In
the decade after Samuel Shaw’s first voyage to China, an American exodus swept
into the Great South Sea, carrying the word that a new people had arrived to
take their legitimate pace among the community of nations. They spilled out
from the wharves of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and countless smaller
seaports into Calcutta, Pondicherry, Sumatra, Ceylon, and even insulated Japan
and returned with cargoes of tea, pepper, coffee, and silks that provided a
timely injection of capital into the withered economy and stimulated the
recovery of the early 1790s . .
Their
early contacts with the peoples of Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe’s
Asian expatriates offered this “new people” a significant measure of their
national character. They believed that Americans who traveled abroad, as much
as those who remained behind, contributed to the creation of the republic and,
especially, toward the formation of an authentic national identity. Indeed,
contact with the regions beyond Europe, navigated between “civilized” Europe
and the “barbaric” East, afforded Yankee voyagers a more nuanced palette from
which to fill in the details of an emergent national persona.
Within
three years, the Columbia Redivia
and Lady Washington had opened a
fur trade for Americans between the Northwest Coast and China, and the nation’s
newspapers preened over the expedition in the same language of global
achievement.
This
passage from True Yankees explores
a cultural chord within the history of the early republic that I find fascinating. While
voyages such as those of the Empress of China, Grand Turk, and Columbia and Washington contributed to the economy of the new
nation, helping to rescue the country from the throes of the wrenching
depressing of the 1780s, it was the reporting of these American travels in the
print culture of the republic that equally merit our attention. The accounts of these voyages in print
culture contributed to formation of a national identity, by casting the “voyages
of commerce and discovery” as national achievements that warranted celebration
across the country, by framing these journeys as American accomplishments that transcended state and
local loyalties, and by identifying a constellation of traits that situated
American in global terms, as “citizens of the world.”
We
find a nice example of this national construction in the 1787 voyage of the
Columbia and
Lady Washington, hailed as the American vessels that opened the Northwest Coast fur
trade.
Courtesy
of Massachusetts Historical Society
In
preparation, the six Boston-area owners commissioned gleaming medals of silver
and copper to commemorate the global and national nature of the voyage.
(Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society) Few Americans would see these tokens of the new nation’s
entry onto a global stage, but it is likely many would read—or hear read to
them—accounts of the medals in the pages of their newspapers. They were touted in the pages of
Boston’s Massachusetts Centinel in September and Charleston’s Columbian Herald, featuring an image of the
national hero George Washington on its masthead, in October. The language that Americans read in these journals bespoke
the imagery of a national and global imagination:
Silver and copper medals, we are told, are striking
off, to be carried by Capt.
Kendrick of Boston, bound to the Pacific Ocean, to
be distributed among the natives of the Indian Isles. . . Fitted at Boston,
North America, for the Pacifick Ocean.”[i] (my italics)
Courtesy
of Massachusetts Historical Society
Journals
like Virginia Journal considered the event so important that the papers described the
preparations for the voyage in its issue for 11 March 1787, several weeks after
the modest fleet had sailed. The
language emphasized that this was not a New England adventure, but a national
enterprise.
Quoting
the Journal of Congress for 24 September 1787, the Carolinians emphasized that the
vessels and cargoes were “the property of citizens of the United States, and
that they are navigated principally by inhabitants of the United States.” Against the report of Shays’s Rebellion
in western Massachusetts, this was welcome news indeed.
So,
the ship Columbia Redivia, under Captain John Kendrick, and the sloop Lady
Washington
under Captain Robert Gray, sailed out of Boston for northwest coast.[ii]
The press covered the departure with all the ceremony that had attended that of
the Empress. As
reported in the Salem Gazette (3-4-1787) New York Packet (10-12-1787), the New-Jersey
Journal
(10-17-1787, the Vermont Gazette (10-15-1787), and Charleston’s State Gazette of South-Carolina (10-22-1787),
Sunday sailed from this port
the ship Columbia and sloop Washington, commanded by Captain J. Kendrick and
Captain R. Gray, on an enterprizing voyage to Kamschatka, on the western part
of this continent. The object of
this voyage is to open an intercourse between these States and the natives of
that distant country, by trading with them for furs, of which commodity, it is
said, that country abounds. The greatest
commercial advantages are expected to be derived from this intercourse.
German-speaking
Americans likewise could share in the national moment, reading in the Lancaster
Beifung for
17 October 1787 and the Neue Unpartheyische Lancaster Zeitung und Anzeigs-Nachrichten
of
Lancaster Pennsylvania1(10-17-1787):
The
national achievement was a national paradox: To unite the nation from thirteen
disparate states, Americans would need to travel beyond their boundaries and
engage the wider world.
[i] Massachusetts Centinel, 29 September 1787; The Columbian Herald, or The
Independent Courier of North America
10-22-87; and Anne E. Bentley, “The Columbia-Washington Medal,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Ser.,
101 (1989): 120-127.
[ii] Joseph Ingraham, Joseph Ingraham’s Journal of the
Brigantine Hope on a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of North America, 1790–92 (Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1971), xii; Robert G.
Albion, et al., New England and the Sea (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 57.
