Did war ships or whaling ships “open” Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century? The complementary fates of two sea drifters, the American Herman Melville and the Japanese John Manjiro, help answer the question. Melville and Manjiro, who crisscrossed the Pacific during the 1840s, offer a particularly mesmerizing example of suggestive coincidence. The oddly parallel lives of these two “Pacific men” (to borrow a term from the poet Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael) help us to understand both the nature of the multicultural floating world of the Pacific during the mid-nineteenth century and the emerging relationship, crucial to both countries, between the United States and Japan. The twin tale of Melville and Manjiro complicates the usual narrative of Commodore Matthew Perry’s fabled opening of Japan 150 years ago, when his so-called Black Ships steamed into Edo Bay and demanded, in the name of President Millard Fillmore, that Japan open its ports to the West.

On January 3, 1841, the twenty-one-year-old Herman Melville boarded the whaling ship Acushnet in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, bound for the rich whaling grounds off the coast of Japan. Two days later, on January 5, the boy Manjiro, a fourteen-year-old fisherman from a small village, boarded a fishing vessel on the coast of Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan. Melville’s itinerary, at least for the next few months, progressed more or less according to plan, rounding Cape Horn and entering the Pacific. Manjiro’s did not. His small boat was caught in a storm and drifted far out to sea, where it was eventually wrecked on the tiny island of Torishima, or Bird Island. Months later, Manjiro and his four companions were rescued by the whaling ship John Howland, like Melville’s boat out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, under the command of Captain William Whitfield. Whitfield took the castaways to the Sandwich Islands (later renamed Hawaii) and entrusted them to his friend, the medical missionary Dr. Gerrit P. Judd. Judd ascertained that they were Japanese, and found employment for them as servants with local American families. Captain Whitfield, childless and deeply impressed with Manjiro’s acumen and spirit, asked to adopt him and take him home to Fairhaven, an arrangement agreed to by all.

Meanwhile Melville, bored with the monotony of whaling, abandoned ship in the Marquesas (an experience detailed in his partly fictionalized novel Typee), and made his way to Honolulu. There he found himself in the midst of a conflict between, on the one hand, British naval officers and, on the other, the local King Kamehameha III and his American prime minister, the very same Dr. Judd, whom Melville called “a sanctimonious apothecary-adventurer.” A clerk for a British merchant, Melville sided with the British, and wrote angrily in Typee about Judd’s predatory operations in Hawaii.

Melville was moved by the native cultures of the South Seas and appalled by what the missionaries had wrought in Hawaii. “Not until I visited Honolulu,” he wrote sardonically, “was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught horses, and evangelized into beasts of burden.” He suggested that the missionary trade was going in the wrong direction: “Four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.” If the missionary plague spread across the South Pacific, there was always, in Melville’s view, inaccessible Japan, which had wisely expelled her Christian missionaries during the early seventeenth century and locked the doors behind them. “So, hurrah for the coast of Japan! Thither the ship was bound,” Melville wrote wishfully at the end of Omoo, his lively sequel to Typee.

Herman Melville never reached the shores of Japan, however, returning instead to New York and western Massachusetts to write his books. He knew that Japan was a country, like death, from which no traveler returned. Except for a narrow trickle of goods and ideas filtered through Dutch traders at Nagasaki, Japan was officially closed to the West for 250 years, with xenophobia as national policy. Travel abroad was punishable by death; visitors from abroad, such as shipwrecked whaling crews, were routinely tortured, forced to trample Christian icons, and killed.

If Melville never traveled to Japan, he was fascinated by the island nation nonetheless, as a kind of heart of darkness of the Pacific. “The same waves wash . . . the new built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham,” he wrote, “while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans.” Like Conrad’s Kurtz on the Congo, Melville discerned in Japan a realm of mystery and ultimate horror. In Moby-Dick (1851), he fitted out his imaginary whaling ship the Pequod with masts cut from trees along the coast of Japan and a captain, the monomaniacal Ahab, who had been “dismasted”—deprived of a leg—off the coast of Japan. The path of the Pequod with its polyglot crew is a direct route to the Japan whaling grounds, the lair of Moby-Dick. The triple threat of a typhoon, a crazed captain, and a white whale spell disaster for Ahab’s ship.

But Melville also thought that the two nations that faced each other across the Pacific were somehow meant for each other’s embrace. He sensed that the United States would play its part in prying open a recalcitrant Japan, and predicted as much in Moby-Dick: “If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.”

Oddly enough, Melville’s prediction was about to come true, though not quite in the direct way that he had imagined. For just as Melville was wondering what it might take to open Japan, Manjiro was embarked on his own extraordinary journey to open the United States. Manjiro, renamed “John Mung” by the sailors on board the John Howland, arrived in Fairhaven (facing New Bedford across the Acushnet River) in May of 1843, when he was sixteen. Of the ten years he spent away from his native Japan, as Junji Kitadai points out in his translation of Manjiro’s travels, Drifting toward the Southeast, Manjiro was on land for only four of them—as much aboard as abroad.

In 1846, having gone to school in Fairhaven and learned both celestial navigation and the barrel maker’s trade in New Bedford, Manjiro joined the crew of the whaling bark Franklin, an ill-fated voyage in which the crew seized control from the mad captain (an incident that may well have inspired the scene in Moby-Dick when Ahab, off the coast of Japan, threatens Starbuck with a musket), and appointed Manjiro second mate. In 1849, Manjiro made the seven-month journey around Cape Horn to join the forty-niners in California. There, pan-handling alone, he amassed enough gold to fund a voyage back to Honolulu, where he was reunited with his fellow castaways. In Hawaii he made arrangements for a dangerous return journey to Japan and landed in the Rikyu Islands in the winter of 1851.

Manjiro’s return to Japan is remarkable for many reasons. He helped to persuade the Japanese authorities that neither he nor the United States was a threat to Japan. His timing was impeccable. At the very moment that Melville, in 1851, was predicting that whaling ships would open Japan, Manjiro was arriving on Japanese shores in a whaling boat. And just as Manjiro was enduring lengthy interrogations—during which he made the case for the benefits of American technology and American-style government— Commodore Perry was preparing his armada of Black Ships for the voyage to Japan.

Manjiro was reunited with his mother in Tosa Province (now Kochi Prefecture) in Shikoku, and almost immediately summoned by the forward-looking provincial lord to educate young samurai leaders in the ways of the West. Promoted to the rank of samurai himself, Manjiro had barely begun his work in Kochi when Perry’s flotilla arrived in Edo Bay, in the summer of 1853, a complete surprise to the Japanese. As Kitadai points out, the United States in 1853 was “an unknown entity” to the Japanese. “No one in Japan had a working knowledge of the English language”—no one, that is, except Manjiro, who at the age of twenty-six was accordingly summoned to Tokyo for meetings with Masahiro Abe, the shrewd prime minister, and other Tokugawa officials.

Perry, who had presented his demands for access to Japanese ports and safe treatment of American sailors, promised to return the following year for an answer. The Tokugawa regime was desperate for information on the Americans, and again Manjiro painstakingly sought to educate Abe and the others concerning the geography, history, culture, and government of the United States. He described the wonders of steam engines and railroads and elected presidents. He tried to persuade the Japanese officials that they had much to learn from the Americans, and that Japan was hurting herself by her policy of self-imposed isolation.

Unfortunately, not all the officials trusted Manjiro. While Abe wished to employ him as interpreter for all future dealings with Perry, another official suspected that Manjiro might be a spy—a sort of American Trojan Horse dropped off the coast of Japan. But Manjiro’s assurances about the essential benevolence of the Americans carried the day with the Japanese officials who may have felt, nonetheless, that faced with American will and weaponry they had little choice.

When Commodore Perry returned to the United States, he expected a hero’s welcome, but Washington had other things to think about, including the threat of civil war. Commodore Perry decided he needed better PR, and asked Nathaniel Hawthorne if he would consider writing a book about the opening of Japan, with Perry as hero. Hawthorne was tempted. As he wrote in his journal on December 28, 1854, “It would be a very desirable labor for a young literary man, or for that matter, an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan.” But Hawthorne had other books on his mind, and suggested that Perry ask Herman Melville, who knew something about the Pacific, to write the book. Perry, stupidly, decided to write the book himself. Herman Melville’s book on the opening of Japan remains one of the great might-have-beens in American literature.

Manjiro, for his part, continued to work toward an opened Japan, serving as an interpreter of American things to the Japanese. He was the official curator of gifts—including a telegraph machine, a daguerreotype camera, and a quarter-scale steam-powered railroad train on a circular track—from Perry’s expedition, since he alone knew what such marvels were for. Manjiro also became a curator of language, writing the first Japanese guide to spoken English and spending several years translating Nathaniel Bowditch’s Practical Navigator—the “seamen’s bible”—which allowed ships at sea to find their bearings from the moon and stars. Manjiro became, in sum, what the anthropologist James Clifford calls a “Squanto figure,” someone who lives between cultures. Melville, too, was a Squanto figure of sorts, a trafficker in languages and cultures. His Typee is an eloquent plea for tolerance of “primitive” cultures, and Moby-Dick offers a vision of men of different nationalities working in concert on a whaling ship.

Manjiro and Melville were most at home at sea. They were Pacific men, as their friends and associates recognized. When a thirty-three-year-old Manjiro helped navigate the first Japanese clipper ship across the Pacific to San Francisco in 1860, an American naval officer on board admired his calm during a typhoon: “Old Manjiro was up nearly all night. He enjoys the life, it reminds him of old times.” Hawthorne wrote of his friend Melville, who also nostalgically reentered the Pacific in 1860 and stopped in San Francisco: “I do not know a more independent personage. He learned his traveling habits by drifting about, all over the South Sea, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trousers.” As Melville himself had written in his great Pacific chapter (111) of Moby-Dick: “To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption.”

Herman Melville called pre-Perry Japan “that double-bolted land,” and Japan, in fact, had to be unlocked not once but twice. Perry did the easy part, forcing Japan to open her major ports to Western ships and Western trade. But there was a second, more significant opening of Japan; this second opening happened much more slowly. It was one thing to fire a few cannonballs across Edo Bay and run a miniature railroad along the beach to impress the samurai. It was quite another to grasp the subtle moves of judo, the tenets of Esoteric Buddhism, or to understand why the most highly prized vessel in the tea ceremony was a dun-colored water jar that had collapsed in the kiln. In this second sense, the opening of Japan occurred as much in the hearts and minds of individuals as in some particular location in Japan or the United States. What sets such people as Melville and Manjiro apart, I think, is that at a certain point it no longer makes sense to speak of them only as travelers or interpreters or guides or Squanto figures. Over time, their cultural encounters occurred not so much between worlds as within themselves.

This idea gives me a way to understand why I am uncomfortable when people speak about the Japanese influence in America or the American imprint in Japan. That model implies a simplistic diorama of Perry and the natives: here are the Japanese with their interesting art objects, and there are the Americans trading modern technology with them. Think of this as the particle theory of cultural exchange. But what we see in nineteenth-century America and Japan is something more complicated and harder to name. Perhaps we need a wave theory of cultural exchange, too. In Pacific men like Melville and Manjiro there is a constant oscillation, a great wave, between East and West. “I believe good will come out of this changing world,” Manjiro wrote to his benefactor, Captain Whitfield, in 1850. In opening themselves to this changing world, Manjiro and Melville opened themselves as well.

Further Reading:

Manjiro’s story is vividly recounted in his own words in Drifting Toward the Southeast, translated by Junya Nagakuni and Junji Kitadai (New Bedford, 2003). Katherine Plummer provides a usefulcontext for such sea drifters in The Shogun’s Reluctant Ambassadors (Tokyo, 1984). And Donald Bernard’s The Life and Times of John Manjiro (New York, 1992) is a well-informed biography. Melville’s Moby-Dick is available in many editions. For a more sustained comparative analysis of Melville and Manjiro, see the first chapter, “The Floating World,” of Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New York, 2003). An exhibition featuring Manjiro entitled “Pacific Encounters: Yankee Whalers, Manjiro, and the Opening of Japan,” is on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum through April 2005.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.2 (January, 2005).

