn
in Canton, 1838-1839, coincided with the eruption of the First Opium War.
This
examination of the Indies Trade demonstrates how the global encounters of
ordinary mariners and merchants, coming at the moment of the
nation’s emergence, influenced the ways in which Americans thought of
themselves and represented their ideas about an emergent American national
character—the “true Yankee.”
