Vaughn on “Tea, Taxes and World History,” 24 May

On Wednesday, 24 May, the American Revolution Institute in Washington, D.C., will host a talk by Prof. James M. Vaughn of the University of Chicago on “On Tea, Taxes and World History: The British East India Company and the Origins of the American Revolution.”

The event description says:

In May 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which instituted a tax of three cents per pound on all British tea sold in America. The act effectively granted a monopoly on the sale of tea in the American colonies to the British East India Company, which was looking to reduce its excessive stores of tea and relieve its financial burdens.

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Tea Act’s passage, James Vaughn, a historian of the British Empire at the University of Chicago, examines the developments in Britain, British North America and South Asia leading to the passage of the act, and discusses why a relatively mundane piece of parliamentary legislation renewed the imperial crisis and led to the outbreak of the American Revolution.

Vaughn is a professor at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the British Empire and Atlantic world during the eighteenth century. He is the author of The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain’s Imperial State and co-editor of Envisioning Empire: The New British World from 1763 to 1773.

Vaughn is currently preparing “a book on the American Revolution and the origins of liberal democracy in global context.”

This talk will also be available for viewing online, starting at 6:30 P.M. Register through this page.

Two Deaths in Pondichéry

At Nursing Clio, Jakob Burnham examines two deaths in the French colony at Pondichéry, India, in 1726.

One was a French soldier named Le Bel who had thrown himself into a well and drowned. The other was a 75-year-old local man named Canagesabay, found hanging from a tree.

Both men had been ill, Le Bel with a “lung abcess” and Canagesabay with debilitating stomach pains. The soldier had made arrangements for his death days earlier while the local man’s sons reported that he had spoken of throwing himself into the street. So it appears both men became physically ill, despaired of recovering, and killed themselves.

Burnham writes that French law required “French subjects who were determined to have committed suicide to hang by their feet in the gallows; have their bodies dragged through the street; be denied Christian burial; as well as have their personal goods and assets confiscated.” Not that this was always applied to the letter.

However, there was a changing attitude:

By the seventeenth century, public officials in France and elsewhere increasingly concerned themselves with suicide as a matter of public order and as part of a larger effort to investigate the circumstances around suspicious deaths. This greater attention to the circumstances of death contributed to what has been called a “medicalization” of suicide, especially at the turn of the eighteenth century. Testimonies from investigations into reported suicides revealed that witnesses and family members began amplifying connections between chronic illness and suicide during this period. Official reports, witness statements, and even interviews with survivors made references to “melancholy, mental and physical maladies over which they reputedly had no control.”

This led to the thinking that someone’s illness may have “transport au cerveau” (gone to his head) and led to suicide.

In Pondichéry, the surgeon-general used just that phrase to explain the soldier Le Bel’s death. However, the same doctor said nothing about the medical conditions preceding Canagesabay’s suicide. And this different approach continued with how the authorities treated the two men’s corpses.

Two Captains and the “disagreeable necessity” of Money

In the eighteenth-century British army, officers were expected to pay their predecessors when they were promoted into a new rank.

Thus, a captain might retire while receiving £750 from an ambitious lieutenant, who in turn would receive £300 from an ensign, whose father would pay £200 to get him into the army in the first place.

Since the captain had paid his own predecessor, he thought receiving £750 was only fair. And this system promised officers some money for their retirement. Of course, it also limited the officers’ ranks to men with wealth—which that society saw as a Good Thing. No matter that some competent officers languished without promotions for years because they couldn’t scrape up the cash.

A similar system appears to have taken hold in the East India Company maritime service, even though the corporation didn’t like it. (Probably because it wasn’t receiving a cut of the money changing hands.)

At the British Library blog, curator Margaret Makepeace just highlighted the case of Capt. James Munro of the East India Company’s fleet. Munro had gone to sea in 1766 at the age of ten, serving under his uncle William Smith [yes, another one] on the Houghton. By 1778 he was second mate, and by 1782 he was sailing to China on the York.

Makepeace writes:

In 1782 James Monro succeeded his uncle William Smith as captain of the Houghton, making four voyages to China and India before resigning and passing the command to Robert Hudson in 1792. Captains were appointed by the ship owners and approved by the East India Company . . .

In April 1792, William Smith wrote to his nephew, addressing him as ‘Dear Jim’. Smith understood that Monro had sold the command of the Houghton for 8,000 guineas, having paid him £4,000 for it. Although Monro had not promised him anything, Smith thought he should receive half the profit. Smith claimed that he could have sold his command at a far higher price, perhaps as much as £7,000, but he had his nephew’s interest too much at heart to consider such offers. He regretted the ‘disagreeable necessity’ of speaking his mind.

James Monro’s reply began ‘My dear Sir’. He felt that he was being put in a very unpleasant position, and put forward his side as he would to someone not related.

Monro was away on board the York when it was decided that he should succeed as commander of the new Houghton which was being built to replace Smith’s ship. On his return to England he was told to pay Smith £4,000. He had no idea that any future demand would be made on him until a chance conversation with his uncle some time later.

Both the East India Company and the owners had been trying to lessen the price given for ships, or to prevent totally the sale of commands. If they had succeeded, would Smith have refunded part of his £4,000? Smith had not paid for his own command but had received interest on Monro’s £4,000 for ten years.

Monro had always thought to offer his uncle £1,000 when he sold the command. He would cheerfully give him 1,000 guineas and nothing more need be said.

I should note that 1,000 guineas was 5% more than £1,000—though still far less than half the difference between what Capt. Munro had paid his uncle Capt. Smith ten years before and what he had received from his successor.

Did the two captains work this out and maintain friendly family relations? See Makepeace’s article here.

“Their belief that the peace was not the king’s to keep”

Lisa Ford’s The King's Peace: Law and Order in the British Empire was published last year by Harvard University Press. It looks at changes in how the British government sought to keep the peace in its empire by changing its fundamental rules.

Ford built the book around five case studies, starting in the province of Massachusetts and then moving on to Canada, Jamaica, Bengal, and New South Wales.

In a review for H-Net (P.D.F. download), Dana Rabin writes:

Boston’s Liberty Riot in 1768 illustrates the disorders faced by agents of empire in the run up to the American Revolution. Riot and threats of violence from white colonists revealed the weakness of the Crown and the powerlessness of the king’s agents to enforce the peace. Residents of Massachusetts justified their intimidation and threats of violence with their belief that the peace was not the king’s to keep but rather that of white, Protestant men in the name of the people. Ford calls this “the end of empire.”