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and the author of books on Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane, as well as The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New York, 2003). Benfey writes for many publications, including the New York Review of Books and The New Republic.

Comparing American and Turkish history

How do you teach the early history of the United States to foreigners? Foreign students—in particular, those I’ve taught in Ankara, Turkey—know a lot about American pop culture. And they are familiar with American literature, if they have taken any courses in American studies, the main academic discipline for teaching and learning about America from abroad. But foreign students often know little, if anything, about American history. In a course I offered on U.S. foreign relations, I asked one student, a graduate of an American studies program, why American culture and literature seem worth studying but not American history? My query was a leading question: I hoped she would exclaim, “But American history is important!” Unfortunately she calmly replied that studying American literature offered her the chance not only to learn English but also to learn about similarities between American literature and other kinds of literature. American history offered no such advantage, however, because it was too unique to say anything about other nations’ histories. What, for example, could U.S. history possibly have to do with Turkish history?

By way of answering these quaint-sounding but in fact important questions—how to teach U.S. history abroad and why—I explained that U.S. history actually has quite a bit to do with Turkish history and not only since World War II, when America achieved true global influence. I have in mind the era of the early American republic, when American relations with the Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey’s ancestor, consisted largely of trade in opium and figs and the evangelical business of a few hearty New England missionaries.

It is clear to me that, despite these seemingly modest connections between the United States and Turkey, the early history of the United States can offer Turkish students lessons about the early history of their own country. And Turkish students’ familiarity with Turkish history and society, in particular issues of national identity and citizenship, minority rights, and women’s rights, can enable them to better appreciate early U.S. history. Both countries, in other words, struggled with how to form “republican” identities. The challenge of getting foreign students to see the early United States as more than a fuzzy abstraction has prompted me to teach important episodes in U.S. history through cross-national and cross-cultural analogies. I don’t incorporate such a comparative strategy wholesale, but even a selective use of the method has paid substantial dividends.

College students in Turkey have mixed feelings about the United States. On one hand they generally dislike U.S. policies in the Middle East, especially concerning Iraq and Israel. The Bush administration’s policy of “preemption” has left them fearing American actions against Turkish territorial sovereignty. On the other hand, some students like contemporary American films, pop stars Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, and NBA basketball, whose stars include not only Americans Allen Iverson and LeBron James but also Turkish players Mehmet Okur and Hedo Türkoğlu. American educational opportunities are also a great draw. Every year a few of the best students in our history department go to top graduate programs in the United States.

Turkish students may have heard anecdotes of pre-World War II presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson. But the first American leader whose policies mean anything to them is Harry Truman. Truman’s opposition to global communism influenced Turkey through the Marshall Plan and the dispatch of the USS Missouri to Istanbul in 1946. The Missouri‘s official mission was to return the remains of a deceased Turkish diplomat (Mehmet Ertegün, the father of the founders of the great R&B label Atlantic Records), but in fact the massive ship’s presence in the Bosporus Straits simply reinforced the sense that America saw Turkey as a bulwark against Soviet communism. Today an observer occasionally may find small businesses or memorabilia with the name “Mizuri.”

Notwithstanding Turkish students’ lack of knowledge about the deep American past, their familiarity with American culture has grown since the end of the cold war and the expansion of cable television and the Internet (through the 1980s Turkey had one television channel). This cultural familiarity, arguably manifesting what Joseph Nye Jr. has called American “soft power,” has created the impression among many Turkish students that American influence—not only cultural, but also military and economic—is eternal or at least as old as the United States itself: American power today, that is, has no traceable origins.

I try to disabuse them of this impression because it reads the past through the lens of the present and because it is tautological, saying in effect, “America is powerful because of its historic power.” An example of this thinking arose in my U.S. history survey when we studied contemporary debates about Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy. A student arguing for the removal’s justification declared, “We know that the U.S. government is strong, and when it wants to do something, it does it.” Might makes right; more pertinent, might has been an American constant.

These sorts of perceptions remind me of the need to communicate contingency in my teaching: that the United States developed one way and not another was not inevitable. It was the result of discrete events, temporary circumstances, the influence or absence of certain key individuals, and the like. And I remind students that contingency is equally important in Turkish history.

With this in mind, the commonalities that emerge in the respective early periods of the United States and Turkey present numerous illuminating subjects for classroom discussion. The national governments of both countries resorted to squashing political opposition in the first decades of their existence: in America the Federalists resorted to the Alien and Sedition Acts; in Turkey, the Republican People’s Party remained the only political party with parliamentary representation until 1946. Although both countries are ethnically diverse, both on occasion forced distinct ethnic communities to “relocate.” In America, the Sauk, Fox, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indian tribes were relocated from ancestral lands in the East. In Turkey, Turkish citizens of Greek Orthodox background were sent to Greece in exchange for Muslims of Greek ancestry, and Kurdish people were removed from their historic areas of settlement.

It is possible that without such drastic steps, neither early republic would have avoided dissolution (although African slavery in the United States mitigated whatever unifying effects ethnic cleansing may have had). Classroom dialogue about conservative nation building in the United States by reference to analogous developments in Turkey encourages students to think more analytically and sympathetically about the costs of forming the American state.

Other aspects of republican state formation in the United States and Turkey provide additional points for comparison. Both countries owe their early survival partly to the protection offered by a global power. The United States was able to expand early in its history partly because Britain, while recognizing American sovereignty, prevented other European powers from encroaching on its former colonies. Likewise Turkey was able to resist encroachment from the Eastern Bloc, as noted above, partly because of the United States. Both of these early episodes of patronage presaged longer-term friendly alliances.

Likewise, Turkey’s founder and first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, took a revolutionary step towards fostering a new Turkish cultural identity by establishing a new Turkish alphabet and language. The formation of the modern Turkish language, different from its Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic antecedents, helps dramatize the analogous enterprise of the American lexicographer Noah Webster, advocate of an “American tongue,” who believed that a distinctive American English would unify American culture and wean Americans from European influence. Turkish students, sensitive to the influence of American and European cultural exports, can readily appreciate Webster’s zeal.

Atatürk’s leadership and importance as a public symbol amid early instability also help students understand the importance of George Washington to the early American republic. After his military leadership in the American Revolution, Washington retired from public life but returned to serve as the first president, to build grass-roots support for the U.S. Constitution, and generally to impart legitimacy to the new U.S. government. Turkish students’ awareness of the absence of democratic institutions under the Ottoman regime, and also Atatürk’s celebrity, helps them understand, on the one hand, the early cult of Washington and, on the other, the evolutionary, not constitutional, formations of the first national political parties in American life: Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans. In a class on American political history, a student confessed that he admired America because its politics were more transparent than Turkey’s. But then our class discussed such irregular U.S. presidential races as the election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson, as president of the Senate, had responsibility for counting state ballots for or against his own candidacy; and the so-called corrupt bargains in 1824 and 1876, when respective winners of the popular vote lost the elections. Through such tales, the Turkish student came to feel less embarrassed by the nitty-gritty of his own country’s politics.

Another point of instructive analogy concerns the status of women. Both the American and Turkish early republics were paternal, in their assumptions that the principal enactors of civic virtue would be men. In the early United States, this largely meant white men. Turkey, although it legitimized political opposition more slowly than did the United States, was more liberal with its early extension of the franchise, empowering all male citizens to vote in 1924. Thus both early republics envisioned a political role for women, but it was an indirect role, focused on raising sons and disciplining or loving husbands who would become virtuous citizens. Similar to the early American ideology of “republican motherhood,” Atatürk proclaimed the emancipation of Turkish women because the republic “needs men who have better minds, more perfect men.” “The mothers of the future,” he hoped, “will know how to bring up such men!”

Yet women’s suffrage was established more rapidly in Turkey than in the United States: Turkish women gained the national right to vote the same decade American women did. So comparison of women’s aspirations and rights in Turkey enhances classroom discussion of the relatively slow process of enfranchising American women. I admit I stumbled on this point when I distributed to my class Abigail Adams’s famous letter urging her husband to “remember the ladies.” I asked students to tell me about Abigail’s tone in the letter. A female student remarked that Abigail was “probably quiet,” because if she were too assertive in demanding equality, John might abuse her. Such a response suggests both a traditional expectation that married Turkish women should be submissive and a more modern sense that women had a rightful place in the political nation.

In the last generation some historians of the United States have begun to teach their subject from a comparative or international point of view. Such an approach is designed to reinforce the reality that the American past was never really separate from the world. If my classroom in Turkey is any indication, however, that message has had little resonance outside the United States. But comparison of the early American republic and its Turkish counterpart—one regime with which students have virtually no familiarity, one regime of which they have a civic if not analytical understanding—produces many instructive points of comparison. Both the similarities and the differences can invigorate discussions of how the United States was formed and how that process was just as fraught and historically contingent as the growth of modern Turkey. What hardships, good fortune, civic building blocks, or realpolitik did Americans of the early republic share with later generations in other countries? In an increasingly globalized academic environment, such questions should help both American and foreign students better appreciate the commonalities of their nations’ histories.

Further Reading:

Joseph Nye described “soft power” in The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford and New York, 2002). Atatürk’s remarks may be found in Lord Kinross, Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey [1964] (New York, 1992). A newer biography is Andrew Mango, Ataturk (London, 2004). Mango’s The Turks Today (Woodstock, N.Y., 2004) interprets modern Turkey. Noah Webster’s remark appears in Jack Greene, ed., The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits (New York, 1987). Suggestions for teaching U.S. history comparatively may be found in David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History 79 (1992) and Carl Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” The History Teacher 36 (2002). An earlier essay about teaching U.S. history in Turkey is Russell Johnson, “Stranger in a Not-So-Strange Land: Teaching and Living the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Turkey,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (2002).

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Tim Roberts is assistant professor of history at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He is the author of Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press, and is currently researching the interaction of American overseas traders and missionaries during the early American republic. He thanks Bilkent students Ayşegül Avcı, Gülşah Şenkol, and Veysel Şimşek for their insights and corrections to this essay.

After spending the summer of 1890 in Venice, the American painter Thomas Moran and his wife, the etcher Mary Nimmo Moran, boarded the steamship Shelter Island to cross the Atlantic and return to their Long Island home. Accompanying them on board the ship was a seemingly odd (and cumbersome) souvenir: the nearly 36-foot-long gondola that the Morans had used during their time in Venice (fig. 1). Due to its substantial length, the gondola made the transatlantic voyage alongside the steamer’s lifeboats, hanging from the davits on the side of the ship. It was transported from New York to Sag Harbor in a similar fashion, and from there it traveled along the Long Island country roads to the Morans’ East Hampton home in a specially outfitted horse-drawn wagon. The vessel quickly became a popular local attraction: there was even an article in the East Hampton Star to celebrate the gondola’s first American voyage, when a group consisting of the Morans and two other couples enjoyed a ride around a local pond.

The gondola fulfilled a range of roles: it was a souvenir that served as a physical reminder of the Morans’ Venetian trip, a visual source that Thomas Moran could refer to in future paintings, a means of pleasurable entertainment for the Moran family, and an antique craft that had supposedly belonged to the poet Robert Browning. Although it might seem an unconventional souvenir today, the gondola, which is now in the collection of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, is also a rare surviving example of something that was surprisingly common at the turn of the twentieth century: Venetian gondolas in America. At their most basic level, these gondolas represented the desire to capture a bit of Venice’s mystery and picturesque culture and bring it to the United States. Yet their presence also points to a growing concern about modernization and the loss of history at the turn of the century.

