Please join us 9 January 2014 at 5:30 for a talk entitled True Yankees: Americans, the South

Seas, and the Discovery of National Identity. Salem State University professor, Dane A.

Morrison, will discuss his forthcoming book. (John Hopkins University Press, 2014)

During the years between the Treaty of Paris (1783) and the Treaty of Wangxi (1844), American

travelers and expatriates first voyaged “eastward of Good Hope,” from the ports of Algiers to the

bazaars of Arabia, from the markets of India to the beaches of Sumatra, from the villages of

Cochin China to the factories of Canton. Their “voyages of commerce and discovery”

introduced the new nation to the world and the world to what the Chinese and other called the

“new people.” True Yankees explores these early American encounters in the South Seas and the

ways in which their first contacts with the East influenced the construction of a national identity.

The book traces America’s earliest global engagements through the voyages of five Yankee

travelers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade in Asia, 1784-1794, scouring the marts of

China and India for goods that would captivate the imaginations of his countrymen, dying

suddenly of tropical fever off the Cape of Good Hope. Mariner Amasa Delano toured much of

the Pacific as an explorer and seal hunter in the 1790s and early 1800s. Edmund Fanning

circumnavigated the globe as another sealer, explorer, and trader, touching at various Pacific and

Indian Ocean ports-of-call well into the 1830s. Harriett Low was a reluctant twenty-year-old

when she accompanied her merchant uncle and ailing aunt to Macao, residing there between

1829 and 1834 and recording her observations of expatriate life. Merchant Robert Bennet

Forbes’s last sojourn in Canton, 1838-1839, coincided with the eruption of the First Opium War.

This examination of the Indies Trade demonstrates how the global encounters of ordinary

mariners and merchants, coming at the moment of the nation’s emergence, influenced the ways

in which Americans thought of themselves and represented their ideas about an emergent

American national character—the “true Yankee.”

Image: Wild Pigeon, Portsmouth Athenaeum Collection, Gift of the Sawtelle FamilyUnknown Chinese artist (possibly Sunqua, active 1830-70)