The book proceeds to reconstruct what Ford considers the ramifications of the American Revolution to the legal history of empire, attributing to Parliament and British colonial officials a new resolve to buttress the king’s power and prerogative against similar future threats. In the period after the American Revolution, the Crown accrued great powers by Acts of Parliament that increased the power of governors and decreased the power of legislative bodies or eliminated them entirely. Judges appointed by the Crown and supervised from London enhanced Crown control over colonial legal systems. The Crown’s expanded power was often framed as a duty to protect.

The focus of chapter 2 is Quebec where white Protestant men again resisted the military rule installed upon British victory in the city in 1759. British Protestant merchants resented any limits to their participation in the fur trade and objected to any concession of rights to French Catholics. Ford argues that in response to their ungovernability and Catholic vulnerability, the Quebec Act of 1774 created a Crown colony in Quebec, granting the governor expanded powers to rule without a legislative body. Even after the creation of the elected assemblies of Upper and Lower Canada in 1791, legislation was subject to the approval of an appointed upper house and gubernatorial veto.

Starting in the 1760s, Massachusetts Whigs feared that Parliament wanted to take more control over the colony. British leaders felt that Massachusetts was trying to operate outside of legal bounds. With each new law, the Whigs felt their warnings were vindicated. With each new resolution or riot protesting a new law, London administrators felt their wish for stronger authority was vindicated. The result was a spiral of resentment and suspicion that no one could resolve.

A Boston Boy Rebuilding the British Empire

Yesterday’s précis of the life of Charlotte Biggs promised a connection to pre-Revolutionary Boston.

You remember that young man whom Charlotte fell in love with as a teenager before her marriage? The one who went off to India to make his fortune?

His name was David Ochterlony, and he came from Boston.

Ochterlony (shown here) was born on 12 Feb 1758, eldest son of a Scottish merchant captain with the same name. His mother was Katherine Tyler, a niece of the first Sir William Pepperrell. The family house from 1762 was a brick mansion on Back Street.

In 1766 David entered John Lovell’s South Latin School. The year before, however, his father had died on a voyage to the Caribbean. The estate was in debt, not paid off until well after the war.

What happened next to young David and his siblings isn’t easy to sort out. There’s evidence he spent some time studying under Samuel Moody at the Byfield school endowed by Lt. Gov. William Dummer, now the Governor’s Academy.

Katherine Ochterlony moved to Britain and in the early 1770s married Sir Isaac Heard, a Royal Navy veteran, merchant, and, of all things, heraldric official.

The Ochterlony children joined their mother in Britain, and Heard welcomed them into his family. It’s said that David developed a close relationship with his stepfather.

When the American War began, David Ochterlony showed his loyalty to the British Empire by joining the army, or pledging to. During this time in London, the teenager evidently met Charlotte Williams, and she fell in love with him.

Ochterlony shipped out to India as an army cadet. In 1778 he gained the rank of ensign, and in three years became quartermaster for the 71st Regiment. During the Second Anglo-Mysore War, connected with Britain and France’s fight on the other side of the world, Ochterlony was captured and spent two years as a prisoner. Then he returned to army staff positions.

The loss of the most populous North American colonies turned British attention to India, and Ochterlony’s career rose with the empire there. In 1812 he became a major general, and in 1816 a baronet and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. (Those are the sorts of honors his stepfather loved studying.) In the first quarter of the nineteenth century Ochterlony was among the British Empire’s most powerful administrators on the subcontinent.

Gen. Sir David Ochterlony was known for adopting the local aristocratic lifestyle rather than maintaining British, or Boston, ways. He had thirteen concubines or wives, who reportedly paraded around Delhi on elephants. A son by one of those women became the heir to his baronetcy after the general died in India in 1825.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the teen-aged girl who had become Charlotte Biggs, author and intelligence source, was still carrying a torch for the aspiring officer she had met in the 1770s. When she wrote an autobiography late in life, she addressed it to Ochterlony, evidently still hoping to see him again. (That manuscript became the basis of Joanne Major and Sarah Murden’s biography, A Georgian Heroine.)

“So much for smug assumptions”

Earlier this year the Yale Alumni Magazine ran a feature headlined “A reckoning with our past,” reexamining the university’s historic ties to slavery in America—and in India, where Elihu Yale made his fortune.

That prompted a striking letter from Chuck Banks, a member of the college’s class of 1959:

I was very struck (if that’s the right word) by the series “A Reckoning With Our Past” in your January/February issue. When I was a freshman, I took classes in Connecticut Hall without any notion of the role of enslaved persons in its construction, and I’ve recently become aware of the role of slaves in many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century public projects, including the White House.

Now I can’t look at these buildings without being reminded of what we owe to generations of slave labor.

Nevertheless, I’ve spent much of my life regarding slavery as a regrettable, tragic historical artifact, but one that didn’t personally affect me or my 11 generations of Yankee ancestors, all farmers and tradesmen. Surely none of them, who lived their entire lives in New England, could have been directly involved in exploiting slave labor.

Or so I thought. Some years ago, a friend who is a colonial history buff brought me a facsimile copy of a colonial-era newspaper which featured an “escaped slave” notice. The fugitive was described not by his name, but by his mutilations: a nick taken out of an ear, and a missing finger joint. The slave owner posting the notice was my fifth great-grandfather James Banks, who lived in the Greenwich/Banksville area of Connecticut in the 1700s.

So much for smug assumptions. Thanks for bringing the series to our attention.

This letter apparently refers to an advertisement that appeared in Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer for 15 Sept 1774, the New-York Journal on the same date, and the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury for 26 Sept 1774, as well as subsequent issues.

James Banks of North Castle, New York, was seeking “A NEGRO MAN, Named WILL, about 27 years of age.” Will had “part of his right ear cut off” and “a mark on the back side of his right hand,” the latter not necessarily an injury but close to the description in the letter. North Castle contains a neighborhood called Banksville, which also spills over into Greenwich and Stamford, Connecticut.

According to James Banks, Will was “very talkative.” In searching for this item, I found 160 advertisements using that phrase in 1774 and 1775 alone. It appears to have been a trope, and a trait that masters of slaves and indentured servants considered hard to change and thus identifying.

A Collection of Art from Bengal via Berwickshire

Last month the Herald in Scotland reported on a collection of Indian art coming to the National Museums Scotland:

Brought back from India in 1766, the collection, which features paintings and lacquer work, was formed by Captain Archibald Swinton while he was in Bengal in north-east India between 1752 and 1766. . . .