From Venice to America

Born in England and raised in Pennsylvania, Thomas Moran is known for his landscape views of the American West. However, following his first trip to Venice in 1886, he devoted significant attention to painting Venetian seascapes in a shimmering, light-infused style that was influenced by the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. Moran was not alone in his fascination with Venice: over the course of the 1880s, a number of American artists—most famously, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent—worked in Venice, depicting the island’s iconic canals and landmarks, as well as its most recognizable workers. Moran, however, was primarily interested in Venice’s lagoon, where boats of all shapes and sizes crossed paths in front of the city’s famed skyline.

After traveling alone in 1886, Moran took a second trip to Venice in 1890, this time accompanied by his wife. When the Morans arrived in Venice in May, they followed the common practice of hiring a local gondolier. While elite Venetian residents—both native and foreign—employed full-time gondoliers as part of their household staff, the common practice for visiting foreigners was to hire a gondolier, usually at daily or weekly rates. In addition to providing a gondola and transportation as needed, gondoliers would also perform other household duties. As the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson explained in an 1893 letter to Mrs. Samuel Mather, “In Venice your gondolier not only takes you out in his gondola … but goes to market and waits at table, blacks shoes, and brings up wood, etc.”

The basic features of Venetian gondolas have remained consistent since the nineteenth century. The boat has a flat bottom and the bow and stern are raised, giving it a shape that is often described as banana-like (fig. 2). Today’s gondolas are famously asymmetrical, with a pronounced tilt toward the starboard side. Although the asymmetry has become more pronounced over time, it originated in gondolas produced at the Casal boatyard in the mid-nineteenth century. The Moran gondola was likely built at the Casal boatyard, which could make it the oldest surviving gondola in existence.

Attached to the bow is the ferro, a distinctive iron fitting whose shape loosely resembles a comb. A popular belief holds that the six forward-facing “teeth” in the ferro represent the six different sestieri, or districts, that constitute Venice. The ferro has two main purposes: it protects the bow of the gondola in the case of a collision, and it counterbalances the weight of the gondolier, who stands on a raised platform at the stern. Historically, it was common for gondolas to have two gondoliers, one each at the bow and stern. This gradually changed over the course of the nineteenth century, and nineteenth-century photographs show both single- and double-gondolier arrangements.

In Venice, the Morans hired an elderly gondolier named Giovanni Hitz, whose gondola was uncommonly ornate. In the early modern era, it was common to see highly decorated gondolas painted in bright colors. However, the passage of a series of sumptuary laws in the Renaissance limited the decoration of any gondola owned by one of Venice’s noble families (the gondolas of foreign diplomats and other non-Venetians were exempt). The gondola’s famous black color—which led Mark Twain to describe the vessel as a “hearse”—dates to these laws: the black pitch used to seal the waterproofing was the only form of color permitted.

Although enforcement of the laws concerning gondola decoration was inconsistent, the sheer number of decorative elements on the Morans’ gondola is surprising. Comparing the Moran gondola to photographs of other nineteenth-century gondolas indicates just how uncommon its level of decoration was. At the gondola’s bow, a series of pitched beams creates a raised platform; the gondolier typically stores his belongings in the enclosed space below. Photographic records show that it was common for the wooden planks closest to the gondola’s passengers to contain relief carvings (figs. 2-5). Yet on Moran’s gondola, not only the final plank, but the entire prow, is decorated with geometric and vegetal reliefs; similar decorations appear on the boat’s stern.

The interior of the passenger compartment contains more low-relief carvings (see slideshow at end of article). A panel depicting the god Neptune brandishing a trident in a seahorse-drawn chariot decorates the front of the passenger compartment. Panels containing a crowned eagle surrounded by serpentine branches adorn the interior sides of the gondola; the crown reappears atop a large monogram surrounded by plant and animal motifs, which attaches to the back of the black leather settee (fig. 6). When Moran purchased the gondola, the interior carvings were painted in black and gold. A 1999 restoration, undertaken at the historic Tramontin boatyard in Venice, saw the panels repainted in the same colors.

Although rarely seen today, in the nineteenth century gondolas were equipped with a felze—a detachable cabin, complete with a door and windows, that provided privacy and protection from the elements. Alternatively, a linen summer awning, which was more like a tarp than a cabin, could be used in warm weather. While the Moran gondola’s felze is currently in storage, it likewise contains elaborate decoration (fig. 1). Shells and arabesques decorate the exterior panels on the front and sides of the felze, and the center of the door depicts a relief carving of a bearded figure with a snake in his mouth. Even the glass windows feature etched floral motifs around the perimeter of the glass. The combination of all of these features results in a gondola that is distinctly more decorative than what would be found on a typical nineteenth-century gondola.

According to Moran, his purchase of the gondola was directly linked to its sumptuous decoration, as caring for the extravagant gondola had become a burden for his aged gondolier, Hitz. As an artist, Moran appreciated the craftsmanship of the boat’s carvings, which were, in his words, “of exceptionally artistic merit.” In a 1909 letter explaining why he purchased the gondola, Moran pointed to its decorative elements: “It was so beautiful & graceful, & so ancient & fine in its carvings, brasses, & fittings, that we fell in love with it, & decided to buy it & have it sent to our Long-Island home.” Yet the gondola—and its elaborate fittings—could also serve a practical purpose for the artist. Although Moran’s 1890 Venetian trip was the last time he traveled to the island, he continued to paint Venetian scenes for the remainder of his career, and his letters confirm that he depicted the gondola in many of his later artworks.

The usefulness of a gondola for a painter who depicted Venetian subjects was noted in contemporary newspaper accounts. News of the Morans’ return from Venice and their acquisition of the gondola was apparently of nationwide interest, as newspapers as far away as Louisiana reported on the event. An article in the Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago) on September 23, 1890, noted that “Moran tried to get it [the gondola] into the country free under the description, ‘tools of trade,’ but the Custom House thought that a duty of 45 per cent ad valorem would do better.” The subject of import taxes was again raised in an October 4, 1890, article in the New Orleans newspaper The Daily Picayune:

Thomas Moran, the artist, imported recently a Venetian gondola, formerly the property and water carriage of Robert Browning, and, it is now swimming on Redhook Pond, Easthampton, L. I. The New York custom-house people made Mr. Moran pay a duty of 45 per cent ad valorem under the schedule for manufactures of wood and metal. Think of writing down a gondola—and a dead poet’s gondola at that—as a ‘manufacture of wood and metal!’ There are some very stupid people in New York.

As The Daily Picayune noted, the gondola was more than simply an artist’s tool. Yet the article also points to another factor in the gondola’s history: its purported connection to the poet Robert Browning. According to Moran’s account of his purchase of the gondola, after he settled his affairs with the gondolier Hitz and once the boat was packed up for transit, the manager of the hotel where he was staying mentioned that the gondola had formerly belonged to the poet Robert Browning, who had died in Venice just a few months before the Morans’ trip. According to the story, Hitz had previously been Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s gondolier, and Browning gave the highly decorated gondola to Hitz before the Brownings returned to England.

The rumored Robert Browning connection to the gondola is likely false, since Browning didn’t reside permanently in Venice, and foreign visitors did not typically purchase gondolas. However, it is possible that Hitz worked for Browning’s son Pen, who had purchased Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice in the 1880s and was a full-time resident. Despite the tenuous factual connections, it is clear that Moran took some pleasure in the story and in the gondola’s possible connection to the Brownings. Although in his letters Moran remained ambivalent and perhaps more guardedly circumspect about the validity of the Browning connection, Moran nonetheless specifically mentioned his hope that Browning might have composed his poem “In A Gondola” while lounging in the gondola now in the painter’s possession.

Gondolas in America

Today, the Moran gondola’s age and location in a museum collection distinguishes it as a rare object. However, the Morans were by no means alone in their interest in gondolas: acquiring Venetian gondolas for private or public use was surprisingly common at the turn of the century. In fact, the Morans’ gondola was not even the only one in East Hampton. According to reports in The East Hampton Star, Albert and Adele Herter, a wealthy couple who were also members of the artist’s colony on East Hampton, also had a gondola, which they brought back from a wedding trip to Venice. Their gondola was a scaled-down version that was likely designed for tourists: it only measured about fifteen feet long, compared to the Morans’ thirty-six-foot behemoth. Another New Yorker, the comic actor Joseph “Fritz” Emmet, also acquired a Venetian gondola in the late nineteenth century. In his case, the boat wasn’t intended to be a souvenir. Instead, Emmet purchased the gondola as a form of leisurely transportation to be used on the man-made lake at “Fritz Villa,” his elaborate and architecturally incongruous estate just outside of Albany.

While a small number of private individuals acquired gondolas, these Venetian boats were regularly seen in public settings. As early as 1862, a gondola was donated to Central Park’s Board of Commissioners for use on the lake; although seen in use in an 1894 photograph (fig. 7), it is unclear at what point gondola rides became a regular fixture at Central Park, since initially there was no one available who could accurately maneuver the boats. In contrast, planners of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago brought fifty-seven gondoliers to the city to man the gondolas that famously floated around the lagoon in the White City.

Gondolas also became popular public attractions at Coney Island, with Luna Park and Dreamland both featuring Venetian-themed entertainment venues that included gondola rides. When Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy opened Luna Park in 1903, one of the main attractions was a reproduction of Venice’s Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal, complete with gondolas. When Luna Park’s competitor Dreamland opened a year later, it also included a Venetian city (figs. 8 and 9). Dreamland’s “Canals of Venice” contained a miniature replica of Venice inside a building designed to mimic the Doge’s Palace. Visitors could travel in a gondola through the half-mile of canals and experience the sights of Venice—all without leaving Coney Island.

Not surprisingly, the development plans for Venice, California, also incorporated gondolas (fig. 10). After acquiring a parcel of marshy land south of Santa Monica, the real estate developer Abbot Kinney began creating the “Venice of America.” The resort town would include buildings in a “Venetian” style, canals, gondolas, parcels of land for homes, and eventually a hotel and amusement pier. Although most of the canals were later filled in, when Venice first opened in 1905, the resort contained several miles of canals, including a large “Grand Canal” that fed into a lake. Whether Kinney intended for the town’s residents to use gondolas to traverse the canals remains unclear. However, gondola rides were a common pastime for visitors, and images of tourists riding gondolas through the canals were regularly depicted on postcards.

Gondolas, Modernization, and Leisure

What might have prompted this interest in gondolas in turn-of-the-century America? Certainly some of it can be explained by the increasing numbers of foreign travelers who visited Venice in the nineteenth century, both on their own and as part of organized tour groups. As material objects that were inextricably linked with Venice, gondolas had long played a role in the remembrance of Venetian holidays. When wealthy young men traveled to Venice on the Grand Tour, they often returned with painted depictions of Venice, such as those by Canaletto. These views of the Grand Canal were typically populated with gondolas and gondoliers. With the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, travelers began to collect photographs and photographic albums; gondolas again played a significant role in these collections. And for the large percentage of Americans who had never been to Venice, riding in a gondola at Coney Island or at the Columbian Exposition would have provided the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience a “foreign” culture without leaving the U.S.

However, another factor may also explain why gondolas began to appear across the United States in the late nineteenth century: a concern that Venice’s unique character and history was under assault. Venice in the nineteenth century was far from an unchanged relic of a preindustrial past: a railroad bridge was built in 1846, which connected the island to the mainland for the first time; a corresponding railroad station was built in the northwest part of the city in 1860. An iron bridge was constructed near the Gallerie dell’Accademia in 1854; the construction of an aqueduct beginning in 1881 eliminated the city’s dependence on well water; and in the 1880s a French company began running steam-powered boats down the Grand Canal.

