The Journey of Phillis Wheatley’s First Published Poem

As related in yesterday’s posting, a storm in September 1767 pushed a schooner packed with whale oil onto Cape Cod.

But that ship wasn’t lost, the cargo was preserved, and nobody died. Not much drama after all.

Nonetheless, the stories of two survivors—evidently Nantucketers Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin—contained enough emotion to inspire John Wheatley’s enslaved teen-aged servant Phillis to write 24 lines of poetry (plus a prose interlude).

Titled “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” that poem appeared in Samuel Hall’s Newport Mercury on 21 Dec 1767—the first recognized publication by Phillis Wheatley. You can read the lines here alongside Amelia Yeager’s essay about the publication for the Newport Historical Society.

David Waldstreicher starts his new study of the poet, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, with this poem and returns to it often as a touchstone of her work, particularly for her braiding of classical and Calvinist motifs and her ocean imagery.

The poem and its publication raise some small questions beyond the identity of the two men, discussed yesterday. One is why Hussey’s name appears first in the poem’s title and in the anecdote published with it in the newspaper even though Coffin was the ship’s captain and the only person named in the reports of the grounding.

I suspect this was a matter of personality. Hussey seems to have been a sociable man, connecting the Boston and Nantucket business communities before the war; serving in Whig political gatherings; speaking for Nantucket businessmen to both the British and Patriot governments during the war (islanders wanted to stay neutral for both economic and religious reasons); and eventually taking a post with the federal Customs bureau. I suspect he just told the story better.

Another question is whether Phillis Wheatley and the family who owned her sought this publication. I think the answer to that is clear in how the poem appeared in the Boston Post-Boy when that newspaper reprinted it on 11 Jan 1768. The “Wheatley” name was eliminated:

• “belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston” became “belonging to a Gentelman [sic] of Boston”
• “being at Mr. Wheatley’s, and, while at Dinner” became “being at Dinner”
• The name at the bottom of the poem changed from “Phillis Wheatley” to simply “PHILLIS.”

Obviously printers John Green and Joseph Russell thought the Wheatleys didn’t want their surname linked to the poem. They may even have heard directly from the family. However supportive of their protégée and property the Wheatleys became later, at the start of 1768 they were still reticent about what we’d call publicity.

I suspect that’s why this poem didn’t appear in a Boston newspaper until after it could be credited as “From the Newport Mercury.” John Wheatley was a wealthy merchant who occasionally advertised, the sort of gentleman local newspaper printers would want to keep happy.

Still, someone must have circulated the poem privately in manuscript for it to get from Boston to Newport. That might have been the Wheatleys, sharing the news among friends and expecting it to stay private. Conversely, the poem might have been spread by Hussey and Coffin within their Quaker network. (I doubt the teen poet had developed her own out-of-town network yet.)

I tested a couple of other possible explanations for the first publication in Rhode Island:

• Did the Newport Mercury run poetry while the Boston papers weren’t yet in that habit? No, Boston printers shared a lot of poems in the 1760s.
• Was Capt. Coffin’s near-shipwreck bigger news in Rhode Island than in Boston since it involved a Nantucket ship? Not only is Nantucket closer to Newport, but both places had large Quaker communities. However, Samuel Hall didn’t pick up the Boston reports about the schooner grounding. (The Providence Gazette for 10 October did carry the second item, reporting Coffin’s ship was safe.*)

In the end, I think someone in Newport who didn’t know the Wheatleys learned about the poem and the story behind it, and asked the local printer to publish it. Hall in turn was beyond John Wheatley’s reach.

What would have prompted such a Newporter to send to poem to Hall? That person was clearly struck by how the author was “a Negro Girl,” and enslaved at that. That’s not merely a footnote to the poem; it’s in the preface, the implicit reason for printing it.

Even the name “Phillis Wheatley” at the bottom of the poem might be significant. Many other early publications credited the poet only by her first name. For example, Ezekiel Russell’s broadside of her elegy to the Rev. George Whitefield said: “By PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, Belonging to Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of Boston.” By 1770 the Wheatley family had become comfortable having their names attached to such publications, but the prevailing style was still not to formally acknowledge enslaved people’s surnames.

Those details make me think whoever asked Hall to print the poem wanted readers of the Newport Mercury to know an enslaved girl had written it—and perhaps to see that that girl was an individual. And, though nothing about the presentation commented on the injustice of slavery, was it possible to avoid that thought?

(* In the database that I access through Genealogy Bank, the 10 October and 3 October Providence Gazettes are mushed together. Looks like something went wrong when they were photographed for microfilm.)

“Castaway on the Back of Cape-Cod”

On Thursday, 1 Oct 1767, the biggest local story in the Boston News-Letter was the weather:

The Beginning of last Week we had here very serene pleasant Weather, until Wednesday Evening, when at about 8 o’clock came on, and continued for several Hours, a most violent Storm of Wind and Rain, with some Thunder and Lighting…

Among the consequences lower down in that paragraph:

Capt. Coffin in a Schooner loaded with Oil was castaway on the Back of Cape-Cod, the Cargo and People saved, and in hopes of getting the Vessel off.

In fact, for all the worry during the storm about ships, fishing vessels, and pleasure boats, “Through the Goodness of Divine Providence no Lives were lost” at sea. (A father and son, aged 84 and 52 respectively, both died after losing their separate ways on roads north of Boston.)

Four days later, on 5 October, the Boston Post-Boy followed up on that story:

Capt. Coffin in a Schooner loaded with Oyl, was cast ashore in the Storm mentioned in our last, on the Back of Cape Cod; but the Vessel has since been got off, and arrived here Yesterday.

That incident fits the details reported in the Newport Mercury on 21 December, as quoted yesterday:

Messrs Hussey and Coffin,…belonging to Nantucket, being bound from thence to Boston, narrowly escaped being cast away on Cape-Cod, in one of the late Storms; upon their Arrival, being at Mr. [John] Wheatley’s, and, while at Dinner, told of their narrow Escape

Unfortunately, none of these newspaper items gives Coffin’s or Hussey’s full names. And lots of men from Nantucket shared those surnames, their families intermarrying just to confuse matters further.

However, for his recent Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley David Waldstreicher spotted that on 7 October the merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary that he “Din’d at home with Stephen Hussey, Abisha Folger junr Richard Coffin Isaac Paddock All four from Nantucket.” That was three days after “Capt. Coffin” and his oil had arrived safely in Boston.

What’s more, in September 1775 Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin were co-owners of a whaling brig named the Mayflower, according to British Treasury records.

So it looks like the two men from Nantucket who told their story of nearly being shipwrecked on Cape Cod in late September 1767 were most likely Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin.

This was probably the same Stephen Hussey (1735–1805) who “was a blacksmith, shipsmith, and whaling merchant.” Having been elected to represent his town at the Massachusetts Convention of 1768 and the Provincial Congress, he became the island’s first Customs Collector under the new federal government.

TOMORROW: The Newport connection?

A Likely Addition to Phillis Wheatley’s Works

Prof. Wendy Raphael Roberts of the University of Albany has announced the discovery of a previously unknown poem by Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of Love Rotch.”

Or, as this press release from the university says, Roberts found a poem in the 1782 commonplace book of Mary Powel Potts (1769–1787) of Pennsylvania, the lines dated to 1767 and attributed to “A Negro Girl about 15 years of age.”

Since we know of only one teen-aged girl of African descent writing poetry in British North America at the time, Phillis Wheatley is the most likely candidate.