The large paintings depict the Nawabs who were ruling Bengal at that time. When Capt Swinton, an army surgeon, first met them, they were the local rulers under Mughal sovereignty but subsequently came under British rule.

The paintings are believed to have been given as diplomatic gifts during this period of transfer of power. . . . An Edinburgh-trained surgeon, Capt Swinton, who lived from 1731 to 1804, travelled to Madras (now Chennai) in 1752 and secured a position as an army surgeon. He served in the East India Company’s army at the beginning of its military expansion in India and subsequently, with his Persian language skills and familiarity with local customs, became an interpreter for the East India Company.

Here’s a biography of Capt. Swinton from the Daily Star of Bangladesh. That article includes the Swinton family painting above, made by Alexander Naysmith in the 1780s.

Evidently the Nawabs gave this art to Capt. Swinton shortly before the East India Company and then the British military forcefully took over India. Indeed, the donors were probably showing off their wealth and power for political advantage.

As a result, this collection doesn’t carry the baggage of art objects and cultural artifacts that came to western countries through looting, conquest, or purchase in a manifestly unfair society.

National Museums Scotland has displayed some of the Swinton collection before. Now those artworks are becoming national property to settle a massive tax bill.

From The Scotsman I learn that the estate at issue belonged to the late Major-General Sir John Swinton, K.C.V.O., O.B.E., D.L., laird of Kimmerghame House and father of the actress Tilda Swinton.

Ferling Reputations for Clinton and Cornwallis

I claim only a basic knowledge of the southern campaigns of the Revolutionary War, but I’ve long had the impression that these are the standard assessments of two British commanders:

• Gen. Lord Cornwallis, despite losing at Yorktown, was a competent commander dealing with a nearly impossible mission and undercut by lack of resources from New York.
• Gen. Sir Henry Clinton was a whiny, self-justifying subordinate who wheedled his way into being commander-in-chief; he was then over his head and bears the blame for not sending Cornwallis enough resources.

John Ferling has just written a new book about that part of the war which, according to Thomas E. Ricks in the New York Times Book Review, turns those judgments on their head:

In WINNING INDEPENDENCE: The Decisive Years of the Revolutionary War, 1778-1781 (Bloomsbury, $40), the veteran historian John Ferling sets out to redeem the reputation of Sir Henry Clinton, the British general who lost that war. As Ferling notes, the conventional view is that Clinton was “capricious, indecisive, overly cautious, muddled and confused, persistently inactive, lacking a strategic vision or a master plan and fatally inhibited by his subliminal sense of inadequacy.” The enjoyment of reading this huge volume is watching Ferling make his case that Clinton was instead “an accomplished, diligent and thoughtful commander.”

Writing with admirable clarity, Ferling contends that Clinton’s “Southern strategy” of shifting the focus of British military operations to Georgia and the Carolinas was an intelligent move. It might have succeeded, he calculates, had Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who led that effort in the field, not been both mendacious and insubordinate.

Had the Southern gambit worked, Ferling states, the British might have been able to retain much of the South in a peace settlement — perhaps holding on to Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas — and so whittle down the new United States into a precarious position for survival. But Cornwallis undercut Clinton’s strategy by disregarding orders and marching off to Virginia and then getting trapped there, at Yorktown, by the arrival of a French fleet. In the clumsy hands of Cornwallis, Ferling charges, the South became “a quagmire for the British.”

As I recall, many traditional assessments of Cornwallis went on to point out that he was a competent commander in India later in his career. I wonder if wider regret about British imperialism in India makes that seem less of an accomplishment.

Asians in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts

South Indians were enslaved in North America well before the two Continental Army soldiers I discussed yesterday.

The 9 June 1757 Boston News-Letter included this advertisement:

Ran-away from his Master, Ebenezer Webster, of Bradford in the County of Essex, a black Slave, Native of the East-Indies, named James; speaks good English, about 21 Years of Age, wears long bushy Hair, of middling Stature, has a Scar on the left side of his Forehead which enters under his Hair: Had on a light Oznabrigs Coat, a brown homespun Jacket, with brass Buttons, black plush Breeches, a pair of new Pumps, a new Felt Hat, and a white Linnen Shirt.—He formerly belong’d to Mr. Elijah Collins of Boston.

Whoever has taken up the said Servant, or may take him up, and convey him to his said Master, or to Mr. Benjamin Harrod, of Boston, shall have THREE DOLLARS Reward, and all necessary Charges paid.—

All Masters of Vessels and others are hereby caution’d not to conceal or carry off the said Slave, as they would avoid the Penalty of the Law.

Dated, June 7th. 1757.

The same ad ran in both the News-Letter and the Boston Gazette for three more weeks. (I found a pointer to this ad at Ned Hector’s website.)

The China Trade brought another set of Asians to New England—people from China and surrounding countries. The New England Historical Society blog picked up on research by documentary filmmaker Qian Huang about a Chinese youth who died in Boston harbor in 1798.

John Boit (1774-1829) was part of America’s mercantile exploration of the Pacific starting in his own teens. In 1794 he took command of the sloop Union out of Newport, arriving in Canton in late 1795.

While in China, Boit took on a teen-aged boy whom he called “Chow” and his family remembered also as “Libei”—most likely named Zhou Libei. The young captain referred to Chow as “My faithful servant.”

Boit continued sailing the Union west, across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic. The sloop arrived back in Boston in July 1796, the first single-masted ship known to have circumnavigated the globe.

Capt. Boit and his “faithful servant” continued to sail for another couple of years, visiting Mauritius before returning to North America. In late 1798 Boit agreed to take the schooner Mac to Cape Verde.

In September, while the Mac was still in Boston harbor and Boston was in the middle of a yellow fever epidemic, Chow fell from the ship’s mast and died. His death was listed in town records on 12 September under the name “Chow Mandarin.” The expensive, well preserved gravestone that Capt. Boit purchased for Chow stands in the Central Burying-Ground and reads:

Here lies Interr’d the Body
of CHOW MANDERIEN
a Native of China
Aged 19 years whose death
was occasioned on the 11th Sepr.
1798 by a fall from the Mast head
of the Ship Mac of Boston
This Stone is erected to his Memory
by his affectionate Master
JOHN BOIT Junr.

Asians in the Continental Army

The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia just shared a blog post about evidence of Asian soldiers in the Revolutionary War.

