Yankees Abroad: Early American Encounters in the World

            I certainly found the people very civil & accommodating & they behaved 

            much better than I had any idea of & in fact as well as any people I ever 

            was amongst.  Making proper allowance for the manners & customs.

                                                            -- Capt. Jacob Crowninshield, 

                                                               aboard America III,

                                                                off the coast of Sumatra, 1801

            they are all without exception a set of cheats, & this they will vouch for, 

            if you should doubt their rascality.

                                                            -- Capt. Thomas Ward, aboard Minerva, 

                                                                 off Canton, 1809

Captain Jacob Crowninshield (1770-1808)
Courtesy, Library of Congress

            It helps to have a historical context in which earlier American responses to the world ground our current questions.  An appreciation for the range of first encounters inspired my writing in True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity (https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/true-yankees) and I hoped the book would challenge the conventional wisdom that posits an American exceptionalism should rule the world.  Colleagues have told me that they have used the book effectively in their classrooms to raise their students’ awareness of American encounters in the world.  For my next project, I wanted to foreground the travelogues, correspondence, mariner’s journals and other sources that tell these stories.  So, serendipitously, when Hackett Publishing (www.HackettPublishing.com), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, approached me to develop a textbook, I jumped at the opportunity.

            Yankees Abroad: Early American Encounters in the World will describe the post-Revolution diaspora to regions that lay “eastward of Good Hope,” or, beyond South Africa into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These American travelers found the world to be a complicated place.  As suggested in the journal entries from Captains Crowninshield and Ward above, Yankees Abroad will explore the range of responses that Americans recorded in their early ‘voyages round the world.’ The book will carry readers vicariously into four of these regions of encounter--the Muslim world of West Asia and North Africa, China, India, and the South Seas.  The book will situate the country’s changing perceptions of the world within their search for opportunities, describing how merchants sought exotic markets and trade goods, captains scouted new routes and discovered new passages, amateur and professional scientists chased new species, artists surveyed imaginative new scenes, and missionaries hunted for “lost” souls ripe for conversion. At the same time, students will share in the fears of Yankee travelers as they encountered the dangers of unfamiliar and distant lands--assaults on their ships from pirates or cannibals, shipwreck on uncharted coasts, and, always, the specter of tropical disease.

Launching of the Ship Fame, George Ropes, 1802
Courtesy, Peabody Essex Museum

I hope the book will enable students to situate our current global relationships within a historical context that sheds light on both earlier American responses to the world and current engagements with it.

“Onboard the Sch[ooner] Pilgrim at Sea, a Prisoner”

The Perseverance
Courtesy, Skinner, Inc.

These are dangerous times to be an American.  Evidenced by the histrionics of the current presidential campaign, many Americans certainly claim to feel more vulnerable and less safe than in earlier times.  The danger, they assert, stems from abroad—illegal immigrants threatening our jobs and “Islamoterrorists” threatening our lives.  We are, of course, not more threatened now than in previous eras, as Americans who lived through World War II and the Cold War can attest.  But, current mythologies have many Americans believing that this is the case.

 

Log of schooner Pilgrim, 1803-1805
Courtesy, Drew Archives

           During a recent research foray in the beautifully appointed Drew Archives in Duxbury, Massachusetts, I was reminded of how a profound sense of national weakness gripped the country in earlier times.  Set within a mottled brown leather wrapper, the frayed and foxed pages of a logbook for the schooner Pilgrim reveal an episode of national insult.[i]  First mate Samuel Delano recorded the incident on the Pilgrim’s voyage into the Pacific to collect sealskins. The Pilgrim had been sailing as “consort” to the Perseverance, commanded by Samuel’s brothers, Amasa and William Delano when the vessels were separated off the coast of Chile.

“South America, Drawn from the Best Authorities: Regulated by Astron,” by Thomas Kitchin. Observat. [1790?]

            As Delano recorded, the morning of Thursday, May 2, 1805, “began with fresh gales and squalls of Rain.”  At 8:00 a.m., the Pilgrim’s watch caught sight of a ship in their wake, following closely behind:

           She gained fast on us, having all sail yet we lay by for her. At noon she came

            up with us and prov’d to be a Spanish ship of 20 guns. She boarded us and

            sent word for me to come aboard with my Papers which was complied with.

This was a Chilean coast guard vessel.  In a Kafkaesque exercise, the Spanish ordered Delano into the coaster’s great cabin, where they interrogated him for several hours, culminating in a demand that he sign a statement that their translator had produced, despite his plea that he could not read Spanish.  As Delano tells the story, he replied,

            But if it was what I had said and no different, I would sign it. They said it was

            the same. I then signed it. I then asked for a certificate to blank any other Spanish

            vessel I might meet that I had been examined by a king’s ship.

At this point, his captors informed him that he must proceed to Valparaiso. Delano protested that the Pilgrim had left men on St. Phelps, and sought to “use every means to convince them there was a danger 10 men’s perishing on and blank for water,” but he was denied.  Over the next two weeks, the Pilgrim sailed “in company with” the Spanish coaster.  During that time, the commandant, “as they termed him,” repeatedly sent for the schooner’s logbook and charts.  Meanwhile, Spanish sailors boarded the Pilgrim, rifling through the cargo and even the sea chests of the schooner’s crew.  As recorded in the Pilgrim’s log for 10 May 1805:

            In Custody of the Spaniards this day they overhauled everything in all parts

            of the vessel, Ripped up [?], unheaded Casks of Flour and Bread in the hold

            and Bundled things About as mutch as they chose and filled every part of

            the vessels with Spaniards to search as they saw for contraband goods.  But

            more Provable to me for other purposes our people still on board the Coster

            . . . say they have much suffered from since they had been prisoners.