While there was a general displeasure among foreigners about the changes Venice was experiencing, the presence of the steamboats caused particular distress in the English-speaking world. Following reports in London newspapers, news of the steamboats made its way to the United States, and on October 23, 1881, the New York Times described the situation: “According to our Italian correspondent, a line of steamers will in a short time be plying on the Grand Canal of Venice. This news must be a shock to the aesthetic feelings of every properly constituted mind, while its effect on Mr. Ruskin is a subject too painful to contemplate.” The article complained about “the snore of steam-boats” and expressed concern about what effect this new development would have on Venice’s gondoliers. It ended with a dramatic rhetorical flourish:

The Piazza di san Marco, the Campanile, the Torre dell’Orologio, the Doge’s Palace, the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, the Academia, the Scuola of San Rocco, the Rialto, where Shylock cozened Antonio and Othello made love to Desdemona, are there for the tourists whose finer feelings are not lacerated by a smoke-begrimed facade. But who can quote Byron with the smell of train-oil in his nostrils? And though the moon will light up, as of yore, the wondross view from the Ponte dei Sospiri, it is sad to think that it must be enjoyed in the incongruous society of a Glasgow engine-driver, who gives “her half a turn ahead” and wipes his sooty brow with a wisp of cotton waste as the funnel belches out smoke against the convent wall which guards the choicest treasures of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese.

Despite the article’s humorous tone, the concern about Venice’s modernization—and especially how the changes would affect tourists—is apparent. Yet although there was spirited opposition on both sides of the Atlantic, and a gondolier’s strike in late 1881, the steamboat venture would eventually be a success.

By the time the Morans traveled to Venice in the late 1880s, Venice’s gondolas were already beginning to be displaced by motorized steamboats. These ancestors of the vaporetti, or water buses, that transport tourists around Venice today originally traversed a single route on the Grand Canal. By 1899, however, Baedeker’s guide to Northern Italy listed ten steamboat routes that linked Venice with the surrounding islands. While gondola travel remained necessary in certain instances (for example, when traveling with trunks, which were not permitted on the vaporetti), riding in a gondola increasingly began to shift from a form of transportation to a leisure activity.

In many ways, the appearance of gondolas in the United States affirmed the gondola’s transition from an object of labor to one of entertainment. Despite Moran’s claim that he bought the boat for its beauty, it is clear that the Moran family also saw the gondola as a source of pleasure and amusement. Indeed, Thomas Moran joked that his gondola became a “seven day wonder” when he first brought it to East Hampton. Yet for the Morans and their guests, the “wonder” of the gondola involved the experience of riding in it as a passenger, rather than attempting to maneuver it. As his biographer Thurman Wilkins noted, “Moran developed no knack as a gondolier, but on the assumption that the canoe was the nearest thing to a gondola in America, he hired a Montauk Indian named George Fowler to be his boatsman.” Among the Mariners’ Museum files is a copy of an undated photograph showing Fowler (in a jaunty gondolier’s uniform) with members of the Moran family aboard the gondola (fig. 11). A picnic basket placed on the shore in the central foreground of the photograph reinforces the connection between the gondola and leisure—for everyone but Fowler, at least.

From America to Venice

Over a hundred years after the Moran gondola traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, it made another transatlantic journey—this time, back to Venice. In 1999, the boat, including the felze and all of its accessories, was shipped from Virginia to Venice for restoration at the century-old Tramontin boatyard, or squero. Before founding the Tramontin boatyard in 1884, Domenico Tramontin had worked as an apprentice at the Casal ai Servi boatyard, where experts believe the Moran gondola was likely made. Today the Tramontin boatyard is operated by Domenico Tramontin’s descendants, and it is one of only a handful of Venetian squeros still in operation. At the boatyard, parts of the gondola that had been previously restored were removed and replaced, new felt was applied to the top of the felze, old nails and screws were replaced with more secure versions (and, incongruously, epoxy glue) and the boat—and its decorative panels—were repainted.

Ironically, one of the main challenges the museum staff faced was the issue of transportation. Specifically, once the gondola arrived in Venice, how would they transport the hundred-plus-year-old boat—which had not been on the water in half a century—to the squero without getting it wet? Ultimately, the gondola itself was taken for a ride, traveling through Venice’s narrow side canals atop another boat. In this short trip we find a distillation of the gondola’s journey—from a boat that was itself a form of transportation for Venetian tourists like the Morans to a museum object whose transportation requires detailed planning and care. Over the course of its history, the Moran gondola has taken on a variety of roles, which reflect changing attitudes toward modernization, leisure, labor, and transportation. Yet despite Thomas Moran’s belief that his gondola was the only one of its kind in the United States, it is clear that it is, instead, a rare surviving example of a much more widespread phenomenon, in which Americans from Coney Island to California shared in the wonder of Venetian gondolas.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the staff of the Mariners’ Museum, especially Jeanne Willoz-Egnor and Claudia Jew, for their assistance with this project.

Further Reading

Thomas Moran’s Venetian trips (including his purchase of the gondola) are discussed in Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains (Norman, Okla., 1965) and the revised second edition, Thurman Wilkins and Caroline Lawson Hinkley (Norman, Okla., 1988). Fritiof Fryxell’s Thomas Moran: Explorer in Search of Beauty (East Hampton, N.Y., 1958) contains a summary of the Moran-related materials at the East Hampton Public Library and several reminiscences of Moran.

For the history of gondolas in Venice, see G. B. Rubin de Cervin, “The Evolution of the Venetian Gondola,” The Mariner’s Mirror 42:3 (Aug. 1956). Riccardo Pergolis’s Le Barche di Venezia (The Boats of Venice) also addresses the history and development of the Venetian gondola, with text in English and Italian (Venice, 1981). A richly illustrated account of the restoration of the Moran gondola at the Tramontin boatyard can be found in the magazine Wooden Boat; see Paolo Lanapoppi, “Six Centuries of Gondolas,” Wooden Boat 152 (Jan.-Feb. 2000): 42-49.

The best introduction to the history of Venice, California, is Jeffrey Stanton’s Venice California: ‘Coney Island of the Pacific’ (Los Angeles, 1993). For the history of Coney Island, see Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (New Brunswick, 2002) and John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1978).

Margaret Plant’s Venice: Fragile City, 1797-1997 (New Haven, 2002) provides an excellent history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Venice with a focus on art and culture. The exhibition catalogue Venice: The American View, 1860-1920 (San Francisco, 1984), which was curated and authored by Margaretta Lovell, provides a good introduction to the American artists who were interested in Venice and the reasons for Venice’s appeal. For more on American artists in Italy, see The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760-1860 (New York, 1989) and The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860-1920 (New York, 1992), both edited by Irma B. Jaffe; see also Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914 (Boston, 1992).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3 (Summer, 2016).

Ashley Rye-Kopec is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation examines depictions of Venetian laborers in British and American art in the late nineteenth century.

What is “American” about American literature? The question was once posed rather often, in the heady days early last century when scholars undertook the work of establishing canons. Then, the question’s answer was most often thematic: American literature was literature “about” America. Such arguments were made, for example, by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition, which linked the ruddy wildernesses of the North American continent with the romance genre, and distinguished it from the European novel of manners. Another thematic reading stands at the heart of F.O. Matthiessen’s enduringly influential American Renaissance, which unfolded masterful readings of five authors by locating what in their works reflected the democratic spirit of their nation.

It is not themes, however, but material texts that animate the national literary concerns of Joseph Rezek’s London and the Making of Provincial Literature. This monograph revisits older questions about national literature, but revises their answers substantially by homing in instead on the historical conditions by which books are produced. The study’s point of departure would appear simple enough: some of the most celebrated national Anglophone literary works—American texts by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but also Irish texts by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson and Scottish works by Walter Scott—were all printed in London. For each of these authors, the London marketplace—the dominant seat of Anglophone publishing in the world—provided a foreign point of access by which their nations and regions could, somewhat paradoxically, find self-representation. The contribution of this remarkable book, then, is to explore that paradox. Contravening received wisdom, London and the Making of Provincial Literature avers that “Irish, Scottish, and American literatures must be located within the cross-cultural procedure of distinction only London could perform. These literatures were not born within the nation through an insular process of organic unfolding, nor did they develop as symptoms of nationally delimited historical contexts. They were made in the transatlantic marketplace through an uneven process of struggle and triumph” (3).

Clearly stated and convincingly argued as this thesis may be, its implications are explosive. For one thing, the comparative frame of this study considers different national literary traditions working in the same language, and discovers in that comparison not so much national differences as analogous social positions vis-à-vis London. The job of comparative literature, despite its name, is often to contrast, to distinguish; but in Rezek’s view, the national literatures of the U.S., Ireland, and Scotland look less like the pure reflections of their respective cultures or peoples than, collectively, like a set of provincial riffs off a metropolitan literary standard. One might immediately object that, to choose only the U.S. example, a provincial identity is exactly what scholars, no less than the writers of the 1830s and 1840s themselves, have told us early national literature was trying to slough off. But this nationalist consensus understands antebellum literature in terms of what it achieved, not how. Restoring some of that how, London and the Making of Provincial Literature suspends the nationalist conclusion that made so much sense between the Civil and Cold Wars. In its place, the book supplies the careful plotting of a metropolitan-provincial antagonism between literary London and the much smaller literary centers that radiated around it. Doing so, this work defies the nationalist parameters that organize the study of nearly all literature, whether British, American, postcolonial, or comparative. Scholars simply do not tend to think in these terms. London and the Making of Provincial Literature accordingly shines a bright light onto one of our critically blindest spots.

Rezek’s study arrives at such counterintuitive conclusions in part because it’s working with book history. Joining the growing number of scholarly monographs that draws on this interdisciplinary field, London and the Making of Provincial Literature sifts through authorial correspondence, reconstructs publication records, and collates editions (turning up some fascinating details along the way—who knew, for example, that there was no single first American edition of Irving’s Sketch Book?) The study is also peppered with smart and detailed close readings, of the kind that grant more traditional literary critics their professional chops. But this study’s real project is to coordinate such thematic close readings with interpretations of the historical and sociological conditions under which the texts on which we perform those readings were first brought into the world as books. The study effectively uses more than one method and, indeed, uses each to cross-check the conclusions of the other. London and the Making of Provincial Literature accordingly provides coordinated and truly interdisciplinary insights—no small feat in a world where “interdisciplinary” is too often a polite way of saying “eclectic.”

Another way in which this study achieves its conclusions has to do with its relatively tight historical focus. The argument of London and the Making of Provincial Literature is deeply bound to the historical terrain between 1800 and 1850 in which it works. Fifty years does offer a slightly wider swath of time than some of the other book-history inflected studies in other periods—such as Jonathan Beecher Field’s wonderful Errands into the Metropolis (2009), which covers about 1642-1662, or Meredith McGill’s indispensable American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003), with its narrow focus of 1834-1853. At the same time, however, in London and the Making of Provincial Literature one wonders about the portability of the argument beyond the first half of the nineteenth century. Is what Rezek calls “aesthetics of provinciality” (14)—an ideological position that absorbs and accommodates the Romantic-era paradox by which great literature is expected to be both universal and particular—something that obtains beyond 1850, when this study leaves off? While I am convinced that we who read and study Anglophone literatures live with the legacy of such a paradox, I am left with questions about whether it begins or ends at precisely the points that London and the Making of Provincial Literature identifies. Thus, a circumscribed historical focus, which enables Rezek to bring forward his evidence and his claims with extraordinary clarity, also presents one of the few potential limitations of this study.

However, the book’s larger argument stands. Scholars who take this study’s conclusions seriously will have to reconsider whether the nation—British, American, Irish, Scottish, or otherwise—can really continue to be the organizing principle for the teaching and study of literature. At the very least, London and the Making of Provincial Literature makes clear that the nation is not a uniform field. Nation-ness does not saturate its territory evenly, and some corners of the national domain may be working much harder to materially produce and mediate the nation than others. Our literatures can seem now to be inescapably national, but another world was once possible. If we adopt the implications of this work in all its challenge to critical orthodoxies, another world may be possible again.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.3.5 (July, 2016).