Of course, a few years ago we assumed that the black portrait artist advertising in Boston newspapers 250 years ago this season had to be Scipio Moorhead, since he was the only possibility to appear in the published sources. (In fact, one of the main sources about him is a poem by Phillis Wheatley.)

But then Paula Bagger put together manuscript sources (including letters I quoted back here) to bring out the life of Prince Demah, now almost certainly the portraitist in those advertisements.

Thus, while it would be unlikely that two African girls were writing poetry in New England in 1767, it’s not impossible.

There are, however, some additional clues pointing to Wheatley:

• Wheatley often wrote memorial verse like this elegy, particularly when she was starting out. She didn’t necessarily know the people she wrote about.
• The title and date of this poem match the details of Love (Macy) Rotch, a Quaker on Nantucket, who died 14 Nov 1767.
• Wheatley wrote “To a Gentleman on his Voyage to Great Britain for the Recovery of his Health” to Love Rotch’s son Joseph, Jr., reportedly in or before 1767. (Boston newspapers reported in March 1773 that he had died in England.)
• Love Rotch’s other sons, William and Francis, owned the ship Dartmouth, which carried the first edition of Wheatley’s poems back to Boston in 1773.
• We know Wheatley’s poems circulated in manuscript and commonplace books among Philadelphia Quaker women like Mary Powel Potts.

And here’s a new bread crumb: In the 25 Apr 1765 Boston News-Letter and several other newspapers that spring, Love Rotch’s husband and two of her sons, William and Joseph, Jr., asked anyone indebted to the late John Morley to pay up “at the store of Nathaniel Wheatley, in King-Street, Boston.” They authorized Wheatley to collect money due to Morley’s widow. That shows a close business relationship between the Wheatley and Rotch households a couple of years before Phillis wrote her poems.

There are still some mysteries. For one:

The only thing that didn’t make sense to Roberts was the copyist’s claim that Love Rotch was the poet’s mistress, since it was widely known that Susanna Wheatley held that role.

Roberts apparently suggests that the Wheatley family loaned or rented Phillis to the Rotch family. That strikes me as a more complex, less likely explanation than that Potts or her teacher misunderstood the origin of the poem and assumed it reflected the author’s lament for someone she knew well.

Another open question:

Roberts found another anonymous poem in the Potts book that she believes Wheatley wrote but can only speculatively attribute to her. Titled “The Black Rose,” it mourns the death of a Black woman named Rose and uses theology to critique a society that refused to mourn the enslaved and oppressed. It would be the only known elegy Wheatley wrote for a Black woman.

Also a mystery in the press release is the actual text of these poems. Those will presumably appear with Prof. Roberts’s analysis in the upcoming Early American Literature article. On Thursday, 26 January, at 6:00 P.M., the Library Company of Philadelphia will host a virtual talk by Roberts on “A Newly Unearthed Poem by Phillis Wheatley (Peters) and the Future of the Wheatley Canon.”

From Experimental Seamanship to the Naval Art

Fans of the Age of Sail might enjoy reading Elin Jones’s article “Stratifying Seamanship: Sailors’ Knowledge and the Mechanical Arts in Eighteenth-century Britain” in the British Journal for the History of Science, accessible here.

As the abstract explains, in the mid- and late 1700s a few British “seamen with decades of experience on the lower deck of merchant and naval vessels” published books about the practical aspects of sailing large ships. Those titles were popular, going through multiple editions.

But after a few more years those authors were supplanted by “land-bound authors and naval officers” from the upper class. That change erased the first group’s emphasis on the collective knowledge and ingenuity of working sailors.

British mariners already viewed “seamanship” and “navigation” as separate areas of knowledge, divided by class. Young Royal Navy officers learned to manage the vessel from veteran sailors, but only officers were expected to know how to figure out where the ship was. For an ordinary seaman to appear on deck with a sextant was not only rare, but possibly mutinous.

It takes a while for the article to get through theories of knowledge to its evidence, but here’s a compelling example:

In 1792, William Nichelson, who had been a seaman on merchant ships before becoming master attendant at Portsmouth throughout the American Revolutionary Wars, published his A Treatise on Practical Navigation and Seamanship. . . .

Nichelson’s work was structured around occurrences and weather events he had encountered under sail and his observations on the best methods to rig, reef, furl, steer and haul, and to improve the ship whilst at sea. . . .

This is most thoroughly demonstrated in Nichelson’s forty-page recounting of the voyage of the East India Company ship Elizabeth from India to England in 1764, aboard which he had acted as master. Whilst sailing 650 leagues off the Cape of Good Hope, the crew of the Elizabeth had encountered a storm which had almost wrecked the ship, and required them to sail for thirty-five days back towards the Cape without a working rudder. Nichelson’s account of this period recounts the inventiveness and ingenuity of an experienced seafaring crew in the face of immediate danger. The ship again was represented as a site of experiment, as the author described in great detail the process by which the crew arrived at the invention of a temporary rudder, made by sawing part of the top mast and lashing it to the outside of the ship, which would form the main part of the new ‘machine’, then sawing an oak plank until it resembled a ‘key’ which could manipulate the mast's direction.

While old salts like Nichelson emphasized gaining knowledge through “experimental” practice, the succeeding set of genteel authors wrote of a “naval art” available to only a few.

This shift from a prizing of collective manual labour to individual mental acumen is further represented in a 1793 publication of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce which details the ‘invention’ by Captain Edward Pakenham of ‘a substitute for a lost rudder’. The invention is remarkably similar to that described by Hutchinson and Nichelson several years earlier, but the account given of its creation is very different. Whilst Nichelson's representation of events emphasized the work of the crew in pooling their experience to arrive at the invention of their new ‘machine’, Pakenham's account describes him as a ‘highly-esteemed inventor’ and includes a plan of ‘my machine’, which he seems miraculously to have devised and wrought single-handedly.

The plan for a temporary rudder is almost identical to that designed by Nichelson's crew, but it would come to be known as ‘Pakenham's Rudder’, described as ‘genius working for the benefit of humanity’, and accordingly awarded a gold medal by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

There are no American examples in the article, but it put me in mind of how Capt. Timothy Folger of Nantucket told his cousin, Benjamin Franklin, about the Gulf Stream. Franklin sent his first report on this ocean current to London in 1768. British authorities mostly ignored it. Franklin ended up republishing his map in later decades in France and the U.S. of A.

“Declaring that we were all Torys at Nantucket”

As I discussed yesterday, the British government exempted the island of Nantucket from its Restraining Act, which limited trade with America.

At the time, Nantucket’s chief industry was whaling, and the chief market for its products was Britain. Neither the islanders nor the home country wanted to derail that business.

Furthermore, most Nantucketers were Quakers, so they had a religious reason, or excuse, to remain neutral in the imperial government’s conflict with the thirteen colonies.

In May 1775, the Continental Congress responded to Parliament’s law by forbidding anyone in the thirteen colonies from trading with parts of the continent that still supported the Crown. That was followed on 29 May by a special resolution:

That no provisions or necessaries of any kind be exported to the island of Nantucket, except from the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, the convention of which colony is desired to take measures for effectually providing the said island, upon their application to purchase the same, with as much provision as shall be necessary for its internal use, and no more. The Congress deeming it of great importance to North America, that the British fishery should not be furnished with provisions from this continent through Nantucket, earnestly recommend a vigilant execution of this resolve to all committees.

