In the
past three years or so, we have witnessed the crumbling of the promise of a
post-racial society, an idea introduced with the inauguration of Barack Obama
as President in November 2009. The
murders of unarmed young black men by a white vigilante, volunteer deputy, and
sanctioned police officers, and the recent horrific massacre of African
Americans at the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina prayer meeting have
exploded this myth. Certainly, the
complications and conflicts that attend racial, ethnic, and cultural matters in
this country are not new—indeed, they have been woven into the fabric of our
national identity and have been concretized as the political issues of the day.
For
historians who specialize in the study of America and the world, the disturbing
developments that have shattered our national sensibilities recall similar racial,
ethnic, and cultural complications and conflicts at the moment when American
mariners first sailed into the wider world following the American Revolution. These events challenge us to re-examine the writings
of those first global Americans, and to weigh their thoughts about race, at
home and abroad, in an effort to find some deeper meaning about our society’s
today. Certainly, we can trace the
markings of racism and ethnocentrism in the journals and books of Samuel Shaw,
Amasa Delano, Edmund Fanning, Harriett Low, and Robert Bennet Forbes. But, what we find here is curious; not racism
or ethnocentrism in their modern guise, but often a conversation about race,
embedded in offhand reflections, as Yankee travelers struggled to make sense of
the diverse peoples--Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, Buddhists, and Parsees--they
encountered.
One
intriguing example can be found in the pages of Amasa Delano’s 1817 Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres. As a Bostonian, we might take Delano’s
views as a measure of northern ideas of black Americans, Africans, Chinese,
Sumatrans, Indians, and other peoples of the world, as well as the emergent
national (white) character. His
American, or “true Yankee,” is opposed to tyranny and repression, whether in
Peru or China. Yet, his views of the
Other are complicated.
In April
1791, Delano landed at Batavia, and found that the capital of the Dutch East
Indies hosted a remarkably cosmopolitan population of some 200,000 Chinese,
Japanese, Africans, and indigenous Malays.
His description incorporated a wide range of opinion. The Chinese
shopkeepers and customs officials were “enemies to idleness,” but “deceitful to
the last degree.” The Javanese would “apply themselves” in farming and
shipbuilding. The Amboynese constructed elegant houses with split cane windows
“very neatly wrought in different figures.” At times, others seemed to violate
the republican principles that Delano extolled. He found Malaysian peoples
“notoriously treacherous” and “void of morals.”
By June, he had reached the Palau islands and found the people there
were specimens of “interest, cordiality and happiness,” a “truly amiable
people.” They demonstrated a blitheful curiosity and even “lively sympathy,”
particularly their King, Abba Thulle, a figure of “wisdom and benevolence.”
One incident, in particular, stands
out in his Delano’s Narrative that
complicates his facile construction of the American national character. The encounter with the Spanish slave ship Tryal, under Captain Benito Cereno,
would bring to the surface fundamental contradictions within the persona of the
“true Yankee.” On the morning of 20
February 1805, after two months of cruising the Pacific shoreline and
collecting seal furs, Delano’s Perseverance
was sailing in light airs when the watch sighted a ship that “acted
very awkwardly.” Ascertaining that she was a Spanish slave ship, the Tryal, and that she was in trouble,
Delano sent out his boats, “well manned, and well armed,” to recapture the
slaver. He brought the Tryal into Conception six days later,
having provided the Spanish crew “every possible kindness.”
Delano’s
tale of the Tryal, festooning the
newspapers of the day, was presented through the voice of the philosophical
world citizen. Throughout 1806 and 1807, readers could find versions of the
story, as well as letters from Delano, the Spanish Consul in Boston, and the
Spanish Minister Plenipotentiary in the Newburyport
Herald and Salem Gazette; Portsmouth Oracle; the Vermont Centinel (Burlington); New
York’s Mercantile Advertiser, Public Advertiser, Republican Watch-Tower, and Spectator;
the Democratic Press and Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser of
Philadelphia, and Alexandria’s Daily
Advertiser and Richmond’s Enquirer.