Jordan Alexander Stein is the co-editor of Early African American Print Culture (2012). He teaches in the English Department at Fordham University and tweets @steinjordan.

The voyage of Moncacht-apé

To celebrate the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-06, Americans have created countless books, museum exhibitions, Websites, television documentaries, and tourism promotions. The hype devoted to Lewis’s dog Seaman is a veritable industry unto itself. But what if Lewis and Clark were not the first explorers to cross what became the continental United States? There is in fact a rival for this honor, a Native American explorer who has the potential to steal the limelight from those iconic figures of Manifest Destiny, and to inspire a debate about Lewis and Clark analogous to the controversies about Columbus, the supposed discoverer of America. The explorer was a Yazoo Indian named Moncacht-apé, and the narrative of his journey comes to us from a French historian of colonial Louisiana, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz.

Le Page lived in Louisiana from 1718 to 1734, the first eight of those years at Natchez, Mississippi, where he lived with a Chitimacha woman, learned the Natchez language, and befriended local native leaders. Rather than describing the “manners and customs of the Indians” in the detached, homogenizing fashion of so many other colonial authors, Le Page recorded many pages of the words of his native informants, the Yazoo explorer among them. What Moncacht-apé told Le Page filled three chapters of his multivolume Histoire de la Lousiane, published in 1758. It first appeared, however, in a shorter version in August and September of 1752 in the Paris periodical Journal Oeconomique, two installments in a series of twelve articles that served as a draft or prospectus for his book. 

The name Moncacht-apé, Le Page wrote, “means ‘one who kills difficulties or fatigue.’ In fact, the travels of many years did not affect his physique.” Clearly the aptness of the man’s name impressed Le Page. He wanted to know more. “I begged him to repeat to me an account of his travels, omitting nothing,” and Moncacht-apé was happy to oblige (3: 88-89). 

The motives for his journey had not been the familiar ones of exploration or trade. Rather, Monacht-apé had set out to learn about the origins of his own people. He began by asking the neighboring Chickasaw “if they knew whence we all came . . . they who are our ancestors” (3: 89). This question absorbed Le Page as well, for in his book and in the August 1752 article, the Moncacht-apé episode follows immediately after an exposition of his ideas on the longstanding controversy over the origins of the American Indians. Quoting at length speeches by the Natchez temple guardian and Great Sun explaining how the nation had migrated from Mexico, Le Page presented a theory that they were descended from an abandoned fourth-century-B.C. colony of Phoenician immigrants. This explained why the Natchez, with their strict caste hierarchy, differed so sharply from other nearby tribes, including the Yazoo. Le Page believed that ancestors of most American “naturels,” as he called them, had come across a land bridge linking Asia to Northwestern America. 

Moncacht-apé set out northward in search of evidence of this migration. The first journey takes him up the Ohio River and past the Niagara Falls to the Atlantic Ocean. This episode does not appear in the 1752 version, however, where Moncacht-apé sets out straightaway up the Missouri River, a route that, since Joliet and Marquette’s initial descent of the Mississippi in 1673, had been identified by the French as the most promising for a transcontinental passage. 

When Moncacht-apé reaches the “Canzés” or Kansas nation they inform him that it will take another month to reach the headwaters of the Missouri, and that from there he should walk for several days north until he finds a westward-flowing river, and that along this river he will find the Otter nation of Indians. His journey proceeds just as he is told, and the Otter people greet him warmly, help him to learn their language, and accompany him downstream. After eighteen days’ travel, he finds an unnamed tribe living in a grassy land with many dangerous snakes. Moncacht-apé winters here, and the following spring continues his descent of the Beautiful River, through other native villages, until he finally nears the Great Water (the Pacific), and meets a tribe that lives chiefly on fish. These folk keep their distance from the ocean however, for they must:

“be on the watch against the bearded men, who do all that they can to carry away young persons, doubtless to make slaves of them. They have never taken any men, although they could have done so. I was told that these men were white; that they had long, black beards which fell upon their breasts; that they appeared short and thick, with large heads, which they covered with cloth; that they always wore their clothes, even in the hottest weather; that their coats fell to the middle of the legs, which as well as the feet were covered with red or yellow cloth. For the rest they did not know what their clothing was made of, because they had never been able to kill one, their arms making a great noise and a great flame” (3: 116).

These dangerous visitors did not come for otter or beaver pelts, but for “a yellow and bad-smelling wood which dyes a beautiful yellow” (3: 117). The latter was evidently a dyewood analogous to the red brazilwood, although it is unclear what Northwest tree this might be.

Moncacht-apé joins an alliance of coastal tribes who are laying plans for an armed resistance against these invaders, and his experience with firearms, learned in French Louisiana, makes him a valuable military advisor. He instructs them to hide near a cove and wait for the bearded loggers to come ashore. When they do, Moncacht-apé and his friends attack and kill eleven men, and divide up the victims’ strange clothing, weapons, and gunpowder as booty.

After winning the confidence of the locals, Moncacht-apé continues farther along the coast toward the Northwest, where the summer days are very long. In the last village he reaches, a group of elders tell him that the coast extends a great distance farther to the northwest, and suggest that it once had been linked to Asia: “One of them [the elders] added that when young he had known a very old man who had seen this land (before the ocean had eaten its way through) which went a long distance, and that at a time when the Great Waters were lower (at low tide) there appear in the water rocks which show where this land was” (3: 127). With this Moncacht-apé has completed his quest, and has also confirmed Le Page’s idea of a land bridge migration to America, a theory that has grown in influence from José de Acosta’s 1590 Natural and Moral History of the Indies to the work of twentieth-century anthropologists. Moncacht-apé returns to Louisiana, and his narrative concludes with an estimation of the distance of his journey from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast.

Because his story was published just prior to the Seven Years’ War, which cost the French their Louisiana colony, Moncacht-apé did not inspire an exploratory expedition, and very few Americans have heard about him. In the 1763 English translation of Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina, the narrative of Moncacht-apé, like the rest of the book, was severely abridged. That version was reprinted in a few nineteenth-century books about American Indian history, such as those by Samuel Gardner Drake. Not until 1883 was a full English translation and analysis published in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society by the amateur historian Andrew McFarland Davis. The story had “slumbered in the pages of Le Page du Pratz until it was revived by [French anthropologist M. A.] de Quatrefages” two years earlier (321). Davis concluded that “there is nothing in the story to tax our credulity if we are not called upon to believe in the annual visits of the bearded men and the various doubtful incidents which their presence involves,” and thus there is a “probability that the journey was actually accomplished” (348).

It is also probable that Moncacht-apé influenced Lewis and Clark. Thomas Jefferson had Le Page du Pratz’s book in his library, and Meriweather Lewis carried a copy of the 1774 English edition to Oregon and back. A couple of references in the letters and journals of the expedition reveal that he and Clark used the book and its map for information about the Padouca Indians and for the possible location of the French Fort Orleans, built by the explorer Etienne Veniard de Bourgmont on the Missouri River in the 1720s. But the papers of the expedition never mentioned Moncacht-apé by name. John Logan Allen in his 1975 Passage Through the Garden, a detailed study of the geographical knowledge consulted and acquired by Lewis and Clark, puzzled over this question: “While the only reference to the Du Pratz work that are found in the field journals of Lewis and Clark relate to the lower Missouri, the fact that the captains thought the book important enough to carry a copy with them raises the fascinating questions of how much faith they placed in the bizarre tale of Moncacht-apé . . . it is highly unlikely that they would have rejected it out of hand, because of the tremendous implications it had for their objective” (96). 

Moncacht-apé had ascended the Missouri and made a portage to the Beautiful River without mentioning any high mountains or other barriers. This fit perfectly the optimistic plans of Jefferson. Perhaps it was the information in Le Page du Pratz that inspired Lewis to design and carry a folding boat. For he mistakenly believed that such a contraption could be easily carried between the headwaters of the Missouri and the westward flowing Columbia. But the fact was, these Europeans had no better information than what natives had provided them. In addition to the map in Le Page du Pratz’s book, Lewis and Clark carried a more recent map of the upper Missouri, made in London from a fur trader’s copy of maps drawn by a Blackfeet Indian named Ac Ko Mok Ki. So perhaps Lewis and Clark suppressed the name Moncacht-apé because they did not want to accept the possibility that they were not the first to make the trip. 

Did Moncacht-apé really make this transcontinental journey nearly a century before Lewis and Clark? Or did Le Page du Pratz invent this Yazoo explorer and his remarkable narrative? I believe it is possible and even likely that some Native Americans did make such long journeys of exploration. Geographical curiosity is not confined to Europeans. My analysis of this question, like that of Davis, must compare not only the three versions of the narrative but also the maps and geographical theories behind them.

All through the eighteenth century, French, English, and then United States leaders badly wanted to find a practical trade route through the continent to the Pacific Ocean. The promise of trade with Asia was what had enticed Columbus, after all, and it became even more enticing in the 1740s when Russian fur traders began to take Otter pelts from the Alaskan coasts and sell them at huge profits in China. Moncacht-apé’s story clearly fed this dream, even if his narrative has significant gaps. He did not carry navigational instruments to calculate his latitude, and he did not provide Le Page du Pratz with a map of his journey. The fold-out map of Louisiana in the 1758 book (fig. 1) includes only the Gulf Coast and basins of the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Rivers. The geography of this unsigned map portrays the outlook of Le Page and the French colony by excluding all the English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard; blank space lies to the east of the Appalachian chain. The map does trace the route of Moncacht-apé from the upper Missouri river north to the Beautiful River, and it even shows a village of the “Loutre” or Otter nation. But that river exits off the upper right corner. Neither Le Page nor, evidently, Moncacht-apé, would commit to drawing the shape of the northwest coast of North America, which was still little known to Europeans.

Even so, the Le Page map constituted an important declaration about the contemporary geographical knowledge of North America. French cartographers since the 1720s had published maps showing a large Western Sea or “Mer de l’Ouest,” a huge inland bay joined to the Southern or Pacific Ocean through an apocryphal strait of Anian, a feature first described by a sixteenth-century Spanish explorer named de Fonte in a relation that was most likely a hoax. Philippe Buache, the French royal cartographer, had in 1752 published two treatises with maps, arguing for the existence of this Mer de l’Ouest just beyond the Rockies. It was to this imagined geography that Le Page du Pratz and Dumont de Montigny added their narratives of Moncacht-apé.

Moncacht-ape’s narrative first appeared in August 1752, the same month that Buache’s map (fig. 2) was presented to the French Academy of Sciences. In the shaded region in the center of the continent it shows a chain of lakes derived from the Indian informants of French fur traders in the 1730s and 1740s, and to the west of that lay the fabled Mer de l’Ouest as indicated by Buache’s father-in-law and predecessor as royal geographer, Guillaume Delisle. This sea is connected to the ocean through straits named for Spanish explorers de Fuca and d’Aguilar. The mythical city of Quivira, for which Coronado searched in the 1540s, appears on its shores. Moncacht-apé dissented from the geography of Buache and Delisle. Le Page wrote that Delisle’s map:

“does not at all agree with the relation that Moncacht-apé made to me of his voyage. The good sense for which I know him, who has no cause to mislead me, gives me faith in all that he told me, and I cannot persuade myself otherwise, than that he went along the coast of the South Sea, of which the more northern part might be called, if you will, the Western Sea. The Beautiful River that he descended is a considerable river, that one should have no difficulty in finding, as soon as one should come to the sources of the Missouri. And I have no doubt that a similar expedition, if it were undertaken, could fully establish our ideas about this part of North America and the famous Western Sea, of which everyone in Louisiana is talking about, and seems to desire so much to discover” (3: 137-38).

Thus Le Page had more trust in Moncacht-apé’s geography than that of some of France’s most celebrated cartographers. 