At the time, Nantucket—or to be exact, the town of Sherburne—wasn’t participating in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The congress had tried to appoint a committee of correspondence for Nantucket County in April, but the men it named hadn’t taken up the call.

In July, the provincial congress wound down its work. It called on all towns, including Sherburne, to elect a new, official Massachusetts General Court. Among the congress’s final resolutions was:

whereas, the inhabitants of Nantucket have by them, large quantities of provisions in their stores, and are fitting out a large fleet of whaling vessels, whereby they intend to avail themselves of the act aforementioned [the Restraining Act], and the provisions they have by them may be unnecessarily expended, in foreign and not domestic consumption:

therefore, Resolved, that no provisions or necessaries of any kind be exported from any part of this colony to the island of Nantucket, until the inhabitants of said island shall have given full and sufficient satisfaction to this Congress, or some future house of representatives, that the provisions they have now by them, have not been, and shall not be, expended in foreign, but for domestic consumption.

Meanwhile, on 6 July a Nantucket sea captain returned to the island from a voyage to Philadelphia. He had hoped to bring back a load of flour. But, wrote Kezia Coffin, “the Congress would not suffer him to bring any declaring that we were all Torys at Nantucket.”

COMING UP: More tacking around Nantucket Island.

“The Island of Nantucket, employed in the whale fishery”

In the early spring of 1775, even before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Parliament took steps to clamp down on New England and its allies.

Given that almost all of Massachusetts had set up a rival government in open defiance of the Massachusetts Government Act, that New Hampshire had driven away Gov. John Wentworth, and that the elected governors of Connecticut and Rhode Island were doing as little as possible to support royal policy, Parliament felt stricter measures were justified.

On 30 March it enacted the New England Restraining Act, also called the New England Trade and Fisheries Act. This law restricted trade and barred ships from the rebellious colonies from the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland. However, that law also included a clause exempting whaling vessels from Nantucket from its new rules.

Nantucket was then the center of the North American whaling industry, which supplied a great deal of the whale oil, spermaceti candles, and other products that Britain used. In addition, many of the island’s leading families were Quakers and thus religious pacifists.

The Nantucket whaling captains could thus make the case in London both that they wanted no part in any coming war, and that their business was too important to interfere with. As a result, Nantucket got this special exemption.

When Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act in December 1775, authorizing the Royal Navy and privateers to capture ships from the rebellious colonies, that new law once again exempted ships from Nantucket:

XL. Provided also, and it is hereby further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That nothing in this act contained shall extend, or be construed to extend, to any ship or vessel, being the property of any of the inhabitants of the Island of Nantucket, employed in the whale fishery only, if it shall appear by the papers on board that such ship or vessel was fitted and cleared out from thence before the 1st day of December, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five; or if the master, or other person having the charge of any such ship or vessel as aforesaid, shall produce a certificate under the hand and seal of the Governour or Commander-in-Chief of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, setting forth that such ship or vessel (expressing her name, and the name of her master, and describing her built and burthen) is the whole and entire property of his Majesty’s subjects of the said Island of Nantucket, and was the property of one or more of them on or before the 25th day of March, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.

In the same year, the American governments were also trying to figure out what to do with Nantucket. The options shrank as war arrived, since in that situation people tend to view neutrals as helping the other side.

TOMORROW: A local headache.

When Balch Came Back

In early October 1775, Nathaniel Balch the hatter left London and sailed back home to America.

On 23 December, the Providence Gazette reported on news from the preceding days:

Captain Gorham is arrived at Nantucket from London, after a Passage of eleven Weeks. With him came passenger Mr. NATHANIEL BALCH, late of Boston.  

Balch was soon on the mainland. On 20 December, the Boston court official and insurance broker Ezekiel Price, taking refuge from the siege in Stoughton, wrote in his diary:

Mr. Bailies, from Taunton, says that Mr. Nathaniel Balch was there last night. He is lately from London, and reports that the great men in England are against us, but that the common people are in our favor.

However, four days later Price wrote that young Benjamin Hichborn had told him:

Mr. Balch says our Boston gentry that lately went to England were, most of them, very desirous of getting back; that the people there in general were against us, and continually threatening to scourge us till they had obliged us to submit.

I don’t trust Hitchborn about anything. But the discrepancy between Price’s entries may simply be due to him using the word “people” to refer to two different groups: ordinary people as opposed to “great men” in his first entry, British gentry as opposed to Loyalist gentry in the second.

Finally, there’s a mention from Isaac Smith, Sr., father of one of the men Balch had sailed and seen some sights in London with. Smith wrote to his niece’s husband, John Adams, on 2 Jan 1776:

Itts likely you may have heard Mr. Balch is returnd from England but came Out the begining Octbr. so cant bring any thing New of a publick Nature tho possibly he may of his One invention.

Balch’s own invention might have meant private information he’d picked up, though, knowing him, it might just as well have been some new funny stories. I haven’t come across any other references to Massachusetts men debriefing the hatter about his trip.

Which means I still have the mystery of why Balch went to Britain at all.

TOMORROW: Post-war legends.

“Hove the Tea all overboard”

On the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party I’m sharing one of the more unusual eyewitness accounts of the event. This text was published in Traits of the Tea-Party in 1835, labeled “Extract from the Journal of the ship Dartmouth, from London to Boston, 1773.”

The Dartmouth, owned by the Rotch family of Nantucket and captained by James Hall, was the first of the three tea ships to arrive in Boston harbor. As such, its legal status determined the ticking clock that drove the drama. If the Dartmouth wasn’t fully unloaded by 17 December, the Customs service could confiscate the remaining cargo (i.e., the East India Company tea) and the ship itself.

Here’s the logbook as published in 1835:

Sunday, Nov. 28. This 24 hours first part fresh breezes, hazy weather, with rain at times. At sunset fetched close in with the Graves; tacked to the southward. At 10, P.M., came to anchor about two miles from the Light-House, got our boat out, and went on shore for the pilot. At 4, A.M., the pilot, Mr. Minzey, came on board. At 6, got under way, wind WNW. turned up Ship Channel and came to anchor in King’s Road. At 11, the tide being ebb, got under way, and turned up and came to anchor under the Admiral’s stern [i.e., Adm. John Montagu’s flagship, H.M.S. Captain]. At 10 at night, two Custom-House officers were boarded upon us by the Castle, we being the first ship ever boarded in this manner, which happened on account of our having the East India Company’s accursed dutiable Tea on board.

Monday, Nov. 29. This 24 hours pleasant weather, lying at anchor under the Admiral’s stern; the Captain went on shore, there being a great disturbance about the Tea. A town-meeting was held, which came to a resolution the Tea should never be landed. Had a guard of 25 men come on board this night at 9, P.M.

Tuesday, Nov. 30. This 24 hours cloudy weather; got under way, and turned up to [John] Rowe’s wharf. Employed unbending the sails, getting our boats out, &c. A watch of 25 men on board this night, to see that the Tea is not landed.

Wednesday, Dec. 1. This 24 hours cloudy weather: warped from Rowe’s to Griffin’s wharf; got out old junk and moored ship—getting our sails and cables on shore.

Thursday, Dec. 2. Cloudy weather; began to deliver our goods, and continued to land them from day to day, till Saturday, Dec. 11, having a guard of 25 men every night.

Tuesday, Dec. 14. Have had another town-meeting, which is adjourned to Thursday.