The Perseverance and crew hailed from
New England, but the journals constructed the “humane and spirited exertions of
[Delano] and his brave crew . . . in the Pacific Ocean” as an American
enterprise, carried out by an “American ship.” For most readers, also, the
Yankee values that were celebrated--the King’s gift of a “Golden Medal” and
“Tribute of Respect’-- redounded to the credit of Yankees from across the
country. Significant as tokens of European acceptance, Delano applauded the
“kind and generous treatment” and “most sincere friendship and benevolence” he
received from Spanish officials. The story resonated with an American public
that applauded acts of heroism by their countrymen, especially for those who
operated on a global stage, and decades later, it would attract the attention
of Herman Melville, who adapted Delano’s account for his most notable short
story. [i]
Yet, in
describing the American as a liberator of disadvantaged peoples and in using
the Spanish Pacific as a setting, Delano was curiously indifferent to the
plight of the Tryal’s human cargo.
Instead, he accepted the Spanish assessment of the mutiny as “those heinous and
atrocious actions” rather than as a spirited struggle for freedom. He was not
ignorant of the fate of the mutineers. Six were condemned to “the common
penalty of death,” and “the heads of the five first be cut off after they are
dead, and be fixed on a pole, in the square of Talcahuano.” Others were
sentenced to ten years of hard labor. What accounts for Delano’s failure to
liberate the slaves of the Tryal or
to decry harsh sentences imposed on men and women who had attempted to take
back their liberty, not unlike the actions that he and his countrymen had taken
twenty years earlier? Like the majority
of white Americans in the early nineteenth-century, his concept of liberty did
not extend to African or Asian peoples. It exposed a cruel paradox at work in
Delano’s America. His 1817 publication came at an historic moment when working
class and middle class white men were becoming more vocal in demanding
expansion of the vote and elimination of property qualifications, even as they
sought to eliminate these rights for women and African Americans. The new
“ladies journals” that had begun to appear advised Yankee women to subsume
their energies into the domestic sphere of child raising, and budding
abolitionists could go as only as far as joining colonization societies that
promoted the emigration of black Americans to Africa.[ii] Within a decade, however, inaugurated in the
work of another Bostonian, David Walkers Appeal
to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), the currents within this
literature that called for a more accepting view of others peoples both at home
and abroad would be appropriated by a new generation of militant abolitionists
who demanded equal rights.
So, what do
we make of this? How do read the writing
of an Indies trade literature within the context of racism at home. Delano was a rather ordinary middle class
mariner. He worked his way up the ladder
and, it appears, down again to die in a measure of respectability, but not
wealth. We could easily reject him as
racist, or ethnocentric, or backward. A
close reading of Delano’s letters and Narrative
suggests something else. On the cusp of
contact with the peoples beyond the Atlantic—Chinese, Indians, Sumatrans,
Parsees, it appears that he was trying to work out what all this meant. As a man inspired buy the rhetoric of the
Enlightenment and a participant in his country’s recent revolution, he aspired
to fashion himself as a citizen of the world, tolerant and cosmopolitan. Regarding slavery, it was the debate over
diversity that played out in this Indies trade literature, and not so much one
side of an issue or the other, that defined American identity in the early
republic.
[i]
Delano, Narrative, 496-497, 318, 329.
Some of these accounts were reprinted from the Gazette of the United States. Newburyport Herald, 21 August 1807; Salem Gazette, 21 August 1807; Portsmouth Oracle, 22 August 1807; Mercantile Advertiser, 24 April 1806 and
27 August 1807; Public Advertiser, 22
August 1807; Republican Watch-Tower,
1 September 1807; New-York Spectator,
26 April 1806; Democratic Press 28
August 1807; Poulson’s American Daily
Advertiser, 25 August 1807; Vermont
Centinel (Burlington), 2 September 1807; Alexandria Daily Advertiser, 28 April 1806; and the Enquirer of Richmond, Virginia, 6 May 1806. Melville
published “Benito Cereno” in serial form in Putnam's
Monthly in 1855, and a year later revised it for The Piazza Tales. A number of literary critics have wrestled with
the problematic moral ambivalence they find in Melville’s classic short story.
See, for instance, Andrew Delbanco, Melville:
His World and Work (New York: Knopf, 2005); Rosalie Feltenstein,
“Melville's Benito Cereno,” American
Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography: 19,
no. 3 (1947): 245-255; Dan McCall, Melville's
Short Novels: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism (New York, NY:
Norton, 2002); Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, “Benito Cereno,” in A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of
Herman Melville, ed. Lea Bertani Vozar Newman (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall,
1986); Maggie Montesinos Sale, The
Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of
Rebellious Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Sterling
Stuckey, “The Tambourine in Glory: African Culture and Melville's Art,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville,
ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 37-64, and
Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations:
Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1993).
[ii]
Delano, Narrative, 89, 64-65,
347-348.
