Public History in Historical Perspective

The Salem East India Marine Society Museum

George H. Schwartz

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781613767153
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The East India Marine Society Museum was one of the most influential collecting institutions in nineteenth-century America. From 1799 to 1867, when Salem, Massachusetts, was a premier American port and launching pad for international trade, the museum's collection developed at a nexus of global exchange, with donations of artwork, crafts, and flora and fauna pouring in from distant ports of call. At a time when the country was filled with Barnum-esque exhibitions, visitors to this museum could circumnavigate the globe and gain an understanding of the world and their place within it. Collecting the Globe presents the first in-depth exploration of the East India Marine Society Museum, the precursor to the internationally acclaimed Peabody Essex Museum. Offering fresh perspectives on museums in the United States before the Civil War and how they helped shape an American identity, George H. Schwartz explores the practices of collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting a diversity of international objects and art in the early United States.

Chapter One

Origins

A Noble company, that early band,

Who left their homes to sail across the sea,

And distant voyages to the Orient planned.

The land of wealth and dark Idolatry.

Behold their Monument!—the rich and rare,

Gathered with cost and pains from every clime,

And in this spacious hall preserved with care,

To interest and instruct the future time.

—Reverend Jones Very, excerpt from “The East India Marine Museum,” 1865

When the East India Marine Society was formed on the last day of August 1799, Salem captain Jonathan Carnes (1757–1827) was homeward bound from the East Indies. Carnes, who became a member of the Society shortly after his return, was emblematic of the post–Revolutionary War Salem mariners who took great risks opening American markets in the Pacific Islands, the Far East, the northwestern coast of North America, Africa, Russia, and the Near East. During a voyage to modern-day Indonesia in 1795, Carnes learned of a location on the west coast of Sumatra where he could obtain the valuable spice, pepper, directly from local inhabitants without interference from hostile Dutch and English ships. Back in Salem, he caught the ear of his uncle, Jonathan Peele, Jr. (1731–1809), a wealthy merchant. Peele outfitted a schooner named Rajah, and with Carnes as master the vessel set sail on one of the most important voyages in Salem’s history. The Rajah returned to its home port in 1797 carrying the first cargo of wild black pepper to America, yielding a 700 percent profit and starting a fifty-year-long lucrative trade for Salem merchants.1

At this time, Salem was in the midst of a golden age of maritime commerce. These were the days, as nineteenth-century author Arlo Bates (1850–1918) romanticized, when “Derby Street was alive with bustle and excitement; when swarthy sailors were grouped at the corners, or sat smoking before the doors of their boarding-houses, their ears adorned with gold rings, and their hands and wrists profusely illustrated with uncouth designs in India ink; when every shop window was a museum of odd trifles from the Orient, and the very air was thick with a sense of excitement and of mystery.”2 At the height of Salem’s commercial activity as the sixth-largest port in the United States (accounting for 5 percent of the nation’s per-capita income), forty wharves lined the South River harbor (see figure 7).3

Figure 7. Plan of the town of Salem in the commonwealth of Massachusetts: From actual surveys, made in the years 1796 & 1804; with the improvements and alterations since that period as surveyed by Jonathan Peele Saunders, 1820. Printed paper, 21 x 315⁄16 in. Peabody Essex Museum Collection, LIBG3764.S2-S286-C.2. © 2016 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by Kathy Tarantola. Saunders was an East India Marine Society member. The museum is one of thirteen buildings plotted on the map and noted in the key as “E.I.M. Museum.”

By 1807 Salem’s mercantile fleet consisted of approximately two hundred vessels. This was the pinnacle of the local shipbuilding enterprise, when shipwrights such as Enos Briggs (1746–1819) were creating the port’s famous East Indiamen. These ships were 75 to 100 feet long, 200 and 300 tons (the measure of a ship’s cargo-carrying capacity), with a multiethnic crew of twelve to twenty-four sailors: one-quarter the size of their European equivalents.4 Rounded barrel bottoms made these vessels sluggish, but they drew less water and were easier to handle. Salem’s East Indiamen were therefore well equipped to navigate in and out of their local shallow harbor and small foreign ports while still having enough cargo space to make a voyage profitable, and they were safer and financially less risky than the larger ships of the period.

Salem’s fleet included the first American vessels to enter many eastern ports—from Mocha (in modern-day Yemen), to Batavia (today Jakarta, capital of Indonesia), to Nagasaki, Japan. The port town valued the region so much that the motto “To the Farthest Port of the Rich East” was inscribed on Salem’s official seal, created when it became a city in 1836. Likewise, merchants in the east held Salem in high esteem. Charles Timothy Brooks (1813–83), a Salem-born Unitarian pastor and poet, wrote:

Some native merchant of the East, they say,

(Whether Canton, Calcutta or Bombay),

Had in his counting-room a map, whereon

Across the fields in capitals was drawn

The name of SALEM, meant to represent

That Salem was the Western Continent,

While in an upper corner was put down

A dot named Boston, SALEM’S leading town.5

While Salem may have been synonymous with the United States among those who would never set foot on American soil, the port’s rise in the antebellum period mirrored, in many ways, the rise of the burgeoning nation.