This doesn’t mean the thousands of soldiers who fought battles in India when the British, the French, and their local allies went to war there. That’s another seldom-told story.

Rather, interpreter Daniel Sieh quoted two sources showing how Continental Army officers identified certain enlisted men as from South Asia:

• “Charles Peters…is an East-India Indian, formerly the property of Mr. Thomlinson in Newbern.” —advertisement for deserters, North-Carolina Gazette, 15 May 1778.
• John Newton, a barber from “Bengaul, yellow complexion, talks good English” —size roll of Capt. Matthias Ogden’s company in the First New Jersey Regiment, 1779-82.

It’s intriguing to note that on 13 July 1776 Dixon and Hunter’s Virginia Gazette included this advertisement for a man named John Newton of the same age and skills as the “Bengaul” in Ogden’s company:

a Servant Man named JOHN NEWTON, about 20 Years of Age, 5 Feet 5 or 6 Inches high, slender made, is an Isiatic Indian by Birth, has been about twelve Months in Virginia, but lived ten Years (as he says) in England, in the Service of Sir Charles Whitworth.

He wears long black Hair, which inclines to curl, tied behind, and pinned up at the Sides; has a very sour Look, and his Lips project remarkably forward. He left his Master on the Road from Williamsburg, between King William Courthouse and Todd’s Bridge, where he was left behind to come on slowly with a tired Horse (which I have been informed is since dead) but has never made his Appearance at Home. . . .

He has been at Richmond, Williamsburg, and in other Parts of the Country, in the Service of Mr. George Rootes of Frederick, and Colonel [Thomas?] Blackburn of Prince William, of whom I had him; and as he is a good Barber and Hair-Dresser, it is possible he may endeavour to follow those Occupations as a free man.

The same notice appeared in other Williamsburg newspapers through September, some referring to Newton as simply “an Indian by birth.” (I first learned of that first ad through Ned Hector’s webpage.)

Sir Charles Whitworth was a Member of Parliament remembered for his use of statistics.

As for Charles Peters, Sieh writes:

Historian Justin Clement has done extensive research into Peters’s years of servitude, court battle for freedom, and subsequent military service. At his querying, historian Todd Braisted discovered that Charles Peters was born around 1757 in Madras (present-day Chennai, India). We can posit that he was born in territory controlled by the British East India Company, and that he was sent as an enslaved person to the Carolinas, where he joined the Continental Army and gained his freedom.

Unfortunately, Peters’s story gets a bit murky after his desertion, and while he occasionally appears in later records, we are still researching what happened to him next. He may have rejoined the Revolutionary forces in time for the reorganization of the North Carolina Line in the spring of 1778. We have tantalizing evidence that Peters participated in the Siege of Charleston, became a prisoner-of-war, and even joined a Loyalist regiment, after which time he died in Kingston, Jamaica.

I must note that, according to the 7 Aug 1783 Pennsylvania Packet, a “pioneer” in the Duke of Cumberland’s regiment named Charles Peters was killed on Jamaica; his murderer, Pvt. John Griffin, was hanged in June 1783.

As Sieh says, both Peters and Newton came to America enslaved. Both had been assigned British names that don’t indicate Asian origin; we need other sources to learn where they came from. And both made multiple moves to gain their freedom.

(It’s a delight to see so many familiar names contributing to the research on these two men: John U. Rees, Don N. Hagist, Robert A. Selig, and Todd W. Braisted.)

Capt. Dobel at Home and on the Far Side of the World

Except for several months as a Continental Navy lieutenant under Capt. John Manley, which ended badly, Joseph Dobel appears to have spent the Revolutionary War ashore in Boston. Certainly when he was in charge of confining suspected enemies of the state he was at home.

After peace came, Dobel resumed work as a merchant captain, commanding a three-masted ship called the Commerce in 1789. Newspapers indicate he made regular trips to Liverpool and also sailed to Cadiz, Spain.

In December 1790, Dobel’s first wife, Mary, died at age fifty-five. I haven’t found mention of any children from this marriage. A little less than three months later, Capt. Dobel married “Mrs. Susanna Joy,” who was about forty years old.

In the early 1790s, the Boston town meeting started to elect Capt. Dobel as a culler of fish (or dry fish). That was one of several minor offices tasked with making sure that particular goods sold in town met quality standards. Dobel’s election shows what his neighbors felt he was expert in. With his colleagues he periodically advertised in the newspapers warning against unofficial fish-culling.

In 1793 Capt. Dobel was living “in Bennet-Street, opposite the North-School.” Early in that year he dissolved a business partnership with Thomas Jackson. I can’t find any earlier advertisements from this firm, so I have no idea what they dealt in.

In those years, American merchants and captains were seeking new business outside the British Empire—beginning the new nation’s “China Trade” and “East India Trade.” One distant destination was the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, then called “Isle-of-France.” In March 1792, after a full year away from Boston, Capt. John Cathcart brought in the Three Brothers from Mauritius “with a cargo of Sugars” for the merchant Thomas Russell. In May 1795 the Massachusetts Mercury ran a report that Cathcart was back at Mauritius.

Cathcart returned to Massachusetts again that year and oversaw the construction of a new ship, the Three Sisters, in Charlestown. It was about 340 tons burden, “Copper Bolted and sheathed.” Soon he took it out on its maiden voyage to Asia.

And then in May 1796 the Boston newspapers reported that Capt. Cathcart had died “two days sail from St. Jago”—Santiago, the largest island in the country of Cape Verde. The merchants who invested in that cruise and the families of all the crew must have worried about what would happen next. But all they could do was collect snatches of news brought back by other ships’ captains.

As of August, the first report to reach the newspapers said, the Three Sisters was at Mauritius, its next stop uncertain. Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser stated that in February 1797 it was at Bengal. In May the Boston Price-Current said that the ship was at Manila. By this time the principal investor, Russell, had died.

I mention all that because Joseph Dobel had signed on as Cathcart’s next-in-command. He had the responsibility of completing the voyage. Most of those dispatches listed Cathcart as the Three Sisters’ captain, adding that he was dead, while a couple gave Dobel’s name. Meanwhile, the ship was still lingering on the far side of the world. The Massachusetts Mercury reported that “The Three Sisters, Doble, of Boston, sailed from Calcutta for N. York Sept. 19 [1797], sprung a leak, and returned.”