The question of the authenticity of Moncacht-apé must remain unresolved, but I think it helps to see the question in light of a fundamental tension in the writings of colonial French Louisianans. Their better judgment led them to promote the promise of wealth from agriculture in the Mississippi Valley, mainly tobacco, indigo, and rice. But to lure more investors and migrants they had to offer seductive stories of precious metals or pelts or of a profitable trade with New Spain, and these promises relied in part upon native informants’ maps and voyages, information susceptible to exaggeration and misinterpretation. 

The lines with which Le Page concluded the story of Moncacht-apé are instructive. After questioning the existence of the Western Sea, he wrote: “[W]hat advantages can we derive from our knowledge of this ocean? Would it be to our interests to go off to look for imaginary riches in a land that has not yet been discovered, whose soils will always be less fertile than those we already possess, and which we are neglecting? Let us put to use that which we have in hand. Will not a real value always be preferable to chimerical profits that must be sought at a great distance, and which may not even exist?” (3: 139-40). As a historian and promoter of Louisiana, Le Page’s primary goal was to promote its agricultural potential, not to look past it to the Pacific and Asia. And yet he could not resist the urge to do so, to complete the overland circle of a global imperial world.

Further Reading: 

The quotations from Le Page du Pratz are from my Web-based translation of excerpts of  The History of Louisiana. The Buache map was published in Considérations géographiques et physiques sur les nouvelles découvertes au nord de la Grand Mer (Paris, 1753) and is reproduced courtesy of the Newberry Library. Another tale of an indigenous transcontinental explorer, published well after Lewis and Clark, is John Dunn Hunter’s Memoires of a Captivity among the Indians of North America (Philadelphia, 1823). Quatrefage’s article about Moncacht-apé appeared in Révue d’Anthropologie 4 (1881). The story of Moncacht-apé has recently been expanded and embellished by Jonathan Reynolds Cronin to produce a 550-page narrative: Yazoo Mingo: The Journeys of Moncacht-apé across North America, 1687-1700 (Bloomington, 2003).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.4 (July, 2005).

Gordon Sayre is associate professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is currently working on an edition of the previously unpublished manuscript narrative of Dumont de Montigny, which does not mention Moncacht-apé.

Having recently spent some time at my parents’ house helping them downsize, my sister and I came upon several shoeboxes crammed with letters—from my parents to their parents, from my sister and I to our parents, and from various friends and relatives to all of us at different moments in our lives. Some of those letters mark momentous events in the history of my family. Most, however, are quite mundane, marking the ordinary passage of time before e-mail and phone calls once and for all replaced our exchange of letters. The pleasure of revisiting dear and familiar handwriting, some of which I hadn’t seen in decades, came back in a flash, evoking vivid memories of people once central to my life.

Mine is probably the last generation in this country to have a felt experience of epistolary exchange now that electronic media have largely replaced handwritten exchanges as the communication mode of choice. Of course my experience of epistolarity is hardly the same as the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Native American subjects of my book, English Letters and Indian Literacies, for whom the only tie to family—sometimes for years at a stretch—was the letters that passed between them. Nonetheless, letter writing involves a set of shared practices and conventions that are gradually passing away at this moment. It is perhaps for this reason that scholars have turned their attention with such enthusiasm and insight to the familiar letter of the past. Through careful analysis of letter collections in British and American archives, scholars remind us that eighteenth-century correspondents were part of a rising generation for whom letters were an increasingly essential part of their lives. Rather suddenly, through vastly expanded literacy as well as increased access to the material conditions necessary for letter writing, better and more efficient transportation of letters, and the dispersal of families that characterized so much of the colonial American experience, ordinary people put pen to paper and marked out their everyday lives and experiences. Increasingly in the eighteenth century, letters became a central means of communication and connection not only for elite families, but also for a variety of people in all walks of life. In New England this included Native American communities living on the outskirts of English settlements.

Epistolarity as Social Network

For all the ways that letters and the conventions of epistolarity are familiar to those of us of a certain generation, recent scholarship reminds us of the many ways in which eighteenth-century letters were produced and consumed very differently—certainly in the Native communities of New England. The implied dyad of the letter writer and recipient that we take for granted today is more or less a fiction: the letter writer may not have been a single individual since a letter might include messages to and from others, especially family members. For those whose literacy was not firmly established, the letter writer might more properly be considered its composer, with a scribe (either paid or acting out of kindness) writing down the actual words. Then, of course, there was the matter of delivery, which might include formal postage, but just as likely might involve a friend or two, or even a passing stranger willing to carry letters; letter delivery, especially for transatlantic mail, was dependent on transport routes, shipping patterns, and trade vessels. Finally, the recipient of the letter would be not only the person to whom the letter is addressed, but would generally include a variably sized group of people—other family members, community members, and even passing visitors and friends with whom one might share all or part of the familiar letter, which would most often be read aloud upon its receipt—sometimes even by the person who had delivered it, who might be expected to carry a return message. There was rarely any expectation of privacy in epistolary exchange, and letters served to consolidate relations that at times crossed from personal to political or financial exchange.

The materiality of letters was of course strikingly different as well, as scholars from Konstantin Dierks to E. Jennifer Monaghan remind us, and access to the technologies of literacy (the right quill for a pen, proper ink, a flat surface for writing, light, paper, and, of course, the leisure to compose a letter) was a challenge for many of the Native correspondents of New England. There was always the fear of letters getting lost, stolen, misunderstood, or misplaced—especially with the formal mechanism of the postal system involved, as Eve Bannet and Lindsay O’Neill have both suggested.

Even so, the class barriers to epistolarity that scholars have tended to assume were there have been challenged in several important recent publications, and evidence of what scholar Susan Whyman calls “epistolary literacy” has been recovered from a range of transatlantic archives: letters among servants and between members of nearly impoverished families form part of the expanding world of the familiar letter. Whyman argues that the expansion of letter writing had a democratizing effect, and that the array of letters among the “lower and middling sort” suggests a far greater network of informal literacy training than had been previously understood. As the clearer and easier form of cursive known as the “round hand” replaced the far more complex and formal handwriting of earlier generations, writing became more accessible in the eighteenth century, as did the proliferation of copybooks through which novice writers developed and perfected their skills. Whyman’s work reinforces what I and others have found in New England archives: the papers of writers who nobody thought could write. Embedded within those letters are references to far more letters than those that remain.

These new discoveries have transformed the way modern scholars approach Native history. Where once the assumption that Native Americans operated outside literacy systems was so powerful that all evidence of Native self-expression was overlooked in favor of English colonial assessments, it is now a core practice of contemporary scholars to first seek the words and expressions of Native people. Letters are one form among many through which Native experience is marked and recorded, but they are an extraordinarily telling one. Thanks to two recent digital collections, the Occom Circle and the Yale Indian Papers Project (now Native Northeast Portal), scholars of early New England Native studies today have access to documents by and about Native Americans in a way that was once unimaginable. Through these two digital sites, both of which are freely available to anyone with a computer and access to the Internet, original documents, including letters, are available to all of us (or will soon be) in very tangible ways—a vast improvement from the microfilm versions that once were the godsend of scholars like me who live so far from their sources. These digital archives are extraordinary. Even for those with only the most fragmentary knowledge of the history and culture of eighteenth-century New England, these collections offer a most tantalizing glimpse of the lives of Native Americans. Each includes a high-quality digital image of the original document, a transcription of the documents, and useful annotations that help situate these works and the people involved.

Much like the shoeboxes of letters in my parents’ house, archival collections result from strange combinations of the momentous and the mundane. Sometimes papers remain simply because nobody threw them out; others remain because they matter deeply as evidence of some element of family or community pride or identity. More often collections—especially letters collections—are a combination of the two, and as outsiders we can never really know with certainty which are the momentous documents and which are not. Rather than establishing which is which, the Yale Indian Papers Project (now Native Northeast Portal) is an ambitious attempt to provide a more comprehensive digital repository for papers from multiple archives (Yale University, the British Library, the Connecticut State Library, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Massachusetts Archives, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, and the New London County Historical Society) documenting some element of Native New England for the last 400 years. Along with letters, the YIPP includes such odd snippets as runaway ads for Native American servants, with their detailed descriptions of eighteenth-century clothing. Also included in that archive are petitions, legislative reports, and summonses. These are the ragged edges of peoples’ lives, often made visible in the archive at their most difficult or fragile moments, when they have in one way or another engaged with a civil body either through the courts or through a legislative petition. At the same time the YIPP offers letters and whatever else may shed light on the vast and complicated network of Native experience in New England, from celebrations of community to acknowledgements of loss and hardship. The accidental intimacy of the letters in this collection as opposed to other kinds of documents provides a hint not of the ragged edge, but of the everyday.

The letters known as the Occom Papers at the Connecticut Historical Society that are now (or will be very soon) available through the Yale Indian Papers Project provide a glimpse into the experience of one Native family network. This particular archive is extraordinary because although it was donated to the Historical Society by Norwich resident and U.S. Representative John A. Rockwell in 1839, the archive itself seems to be the result of the choices (accidental or not) by the Mohegan minister and political leader Samson Occom and generations of his family about what to keep. Together with the letters and documents in the Occom Circle, which contains even more letters, confessions, account books, lists, diaries, reports, and sermons by and about Occom, these papers may well provide one of the most comprehensive records of this Native American family. The Occom Circle focuses primarily on the Native students and teachers connected to Moor’s Charity School, which was founded by Eleazar Wheelock in 1754. Samson Occom was central to the establishment of this school, which educated more than sixty-five Native students before moving to New Hampshire and becoming part of Dartmouth College. The Occom Circle rightly restores Occom to his central role in what eventually became Dartmouth College, and the archive offers us a window into the lives of the Native students, the English and Colonial benefactors of this school, and a variety of records in some way connected to Occom, including records concerning the founding of what eventually became the Brothertown community.

In the context of this extensive family history, a short letter by Olive Adams, written in 1777 from Farmington, Connecticut, stands out. Olive, a twenty-two-year-old Mohegan woman at the time she wrote this letter, never attended Wheelock’s charity school featured in the Occom Circle, and in fact her educational background is unclear. She writes:

“Hon.’^d Father and mother I tak this opportu^nity to inform you that we are well but not so strong ^as I have been we have never heard from any of you Sence Hon.’^d Father was hear but I hope these few Lines will Find you all well as they Left us I hope mother will not Begroudge the time to vesit her unfortunat Daughter, Please to Bring Brother Andrew Giffard, th Docter if you can For we long to see him hear. Pleas to send us letters every opportunity you have and we will do the same. Nomore From your Dutiful Daughter Olive Adams.”

To which she adds the following postscript: “Pray mother to bring my cotton yarn, and bit Red broadcloth to pach my old cloak. Remenber our love to our Brothers and Sister and to all their that inquir after us if thers any such.”

In many ways, of course, this is an insignificant letter: poorly written, phonetically spelled, it contains little other than the most benign family news: everyone is more or less well, and it would be great to receive a visit, or at least some letters.

And yet. The year is 1777, and the American Revolution is raging. Young Olive, originally from Mohegan, has been married for about two years to Solomon Adams. Adams was a Tunxis Indian living in Farmington and an advocate, like Olive’s father, of an emigration movement through which the Native Christians of a variety of Algonquian communities throughout southern New England planned to band together to form a single community on upstate New York called Brothertown. Plans for this new community had been suspended because of the war, and so for now everyone waited. Most significantly, the parents to whom Olive writes are Samson and Mary Occom, the honored parents of ten children (the youngest of whom, the Andrew Gifford mentioned in this letter, is just a toddler) and the spiritual leaders of a Christian Indian diaspora throughout New England. The intertribal family connections are dizzying: Samson Occom and his brothers-in-law, Montauketts Jacob and David Fowler as well as his sons-in-law, Solomon Adams (Tunxis) and Joseph Johnson (Mohegan) are all deeply involved in this new community, and beyond their interconnections as an extended community of Algonquian New Englanders, these men all shared a strong commitment to literacy and Christianity as means of maintaining Native community.