The schooner and her coaster guard reached Valpariso by May 24, where they were reunited with Amasa and William aboard the Perseverence.  Fortunately, Amasa had sailed in these waters previously and has accrued some influence with Chilean authorities. He was able to arrange for the release of the schooner.  However, his efforts to reclaim “articles that the Spanish Sailors had stolen” from the Pilgrim and her crew—clothes, small goods, and cash—were unsuccessful—“all they got was a shrug of the shoulders.”  Samuel Delano recorded a further act of overreach in the ship’s log: The Commodore “sign’d the Back of my Clearance from Boston, [but] forbidding the Pilgrim to Navigate the Pacific Ocean.”

            As I note in True Yankees, Americans considered such incidents, all too common in the new republic’s early years, as insults to the national honor.  The last word goes to Samuel Delano in the Pilgrim’s log:

            I may never Die until I have had Just Recompence for Insults and Injuries

            Receiv’d from Spaniards men.

Special thanks to Carolyn Ravencroft, Research Librarian, Drew Archives, Duxbury, Massachusetts For more, www.drewarchives.org 

True Yankees: 2015 Americana Lecture, 22 November

Please join me for a talk about “True Yankees” at the annual

Americana Lecture

Hamilton Hall, Salem Massachusetts

Sunday 22 November 3:00 pm

Proceeds support this important 1805 Samuel McIntire designed National Historic Landmark.

For further information, see

http://www.hamiltonhall.org/americana.php

For purchase information, see
https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/true-yankees

Americans Celebrate the Empress of China, 1785

On the 11th of May 1785, the American ship the Empress of China slipped into her berth along the wharves of New York’s East River, to the calls and “huzzahs” of astonished merchants, sailors, and dockworkers. Hundreds of curious on-lookers dropped their ledgers, tools, and carts and raced to observe her arrival. Even in the midst of a staggering economic depression, New Yorkers were used to seeing ships returning from distant Europe and the West Indies or coastal ports like Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. But the arrival of this vessel drew exceptional notice because her port of call had been particularly exotic and her cargo was not the usual store of sugar, molasses, and grain carried on a conventional voyage. The Empress was the republic’s first Indiaman, the first American vessel to sail “eastward of Good Hope” into the waters of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Fifteen months earlier, she had departed New York with a cargo of Appalachian ginseng and Spanish dollars, and onlookers now gaped to see the wares she had brought back from the East.[i]

The opening lines to True Yankees recall the gaping astonishment and gleeful festivities that surrounded the Empress’s return from China.  The event was important, ushering in a new age of global engagement for Americans, at the moment when they were constructing a new nation. But, so, too, was the experience of encounter, as Americans’ responses to the voyage reveal how they thought about their young republics (as the thirteen new states defined themselves) and the ways in which they attempted to mark the Event. These forms of thinking nationally were as experimental as the Empress’s voyage itself.

In this age of genteel sensibility described by a number of historians, the news journals of the day were inventing a language of national sensibility to replace the discourse of imperial feeling made null by the Revolution and independence.  It would create a language of achievement, duty, and honor.[ii]

The project began even before the Empress sailed.  In March 1784, The Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser reported on preparations for the voyage, asserting “the ship  . . . belongs to citizens of the . . . United States.” A host of other newspapers described the fanfare that accompanied the national moment. On passing Fort George, the Empress had fired the “United States salute,” it was reported. Designed by “Mr. Peck of Boston,” she carried “several young American adventurers.”  In the details, readers could not only feel the embrace of the national moment, but also glimpse a set of traits that would define the American and become the essential themes of an emergent China Trade literature.  In an anthropomorphic exercise, the vessel itself seemed to encapsulate traits that the editors hoped would appear in the character of the “new people”: “built on the new invented construction of the ingenious Mr. Peck . . . she is deemed an exceeding swift sailer.” A product of American craftsmanship, crafted by their countrymen’s own hands, she was, as well, a “handsome, commodious and elegant ship.” As for the men, readers could see in the descriptions of captain and crew representations of a familiar trope, the simple, honest New England Jonathan, “all happy and cheerful, in good health and high spirits” who behaved “with a becoming decency.”  In an early expression of the manifest destiny that would mark the antebellum era, they appreciated their national mission and were “elated on being considered the first instruments, in the hands of Providence, who have undertaken to extend the commerce of the United States of America.”  Yet, against the isolationist impulse of later periods, they embraced the opportunity to encounter and engage the wider world and to carry the republic “to that distant, and to us unexplored country.”  In sum, then, they were simple, enterprising, national, cosmopolitan.[iii]  As the Congress toasted two months later at its Independence Day banquet, “May the Simplicity of Manners, Industry and Frugality distinguish the Character of an American,” and bring “Liberty, Peace and Happiness to all Nations.”[iv]

---

[i] True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity, 1784-1844 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), xi.

[ii] Sarah M. S. Pearsell, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6-8.

[iii] Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, March 11, 1784.

[iv] New Hampshire Mercury and General Advertiser, 19 July 1785.

True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity

 Dane A. Morrison

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. 

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.”