It wasn’t until that spring of 1798 that the Three Sisters was back in the north Atlantic. In late March there were two reports of it being spotted in or near Delaware Bay. Finally, on 27 June, Capt. Dobel brought the ship into New York harbor. That was more than two years after the news that Cathcart had died.

On 31 July a notice in the New-York Gazette announced that the Three Sisters “will be sold reasonable, with all her stores as she came from Calcutta, and the terms of payment made convenient.” Another advertisement, noting that the ship was built “under the superintendence of the late Capt. JOHN CATHCART,” appeared in Russell’s Gazette in Boston the next month.

Those ads promised that the Three Sisters was “a remarkable fast sailer” and only two and a half years old. But the expense of the extraordinarily long voyage meant the ship’s owners needed cash fast.

TOMORROW: Capt. Dobel and the U.S.S. Constitution.

Deerfield Symposium on “Fashion and Conflict,” 28-30 Sept.

On 28-30 September, Historic Deerfield will host its fall symposium on the topic of “Fashion and Conflict in Early America.”

This event is designed to produce “an in-depth look at the broad meanings of conflict on clothing and textiles that defined culture in 18th- and early-19th-century British and French North America.”

Sessions include:

• “How Colonial America’s Hunger for Fashion in an Era of Mercantilist Competition Drove the British Industrial Revolution,” John Styles, University of Hertfordshire
• “Fashioning an Imperial Fabric: India, Calico, and Colonial Consumers in British Policy,” Jonathan Eacott, University of California, Riverside
• “Sophia Thifty Opines on Shoes on the Eve of the Stamp Act: Or, The Printer, the Cordwainer, and the Matron,” Kimberly S. Alexander, University of New Hampshire
• “‘American Greivances red-dressed’: British Uniforms and their Symbolism in Boston during the Townshend Acts Crisis,” David Niescior, Old Barracks Museum
• “A ‘New-Fashioned Jacket’: Dress and Undress in the Practice and Depiction of Tarring and Feathering,” Arinn Amer, C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center
• “A Cutting Narrative: 18th-Century Boston Tailoring,” David E. (Ned) Lazaro, Historic Deerfield
• “Linen or Lace? How George Washington’s Shirt Ruffles Defined the American Presidency,” Amanda Isaac, Mount Vernon
• “Conflict and Conservation: A Proposal for the Treatment of George Washington’s 1789 Inaugural Coat,” Colleen Callahan
• “‘...Kind of armour, being peculiar to America’: The American Hunting Shirt,” Neal T. Hurst, Colonial Williamsburg
• “The Age of Reform: American Military Dress in the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1760-1790,” Matthew Keagle, Fort Ticonderoga
• “The Razor’s Edge: Contextualizing Shaving Practices in 18th-Century America,” Jacqueline Delisle
• “‘Scarce and Valuable British and French Dry Goods’: Textiles Taken by American Privateers in the War of 1812,” Ann Buermann Wass, Riversdale House Museum
• “À la créole: Caribbean Self-Fashioning in an Age of Revolution,” Phillipe Halbert, Yale University

In addition, there are museum talks and workshops available for additional fees. Follow this link for complete information and registration form.

Morrison on “Exporting the Revolution” in Exeter, 22 May

On Tuesday, 22 May, the American Independence Museum in Exeter, New Hampshire, will host a lunchtime talk by Dane A. Morrison on “Exporting the Revolution: American Revolutionaries in the Indies Trade.”

Morrison, a professor of history at Salem State University, is the author of True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity. Here’s what he’ll speak about:

One of the notable consequences of the American Revolution was the opening of American trade with the East, commencing with the voyage of the Empress of China, departing New York’s East River virtually at the moment when Congress was ratifying the Treaty of Paris in February 1784. Independence had freed Yankee merchants from Britain’s mercantilist regulations, confining their vessels to the waters of the Atlantic and Caribbean, and triggered the country’s entrance onto a global stage.

This talk will examine the emergence of Americans onto a global stage, raising such questions as:

• How did early American “citizens of the world” recollect the Revolution?
• How did they negotiate the complications of culture in their travels around the world?
• And, how did they hope to defend the legitimacy of the new nation and champion the republican principles that they hoped would define an emergent national identity?

This “Lunch and Learn” session will take place from 12:00 noon to 1:00 P.M. at the Folsom Tavern, 164 Water Street in Exeter. Parking is available in the nearby museum’s parking lot on Spring Street and along Water Street. People are welcome to bring lunch.

This event is free and open to the public. However, the tavern is is a historic building, and the second-floor lecture space is not handicap-accessible.

Lt. Lindsay Lives Through the Battle of Pollilur

Once the French entered the war against the British, the fighting expanded around the globe to wherever those two empires were in conflict.

In India, the British army supported the British East India Company, which recruited local troops. The French allied with Hyder Ali, sultan of Mysore. The result was the Second Anglo-Mysore War.

Last month I stumbled across the memoir of that conflict from the Hon. John Lindsay, a lieutenant in the British army at the age of nineteen. Here’s his description of the end of the first Battle of Pollilur on 10 Sept 1780, which was more costly to the British forces than Bunker Hill.

Lindsay was a younger son of a Scottish earl, but his recollections work best when read in an upper-class British voice.

After my company had delivered their fire amongst the multitude of the enemy that were around us, the [enemy] horse immediately rushed in, and, the ranks being now irretrievably broken, every one threw down his arms, and used every means to preserve his life; whilst, all around us, no object presented itself but the enemy, with drawn sabres, cutting and hacking the miserable wretches that were at their mercy.

As my company was (from their being lately sent to the assistance of the rear-guard) the last body of troops that were in the field, they were nearly all cut to pieces; the greatest part of the soldiers and officers of the line came running down towards me, and the enemy’s horse galloping after them; they were driven to a hollow piece of ground, which had been the means of sheltering my company pretty well during the action; there were therefore five or six hundred people in this place, crowded together, which the horse surrounded, who, by the length of their weapons, could plunge them into the middle of the crowd.

Our situation was now become beyond all description dreadful, from the screams of the wounded and dying people on the side of the hollow, and from the vast numbers that were smothered in the middle of it, owing to the extraordinary pressure. In this situation I was so unfortunate as to be near the centre, and in a few minutes I should have suffered the same fate as a number of others, if at that time I had not called out to two men of my company who were near the edge, and, though they were both desperately wounded, yet by great exertions they dragged me out of the dreadful pressure.

Good show, men! Sorry about those wounds, but at least your lieutenant is out of a tough spot caused by his being as far from the enemy weapons as possible.

