“ In 1667, a Berlin theologian, Andreas Mueller...had pieced together... from clues discovered in obscure Arabic texts, (that) would, he promised, enable European traders and missionaries to learn to read and speak the Chinese language with ease. Perpetually frustrated, however, by his inability to secure what he considered just compensation for his efforts, Mueller refused to reveal his secret and finally burned his papers before he died without their having been examined or published.”

Ideographia (51)

Mueller called his invention, the “Clavis Sinica,” the key to Chinese. Carter ‘s “Clavis Sinica” finds material form in two remarkable documents. The first is a dictionary, Dictionarium Sinensis, and the second a handbook, Xiuxiang Hongmao Fanzi (Illustration of the Writing Methods of the Red-Haired People).  Both documents were composed in manuscript form and were keys to revealing what Carter aimed to learn.  The Dictionarium was, in its first incarnation, compiled by the Italian missionary Barilico de Clemona between 1692 and 1699.[28] It holds some 15,000 entries, indexed by Latin transliterated pronunciations, with translations from the Chinese into Latin, and then indexed by radicals and stroke quantity in standard Chinese fashion. Carter attributed  the transcription of his Dictionarium  to Abel Xaverius, his tutor. We can presume that this heavyweight tome of 1113 pages was a source book for Carter’s higher-level education. There is no doubt that Carter used the book. Lodged in the book’s cover is a sheet in his own hand of “characters with elements difficult to find.” While it is almost impossible at this remove to determine exactly what level of proficiency Carter had achieved, the presence of a “difficult to find” aid suggests the achievements of an advanced student. The Dictionarium acquired a language learning tool also suggests an advanced and avid learner. The creation of this facsimile itself must have taken months, and one imagines that Abel Xaverius worked diligently at this task for his student, while waiting for him to return after his second or third voyage. However, Morrison’s words: “he (Abel) has not had time to learn the characters of his native language.” cast doubt on what role he in fact had in the transcription. If Morrison’s observation that the: “Jesuits have kept Abel drudging so closely at the Latin...” is on the mark, then perhaps Abel was responsible only for the inscription of the Latin meanings of the characters. Should Morrison’s views be correct, it forces also a re-framing of the “Appeal” incident described later in this essay.

Whomever deserves credit for transcription, when Carter left China in 1805 the Dictionarium probably traveled with him, and one would also guess that the book accompanied him to Europe for the eleven years that he lived there, travelling in turn to the US thence to England, France, Scotland and back to England before returning to residence in New York City where he lived out his years. The Dictionarium was part of the third of his library bequeathed to his sister Rachel Jenks and upon her death the Dictionarium passed into the possession of John Carter Brown, who gave it to the library of Carter’s alma mater. John Carter Brown’s estimation that Carter was “particularly versed in the Oriental languages and literature,” likely gave Carter more credit than he deserved, but it was the way his family chose to remember him. The volume represents Carter’s aspirations to a higher literacy, one that more fully introduced him to the “interesting language and literature” he first encountered in Canton.

The Illustration of the Writing Methods of the Red Haired People is dictionary-like, a phrase book and business vocabulary primer filled largely with names of teas, of fabrics,  and grades of fabrics, addresses of shops, the names of trading firms, including even renderings of Rhode Island specific terms like Providence and Brown and Ives.[29] This book was only recently rediscovered by Man Sheung Yeung a language scholar at Hong Kong University. Yeung was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2012 and uncovered the book while exploring the archives of Caleb Cushing, a prominent New England political figure, who rose to national prominence as Massachusetts Congressman, US Attorney General and holder of various diplomatic posts, including  an appointment as the first US Ambassador to China. The eminent Arthur Hummel, librarian of the Chinese collection from 1928 to 1954, fortuitously had noted that the book had come once from the collection of Benjamin Bowen Carter.[30] This document is remarkable first for its provenance, a trade document, intended to educate Chinese merchants about their foreign clientele that somehow passed into Carter’s hands, then to Cushing’s and ultimately the Library of Congress. In addition to the matter of fact glossary of trading terms and renderings of the names of principals in the Canton trading community of the time, this book also includes more allusive content that offers  reflective observations about the interactions of memory, locale, and travel.

These short poetic phrases conjure up the persistence of hometown roots, even when in places far away. Strikingly they resonate with Carter’s self-image as a wanderer.  These phrases frame the larger text of the work and suggest that what one imagines to see in the present can be an illusion, that the optics of the present are rooted in a past and another place. In this way, it can be read as a commentary on the uncertainty of translation. Such a poetic epigraph contrasts with the matter-of-fact catalogue of the numerous silks and the multitude of teas that were goods in trade, a manual for Chinese who wanted to trade with the Europeans. As a text for American traders who wished to master Chinese, it is an introduction to vocabulary and, more broadly, to a way of thinking.