Both Samson Occom and his son-in-law Joseph Johnson were prolific writers who had acquired their educations from Wheelock’s school, and they were both widely recognized throughout New England for their erudition. Indeed, the words of fathers, brothers, nephews, and sons are all there in the historical archive with their formal address and rhetorical flourishes. What Olive’s letter tells us, however, is a slightly different story. Hers is the story of mothers and daughters and sisters and wives, and the ways in which women participated in networks of community specifically as literate figures.

Reading carefully, we can also discern some clues about the education that Olive would have received as a young girl. When travelling in Great Britain in the latter part of the 1760s, roughly a decade before Olive’s letter, Samson Occom wrote to his wife, “try to instruct your girls as well as you can.” In another letter, he wished her to “instruct our children in the fear of God as well as you can, and send them to school as much as you [blank] advisable if the school continues.” But while his son Aaron briefly attended Wheelock’s school, none of the Occom daughters ever did. Most probably the Occom children were occasional students at the one-room schoolhouse at Mohegan. They cobbled their education together from their mother’s instruction, their father’s teaching (when he was home) and whatever schooling was available at any given moment. They were certainly surrounded by educators: both their uncles and their father served as schoolmasters, and several of the Occom daughters married schoolteachers as well.

Native Families Creating Networks of Literacy

Indeed, Olive Adams’ laconic letter tells us a vivid story of the networks of literacy through which Native families cemented their connections across time and distance. From yarn and cloth to family visits and sibling relationships, Olive’s letter marks the ways in which family-based literate practice did as much to maintain Indian community as any political or legal document. The local school may have been an uneven presence, but the existence of Olive’s letter suggests that her family probably did more to produce her literacy than any educational establishment ever could.

However she acquired her skills, Olive’s letter points not only to her ability to form words and letters, but also to her familiarity with the conventions of epistolary address that shaped letter-writing in this period. Olive’s letter is generally laid out appropriately, with the properly situated date and location in the upper right-hand corner, the salutation on the left margin, and the formal language of respect directed to her parents, especially her father. While Olive could on occasion expect visits from her itinerant minister father, she was much less likely to see her mother and siblings, so letters allowed her to maintain her connections to her large family. In this difficult moment of community dispersal and fragmentation, letter-writing was as essential to maintaining connections and strengthening community as the complex political negotiations among Native communities and with colonial political bodies that would culminate in the Brothertown settlement. Letters stood in for individuals, and exchanges of material items—yarn, cloth—sometimes had to stand in for personal affection.

The very ordinariness of this letter confirms that literacy was far more widespread than we perhaps understood. The mundanity of Olive’s letter almost guaranteed its disappearance: such letters rarely survive more than a few weeks—never mind centuries. For whatever reason, however, her father kept this letter, and so we have it. And while it is exceptional within the archive, it is likely that this was not an exceptional letter at all, but rather one of many that exchanged hands in the volatile years of what Colin Calloway has termed the American Revolution in Indian country. Olive asks for family visits, certainly—but she also asks for letters. The request for letters is a refrain that runs throughout the correspondence Occom received from his Native friends and family throughout the 1770s and ’80s. Even the most tenuously connected people wrote to him asking for letters, or for news from home, or for permission to pass along letters for their own family through him. Literacy, in other words, connected certain Native families and communities in colonial America, serving not only a political function, but a personal and social one as well.

A very different kind of letter is also gathered into the Occom Papers archive, one written five years earlier by Jacob Fowler, Samson Occom’s brother-in-law and Olive Adams’ uncle, living in Groton, Connecticut. If Olive’s letter is remarkable for its every-day serenity, Fowler’s letter stands out for its raw broken despair. In it, Fowler records the devastating loss of his only child and the spiritual crisis that this entailed for him. He writes on a single sheet of paper:

Dear Brother

            Here comes Melancholy News to You—Behold the Hand of him who has all Power both in Heaven and on Earth, for we are bereved of our only Child, that lay so folded up in our Hearts, alas! what shall I say what can I say; who is there that can say unto God what doest Thou or why do’st Thou thus. – my heart is almost broke: – but it is the Will of God, and we can only Join the holy Angels in saying, Amen : thy Will be done and not ours. O! for an Heart to praise my God. Submissive Will is wanting – do der Brother come over Speedily. Whist her Mother held her in Lapp She told her Mother tht She wanted to put on her Back. which She did and before She cross’d the Room once the little Darling was gone = I am Your Little B[r]other that is Bereaft of my only Darling –

Jacob Fowler

Sideways on the same sheet: “We bury her to morrow about Noon do send to Dr Henry.” If this letter had not been preserved, Jacob Fowler would exist in the archive as a flattened, abstracted figure notable for his connections to others rather than any signal act of his own. His older brother, David Fowler, had an important role in Wheelock’s school and the narratives that advertised it; his brother-in-law Samson Occom was essential to bringing his much younger brothers-in-law to Wheelock’s school in the 1760s and remained a central figure in their lives throughout their adult years. For much of his life, Jacob Fowler was there with his family, supporting the Brothertown initiative, working as an itinerant minister and schoolteacher, rarely stepping out of the archive in any way that separated him from his active, powerful family.

Here, however, is a wail that crosses the centuries, a crisis of the heart that instantly humanizes him. The letter itself touchingly breaks down; it starts in clear and graceful handwriting and then gets increasingly fragmented. After the words “Submissive Will is wanting” there seems to be a break: the handwriting shifts, the spelling is erratic, the ink is blotted, words are crossed out, and the words “Little B[r]other” are inserted above the final sentence, which otherwise makes no sense. The emotion attached to the brief description of his darling daughter’s final moments is vividly marked on the page, and Jacob Fowler, father, husband, schoolmaster is reduced to a “Little Bother”—clearly a slip of the pen that elides the “r” in “Brother” with the lower loop of the “B” but a telling one nonetheless—he is extraneous in the world, useless without his “little Darling” who once lay “so folded up in our Hearts.”

Indeed the tension between the words of the good Christian: “it is the Will of God, and we can only Join the holy Angels in saying, Amen: thy Will be done and not ours” is in striking contrast to the outbursts in which Fowler challenges that God: “O! for an Heart to praise my God. Submissive Will is wanting.” Lost in his despair and grief, he begs his brother to save him from his own doubts. Fowler can barely admit his own crisis: his acknowledgment that he resists God’s plan is written in the passive voice (“Submissive Will is wanting”) and the broken-hearted (and broken-phrased) description of the last moments of his child’s life hint at the regret and despair that he feels: why did his wife put her down? Why were they not holding her at the end? Why couldn’t this beloved child have stayed with them longer? While the letter opens with the shared loss that he and his wife have experienced (“we are bereved of our only Child, that lay so folded up in our Hearts”), in the end he is isolated in his own grief, despairing the loss of his “only Darling.” “Come over Speedily” he begs Occom, underlining the word “speedily” for emphasis. Did Occom keep this letter because he was there for Fowler in this moment of need, or was he haunted by his inability to comfort his grieving brother-in-law? Did the letter get there in time, or did Occom receive it after the crisis had passed? Archives ultimately reveal only so much.

As I do for the letters in my family’s house, I have a visceral sense of familiarity upon seeing the particular handwriting of these eighteenth-century correspondents, so familiar and yet so distant. I know them, I sometimes tell myself; we share a set of memories and experiences. Their letters aren’t addressed to me, and yet somehow they have come into my hands (always carefully and in accord with the rules of the archive, of course), and so I have an obligation and a responsibility to the stories that they tell. Yes, both a familiarity and, if I’m honest, an affection for that dear and familiar handwriting, so much a part of who these people are and were. I know them by the particular arch of their Ds, the flourish of their signatures, or even the distinctive shapes of their vowels and consonants, their commas and their periods.

Of course, these are simply the stories I tell myself. These letters were never written with me—or anyone like me—in mind. The sense of intimacy that draws me to Olive Adams and Jacob Fowler is entirely of my own making. Considering that I don’t know much of anything about them—what they looked like, how many children they had, what they thought about in the long stretches between the handful of letters that remain—my sense of intimacy with the writers of these letters is, of course, entirely one-sided.

And yet it has been an honor and a pleasure to get to know these correspondents; accidentally or not, I have been privileged to get a peek at their lives and their experiences. I certainly do not pretend to fully understand the lives of these young Native American writers, but their letters have marked me, and I hope I have served them well in reminding us of the work that went into the production and dissemination of their words and letters.

Further Reading:

On eighteenth-century Native New England: Joanna Brooks, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan (2006); Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening (2012); Laura Murray, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren (1998); Hilary Wyss, English Letters and Indian Literacies (2012)

On letters and letter writing more generally: Eve Bannet, Empire of Letters (2005); Konstantin Dierks, In My Power (2009); E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (2005); Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter (2015); Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic Families (2008); Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People (2009).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Hilary E. Wyss, Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University, has written extensively on Native literacy and community in early America. Her most recent book is English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750-1830.

The Curious Case of the 1670 Deed to Aquehonga Manacknong

Staten Island is the least populated part of America’s most populated city, hence its self-pitying nickname: “the forgotten borough.” But when it comes to its Native past, perhaps it is really the forgetting borough. There are no indigenous place names currently used on the island, which makes it unique among all counties in the greater New York City area.

This erasure may be evidence of its contested past, as the colonists who bought it were rather glad to see the Natives go. Dutch and English colonists spent forty years trying to claim the island. Unsurprisingly, the messy history of its purchase is overshadowed by legends of the more celebrated island to the north. But here the oddball borough has Manhattan beat, as it has a more compelling story to tell of how it was bought and sold.

From land papers, we know that Indians most often called the island Aquehonga Manacknong, a name that likely meant “the place of bad woods.” (The name also suggests the borough’s inferiority complex goes back a long time.) In keeping with the place’s characteristic amnesia, we don’t even know what the island’s Native residents called themselves. At different points in the colonial period, communities on the island were politically linked with the Hackensack, Tappan, Raritan, Manhattan, and Rockaway peoples. But no colonist recorded a proper name for just the islanders. One acceptable but broad term for the people of Aquehonga Manacknong is Munsee, which is a later name for dialects spoken near the lower Hudson. Today, the descendants of Munsee speakers also identify as Lenape or Delaware.

The Dutch, who began colonizing the region in the 1620s, admired the hilly mass that guarded one of the best natural harbors on the continent. They named it after the Staten-Generaal, the assembly that united the seven Dutch provinces and was the highest sovereign body in their monarch-less republic (fig. 1). Although the Dutch made an initial purchase of the island in 1630, they did not get around to making a permanent settlement until 1639. The early European buildings were abandoned in local wars that broke out in 1641, then again in 1655. Though Natives signed a second deed to the island in 1657, it was annulled months later when the Dutch purchasers failed to deliver the goods promised for the land.

The 1670 deed that finally ended indigenous claims now rests several miles from the actual island, in a small cache of Staten Island papers at the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West (fig. 2). As the document that officially made Staten Island part of New York and not New Jersey, it is an undeniably significant text. But it is also an unusual text, containing seldom-seen details of how Native communities negotiated over land. When read closely, the 1670 deed challenges our tendency to see deeds as merely evidence of Indians’ capitulation to colonial rule. While the document reveals a painful process of dispossession, it also shows colonists reconciling their legal practices with Native traditions in peculiar ways.

Before getting to this piece of evidence, it helps to consider the larger history of Indian land sales, starting with the tale of Dutchmen buying Manhattan for a mere twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets. There is a grain of truth in this apocryphal story. A 1626 document reported that Pieter Minuit offered the Manhattan people sixty guilders of unspecified goods as compensation for the Dutch West India Company’s initial occupation of the island’s tip in either 1624 or 1625. First calculated by a nineteenth-century historian, the $24 price then made its way into schoolbooks. The myth of Manhattan’s price makes an irresistible origin story for the capital of capitalism. It tells us that the Big Apple was the home of predatory business deals from its very start. Whether seen gleefully or cynically, this smug little story assures us that Westerners were crafty while the indigenes were naïve.

