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Dennis Malone Carter, Decatur Boarding the Tripolitan Gunboat, 1878
US Navy Museum
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Following up a wonderful
collaboration with Johns Hopkins University Press on
True Yankees: The South Seas and the
Discovery of American Identity, I am delighted to
work with JHUP again to publish “Eastward of Good Hope”: Early America in a Dangerous World (forthcoming 2019). A preview:
In the
autumn of 1806, American newspapers were filled with the horrific news of the
loss of the ship Essex. This was not the famous, ill-fated barque
that had been “stove by a whale” in 1820, later transformed into an American
icon through the pen of Herman Melville.
The reports of this Essex, a
merchant ship out of Salem, Massachusetts, was, in fact, more lurid and
terrifying:
News is received here that Captain
Joseph Orne in the ship Essex had
arrived at Mocha, with $60,000 to purchase
coffee, and that Mahomet Ikle, commander of an armed ship, persuaded him to trade
at Hadidido, and to take on board 30 of his Arabs to help navigate her thither
while his vessel kept her company; that on the approach of night, and at a concerted
signal, the Arabs attacked the crew of the Essex, . . . and that the result was the slaughter of
Captain Orne, and all his men,. . . The headless corpse of Capt. Orne and the
mutilated remains of a merchant floated on shore and were decently
buried. It was soon after ascertained
that the
faithless Mahomet was a notorious
pirate of that country.
It would
have been difficult for Americans in the early republic to escape this tragedy
and the thousands of similar reports from around the globe that depicted the
world beyond their shores in such dire terms.
News of similar assaults on their countrymen aboard the Boston off Nootka Sound in 1803, the
Putnam in 1805, and the Friendship
off Sumatra in 1831, the murders of Captain James Cook in 1779 and the men of
the US Exploring Expedition in the South Seas in the 1830s, the loss of
explorers and traders Joseph Ingraham and the mysterious disappearances of the
US Navy sloop Wasp (9 October 1814)
and countless other Yankee vessels, the loss of men such as Samuel Shaw and
William Henry Low to “tropical fever” assaulted American readers. Even before stepping onto a global stage in
the 1780s, Americans had imagined the world as disordered and dangerous, hobbled
by tyranny and oppression or steeped in chaos and anarchy, often deadly, always
uncertain, unpredictable, and unstable, and their encounters after independence
reinforced their assumptions. As historians assert, “seasons of misery”
confronted early Americans in their “barbarous years” and particularly in
distant lands among “dangerous neighbors.” This vision of the world, more than
anything else, shaped Americans’ ideas of their place in the world. It has been
a view shared by Puritans who carried a reformist sense of “a city upon a hill”
to American shores, Yankee voyagers who freighted a mission of bringing order
to a world that they found “in a constant state of flux” in the early republic,
and the many Americans today alarmed by the torrent of news of foreign wars,
terrorism, massacres, and refugee crises.
