Thanksgiving 1805 in a Dangerous World

This past Thanksgiving week, American news broadcasts and journals reported the death of missionary John Chau on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean.  It appears that Chau had gone to the remote site in hopes of bringing the Bible to one of the last isolated groups left in the world.  Previous efforts to make contact with the Sentinelese had resulted in violence, as they attempted to protect their island from intrusion.[1]

            This is not the first Thanksgiving disturbed by sensationalist reports from overseas.  Nor is it the first Thanksgiving in which media reports fostered the conceit that the world is a dangerous place for “innocent” Yankees who only seek “peaceful” purposes among “backward” peoples.  On 28 November1805, Thanksgiving Day in the home port of Salem, Massachusetts, Capt. John Carlton anchored the Putnamoff Rhio, a modest port on Bintan Island, off the pepper-rich island of Sumatra. Although the local Malay population had acted suspiciously, Carlton had decided to leave ship anyway to conduct business ashore.  With their commander away, the crew unwisely disregarded his orders and allowed a proa(canoe) to close with the ship and permitted half a dozen Malay men aboard to trade pepper.  By the time Carlton returned, he found half of his crew killed or wounded and his ship vanished.  The Putnamwas never heard of again.[2]

            In the years when Americans were forming a national character and embarking onto a global stage, their newspapers erupted with bursts of sensationalist reports similar to these.  The accounts of atrocities overseas came with frequency and were often painted in such gruesome detail—headless corpses, mutilated bodies, entire ships and crews vanished. The raw power and thrust of early America’s acquaintance with the world contributed to a sense that the world was filled with dangers that threatened American lives, property, and values.  Consequently, a sense of dread covered every voyage that would carry merchants, mariners, adventurers, and missionaries “round the world.”  When missionaries Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons sailed to the Ottoman Empire about Thanksgiving 1819 to preach to the Muslim population there, they expected to be martyred for their cause.[3]  

            Much is missing in these stories of innocents abroad in a dangerous world that would dramatically alter the narrative.  Readers would never learn what actions might have led to the assault on the Putnam.  They would learn nothing of prior contacts between the crew and the indigenous Malays. They would learn nothing of trade practices, local customs, or taboos, and whether these had been honored or breeched. Nor would they learn the history of the pepper trade, in which both sides had practiced a cordial form of commerce underscored by mutual respect.  Consequently, a steady stream of sensationalist, partial accounts contributed to a sense of the wider world as dangerous—and one that must be subdued.

 More about the loss of the Putnam can be found in my forthcoming book, Eastward of Good Hope.

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[1]“North Sentinel Island tribespeople believed to have killed trespassing US 'missionary,'” CNN, 22 November 2018  https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/21/asia/andaman-nicobar-us-missionary-killed-intl/index.html;"‘God, I Don't Want to Die.' Journal Reveals the Final Days of an American Missionary Killed By An Isolated Tribe,” Time, 23 November 2018, http://time.com/5462286/american-missionary-killed-tribe-journal/.

[2]Salem Gazette, 4 July 1806; Phillips, Pepper and Pirates, 31-38; Ardiff 127–130. In locales such as Salem, the lesson had particularly powerful resonance because these events involved family names long associated with the area: the Putnams (of the witch trials infamy), Carltons, Browns, and Petits had inhabited Essex County since the seventeenth century.

[3]For more perspective on missionaries such as Fisk, Parsons, and Chau, see Christine Leigh Heyrman,American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam(New York: Hill and Wang, 2015).

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Cannibals All!

            How often do we find, that when we happen upon a new book—invoking a fresh set of ideas—it changes our perceptions of familiar books?[1]  This has been, once again, my experience over past semester, as I taught an undergraduate course based on my forthcoming book, Early America in a Dangerous World (Johns Hopkins, in process).  In the next few blogs, I will introduce readers to some exciting new texts that have inspired me to reimagine some of the classics in the considerable literature of discovery.  In this piece, we will look at Kelly L. Watson’s excellent study, Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (NYU Press, 2016).

            I happened on Watson’s fascinating examination of cannibalism, Insatiable Appetites, and decided to try her ideas out in the undergraduate course.  Watson is interested in the evolving concept of the cannibal, rather than the practice, so there was no need for a trigger warning.  I told my students that they would not find much gore—to the relief of some and the disappointment of others, it appeared.  

      Watson observes that since the time of Herodotus, Western writing has described peoples  

who inhabited the edges of the “civilized world” as man-eaters, and his has framed

“within colonialist literature . . .  an assumption that the binary construction of civilization versus savagery and barbarism defines the world.”[2]  Particularly revealing is her connection between Western assertions of cannibalism and savagery on the one hand and constructions of gender on the other.  As she writes:

            Implicit within ideas about barbarism in the early modern world was the inability 

            of barbarians to conform to the established norms of gendered power and sexual

            practices.  Cannibalism, then, existed alongside the perception of inappropriate 

            cultural practices in the writings of European men. The formation of masculine 

           and, later, racist imperial  power insisted on the perceived presence of 

           cannibalism.  In the early centuries of  conquest, cannibalism above all else

           determined savagery,  and savagery established one’s place within the hierarchy

           on which civilization and imperialism rested.

