Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

Carter in the Archives

Carter’s works are mainly kept in the library of the Rhode Island Historical Society and the John Carter Brown Library. They include journals and accounts of his voyages, invoices and receipts of commercial purchases, family and business letters, vocabulary notes and materials for studying the Chinese language. Business historian John D. Wong has already noticed and made use of Carter’s papers in extracting information related to Wu Bingjian.[24] Regarding Carter’s books, one-third of them were given to his younger sister Rebecca C. Jenckes (1778-1837) after his death, and some are now deposited at the John Hay Library, including a Chinese-Latin dictionary entitled Dictionarium Sinicum. The dictionary is believed to be Carter’s textbook for learning Chinese, and some pages bear his handwritten notes. This dictionary had already been recorded in The History of Printing in America, published by Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) in 1810, and it was moved to Brown University in 1844 by John Carter Brown (1797-1874), Carter’s nephew.[25]

In addition to the above-mentioned collections, four of Carter’s original manuscripts are kept in the U.S. Library of Congress: a Chinese exercise book for daily and business conversations, a Chinese grammar entitled Zhongguo guanhua 中國官話, a revised version of Francisco Varo 萬濟國/萬方濟各’s (1627-1687) Arte de la Lengua Mandarina, and the Illustrations. The first manuscript has the following inscription:   

There was originally a loose fly-leaf in this book which became lost. Fortunately A. W. Hummel, Chief of the Orientalia Division (1927-1954), had previously copied down the inscription on it which read: “Benj. B, Carter, Canton, Dec. 1st 1805.”…

Arthur W. Hummel also mentions that Carter was still in correspondence with Abel-Rémusat about the study of language in 1819. In the second manuscript, there is Carter’s signature with date: “Benj. B. Carter, Canton, Jan. 15, 1806,” demonstrating that Carter began with the acquisition of the Chinese characters, vocabulary and phrases, and went further to study the grammar.[26] 
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[24] “Carter-Danforth Papers”; John D. Wong, Global Positioning: Houqua and His China Trade Partners in the Nineteenth Century (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2012) [https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/9282867], pp. 119, 123.
[25] For the U.S. Library of Congress copy of Varo’s work, see W. South Coblin and Joseph A. Levi eds., Francisco Varo’s grammar of the mandarin language, 1703: an English translation of “Arte de la lengua Mandarina” (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2000), editor’s foreword, p. vii and introduction, pp. xxiii-xxiv.
[26] Regarding the discovery and the main contents of the second and third manuscripts, see my conference papers: “Study of Benjamin Bowen Carter’s Copy of an Early Chinese Grammar Text Dated 1806”, 44th Annual Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies Conference, October 9-11, 2015, University of Pittsburgh, U.S. and “China-US Trade in Early 19th Century Canton: With Reference to Benjamin B. Carter’s List of Chinese Glossaries at the US Library of Congress 19世紀初葉中、美兩國的廣州貿易──從美國國會圖書館藏咖咑的漢語詞匯短語集談起”, Academic Conference on “Thirteen Factories of Canton: Investigation of the Documentary Evidence and Establishment of a Museum” 廣州十三行文獻研究暨博物館建設學術研討會, September 21-22, 2013, Guangzhou, China. A revised version of the latter paper is scheduled for publication in a volume entitled Essays Linking Sizihwan Bay and Hong Kong 西灣‧香江論學集and the volume will be published by the Department of Chinese Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan.

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