Dane A. Morrison - Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World

Eastward of Good Hope

Early America in a Dangerous World

Dane A. Morrison

Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore

2021 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morrison, Dane Anthony, author.

Title: Eastward of Good Hope : early America in a dangerous world / Dane A. Morrison.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020057646 | ISBN 9781421442365 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781421442372 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: AmericansTravelAsiaHistory19th century. | AmericansTravelOceaniaHistory19th century. | AsiaDescription and travel. | OceaniaDescription and travel. | AsiaForeign public opinion, American. | OceaniaForeign public opinion, American. | AsiaForeign relationsUnited States. | United StatesForeign relationsAsia. | OceaniaForeign relationsUnited States. | United StatesForeign relationsOceania.

Classification: LCC DS8 .M77 2021 | DDC 915.0409/034dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057646

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Frontispiece: William Barker, A Chart of the World, according to Mercators Projection, shewing the latest Discoveries of Capt. Cook (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1796), folio 150, 1978. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library.

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In the autumn of 1806, American newspapers were filled with the horrific news of the loss of the ship Essex. This was not the famous, ill-fated barque that had been stove by a whale in 1820, later transformed into an American icon through the pen of Herman Melville, although the reports of this Essex, a merchant ship out of Salem, Massachusetts, were, in fact, as lurid and terrifying:

News is received here that Captain Joseph Orne in the ship Essex had arrived at Mocha, with $60,000 to purchase coffee, and that Mahomet Ikle, commander of an armed ship, persuaded him to trade at Hadidido, and to take on board 30 of his Arabs to help navigate her thither while his vessel kept her company; that on the approach of night, and at a concerted signal, the Arabs attacked the crew of the Essex,... and that the result was the slaughter of Captain Orne, and all his men.... The headless corpse of Capt. Orne and the mutilated remains of a merchant floated on shore and were decently buried. It was soon after ascertained that the faithless Mahomet was a notorious pirate of that country.

It would have been difficult for Americans in the early republic to escape this tragedy and the thousands of similar reports from around the globe that depicted the world beyond their shores in such dire terms. News of similar assaults on their countrymen aboard the Boston off Nootka Sound in 1803, the Putnam in 1805, and the Friendship off Sumatra in 1831; the murders of Captain James Cook in 1779 and the men of the US Exploring Expedition in the South Seas in the 1830s; the loss of explorers and traders such as Joseph Ingraham and Isaac Pendleton and the mysterious disappearances of the US Navy sloop Wasp (October 9, 1814) and countless other Yankee vessels; and the loss of voyagers such as Samuel Shaw and William Henry Low to tropical fever assaulted American readers. Even before stepping onto a global stage in the 1780s, Americans had imagined the world as disordered and dangerous, deranged by tyranny or steeped in chaos, often deadly, always uncertain, unpredictable, and unstable, and their encounters after independence reinforced their assumptions. As historians assert, seasons of misery confronted early Americans in their barbarous years and particularly in distant lands among dangerous neighbors. This vision of the world, more than anything else, shaped Americans ideas of their place in the world. It has been a view shared by Puritans who carried a reformist sense of a city upon a hill to American shores, Yankee voyagers who freighted a mission of bringing order to a world that they found in a constant state of flux in the early republic, and Americans today who feel inundated with news reports of foreign wars, terrorism, massacres, and refugee crises.

Focusing on four representative arenasthe Ottoman Empire, China, India, and the Great South Sea (collectively, the East Indies, Oceania, and the American continents Northwest coast)this book recasts the relationship between America and the world by examining the early years of the republic, when its national character was particularly pliable and its foundational posture in the world was forming. Freed from restrictions of British mercantilism, Yankee merchants sent voyages of commerce and discovery into distant seas. Through the news from the East, carried in mariners news reports, ships logs, journals, and correspondence, Americans at home imagined the world as a congeries of dangerous and incoherent sites, distinct from their own values, yet amenable to their molding.

In this book, I reconsider American ideas about the world through three questions: (1) How did British Americans imagine the world before independence allowed them to travel eastward of Good Hope? (2) What were the signal encounters that filled the public sphere in their early years of global encounter? And (3) how did Americans contacts with other peoples inflect their ideas about the world and their place in it? This study draws on scholarship from global history and early American print culture, in particular, to describe the connected vision through which Americans forged their relationships with the world. The book identifies a dominant theme that emerges in the travelogues of Americans who voyaged to distant landsthe sense of threat to Americans and to their culture and interests across the globe.

I may be accused of contributing to what Beth Fowkes Tobin describes as a colonialist historiography in which the historian retells the history of the

A number of historians have wrestled with the contradiction between a national narrative whose arc is one of upward liberal progress, confidently strutting across the continent carrying republican values and institutions, and the more fragmented collections of an anxious republic, steeped in the violence of racism and exploitation. The former is a twice-told tale, invented through selected materials by amateur historians in the nineteenth century and repeated at county fairs and business-club dinners, imposed through rote in public schools on children who learn to hate history without ever having learned it.

Studies that directly address the issues that are raised in this project appear to be rare. The closest example is perhaps Kathleen Donegans Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America