Thursday, Dec. 16. This 24 hours rainy weather; town-meeting this day. Between six and seven o’clock this evening came down to the wharf a body of about one thousand people;—among them were a number dressed and whooping like Indians. They came on board the ship, and after warning myself and the Custom-House officer to get out of the way, they unlaid the hatches and went down the hold, where was eighty whole and thirty-four half chests of Tea, which they hoisted upon deck, and cut the chests to pieces, and hove the Tea all overboard, where it was damaged and lost.

Historians have quoted from this text for many decades, but all the citations go back to Traits of the Tea Party. In other words, no one knows where the original manuscript is, so we rely on this transcription.

Traits of the Tea Party was written anonymously by Benjamin Bussey Thatcher based on extensive interviews with George R. T. Hewes and other old men. The logbook appeared in an appendix alongside the first attempt to list all the people who participated in the Tea Party, provided by ”an aged Bostonian.” Years ago I posited that that list came from the newspaper publisher Benjamin Russell. But who provided the logbook?

There are some internal clues. The author was aboard the Dartmouth when the tea was destroyed, having been told “to get out of the way.” If the transcript is correct, that author had already referred to the cause of the trouble as the “accursed dutiable Tea,” which suggests he shared the political views that dominated Boston and hadn’t chosen for the Dartmouth to carry that tea.

The captain of the Dartmouth, James Hall, was a Loyalist who left Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War. The Canadian historian L. F. S. Upton wrote that Hall commanded ships for the Royal Navy before dying in England in 1781. It’s therefore very unlikely that his logbook would have been available to an American author in 1835.

Ship owner Francis Rotch (1750-1822) spent the war and ensuing years outside North America, managing whaling operations from Britain, the Falkland Islands, and France. He returned to Massachusetts in the 1790s and became known for devising improvements to whaling technology. So it’s possible that the logbook had become Rotch’s property and his heirs shared it—but he couldn’t have written the log since he wasn’t aboard the ship. And the Rotches weren’t part of the Boston crowd.

The most likely author and source seems to be the Dartmouth’s mate, Alexander Hodgdon (1741-1797). We know from his brother-in-law Ebenezer Stevens that Hodgdon was on board the Dartmouth as the Tea Party began. He remained in Massachusetts through the war, at one point commanding a militia company in defense of the state. Hodgdon served in public offices and eventually became Massachusetts state treasurer. That seems to have been enough for some twentieth-century authors to say positively that Hodgdon wrote the Dartmouth logbook.

A Voice from Nantucket

For the last couple of days I’ve quoted newspaper accounts from October 1738 about a violent uprising of Wampanoag people on Nantucket that not only never happened but was, contrary to the first reports, never even planned.

In the winter 1996 issue of Historic Nantucket, later adapted in his book Away Off Shore, Nathaniel Philbrick discussed another apparent account of the same fear, preserved in the Nantucket Historical Association’s archives.

This story was set down in 1895 by Eliza Mitchell, then close to ninety years old. She recorded a story she remembered hearing as a child in the 1810s from another woman who had then been about the same age—thus putting the origin of the tale in the 1730s.

Philbrick described the older woman’s recollection this way:

As the girl and her older brothers and sisters changed into their night clothes and tightened their beds, there was a sound at the front door. It was their father. He was clearly agitated and yet was trying desperately to remain calm, announcing that mother “need not retire or undress the children.” When asked why, he simply said that “there was trouble brewing with the Indians.” But all of them, especially her brothers and sisters, demanded to know more. Reluctantly, her father explained: The day before, an Indian had come into town and “carefully, though very privately” told of a secret plot by the two tribes to attack the English settlement and take over the island. Even though the character of the Indian informant was somewhat suspect, the town officials were inclined to take the warning seriously. When you lived on an island that was a three-hour sail from the mainland (in ideal conditions), you were not about to dismiss even the wildest rumor.

Word went out to all the men that they would be divided into several companies: some would stay in town to protect the women and children in case the attack materialized; other groups would head out to the various Indian villages in an attempt to discover if, in fact, an uprising was in the works. In the meantime, it had been “thought best not to inform their families until the last minute.”

But now the truth was out, and according to the old woman, there were “many fears and some tears.” Borrowing a page from the frontier towns in the western half of the colonies, the Nantucketers decided to consolidate the women and children into a few, easily defended houses, and so “the families gathered their little ones close around them, club’d together, well as they could.” The old woman remembered laying her head upon her mother’s lap, and gradually falling to sleep, “as children will.”

It was time for the men to search the darkness for Indian war parties. All night they patrolled the treeless moors in the swirling mist, their eyes and ears straining for some indication of the Indian bands their imaginations inevitably placed behind every rise of land and within every hollow. But by daybreak they had found nothing. Exhausted, they returned to town and made their report.

The next day, the town’s sheriff and “fifty well-armed men” set out to determine, if possible, the “meaning of it all.” Instead of finding the Indians in the midst of a war dance, “they found all quiet.” It was harvest time, and the Indians were “merrily husking their corn.” When they learned about the white people’s fears, the natives were deeply disturbed and demanded to know who had told them this false story.

As it turned out, the informant had spent the last three days in a drunken stupor, having used the money the English had paid him to purchase rum. According to the old woman, the Indians were “so highly incensed [that] they came near tearing him apart.” Eventually it was decided that he would receive no less than thirty lashes (the limit allowed by colonial law) at the town’s whipping post.

Mitchell went on to describe the punishment, saying it was the last public whipping on the island.

This story fits the mold of what I call “grandmothers’ tales”—historic stories we hear as children and never doubt, even though the original storyteller might not have meant them to be taken literally. Some of our best legends get into print that way.

In this case, however, the story matches some important aspects of the earliest Boston News-Letter report of the conspiracy: a single Native man alerting the white settlers on Nantucket, prompting a brief but consuming fear “wholly contradicted” a short time later. According to Mitchell, the man initially hailed in Boston as “an honest Indian Fellow” ended up being whipped for lying.

In his Early American Studies article “Inventing an Indian Slave Conspiracy on Nantucket, 1738,” Justin Pope blames John Draper of the Boston News-Letter not only for printing an unfounded rumor but for largely creating it. According to that paper’s abstract, Draper chose to “invent a sensational account of an imminent Indian uprising” based on “conventions established over years of reporting slave unrest.”

The Nantucket tradition that Mitchell wrote down suggests that the island’s British people truly were afraid of a Native uprising around the start of October 1738, enough to gather their women and children and organize patrols. With those “conventions” about uprisings already established, local whites could have sensationalized their fears themselves. Draper might have accurately reported the news that mariners from Nantucket brought to Boston. Or newspaper reports and local gossip could have built on each other in a spiraling account.

The Nantucket Conspiracy “wholly contradicted”

Yesterday I quoted items from the Boston News-Letter of 5 Oct 1738 and the Boston Evening-Post of 9 Oct 1738 about a narrowly averted uprising of Wampanoags on Nantucket Island, and ongoing fears that the Native sailors on whaling ships might have risen up, too.

However, on 16 October the Boston Gazette, which had reprinted the News-Letter’s news the week before, stated:

The News that we had in the publick Prints of October 9th, that 16 Indians of the Island of Nantucket had lately a horrid Scheme contriv’d to set Fire to the Houses of the English inhabitants in the Night, and kill as many as they could, is wholly contradicted by a Vessel that arrived here a few Days ago:

This Report arose by a drunken Indian Woman of that Island being in Liquor reported such Things, and she and another Woman was brought before a Justice of the Peace and examin’d, an could make nothing of it but a drunken Story.