Then, reflecting that the superior appearance of my dress might be fatal to me, I recollected that I had in my pocket two hundred pagodas [gold coins], being the subsistence of my troop, and which, it immediately struck me, would be the means of preserving my life.

Such a hardship being an officer, having to wear “superior” dress. But at least one does get to carry the company’s money and use that to bribe one’s way out of being killed.

I therefore looked around me to observe the different countenances of the horsemen, and, thinking that I had distinguished one whose look was less ferocious than the rest, I pulled out my bag of pagodas, and beckoned him to approach me, which he instantly did, put up his sword, and dismounted. I immediately delivered him the bag; he seemed much surprised and pleased at the magnitude of its contents, which gave me the most sanguine expectations.

After he had put it up, he demanded my accoutrements, which I instantly took off and presented to him; I now thought he would have gone no farther, but (one after the other) he stripped me of everything except my breeches and one half of my shirt,—having torn off the other to tie up my other shirts in a bundle.

Though much concerned at being thus stripped naked after the part I had acted towards him, I however made no doubt but that he would grant me his protection, especially when I saw him mount his horse; which he, however, had no sooner done, than he drew his sabre, and, after giving me two or three wounds, instantly rode off, leaving me stung with rage, and laying the blame upon myself for having called him towards me.

The nerve to ride off with the company’s money that way!

After some minutes, what with the loss of blood and the intense heat of the sun, I fainted away, fully convinced that I was expiring, and pleased to think my last moments were so gentle. I do not know how long I remained in this situation, but I was roused from it by a dreadful pain in my left shoulder-blade. I now found that I was nearly driven into the centre again, and that a dead man was lying upon me, and a pike that had passed through his body had penetrated into my shoulder, and caused me the severe pain.

Severe pain, I say! From a pike sticking through another man’s body.

In this manner I lay for some minutes, when John Kelman, of my company, called out, upon observing me, that I was dead; upon which I answered, “Not yet, but near about it.” At this moment he observed three French hussars, and desired me to go to them; I answered him that I was so weak I could not walk, and, besides that, I was so jammed in the crowd that I could not move myself; upon which, being a very strong man, he reached out his hand towards me, and, my head being the only part he could touch, he dragged me out by the hair, and carried me to the French, when I once more fainted; however, one of them put some arrack [liquor] into my mouth, which soon revived me, and I told them in French I was an officer, and requested that they would protect me, which they assured me in the strongest manner they would do. They accordingly drew their swords to keep off the horse, who were every moment endeavouring to cut me down. At this time my preserver, John Kelman, was by some accident separated from me, and I afterwards found he was cut to pieces.

Oh, tough luck, Kelman!

The British had gone into battle with more than 3,800 fighting men. Lindsay was one of only 50 officers and about 200 private soldiers who survived to be taken prisoner. The rest of his memoir is about his captivity. That experience was, needless to say, difficult.

A Trial and Execution in India

What was happening in India while the siege of Boston got under way on the far side of the world? The Executed Today blog describes a controversial court case:

On [5 Aug] 1775, inconvenient Indian official Nandakumar (or Nand Kumar, or Nuncomar) was hanged on a forgery charge — all too conveniently inflicted at the very time he was accusing British Governor-General Warren Hastings [shown here] of corruption.

Nandakumar and Hastings decidedly did not get along; the Indian believed he had been unfairly denied a plum career assignment. He leveled in response an accusation that Hastings was taking payola in exchange for his appointments.

English pols involved in the administration of India, such as Philip Francis, John Clavering and George Monson, had their own rivalries with Hastings and wanted to pursue these charges. Instead, within weeks, Nandakumar was facing years-old forgery charges, and two months after his trial, he was at the end of a rope. . . .

(He forged part of a will to recover a bad loan. All concerned appear to agree that this charge is factually accurate, which is, of course, a long way from explaining why the matter required immediate adjudication at this juncture. Incidentally, while forgery could get you hanged in England, it was a much less serious offense under Hindu law.) . . .

Parliamentarian heavyweight Edmund Burke would eventually weigh in on the hanged man’s side, charging that Hastings had “murdered this man, by the hands of [Chief Justice] Sir Elijah Impey.” In a report to the select committee established by the Amending Act (cited in this tome), Burke noted

that this Trial and Execution was looked upon by many of the Natives as political; nor does the Committee conceive it possible, that, combining all the Circumstances together, they should look upon it in the Light of a common judicial Proceeding; but must regard it as a political Measure, the Tendency of which is, to make the Natives feel the extreme Hazard of accusing, or even giving Evidence of corrupt Practices against any British Subject in Station, even though supported by other British Subjects of equal Rank and Authority. It will be rather a Mockery, than a Relief to the Natives, to see Channels of Justice opened to them, at their great Charge, both in the Institution and in the Use, and then Appeals, still more expensive, carefully provided for them, when, at the same Time, Practices are countenanced, which render the Resort to those Remedies far more dangerous than a patient Endurance of Oppression, under which they may labour.

Hastings was impeached for corruption in 1787 — it took Burke, who served as one of the prosecutors, two full days to read the 20-count indictment against him, though Burke’s own attempt to add judicial murder to the bill of particulars was jettisoned.

The House of Lords finally acquitted Hastings in 1795. Britain continued to enjoy the new empire he had assembled in India, even richer than the colonies lost in North America.

Executed Today points to three sources on this case: Henry Beveridge’s The Trial of Maharaja Nanda Kumar (1886); J. Duncan M. Derrett’s article “Nandakumar’s Forgery” in The English Historical Review (April 1960); and Nicholas B. Dirks’s The Scandal of Empire (2008).

Hannah Snell’s Wound

Last month I quoted a news item from 1771 about Hannah Snell, celebrated in the British Empire for having served as a marine in the late 1740s.

During Britain’s early campaigns in India, Snell was wounded in the legs and groin. Nevertheless, her superiors didn’t discover that she was a woman. That provoked some questions, so I looked up the portion of the book about Snell that described her wounding.

This is from an 1801 edition of The Female Warrior:

During all this time, our heroine still maintained her wonted intrepidity, and behaved in every respect consistent with the character of a brave British soldier. She fired during the engagement, no less than thirty-seven rounds, and received six shots in her right leg, and live in the left; and what was still more painful, a dangerous one in the groin.

