American Political Interest in the Pacific
After a century of imperial regulation from the “mother country,” it was only when Britain sent East India Company ships to Anglo-American shores in 1773 that Americans rose up in arms.[16] With the incursion of the East India Company into their very harbors, Americans believed they had come dangerously close to subjection, slavery even. Under the East India Company, American soil would remain forever an exoticized economic release valve for the white men mandated to rule the globe. Americans rebelled; it was time to go out in the world, to prove they were indeed of the class of white overlords, not in that of an exploited people such as the East Indians. They included men such as Salem’s Elias Hasket Derby, on of the wealthiest merchants of the republic and owner of the Grand Turk, the first New England vessel to sail to China. In 1789 alone Derby sent four ships to Whampoa anchorage, and when his teas threatened to glut the U.S. market, he pulled strings in Congress to get tariff relief for China merchants.[17] In his portrait Derby displays a confidence born of ships of state (note the flag), as well as geographic mastery and knowledge (note his map and books). He like Carrington and many other leading merchants “in town” were powerful men of the world, and that worldliness was, unsurprisingly, reflected in their domestic tastes.
By the end of the 18th century, the largest international frontier remaining to Europeans and Americans was the Pacific Ocean. For two and half centuries the Spanish had been plodding their way across the Pacific between Mexico and the Philippines in the lucrative galleon trade, relatively uninterested in further Pacific exploration. While Dutch Pacific trading posts were established early and sent information back to Europe about the South Seas, it was not really until the imperial rivalries of the global Seven Years War that Europeans began aggressively exploring the Pacific. Capt. Cook was the most notable Pacific explorer in the French-Anglo-American world of the revolutionary Atlantic. Following Cook and independence from Britain, Americans flooded into the Pacific.[18] Occurring in this early republican period was a dramatically intensified trade with the Asia-Pacific, the fruits and dramas—and ambitions—of which show up in American homes.
The Pacific Ocean became a targeted arena for American enterprise in the earliest years of the republic as it stumbled toward the global economic strength necessary for a white masculine identity within European-dominated global geopolitics.[19] Two economic tracks led early republican Americans from the northeast directly to the Pacific: first merchants sent ships in search of marketable China-trade commodities and, secondly, whalers breached Cape Horn sailing in search of whales. While US merchants initially sent their ships to East Asia via the Indian Ocean, they soon discovered that the Pacific route gave them a great advantage in China over their main competitor, Britain. The Pacific yielded up a veritable cornucopia of resources marketable in China, from Northwest coast furs, to rocky island sealskins, to the sea cucumber, and Hawaiian sandalwood.
In 1787, before the U.S. Constitution was even in place, John Kendrick of Wareham, Massachusetts, an “Indian” in the Boston Tea Party and fresh off Continental naval privateering victories in the Revolution, led the first U.S.–flag circumnavigation of the globe, to avow the manhood of his new country. Leading two vessels, the Lady Washington and the Columbia Rediviva, Kendrick never returned—he stalled in the Pacific for six years, establishing a forceful U.S. commercial presence there. He was shot in 1794 in Hawaii, reminiscent of Captain Cook’s demise, but this time the perpetrators were British and the murder called an “accident.” Too bad for Kendrick, but ultimately worse for the British, because hundreds of U.S. ships followed in Kendrick’s wake.
In 1806, a sailor on the Rose sailing out of Nantucket across the Pacific, ultimately toward China, complained that his captain had sailed past an uncharted island without surveying it,without making it known to the world as a U.S. discovery.
In 1813 Yankee captain David Brown, Bostonian and former US navy commander, claimed for the United States the Pacific island Nuku Hiva (in the Marquesas Islands and featured in Herman Melvile’s Typee). He named it after President Madison, becoming one of the young nation’s first true Pacific imperialists. Brown argued that the United States, in fact, “bordered” on China, Japan, and Russia, just as it did on the West Indies.[21] The Monroe Doctrine a decade later, widely believed to be intended to keep Europe out of the Caribbean, had Pacific waters in its view as well. With a weakening of the Spanish Empire, the United States moved in to fill the void, and by the time one-time China Trader Edward Carrington hung Dufour’s scenes of the Pacific in his North Parlor, the “Spanish Lake” had become the “U.S. Lake.”“The Island was just discernable on deck bearing NW 111 leagues distant…What our Captain’s motives were for not stopping we are at a loss to account for as Islands not laid down in the chart ought to be considered as new discoverys and ought to be minutely surveyed as to their situation, soil, and productions [20]. But the distance we are from them prevents us from forming any idea of them.”
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[16] See Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (Chicago, 2010), pp. 175-202; and “Tea, Sovereignty, and an East Indies Trade for a New American Empire,” [LINK] in this book.
[17] Downs, Golden Ghetto, p. 143, 200.
[18] Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 117-26.
[19] We should note that this interest in Pacific regions long preceded the Mexican-American War, in which Mexico ceded California to the U.S. in 1848, or the onset of the Gold Rush in 1849, events that traditionally mark the beginning of U.S. expansion to the Pacific. But interest in the “Great Ocean”—and arguments for making it a special U.S. sphere of influence—dates backs to the victory over Britain in the 1780s.
[20] The Rose, Collection 15, folder 169, Nantucket Historical Association
[21] See Allen B. Cole, “Captain David Porter’s Proposed Expedition to the Pacific,” Pacific Historical Review 9, no.1, March 1940; and Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, W.W. Norton, 1960.