(One curious detail: None of the earlier reports I’ve seen stated that “16 Indians” had conspired. That number might reflect how details, true or false, circulated without initially getting into the newspapers.)

Other Boston newspapers ran the same correction, as did papers in Newport and Philadelphia that had printed the first story. But of course not everyone saw that second item—especially decades later.

As Justin Pope describes in his recent article, “Inventing an Indian Slave Conspiracy on Nantucket, 1738,” later historians found the initial report but not the refutation. Obed Macy’s 1835 The History of Nantucket and Alexander Starbuck’s 1878 History of the American Whale Fishery both used the News-Letter article as their authority for describing an actual Wampanoag uprising.

So, for that matter, did Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra, published in 2000. Except that Linebaugh and Rediker looked more favorably on that alleged bid for freedom. That reflects a larger ongoing debate among historians about whether slave uprisings in the New World were actual attempts by people to free themselves or imagined plots by paranoid slaveholders who coerced confessions from innocent people. The answer to that question offers different pictures of enslaved communities—as resistant rebels or as oppressed victims.

Other historians have caught the printers’ corrections and thus the real significance of this particular story as revealing colonists’ fears. In New York Burning Jill Lepore wrote:

If a single drunken Indian woman could come up with a plot and a completely plausible justification so compelling that it terrified an entire island of English colonists and was reported up and down the Atlantic seaboard, even though there were no fires on Nantucket that fall, the degree of panic inspired by actual fires like the ten that blazed in New York in March and April 1741 is hard to imagine.

TOMORROW: A memory of the fear on Nantucket.

A “horrid Scheme” on Nantucket?

On 5 Oct 1738, the Boston News-Letter published an article describing a planned uprising by Wampanoags on Nantucket Island:

We hear from Nantucket, That there has been lately a horrid Scheme conceiv’d by the Indians of that Island, to set Fire to the Houses of the English Inhabitants in the Night, and then to fall upon them arm’d, and kill as many as they could.

But the Execution of this vile Design was happily prevented by an honest Indian Fellow, whom they could by no means seduce to join with them in so desperate an Undertaking, but gave Timely Notice to the Inhabitants thereof, who accordingly keeping upon their Guard, the Indians have desisted.

It seems these Indians have for some Time past appear’d surly and discontented; and ’tis said the above Affair was conceived last Spring, before the Vessels sail’d on the whaling Voyages; and that the Indians who went out with the English on those Voyages were in the Confederacy, and were to do their Part by destroying the English on the Sea:

As several of those Vessels are not arrived tho’ long expected; and as the greater Number in the Crews were Indians, the Consequence thereof is much to be feared.

On 9 October, the Boston Evening-Post reprinted most of that item, adding in the middle:

The Pretence the Indians have for this cruel Attempt, is, as we hear, that the English at first took the Land from their Ancestors by Force, and have kept it ever since, without giving them any valuable Consideration for it;…

Upon the Discovery of the Plot, the English took to their Arms, and stood on their Defence, which discouraged the Indians from making any Attempt upon them; and we are impatient to hear whether their whaling Vessels are return’d in Safety, and what Measures have been taken to secure the Peace and Safety of the Island.

This summer, Missouri University of Science and Technology history professor Justin Pope published a study of this incident in the Early American Studies journal. The university proudly touted that publication, saying:

The “Nantucket conspiracy,” as Pope calls it, is also a cautionary tale for historians who rely on newspaper reports for their accounts of life in colonial America, Pope says. . . . The 1738 newspaper story began as a rumor that “would have passed into local lore if not for the newspaper men of Boston,” writes Pope. It began with printer John Draper, who first reported the account in his Boston News-Letter on Sept. 28, 1738.

That issue of the newspaper is actually dated 28 Sept–5 Oct 1738 on its front. That means it was printed and distributed on 5 October, collecting news that had arrived since 28 September.

Back to the university press release:

…the Boston News-Letter story “took off,” Pope writes. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic ran with the story, which soon became the 18th century equivalent of a viral social media post. “Draper’s story made for good copy,” Pope adds.

“Within a week, his rivals in Boston had copied his version of the conspiracy verbatim,” writes Pope. Within two weeks, printers John Peter Zenger in New York City and Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia were running the story.

But that wasn’t the final word.

TOMORROW: “wholly contradicted.”

The Fight off Fairhaven

Fort Phoenix in Fairhaven overlooks the site of what’s often called, especially in Fairhaven, the first naval fight of the Revolutionary War. (People in Machias, Maine, disagree.)

As Derek W. Beck described in this article for the Journal of the American Revolution, the action started on 11 May 1775 when “a barge from Capt. Linsey’s brig”—H.M.S. Falcon under Capt. John Linzee—stopped a sloop in Buzzard’s Bay. (Linzee shown here courtesy of the Linzee Family Association.)

That sloop was owned by Simeon Wing of Sandwich and commanded by his son Thomas. According to a June report from the Sandwich committee of correspondence, the Wings’ ship

hath been plying, as a wood boat, between Sandwich and Nantucket for some years, and it hath been the usual practice to settle with the custom house once a year, the officer always giving them their choice of paying twelve pence per trip, or the whole at the year’s end: and this hath been, we find, on examining, the common practise with other vessels which have followed the same business at the same place.

That arrangement meant, however, that the sloop had no clearance papers for that particular voyage. Linzee seized it. The historian Richard Frothingham later understood that the captain planned to use vessels he captured to “freight sheep to Boston” from Martha’s Vineyard, feeding Gen. Thomas Gage’s besieged garrison.

Following normal protocol, Linzee transferred some of his crew onto the Wings’ sloop to sail it into a friendly harbor. Midshipman Richard Lucas was put in charge of “eight seamen, three marines, a gunner, and a surgeon’s mate,” as Beck (using British naval sources) recounts.

Then the British officers learned about another vessel ripe for seizure. The Sandwich report stated: “An Indian fellow, on board of Wing’s vessel, informed Capt. Linsey of said [Jesse] Barlow’s vessel, which had brought a cargo lately from the West Indies, and was laden with provisions, in Buzzard’s Bay.” That Native American sailor evidently saw a better future allying with the Royal Navy.

Linzee sent the Wings’ sloop after “Barlow’s vessel” and the provisions it carried, quite possibly intended for the provincial army. But by the time Midn. Lucas had caught up with that ship in Dartmouth harbor, it had been unloaded. He seized it anyway. Then “both vessels, with all the crews and passengers, were taken, and proceeded to the cove to Captain Linsey.”

Barlow, a young man from Sandwich, was determined to get his sloop back. He “made application to some people at Dartmouth” for help. At the time, that town still encompassed modern New Bedford, Acushnet, and Fairhaven. Dartmouth was dominated by Quaker merchants who were not enthusiastic about the war and how it disrupted their trade. Barlow therefore went to men in the Fairhaven village, who were reportedly having a militia drill on the afternoon of Saturday, 13 May.

Barlow offered to put up half the money to arm the 40-ton whaling ship Success with two swivel guns and an extra large crew for fighting. Two militia officers—Daniel Egery and Nathaniel Pope—gathered twenty-five to thirty volunteers, including drummer Benjamin Spooner. In the shorter of two accounts later published by local historians, Pope’s son related that the bulk of the men hid below deck as the Success sailed out of Fairhaven on Sunday morning:

Father had the deck, managing affairs there, and Captain Egery, with the drummer, was in the cabin. Captain Egery came on deck to counsel, at father’s foot-rap. There was one other man and a boy, I think, on deck.