Distressed in her mind, lest the surgeons should discover the wound in her groin, and consequently her sex, which she was determined to conceal, even at the hazard of her life.—Confirmed in this resolution, she communicated her design to a black woman, who attended her, and who had access to the surgeon’s medicines, and begged her assistance. Her pain, now became very acute; and with the generosity of the black woman, who brought her lint, salve, &c. she endeavoured to extract the ball; by probing the wound with her finger, till she could feel the ball, after which she thrust in her finger and thumb, and pulled it out. This was a painful and dangerous operation; but she was resolved to brave every difficulty, rather than expose her sex, and in a little time she made a perfect cure.

As the heavy rains, and the violent claps of thunder were now set in, (being what they term in that country, the monsoons) the siege was entirely raised.

Our heroine being so dangerously wounded, was sent to an hospital, at Cuddylorum; and was attended by Mr. Belchier and Mr. Hancock, two able surgeons; from whom she concealed the wound in her groin.

During her residence in the hospital, the greater part of the fleet sailed; but as soon as she was perfectly cured, was sent on board the Tartar Pink, which then lay in the harbour, and continued to do the duty of a sailor, till the return of the fleet from Madras.

Curious as it seems, the Royal Navy did have a ship named the Tartar Pink. In 1739 it brought news of Britain’s rising hostilities with Spain to Boston. That was the start of the War of the Austrian Succession, which was still going on when Snell joined the military in 1747.

At least one later author assumed that the “black woman” in Snell’s eighteenth-century biography was a native of India rather than, say, an African attached to the army. Either way, it’s an interesting example of women working together.

Hannah Snell and the Press Gang

Hannah Snell (1723-1792) was a native of Worcester in England. In 1747, her husband having deserted her and their child having died in infancy, she borrowed a brother-in-law’s clothes and name and enlisted in the British marines.

Over the next three years Snell participated in an abortive expedition to Mauritius and then a long campaign in India. Reportedly she was wounded multiple times to her legs and groin, and at one point whipped on her bare back. Nonetheless, Snell maintained her identity as a male until the ship returned to London, when she revealed her secret to her shipmates.

And then Snell made a deal with a London publisher for her story. The Female Soldier turned Snell into a celebrity. Engravers issued prints of her in her uniform. Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland, ensured that she received a military pension.

With Britain at war off and on throughout the century, Snell’s story was frequently republished to encourage martial patriotism from all British subjects. Isaiah Thomas put a version into his almanac for 1775 as Massachusetts prepared for armed rebellion, reusing an old cut of a woman holding a musket. (For more about that image, see my article here.)

In January 1771 the Oxford Magazine published a new anecdote about Hannah Snell, by this point in her mid-forties, a pub owner, and a mother of two new children by a new husband. The item appears to have come from a British newspaper dated 2 January:

Friday last a press gang was very busy at Newington-butts, and having impressed a poor countryman from his wife and children, the distressed woman followed her husband with lamentations, which induced many women to sally from their houses; among the Amazons was the famous Hannah Snell, who immediately demanded the captive from the Lieutenant; he refusing, and bad words ensuing, she collared and shook him; two sailors advanced to rescue their officer, whom she beat, and challenged to fight any of the gang with fists, sticks, or quarter-staff, only let her be permitted to pull off her stays, gown and petticoats, and put on breeches, declaring she had sailed more leagues than any of them; [“]and if they were seamen, they ought to be on board, and not sneak about as kidnappers; but if you are afraid of the sea, take Brown Bess on your shoulders, and march through Germany as I have done: Ye dogs I have more wounds about me than you have fingers. By G—d, this is no false attack; I’ll have my man[”]; and accordingly took the poor fellow from the gang, and restored him to his wife.

Thus did the long petticoats, headed by a veteran virago, overcome the short trowsers.——

Mrs. Snell has a pension of 50 l. per annum left by the late Duke of Cumberland, for her many manly services by sea and land.

That story was soon circulating in America as well. It appeared in the 25 Mar 1771 New-York Gazette, the 28 March Pennsylvania Journal, the 2 April Connecticut Courant, the 11 April Massachusetts Spy by Thomas, and the 19 April New-Hampshire Gazette.

In addition to giving us another glimpse of Snell, that article is notable for being one of the earliest print appearances of the phrase “Brown Bess” (or “brown Bess,” as the Pennsylvania Journal rendered it).

TOMORROW: But it wasn’t the very earliest appearance.

Taking the General Monk

Yesterday I left the Pennsylvania navy vessel Hyder Ally and the Royal Navy sloop General Monk in the middle of a fight in Delaware Bay on 8 Apr 1782.

The young captain of the Hyder Ally, Joshua Barney, told his helmsman to do the opposite of what he ordered and then yelled, “Hard a-port!” The helmsman steered to starboard. Meanwhile, the commander of the General Monk, trying to keep alongside the smaller American vessel, heard Barney and ordered a turn to port.

The General Monk’s jib boom plunged into the Hyder Ally’s rigging. In that position, the Americans could fire their port guns at the British vessel, but most of the British cannons were useless. The Hyder Ally crew rushed to keep the two ships entangled and started to fire. They even turned some of their starboard guns around.

The Hyder Ally cannon blasted canister and grape shot across the deck of the General Monk—thirteen broadsides in all. Barney had recruited riflemen from the Pennsylvania countryside as marines, and they joined in the firing from the rigging. After twenty-six minutes of battle, twenty of the British crew of 136 were dead, thirty-six wounded, including the captain. A British midshipman surrendered the General Monk.

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy frigate Québec was sailing up the main channel of the Delaware River, chasing the battle. That meant Barney and Lt. Justus Starr, whom he sent to command the new capture, had to work fast to separate the two ships and start upriver toward Philadelphia. They bought time by hoisting British flags and exchanging friendly signals with the Québec until it halted.

Once the Hyder Ally and General Monk had left the enemy frigate behind, Barney called over and learned the name of his prize. Lt. Starr also reported back that of the larger ship’s twenty-four guns, six were only “Quaker guns”—logs carved like cannon to intimidate other ships into surrendering. So the fight wasn’t as much of a mismatch as it had seemed.

The 10 April Freemen’s Journal, published in Philadelphia, reported:

Yesterday the Hyder Ally, a vessel fitted out for the protection of this river and its trade, returned to Chester after a severe conflict with a vessel of superior force, which with great gallantry and good conduct, on the part of captain Barney and his crew, has been captured and brought into port.

