After breaking free from British rule, American identity had more to
do with sailing to the East than trekking into the West.
Honorable Mention, US Maritime History, John Lyman Book Awards
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.
