Dane A. Morrison's "Eastward of Good Hope"

Dane A. Morrison is a professor of early American history at Salem State University. He is the author of True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity and the coeditor of Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Old hands adapted, learning the gales and currents driven by the seasonal monsoons of the South China Sea, following ancient routes pioneered by Chinese, Indian, and even Arab traders to Malacca and beyond. Chinese traders, likewise, used these winds to send their trading junks to Taiwan and to the Philippines, where, Nathaniel Bowditch reported, one could find the "great numbers” of Chinese junks dominating the indigo trade at Manila the beginning of the year. In March, dry monsoon winds blew out of the northeast, and in the 1780s Yankee captains began to take advantage of these to venture out of Canton into the Indian Ocean. By midsummer, the winds of the southeast monsoon rose out of the Indian Ocean, bringing drenching rains—as much as 30 inches of precipitation over two months--and propelling the sails that would carry ships back to China. Ambitious traders such as William Elting frequently weathered these late autumn winds, taking his chances to squeeze out more profit--“In the trade on the Malay coast requires you to stay as long as possible.” Elting had mastered the tactic of sheltering under the lee side of Sunting Island if the seas grew too rough. Others learned to simply comply with the monsoon winds, as the Cordelia did in the straits east of Java, “which made our passage longer, which was a little over one hundred days,” sailor Charles Tyng conceded. Many would not take the risk. As one captain’s clerk observed in 1852, it was an “unlucky cruise” that was “timed with the autumnal change of monsoon.” In his voyage to Japan in 1853, the flagship Mississippi under Commodore Matthew Perry followed a circuitous course to keep the ship away from hurricanes that swept Indian Ocean in the early part of the year.

This passage epitomizes several of the themes that I explore in my recent book, Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World. It describes the kinds of challenges that confronted early American mariners as they explored the sea routes that led them out of the Atlantic and to reach what were for them the exotic ports of the wider world. The book’s title recalls the emotional costs of a voyage as American travelers sailed the unfamiliar and dangerous seas of the Ottoman Empire, China, India, and Oceana, and beyond. The title, Eastward of Good Hope, is taken from the writings of Amasa Delano, for whom the geography of a voyage to China, India, and the Pacific in the 1790s was a statement of liberation after Americans won their independence from Great Britain in 1783. For Delano and countless other Yankee voyagers, the phrase also measured the psychological and emotional costs of learning to navigate through the baffling shoals and reefs, daunting pirates and buccaneers, disconcerting monsoons and typhoons of a strange and dangerous world.

Eastward of Good Hope recounts the struggles and tribulations of William Elting, Charles Tyng, and many more—whose accounts linger in archives, but rarely appear in the popular treatments alongside the celebrated Matthew Perry or Nathaniel Bowditch. We learn more about the dangers of these ‘new worlds’ from the tattered, dusty letters and journals of forgotten mariners like Elting and Tyng, or merchant William Appleton in Canton, missionary Harriet Newell in India, or Biblical Scholar Edward Robinson in the Ottoman realm. Similarly, I wanted to embed these travels, so frequently and so inaccurately depicted as examples of a mythical American exceptionalism, within a global maritime experience in which generations of countless Chinese, Indian, and even Arab traders pioneered the routes later followed by Yankee mariners.

Dangerous voyages set the stage for what comes later in each chapter. Encounters between Yankee mariners, merchants, missionaries--emotionally taxed, exhausted, homesick, and vulnerable, carrying conceits of their own superiority and other peoples’ inferiority--and Ottoman, Chinese, Indian, and Oceanic peoples--welcoming but wary, carrying the experience of 300 years of European conflict and conquest.

Learn more about Eastward of Good Hope at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue