True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity(131 The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science)

With American independence came the freedom to sail anywhere in the world under a new flag. During the years between the Treaty of Paris and the Treaty of Wangxi, Americans first voyaged past the Cape of Good Hope, reaching the ports of Algiers and the bazaars of Arabia, the markets of India and the beaches of Sumatra, the villages of Cochin, China, and the factories of Canton. Their South Seas voyages of commerce and discovery introduced the infant nation to the world and the world to what the Chinese, Turks, and others dubbed the "new people." Drawing on private journals, letters, ships' logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, Dane A. Morrison's True Yankees traces America's earliest encounters on a global stage through the exhilarating experiences of five Yankee seafarers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade scouring the marts of China and India for goods that would captivate the imaginations of his countrymen. Mariner Amasa Delano toured much of the Pacific hunting seals. Explorer Edmund Fanning circumnavigated the globe, touching at various Pacific and Indian Ocean ports of call. In 1829, twenty-year-old Harriett Low reluctantly accompanied her merchant uncle and ailing aunt to Macao, where she recorded trenchant observations of expatriate life. And sea captain Robert Bennet Forbes's last sojourn in Canton coincided with the eruption of the First Opium War. How did these bold voyagers approach and do business with the people in the region, whose physical appearance, practices, and culture seemed so strange? And how did native men and women-not to mention the European traders who were in direct competition with the Americans-regard these upstarts who had fought off British rule? The accounts of these adventurous travelers reveal how they and hundreds of other mariners and expatriates influenced the ways in which Americans defined themselves, thereby creating a genuinely brash national character-the "true Yankee." Readers who love history and stories of exploration on the high seas will devour this gripping tale.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction the first generation 1. Samuel Shaw's Polite Reception, 1784–1794 First Interlude 2. Amasa Delano Opens the Great South Sea, 1790–1820 Second Interlude 3. Edmund Fanning's "Voyages Round the World," 1792–1833 Third Interlude the second generation Harriett Low in Manila and Macao, 1829–1834 Fourth Interlude Robert Bennet Forbes and the First Opium War, 1838–1840 Postscript Notes Index

About the Author :
Dane A. Morrison is a professor of early American history at Salem State University. He is the author of A Praying People: Massachusett Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600-1690, and the coeditor of Salem: Place, Myth and Memory and the World History Encyclopedia, volumes 11-13: The Age of Global Contact.

Review :
True Yankees is an excellent book contributing valuable information on America's early story... Anyone interested in the birth of our nation and how we entered into the world of commerce will find this a detailed resource. -- Cindy Vallar Pirates and Privateers Although part of US cultural and economic history, the role of long-distance sea trade in developing the nation's character and global outlook in the early national period has not been discussed until now... The book is informative and entertaining, a rare combination. Highly recommended. Choice In this book Dane Morrison discerns the beginnings of an American identity in an earlier period of American history by focusing more on the sea than the land through the maritime expansion outwards of the post-Revolutionary and ante-bellum early United States republic... What helps to give the book pace and human engagement is the way in which it is largely based around the lives and travels of a number of key individuals representing different periods and dimensions of what it meant to be what the book's title terms a 'true Yankee.' -- John Gascoigne Bulletin of the Pacific Circle