The Success spotted Barlow’s sloop in the waters between Buzzard’s Bay and Martha’s Vineyard. Only one sailor and one armed Marine were on deck. Pope steered his ship close before stomping for Egery. Spooner’s drum sent the militiamen charging up onto the Success’s deck.

The Marine set down his gun and ran to cut the anchor cable of the prize sloop so it could move off, but the Success was too close. Pope shouted for the British men to stay still or be shot. His crew grappled the two ships together and boarded the prize. Pope’s son wrote, “the thirteen prisoners were disarmed and placed below, their position secured by the weight of cable and anchor put over the gangway.”

Egery and Pope then consulted on what to do next. Pope’s son later wrote that they sent the recaptured prize back to port, but British sources suggest that the provincial officers took the Success and Barlow’s sloop together out to look for the other captured ship—the Wings’ firewood boat. Midn. Lucas was on board that sloop along with most of his loyal sailors and Marines.

TOMORROW: Shots fired, and the aftermath.

Venues for Valiant Ambition by Nathaniel Philbrick

Following up on Bunker Hill (discussed in most of these postings), Nathaniel Philbrick has brought out Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution.

As the title indicates, this book focuses on the Continental commander-in-chief and one of his most capable yet prickly protégés.

Philbrick describes Arnold’s feats on Lake Champlain in the Battle of Valcour Island in the fall of 1776, at the same time that the British army was driving Washington out of New York City. He follows the two men through their separate campaigns—Washington running into defeat at Brandywine, Arnold enjoying part of the victory at Saratoga.

And then everything started to go terribly wrong.

Nat Philbrick’s great skill as a historian is finding details and quotations that bring out the emotional core of a story. In this book he focuses on the two men’s psyches as they grew together and apart. He also argues that the revelation of Arnold’s treachery, coming at a low point in the fight for independence, strengthened American unity by providing an enemy to rally against.

I missed Philbrick’s first swing through these parts on his book tour, but he’s coming back through New England next month. Here are the venues:

• 7 June, 7:00, Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center on behalf of the Lake Champlain Maritime Center, Burlington, Vermont
• 9 June, 7:00, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester
• 10 June, 4:00, Falmouth Historical Society
• 15 June, 7:00, Barrington Books, Barrington, Rhode Island
• 16 June, 6:00, Boston Athenaeum

Then three events at the Nantucket Book Festival:

• 18 June, 9:00 A.M., “Revolutionary Figures on a Shifting Canvas,” Nantucket Atheneum
• 18 June, 1:00 P.M., Mitchell’s Book Corner
• 19 June, 6:00 P.M., panel discussion at Nantucket Whaling Museum

For more details and other venues, check Philbrick’s website.

Hancock and the Harrison

In 1763 the London merchant Jonathan Barnard took on Gilbert Harrison (d. 1790, his monument in the church at Newton Purcell shown here) as a full partner and successor.

One of Barnard and Harrison’s major customers in Boston was Thomas Hancock, who died the following year.

John Hancock inherited his uncle’s business and business contacts, and he started a busy correspondence with Barnard and Harrison. In late 1765 the Stamp Act threatened that relationship.

Hancock warned the Londoners on 14 October: “I have come to a Serious Resolution not to send one Ship more to Sea nor to have any kind of Connection in Business under a Stamp.” If any of his own ships arrived after 1 November, he would “Haul them up” instead of sending them back out.

In that same 14 October letter, however, Hancock announced that he had launched a new brigantine, owned in thirds by himself, Barnard and Harrison, and a Nantucket partnership named Barker and Burwell. As a tribute to his London contact, Hancock had named that ship the Harrison. “She sail'd for Nantuckett 11th Inst. compleatly fitted for the sea, and as pretty a Vessell & as well Executed as I ever saw a Vessell & I think tolerable Dispatch.”

Through November Hancock continued to complain about the Stamp Act, urging his London partners to lobby for its repeal. The next month, Hancock reported that officials in Boston weren’t enforcing the Stamp Act since the local Sons of Liberty had made sure there was no stamp master to distribute stamped paper. On 21 December he wrote to Barnard and Harrison:

This I hope you will receive by the ship Boston Packet. John Marshall, commar., which is now fully loaded with oyl, & have cleared him out at the Custom house, the officers certifying that no Stamps are to be had, which is actually the case, & you may rely the people on the Continent will never consent to the Grievous imposition of the Stamp Act. Our Custom house is now open as usual & clearance taken without stamps. That I apprehend there will be no risque on your side, here. I am under no apprehensions.

Despite his confidence, Hancock was facing a risk: the royal authorities could seize his ship and its cargo of whale oil for sailing without the proper paperwork.

The Boston Packet got through, and Barnard and Harrison assured Hancock that they had joined with other London merchants doing business with North America to urge the government to repeal the law. By early 1766 it was clear that such pressure was working.

On 26 February Hancock responded to that good news by writing:

I am very glad you have interested yourselves for us & wish your application may produce the Desired Effect. I am sure it is as much for the interest of Great Britain as ourselves to Ease our trade & in the case of the Stamp Act, there seems a necessity of Repealing it for almost to a man throughout the Continent, they are determined to oppose it, but I hope very soon to hear some good acct. from you. Do give me the earliest notice that the Parliament determines. I imagine the Brig Harrison will be the first Vessel here if the Stamp Act be repealed.

In early April the Harrison, captained by Shubael Coffin, left Britain for Boston. It carried loaf sugar and women’s stays for Samuel Eliot, “English and India Goods” for Frederick William Geyer, and the February London magazines for John Mein. And it carried a copy of the London Gazette with important news.

The Harrison reached Boston on 16 May 1766 after a voyage of six weeks and two days. The merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary:

Capt. Shubael Coffin arr’d from London abo. 11 of Clock & brot. the Glorious News of the total Repeal of the Stamp Act which was signed by his Majesty King George the 3d. of Ever Glorious Memory, which God long preserve & his Illustrious House.

The 19 May Boston Gazette noted:

It is worthy Remark that the Vessel which bro’t us the glorious News of the total Repeal of the Stamp Act is owned by that worthy Patriot, JOHN HANCOCK, Esq; who first ventured his Ship with a very rich Cargo for London, with a Clearance without the Stamp.

TOMORROW: Much rejoicing.

New Myths of the Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre occurred 244 years ago today. From the start that was a controversial event with different participants seeing it quite differently. It’s been mythologized in many ways, and myths and misconceptions continue to crop up. Here are some that I’ve seen repeated recently.

Did Crispus Attucks work at Gray’s ropewalk?

Boston’s official report on the shooting, titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre…, gave a lot of attention to a brawl between soldiers and workers at John Gray’s rope-manufacturing facility on 2 March. That fight involved two soldiers, Mathew Kilroy and William Warren, and one ropemaker, Samuel Gray, who faced off on King Street three days later. Another soldier, John Carroll, was part of a follow-up brawl on 3 March. Thus, the town suggested, those soldiers had not shot in self-defense but out of anger at townspeople, and perhaps at Samuel Gray in particular.