Americans generally take Native history more seriously today, but we haven’t retired all our simple myths about Indians and land. Many make the common assumption that Indians did not believe territory could be sold, while colonists obviously did. It is true that Natives and Europeans had drastically different uses for land, and mutual misunderstandings about real estate transactions were common. But the idea that Natives were incapable of seeing land as a transferable property is a kind of Noble Savage hokum that insists Indians had a spiritual reverence for every square inch of soil, and thus barely made a mark upon the earth. When repeated uncritically, the idea that indigenes were incapable of imagining territory as property is a crude caricature of Natives’ diverse cultural beliefs that erases thousands of years of actual indigenous land use. In fact, Indians across the continent transformed the natural world to their liking, marked extensive territorial boundaries, and consecrated their lands with their buried dead. And many Native leaders agreed with colonists that at least some tracts (especially those without sacred significance) could be bounded, transferred, or leased. As early as 1643, the English colonist Roger Williams pointed out that his Narragansett neighbors were “very exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Lands … I have knowne them make bargaine and sale amongst themselves for a small piece, or quantity of Ground.” He argued that anyone who denied this fact was advancing the “sinfull opinion among many that Christians have right to Heathens Lands.”

Another widely held belief is that most deeds were the products of outright trickery or intimidation. It is true that white land agents drew up fraudulent papers, lied about their deeds’ terms, and tried to garner the signatures of intoxicated or unauthorized sellers. But far more often, the real swindle came from lopsided economics and demographics. There was an inherent imbalance when hunting-and-farming gift-centered societies that were suffering devastating population losses from disease did business with growing colonial societies connected to a global web of trade that gave them a much broader selection of technology and wares. When we calculate prices in European currency, we erase the Native perspective on what they were “actually” being paid. And there was always the looming specter of violence. Although colonists seldom made explicit threats when orchestrating legal transfers of territory, and the text of deeds often championed peace and coexistence, there remained the possibility of illegal incursions or bloodshed if the papers were not signed. Chicanery and coercion were certainly part of the process, but seldom blatant.

The 1670 Staten Island deed and the minutes of negotiations show in detail how these transfers worked. Though the papers document a Native loss, they also are evidence of a forty-year process of contestation, and more than a week of face-to-face negotiations. In the years before the deed was written, colonists had been hounding the islanders to renegotiate the twice-voided sale. The foreign population was booming, and the English colonists who had evicted Dutch officials in 1664 were looking to establish clear title to the best lands near Manhattan. The Munsees found colonists to be bad neighbors, since Europeans’ free-roaming livestock trampled Native cornfields. Looking to resolve Indian complaints and satisfy colonial land hunger, New York governor Francis Lovelace invited the island’s chiefs, or sachems, to work out a full sale that spring.

Talks commenced on April 7, 1670, a day later than planned, as “Windy Weather” kept the first Native parties from crossing the bay. The negotiations began haltingly, as not all of the five leading sachems of Staten Island were present, so the colonists had to wait another two days while the full delegation took shape. In the first meeting, the new English leaders produced previous deeds from the Dutch archives, to support their side of the negotiations. In doing so, they made an offensive mistake when they “demanded” if the present sachems “have heard of the names in the Dutch Records, of w^ch diverse were read to them.” Perhaps just then a chill went over the proceedings while the islanders exchanged pained looks, for the Indians answered, “some they remember, but they are dead, so [the sachems] doe not love to heare of them.” In reading the names out loud, the colonists had accidentally broken the Munsee taboo against speaking of names of the deceased. Still, the sachems were willing to forgive the transgression and work out a sale, provided that “a Present shall bee made them some-what extraordinary for their Satisfaction.”

Native and colonial officials met several times over the next six days, working out the details of this gift. The initial offer of clothing, tools, and munitions was deemed not “extraordinary” enough. And there was no wampum: the sacred shell beads not only functioned as a cross-cultural currency, but were also highly valued as decorative jewelry and a symbolic gift by Indians. The Munsee delegation returned with a request for six hundred fathoms of the beads, the colonists counter-offered only half that; finally they all settled on four hundred fathoms. (Each “fathom” could contain between 180 and 300 individual wampum beads, meaning the entire exchange contained between 72,000 and 120,000 beads.) While wampum’s value in European coins had been declining for decades, this was still a substantial sum—the beads alone far surpassed the first price paid for Manhattan nearly fifty years earlier. In a similar back-and-forth, the Indians convinced the colonists to triple the amount of clothing offered, and significantly increased the gifts of guns, lead, powder, hoes, and knives.

On the thirteenth of April, the colonists drew up the deed. The resulting document—three buff-colored parchment pages, covered in fine calligraphic writing, and bearing the colony’s red wax seal—was far longer than most land papers, and its first curious feature appeared on the signature page. Four additional names were offset from the names of the governor, the mayor, and eight members of the colonial council. Two of them (William Nicolls and Humphrey Devenport) were English, the other two (Cornelis Bedloo and Nicholaes Antony) were Dutch. A notation to the side identified these signatories as “4 Youths.”

These were apparently the sons of council members or the previous governor Richard Nicolls. No minutes indicate why exactly the young men were asked to sign this text, but the practice of bringing in the next generation to witness agreements had some precedent. Just three days earlier, Governor Lovelace signed an agreement with an Esopus Indian sachem from farther up the river, who had brought along “his young Son and another young Indyan” to “sett their hands” on an older peace treaty, and the Governor “admonished” the Esopus sachems “to Continue the same Custome yearely.” Though the English were insisting upon these annual meetings, the practice fit rather well with Native diplomatic customs, which favored the regular renewal of previous agreements.

A similar clause appeared on the 1670 Staten Island deed. In an addendum on the final page, several sachems agreed that they “shall once every Yeare upon the First Day of May yearely after their Surrender repaire to this Forte to Acknowledg their Sale of the said Staten Island to ye Governour or his Successors to continue a mutual friendship betweene them.” Even more extraordinary was another short memorandum written two days after the original signing, written on the back of the first page (fig. 3):

Memorand. That the young Indyans not being present at the Insealing & delivery of the within written Deed, It was againe delivered & acknowledged before them whose Names are underwritten as witnesses April the 15th 1670
The marke of X Pewowahone about 5 yeares old a boy
The marke X of Rokoques about 6 yeares old a Girle
The marke of X Shinguinnemo about 12 Yeares old, a Girle
The marke of X Mahquadus about 15 yeares old, a young Man
The marke X of Asheharewes about 20 Yeares old, a young man

The Xs mark the actual penstrokes. The signatures of Pewowahone and Rokoques, the kindergarten-aged boy and girl, are so dark they can be seen on the other side of the thick page. It seems the children, perhaps having their hands directed by an adult, moved the pen so slowly that excess ink bled through. All the young signers’ marks are but twisted lines, their meanings unclear. By contrast, the marks of Native adults on many other deeds were recognizable pictures of animals, weapons, and people.

It is a strange thing to see the writing of small children—and half a dozen adolescents—on a momentous legal document. And it is even more mystifying that no one at the time noted who decided to call children as witnesses and why. Yet as unusual as these actions were, there are some likely reasons both parties would want to involve their young. For colonists frustrated at having to buy the same piece of land three times in forty years, the marks of those four colonial boys and five Munsee youths would prevent any further Indian claims from surfacing later. But even if we assume that including Native children signatories was a colonial idea meant to protect their property, the act served Native interests as well. No Indians wanted to repeat the upsetting moment of the previous week, when colonists spoke the names of the dead. Having a five- or six-year-old’s mark on the treaty made it more likely he or she would be alive to affirm the agreement for decades into the future.

Moreover, Munsee people had long been dedicated to teaching their children about politics and history. More than two decades earlier, in the midst of the horrific Dutch-Native war known as Kieft’s War, sachems who left a failed peace negotiation made it clear that this moment would live on. While criticizing the New Netherland director Willem Kieft for his insufficient gifts, the Munsees remarked that he “could have made it, by his presents, that as long as he lived the massacre would never again be spoken of; but now it might fall out that the infant upon the small board would remember it.” The same principle seemed to be at work among the Staten Island Indians. Neither Pewowahone nor Rokoques would easily forget the childhood memory of signing that parchment.

Perhaps there are other incidents like this silently chronicled in the many thousands of seldom-read and yellowing land deeds sitting in American archives. But even if it is an outlier, the sale of Aquehonga Manacknong confirms a larger point that many scholars are making about Native land loss. We have long known it was more than just an economic or military matter, but now we are truly starting to grasp the complexity of what happened when Natives and colonists did business. Seemingly unrelated cultural matters like the taboo of speaking of the dead or the ways Native parents taught their children history were crucial to forging an agreement over land. And in its peculiarities, the 1670 deed shows that the Natives who sold Staten Island were hardly defeated dupes. It is a page out of the forgotten borough’s past well worth remembering.

Further Reading

For more on the $24 myth see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999). On Staten Island placenames, see Robert S. Grumet, Manhattan to Minisink: Native American Placenames in Greater New York and Vicinity (Norman, Okla., 2013). There have been several new books on Munsees and their dealings with the Dutch and English in just the last few years. Robert S. Grumet takes a close look at land sales in The Munsee Indians: A History (Norman, Okla., 2009), while Tom Arne Midtrød examines diplomatic practice along the Hudson in The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley (Ithaca, N.Y., 2012). Susanah Shaw Romney compellingly explores the central role of women and larger family networks in Dutch-Native relations in New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014). For a cultural reading of land transfers and the way Native peoples thought about space on a broader scale, see also Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, Minn., 2008) and Jeffrey Glover, Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604-1664 (Philadelphia, 2014).

This article originally appeared in issue 15.2 (Winter, 2015).

Andrew Lipman will be joining the history department at Barnard College, Columbia University, this fall. Previously he taught at Syracuse University and was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Long-Term Fellow at the New-York Historical Society. His first book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

In 1762 the Wappinger spokesman Daniel Nimham gave an account to colonial officials of his people’s historical connections to other Hudson River Indians. With this brief testimony, Tom Midtrød writes, Nimham “provided a glimpse into a world of Native interactions and relationships” (xii). This statement nicely encapsulates The Memory of All Ancient Customs, for the purpose of Midtrød’s book is to provide a window into the mostly hidden world of intra-Indian interactions in the early Hudson Valley. Therein lies the great strength—and some might argue the Achilles’ heel—of Midtrød’s work.

The book’s contribution is not that it places Native Americans at center stage, since many recent works have established this trend, but that it highlights inter-Indian diplomacy and other forms of interaction betweenNative peoples. This framework cuts against the vast majority of scholarship that primarily explores relationships between Indians and Europeans. And while some historians have explored inter-Indian exchange, Midtrød is one of the few to center his narrative entirely around such issues. As he rightly notes in the preface, Native connections to the outside world were “far too complicated to be described simply as a binary juxtaposition of Natives and newcomers” (xiii).

Midtrød begins his reconstruction of the “now lost world” of Native political relationships, kinship connections, and other networks of exchange with a well-conceived preface that succinctly outlines the book’s argument, structure, and evidentiary base (xii). The introduction that follows outlines the social and political structures of Hudson River peoples during the seventeenth century. The region was largely dominated by Munsee and Mahican speakers, and included such groups as the Esopus, Mahican, Wappinger, and Schaghticoke peoples. Also included in this study are the inhabitants of Long Island and their diverse connections to Hudson River peoples. Midtrød notes that the Valley consisted of numerous distinct polities heavily grounded in localism, but this did not lead to hostility and warfare. Cooperation instead was the hallmark of relations between peoples who maintained strong actual and fictive kinship ties with one another. He argues that, despite the upheaval caused by colonization in the early years of contact, which included substantial demographic decline, Native political structures showed considerable stability and continuity (19).