The General Monk was eventually made a Continental Navy ship, once more called the General Washington. Philip Freneau wrote a poem on the fight, which became known as the Battle of Delaware Bay. Years later, Barney commissioned Louis-Philippe Crépin to paint “Hyder Ally Captures the General Monk,” shown above; that picture is now owned by the U.S. Naval Academy Museum.

Barney went on to a long naval career, which included capture by British privateers in 1793, service in the navy of Revolutionary France, and a command in Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812. He was wounded at the Battle of Bladensburg and died, reportedly of complications from that wound, in 1818.

During the same war, with America once again awash in anti-British sentiment, a privateer named Hyder Ally was launched from Maine. This ship thus indirectly preserved the name of an Indian government official who had died decades earlier.

Hyder Ally on Patrol in Delaware Bay

In April 1782, the port of Philadelphia was under the protection of an armed ship named Hyder Ally, after Hyder Ali Khan, the sultan of Mysore in India.

When I first read this fact, I was struck by how Americans were honoring the Muslim governor of a monarchy on the other side of the world. Hyder Ali had succeeded in fighting off Britain’s attempts to take over Mysore, so he had become an emblem of anti-British resistance all over the world. John Willcocks had even chosen that name for a ship he used to trade with the Caribbean.

By early 1782 Willcocks and his fellow Philadelphia merchants were losing a lot of ships to the Royal Navy and Crown privateers waiting at the mouth of Delaware Bay. So they agreed to pool their money, buy the Hyder Ally, and fit it out for fighting. The last step of their plan was to ask the Pennsylvania government to reimburse them; the legislature did so on 9 April, after the ship had already left port.

Willis J. Abbott’s Naval History of the United States (1890) says of the Hyder Ally, “She was in no way calculated for a man-of-war; but…she was pierced for eight ports on a side, and provided with a battery of six-pounders.” The exotic name remained.

To command this small, slow armed vessel, the state appointed Joshua Barney (1759-1818, shown above). A Maryland native, he had embarked on a naval career in early 1776, when he was only sixteen, serving under Esek Hopkins, the Rhode Islander who was first commander of the Continental Navy. In 1779 Barney was captured and imprisoned in Britain, and in 1781 he escaped back to America, ready to go into the fight again.

Barney’s version of what happened next was printed in his daughter-in-law’s A Biographical Memoir of the Late Commodore Joshua Barney in 1832. A more recent study is Hulbert Footner’s Sailor of Fortune: The Life and Adventures of Commodore Barney, U.S.N. from 1940.

On 7 April, the Hyder Ally led a fleet of seven Philadelphia merchant ships out of the city harbor and down into Delaware Bay. They anchored at Cape May to wait for better winds. An eighth merchant vessel joined them. Barney’s mission was to get all those ships safely to sea and then return to the bay for the next batch.

Meanwhile, the commanders of the British frigate Quebec and armed sloop General Monk spotted this fleet and its lone protector. The next morning they brought in another armed vessel, the privateer Fair American. That ship had been an American privateer under the same name until the previous fall, when it had been captured; now it was financed by Loyalists in New York City. Likewise, the General Monk had been the Rhode Island privateer General Washington.

At ten o’clock Barney glimpsed the three British ships. By noon it was clear that the two smaller ones, the General Monk and Fair American, were heading for his fleet while the big frigate kept to deep water and maneuvered to cut off the route to the sea. The young captain signaled for all the merchant ships to sail back up the Delaware, staying as close to the shore as possible. One, the General Greene, was equipped with twelve cannons, and its master offered to stay with the Hyder Ally and fight. As the two Crown vessels bore down, those two smaller American ships lingered behind the trading ships to protect them.

That plan worked right up until the battle started. The Fair American approached, guns primed. Instead of fighting, the General Greene tried to slip out of the bay. It ran aground, its crew jumping off over the bowsprit. The Fair American fired broadsides at the Hyder Ally as it raced upriver after the merchant prizes—but then it ran aground, too.

That left the Hyder Ally and the General Monk still under sail in the bay. The Royal Navy ship was clearly larger, faster, and more maneuverable. It had twenty-four guns, the Pennsylvania ship sixteen or eighteen. The General Monk approached the Hyder Ally, expecting a surrender since Barney’s gun-ports weren’t even open yet.

But then Barney ordered a broadside. The two ships exchanged cannon fire at the distance of a pistol shot, sailing closer. According to Footner, the General Monk’s guns were six-pounders rebored to accommodate nine-pound balls; some were overheating and jumping out of their carriages. Still, it was the stronger ship.

Barney told the Hyder Ally helmsman, “Follow my next order by the rule of contrary.” Then the General Monk came up close beside them. Barney shouted, “Hard a-port your helm—do you want him to run aboard us?” His helmsman made a sudden turn to starboard.

TOMORROW: Well, that’s enough for one day, don’t you think?

“True Yankees” Talk in Salem, 6 Nov.

Tonight, 6 November, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site is hosting a talk by Prof. Dane A. Morrison on his new book, True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity.

The publisher’s description of the book says:

With American independence came the freedom to sail anywhere in the world under a new flag. During the years between the Treaty of Paris [1783] and the Treaty of Wangxi [1844], Americans first voyaged past the Cape of Good Hope, reaching the ports of Algiers and the bazaars of Arabia, the markets of India and the beaches of Sumatra, the villages of Cochin, China, and the factories of Canton. Their South Seas voyages of commerce and discovery introduced the infant nation to the world and the world to what the Chinese, Turks, and others dubbed the “new people.”

Drawing on private journals, letters, ships’ logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, True Yankees traces America’s earliest encounters on a global stage through the exhilarating experiences of five Yankee seafarers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade scouring the marts of China and India for goods that would captivate the imaginations of his countrymen. Mariner Amasa Delano [1763-1823] toured much of the Pacific hunting seals. Explorer Edmund Fanning [1769-1841] circumnavigated the globe, touching at various Pacific and Indian Ocean ports of call. . . .

How did these bold voyagers approach and do business with the people in the region, whose physical appearance, practices, and culture seemed so strange? And how did native men and women—not to mention the European traders who were in direct competition with the Americans—regard these upstarts who had fought off British rule? The accounts of these adventurous travelers reveal how they and hundreds of other mariners and expatriates influenced the ways in which Americans defined themselves, thereby creating a genuinely brash national character—the “true Yankee.”

Morrison’s talk starts at 7:30 P.M. at the Salem Visitor Center at 2 New Liberty Street. A book signing will follow. It’s free and open to the public, though seating is limited.