In all that attention to the ropewalk fight, however, no witness identified Crispus Attucks as being involved. Testimony does put a big man of African descent in the brawl: Drummer Thomas Walker of the 29th Regiment. But justice of the peace John Hill recalled shouting at Walker, “you black rascal, what have you to do with white people’s quarrels?” That suggests that no man of color like Attucks had been prominent in the fights before. Newspapers described Gray as a ropemaker but Attucks simply as a sailor.

In 2008 I noted a Boston Globe essay that said, “According to lore, Attucks reappeared [in Boston] just before the massacre, likely finding dock work as a rope maker.” But there’s no evidence for that guess and some to suggest it was mistaken. I suspect people trying to find a tight link between the ropewalk fight and the shooting on King Street assumed Attucks was involved in both, but historical events aren’t always so neat.

Did Attucks work on a whaling ship?

In Traits of the Tea-Party, published in 1835, Benjamin Bussey Thatcher cited an old barber named William Pierce as his source that Attucks “was a Nantucket Indian, belonging on board a whale-ship of Mr. Folger’s, then in the harbor…” But Pierce also told Thatcher that he’d never seen Attucks before the night of the Massacre, so he didn’t have inside information.

Boston’s 1770 newspapers directly contradict Pierce. They said Attucks was from Framingham, not Nantucket. They reported Attucks was “lately belonging to New-Providence [in the Bahamas], and was here in order to go for North-Carolina”—meaning he worked on trading voyages to the south rather than hunting whales.

I suspect that Pierce’s memory of Attucks from sixty-five years before had gotten mixed with his memory of the Prince Boston legal case, which did involve a man of African and Native descent, whalers from Nantucket, and a captain named Folger.

TOMORROW: The myth of the tombs.

The Servant Left Behind

I’ve been discussing the Chinese businessman Punqua Wingchong, who arrived in Nantucket in 1807 and left New York the following year under controversial conditions. When Punqua came to America, he traveled with a servant. What happened to that man?

According to Frances Ruley Karttunen’s The Other Islanders: People Who Pulled Nantucket’s Oars, Punqua left his servant Quak Te behind on Nantucket. That man kept “a sleeping bag and a very large wardrobe,” and as of November 1809 still had over $40 in cash. But Quak Te evidently despaired of adjusting to life on the island or getting home, and he hung himself in his rented room.

The probate record referred to him as “Quak Te, of Nantucket, a Black man deceased.” Another record labeled him as “colored.” I wondered if that opened the possibility that Punqua’s servant was actually of African descent; Quaco is an Akan name meaning “male born on Wednesday,” and its derivative Quock was not an uncommon name for enslaved men in America.

However, Karttunen quotes an 1809 entry from the Nantucket Atheneum: “Quack Te a Chinese hung himself it is supposed.” I therefore conclude that the island authorities probably had so little experience with Asian men in 1809 that they didn’t know if “Chinaman” was a legal category. They knew Quak Te wasn’t white or Indian, so they classified him with Negroes. Some laws in the early republic required racial classification, but the boundaries of those classes were slippery.

As for Punqua Wingchong, he returned to his business in China despite the imperial laws forbidding him from traveling abroad. Then again, those laws barred him from trading with westerners outside the authorized area of Canton, and he did that in his shop anyway. Perhaps the Chinese authorities were willing to look the other way if he brought back useful information about the young U.S. of A.

Punqua Winchong kept up his good relations with America. He sent a thank-you letter to the new President, James Madison, and a gift for his wife, followed by two more letters over the next couple of years. In 1811, Punqua advertised his Canton shop in New York newspapers. Dael Norwood concludes that he was in America at that time, but I suspect he was still in China and had an agent place that ad targeting American sailors.

Punqua definitely returned to Nantucket in 1818; Karttunen reports his name is on a boarding-house register. That year the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany also reported:

A Chinese merchant, Punqua Wingchong, of Canton, was lately in New York. The Tuscarora natives, who saw him, were so struck with his physiognomy, that they insisted he was one of their people. They made earnest inquiry who he was, and were astonished on being told that he was a Chinese. Such is the physiognomonical resemblance of these races of Americans and Asiatics.

Other Americans recognized Punqua from the political controversy of the previous decade.

I don’t know if Punqua once again went home to China, or if there are any Chinese sources to fill out his life. But he and his servant exemplify the expanding international trade of the early nineteenth century.

“He is no more a Mandarin than one of our shopkeepers”

Yesterday I noted Dael Norwood’s article about a Chinese businessman named Punqua Wingchong, who got special permission from Thomas Jefferson’s administration to sail home during the embargo. Jefferson’s critics complained that Punqua was just a front man for John Jacob Astor.

Punqua had come to the U.S. of A. on his own, however. In 1807 he arrived on Nantucket on the Favorite, accompanied by a servant. In The Other Islanders: People Who Pulled Nantucket’s Oars, Frances Ruley Karttunen writes that the local diarist Keziah Fanning described him as: “a Chinaman that came with Mr. Whitney last fall from Canton. He is a merchant there. He is the color of our native whites.”

After Punqua’s return voyage in August 1808 became a political controversy, a New Yorker wrote to Secretary of State James Madison under the pseudonym “Columbus” to warn the administration that they had made a mistake:

Mr. Winchong who is represented as a China Mandarin I know well and knew him before he left Canton. He is no more a Mandarin than one of our shopkeepers is for that is his occupation. That he came away from China and must return by stealth I am sure of, as it is the only way a Chinese can visit a foreign country in a foreign vessel and Mr. Winchong has frequently told me that he came away from Canton without any Mandarin knowing it and he expected to return the same way, and I believe that should the Mandarines become acquainted with his visit to this country when he returns they would strip him of every cent he is worth. . . .

Since I left NewYork (my place of residence) on my Journey to this place I have had continual enquiries respecting the great Chinese Mandarin and I have in several instances related what I knew concerning him and I have just learnt that the Ship Beaver of near 500 Tons is permited to carry him and his property to Canton. This the Feds & Tories with a sneer observe is another proof of the wisdom of Mr. Jeffersons administration. I have sir now only to add that the Ship Beaver belongs to the bitterest opposers of the present administration and should they succeed with their tool Winchong in accomplishing their object they will laugh at those that granted the favor by way of showing their superior wisdom.

That Winchong does not possess 5000 Dollars in this country is my opinion for some time ago I recievd a letter from Mr. S. Whitney the gentleman that bro’t Winchong to this country stating that he wished me to be friendly to Winchong as he had not exceeding $500 Dollars with him and surely he ought to know. That Winchong holds notes of Shaw & Randall’s to a large amount and that he came to this country for the express purpose of collecting the same, is certain, but that House became bankrupts several years ago. Shaw is since dead and Randall with hard labour can scarcly support his indigent family. Therefore not a cent has been collected from them.

It would be cruel to the highest degree for any person to object to Mr. Winchong and the other chinese having permission to return to their native country but why is a ship of five hundred Tons necessary to carry them (and to return with a full Cargo). A small vessel certainly would be more expeditious (and particular at this season when they will have to take a circuitous and difficult route) and perhaps equally as comfortable.

By the time this letter reached the capital, Punqua’s ship had already sailed. But it points out some more connections between Punqua and Massachusetts.

When “Columbus” wrote, “the Ship Beaver belongs to the bitterest opposers of the present administration,” Norwood says he probably meant brothers James Perkins (shown above, courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum) and Thomas Handysyd Perkins, who were partners in that ship with Astor. The Perkinses were indeed Federalists—which is probably why they kept quiet and let Astor handle arrangements with his friends in the Jefferson administration.