There is much more to Watson’s study—particularly her ability to situate the construction of barbarism within ideas of gender--and I encourage readers to pick up a copy for themselves.  

            Insatiable Appetites is the kind of book that changes how we might think about the early American Indies Trade and voyagers such as the ill-fated Samuel Patterson, a prominent character in my own work. Patterson (1785-  ) traveled the Pacific on three voyages over six years (1802-1808), touching at Australia in 1808, marooned on Fiji after shipwreck for six months, and raising a family on Hawai’i.  Returning from the sea, broken both physically and psychologically, in 1817 he produced Narrative of the adventures and sufferings of Samuel Patterson, experienced in the Pacific Ocean, and many other parts of the world, with an account of the Feegee, and Sandwich Islands, a text that influenced a whole genre of American travel writing.[3]  Patterson’s text is an important example of how ordinary sailors, rather than ships’ officers or merchants, constructed the Pacific and its peoples and how these experiences entered the consciousness of Americans to create an imagined world of in a state of barbarism populated by cannibal peoples.  

            In giving his readers “an Account of the Religion, and Customs of the People of Feegee,” Patterson focuses on what they would find sensationalist and sordid.[4]  And, so he selects the most damning epithet he knows will lure readers:

            These savages are cannibals, and eat the bodies of their own malefactors, and 

             all those of their prisoners: and as they were continually at war with some of 

             the tribes around  them, and the breach of their own laws, in nearly every case 

            was punishable with death, they generally had a supply of human flesh.[5]  

He paints an image that counters the myth of Yankee enterprise, energy, and initiative as markers of civilization:

            When cultivating their lands, and in their other labours, about noon they 

            generally have a hole dug in the ground, heated by a fire made in it ; and 

           after they clean out  the coals and ashes, they lay in their dead bodies, human, 

           if they have any for eating,  if not, hogs, and also potatoes and yams. On 

           these they place a covering of straw, and then bring on the hot ashes and earth. 

          After a few hours they take out the flesh,  &c, and each one receives his share.[6]  

As historian Konstantin Dierks observes, he “came home with reinforced contempt for the sundry ‘uncivilized’ peoples inhabiting that world.”[7]  Patterson concluded,

            how many of our fellow beings, with the exception of speech, scarcely can 

            be said to be before the beasts of the wilderness in improvements: — naked, 

            uncivilized, and preying on their own flesh. What a change, when the holy 

           principles of the religion of  Jesus shall possess the hearts of all men!

            Watson’s study helps us to interpret Patterson’s Narrative in fresh ways.  While Insatiable Appetites explores an earlier time--North America in the fifteenth- and sixteenth- centuries--her insights carry over into Patterson’s world.  In Watson’s terms, Patterson’s conclusions were prepackaged before he ever left America.  Patterson approached his Fiji Islands passages in a curiously understated style: “The food of this country is, yarns, potatoes, plantains, cocoanuts, bananas, taros, breadfruit, human flesh, an inferior kind of swine which they raise, &c.”[8]  Yet, a distinct cultural agenda informs his Narrative.  As for other Americans, a tradition of western writing about Native Americans and even Catholics had trained him to think about other peoples as lacking the trappings of civilization.  We would expect Patterson to have been appalled by cannibalism and the general disorder and lack of discipline he saw among the Fijians.  Furthermore, his book was written to attract readers and cannibalism was among the most horrific, and enticing, of subjects for the early American public.  As Watson reminds us, travellers do not commonly go into strange lands with open minds; they assume their own cultural superiority and use their own beliefs and practices as benchmarks by which to judge others.  Given that his own country was a new and culturally insecure nation, Patterson’s Narrativeoffered his readers a sense that they belonged within the community of civilized nations.  In doing so, he reinvented cannibalism and savagery for a new generation of Americans.

Notes

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[1]This title is drawn from George Fitzhugh’s 1857 pro-slavery tract, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters.  Fitzhugh maintained that the capitalism of the Northern states fostered a kind of ‘moral cannibalism,’ a metaphor for management’s exploitation of workers.  Like most early Americans, Fitzhugh used the term ‘cannibal’ rather cavalierly to suggest conditions of anarchy or savagery.

[2]Watson, 7, 26.

[3]It is likely that Patterson’s book was an example of social writing, perhaps disctated to his minister who then edited the whole.  We see hints in the Biblical epigrams to each chapter, such as:

            With melting heart and weeping eyes,

            My trembling soul in anguish lies;

[4]Patterson’s Elizawrecked on Nairai Island in June 1808.

[5]Patterson, 88.

[6]Patterson, 87-88.

[7]“Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861” (exhibit), Indiana University

http://globalization1789-1861.indiana.edu/exhibit/items/show/8.  Konstantin Dierks’s website is a valuable resource for scholars of early American globalization.

[8]Patterson, 87.

Early America in a Dangerous World

            

Dennis Malone Carter, Decatur Boarding the Tripolitan Gunboat, 1878

US Navy Museum

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.