Punqua’s “notes of Shaw & Randall’s” also have New England roots. Samuel Shaw had grown up in Boston and become an artillery officer during the Revolutionary War. He helped open the China Trade, first as supercargo on the Empress of China in 1784 and then as a trader and first American consul in Canton from 1786 to his death in 1794.

Thomas Randall’s background is harder to pin down, in part because there’s a prominent New York merchant of the same name. He was a lieutenant in the Continental artillery regiment as early as October 1775, when he was court-martialed for stabbing an enlisted man. (The panel recommended a reprimand.) In 1784 Shaw insisted that “Captain Randall, with whom he had formed an intimate friendship in the course of the American war, and who was as destitute of property and employment as himself, should be united with him and share with him the profits of the agency” in China.

That enterprise failed after Shaw’s death at the age of thirty-nine, and the notes Punqua hoped to collect on were worthless. No wonder he needed help to get back home.

TOMORROW: But what about his servant?

Two Looks at Rhode Island’s Continental Soldiers

On Wednesday, 29 August, the African Meeting House on Nantucket will host a talk by Louis Wilson on “Rhode Island’s Black Patriots in the Revolutionary War.” This is the Museum of African American History’s annual Frank and Bette Spriggs Lecture. Wilson is Professor of African and African American History at Smith College; he studies African-Americans in the Revolutionary War and free blacks in ante-bellum Rhode Island.

The museum’s event description says:

The American Revolution was a defining moment in the formation of what became the United States of America. The men and women who fought in that conflict have, for the most part, been memorialized. Unfortunately, this history gives little account of the many black soldiers who fought in the war. Through his research, Dr. Louis Wilson, has captured the names of over 800 men who served in Revolutionary War army units from Rhode Island. In his talk, Dr. Wilson will share the personal stories of these men who fought to liberate their country from tyranny while their own personal freedom was not guaranteed.

Prof. Wilson’s talk begins at 2:00 P.M., and is free and open to the public. The African Meeting House is at 29 York Street in Nantucket.

In related news, the Rhode Island Society of the Sons of the American Revolution has published Bruce C. MacGunnigle’s transcription of the Regimental Book, First Rhode Island Regiment for 1781 &c. That document preserves the names, origins, and physical descriptions of the men in the regiment in that year.

In 1778 the 1st Rhode Island enlisted a large number of men of African and Native American ancestry, including slaves—a controversial move. For a while more than half the regiment’s soldiers were men of color, and the racially segregated companies left people with the impression of a “Black Regiment.” By 1781, however, the 1st Rhode Island was recruiting white men and no longer separated its recruits by race. This book therefore lists an unusually varied set of Revolutionary American soldiers. Here’s a P.D.F. file of a brochure about the book and order form.

The Shifting Gulf Stream

American ships’ captains in the Atlantic appear to have caught on early to the steady northeast current along North America’s eastern coast and across to northern Europe. However, no one apparently mapped that whole current until the late 1760s, when Benjamin Franklin and his cousin, Nantucket captain Timothy Folger (shown here, courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association), created and privately published the first chart of the Gulf Stream.

That map can be explored at the Library of Congress website. Franklin wanted to speed up mail delivery across the Atlantic by showing British captains how to avoid the current when sailing west. Apparently most captains ignored him.

Coming home to America in 1775 in bureaucratic disgrace after leaking Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s letters, Franklin apparently took his supply of printed maps with him; none survived in Britain. For two centuries that printing was thought to be entirely lost, but then a couple of examples turned up in French archives. Either French captains saw more potential in them, or Franklin brought a few copies when he arrived in France as an American diplomat.

While in Paris, Franklin allowed another map to be engraved. Yesterday I described how the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library discovered Franklin’s own copy in its collection. That map’s labels are in French, and they suggest the Gulf Stream points to France, not Britain—emphasizing natural ties between the new allies?

On returning to the U.S. of A., Franklin commissioned yet another engraving of the Gulf Stream chart, this time published in Philadelphia by his American Philosophical Society in 1786. Here’s the Library of Congress’s image. This map’s inset shows all of western Europe equally, but this time the main map offers a lot more detail about the enticing Northwest Territory.

Thus, though the Gulf Stream doesn’t change much from one of Franklin’s maps to another, the lands shown around it change significantly.

Dr. Samuel Gelston on Trial

Since March I’ve been meaning to finish the story of Dr. Samuel Gelston, the Nantucket physician whom the Patriots jailed in January 1776, and then had to recapture the next month when he escaped.

In the summer of 1776, Gelston was still in custody, guarded by Berachiah Basset on Naushon Island, the biggest of the Elizabeth Islands off Cape Cod. Perhaps the authorities had sent him to such a remote place to prevent a second escape. At the time, Patriot leader and future governor James Bowdoin was Naushon’s absentee owner. (The thumbnail image here shows Naushon in winter; for a print of this or other aerial views, visit Joseph R. Melanson’s Skypic.com.)

On 5 July 1776, the Massachusetts House resolved:

That the said Berachiah Basset, Esq., be, and he hereby is, directed to send the said Dr. Samuel Gelston, under a proper Guard, to the five Justices in the County of Suffolk, appointed a Court to inquire into the conduct of persons suspected to be enemies to the liberties of this Colony...

In a petition published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1874, Gelston basically threw himself on the mercy of this special court:

your petitioner by the special Order of the Honorable Court has been brought before your Honors, to answer to several Complaints brought against him, one of which was that of supplying Capt. [James] Ayscough [of the Royal Navy] with provisions, the particulars of which has been given in with Truth and Candour, & he apprehends has been Laid before your Honors.

The other is for several speaches made in conversations & Threatening to spread the small Pox all of which he absolutely Denys, & presumes no positive evidence can be produced to support such a charge neither has he at any time held any Correspondence with, nor supply’d the army or navy of Britain except in the present Instance nor has he been regardless of his duty to his Creator, his Country & posterity—

Your petitioner would further beg Leave to set forth to your Honors That he has a Wife & Family consisting of Eight children, who must be Greatly distressed by his absence & confinement as well as his property Distroyed.

Therefore most Humbly Request your Honors to consider his situation with kindness and attention & if possible to suffer him to Return to his family.—He is willing with Humble Contrition to Confess his Faults & in future to behave himself with calmness and moderation in every action that may tend to promote the Good of his Country & its cause which shall be advised on every Occasion.

Once more your petitioner would beg leave to add That he is Heartily sorry that he has been so unwise as to attempt to make his Escape before he was Acquitted by your Honors, one thing was, he did not consider himself under parole & was foolishly Lead by the advice of Others.

The justices were apparently in a forgiving mood, perhaps because the war looked quite different in July 1776 from how it had five months earlier. Massachusetts was no longer the center of the fighting, and the British navy no longer so close. (People had no idea that the British military had returned to Staten Island early that month, and that the worst of the war lay ahead.)

Dr. Gelston seemed contrite about the actions he admitted to: helping Capt. Ayscough and trying to escape. Apparently no one came to testify about what he denied doing, such as spreading smallpox. (Even before the war, he’d had to deal with public fears about how he treated that disease.) So the justices sent Gelston back to Nantucket.

In 1779, as I wrote back here, Gelston was again caught up in a dispute over local Loyalists aiding a British warship that visited Nantucket—except this time he was a witness against other men. So he seems to have discarded his Loyalist sentiments and accepted the independence of Massachusetts. Dr. Gelston died in July 1782, aged fifty-seven.