Salem’s overseas trade was a complex affair; only those Yankee sailors who possessed keen nautical and business acumen were successful in acquiring goods and creating profits. In these heady days, a ship did not leave home with cargo intended for the final destination; instead, it carried New England resources such as dried fish and timber to trade along the way at several different ports. A vessel bound for the East Indies would typically exchange goods in Europe, then sail down the coast of Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope to the Isle de France to trade, and continue up the African coastline, along the rim of the Indian Ocean, to India, Batavia, or Canton (today Guangzhou). In all of these eastern ports, the ship’s master and supercargo drove profitable bargains, often turning over cargoes (and, in some cases, the ship itself!) a dozen times for a great profit.6 Due to these intricate trading patterns, Salem mariners obtained knowledge of distant cultures and also of the material objects associated with these new lands.

Once Salem ships returned home, and after duties were paid, most foreign merchandise such as pepper from Sumatra or tea and silk from China would go into shops or be sold at auction. Some cargo would be re-exported to Europe or other American ports. Mary Boardman Crowninshield (died 1840), the wife of then secretary of the navy Benjamin William Crowninshield (1772–1851), wrote to her husband in 1815 of “a most agreeable jaunt down to the wharf to see the prise [sic] goods.” She discovered “the most elegant ladies clothing . . . books most elegantly bound . . . elegant pictures landscapes in colours . . . chintzes very beautiful table linens.” This experience led her to exclaim, “I wish you could have been with me to HAVE SEEN THESE PRETTY THINGS.”7 Numerous advertisements for similar commodities were published daily in Salem newspapers, echoing Crowninshield’s description of Salem’s wharves and evidence that a wide array of goods were available to residents. In turn, Salemites used this vast assortment of commodities to create a cosmopolitan lifestyle normally associated with large European cities—using spices for meals, drinking tea in Chinese porcelain and English ceramic services, and imbibing spirits crafted in distant lands.

In postwar Salem, a burgeoning economy allowed local shipping merchants to emerge from their Puritan roots and become the port’s most influential class, eclipsing the religious elite that had governed the town in the previous century.8 Shipowners and captains developed new areas of the city to display their wealth, funding the construction of elegant Federal-style houses and public buildings. Their ships brought back more than fine goods and profit, though. A constant stream of material culture, both artwork and extraordinary objects referred to as “curiosities,” flowed into the town. When Jonathan Carnes returned to Salem in October 1799 after the Rajah’s second voyage to Sumatra, his valuable cargo of pepper was matched in importance by a select few items from this distant land. One might view these thirteen objects, which included a cup made from rhinoceros horn, an elephant’s tooth, and various flora and fauna, as mere bric-à-brac. To Salem mariners, however, they were cultural reflections of their new trading partners and perhaps emblems of American free trade in the new republic.

The objects Carnes gave to the East India Marine Society were the first donation to the newly founded institution. Among them was a most unusual-looking pipe he acquired near Banda Aceh, Sumatra (see figure 8). Not one but two metal stems emanate from the central bowl like cattle’s horns. The carved and decorated bowl is caked with a thick black tar, evidence that it was smoked at some point in time, but this dark patina does not reveal any further clues as to the object’s origins and meaning. Was this an object for leisure, or was it intended for ritual purposes? Today, little is known about this curious pipe except that it is not native to Sumatra.9 Its double-ended form, however, makes it one of the most symbolic objects in the Society’s collection, unintentionally encapsulating the multiple meanings imbued within this organization.

In the early days of the United States, Salem was representative of a new kind of American town, one at the forefront of the American Enlightenment.10 At this time, the town had two newspapers, ten churches, several schools, banks, publishers, insurance companies, charitable organizations, libraries, bookstores, a municipal water system, and concert halls in addition to the East India Marine Society Museum. Salem could also boast of its national political importance in these years immediately following the formation of the country. Native-son Timothy Pickering (1745–1829) was George Washington’s third secretary of state, and in the following decades, Salem mariners—many of who were Society members as well—became senators, congressmen, and cabinet members. The town was home to intellectuals who rivaled those in the nation’s early capital, Philadelphia. For instance, Edward Holyoke (1728–1829), a well-respected scientist and physician who had lived through the transformative eighteenth century in Salem, was a founding member and later president of the American Academy of Arts and Science (founded in 1780 in Massachusetts).

Figure 8. Two-stem smoking pipe, circa 1790, acquired by Captain Jonathan Carnes in Sumatra. Metal and wood, 2⅝ x 9½ x 1⅝ in. Peabody Essex Museum Collection, M18. © 2014 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by Walter Silver.

As Salem developed into a global port, the first American collecting institutions took form in the country. During the first half of the eighteenth century, they were versions of the Kunstkammer (art chamber) of the late Renaissance and the Wunderkammer (wonder chamber) of northern Europe. Better known as cabinets of curiosity, these precursors to the modern museum were created by noble and elite circles and scholars or virtuosos and emphasized an object-based epistemology to obtain knowledge. While many cabinets highlighted the rare and unusual, the collections reflected a scientific and human impulse to classify the world. They also contained ethnographic material amassed and disseminated from exploration during the Age of Discovery. Thus, cabinets of curiosity were partly devices for learning, partly fantastical, and tinged with a hint of religious reliquaries. While there were regional differences, princely cabinets in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe emphasized the rare and exotic; they were showpieces that enhanced the status of their owner. Among humanist scholars, cabinets served a more scientific purpose.11

At the end of the eighteenth century, European cabinets of curiosity were being replaced by large municipal or national institutions devoted to art: the universal survey museum.12 The Louvre, established in Paris in 1793, was the first such institution open to the public. Through its classical architecture and arrangement of Old World and Renaissance art, the Louvre promoted French culture as the next step on the historical trajectory of western civilization.13 The British Museum in London was similarly formed with an elitist ideology emphasizing the democratization of art for the masses.14 Universal survey museums did not appear on American shores until the end of the nineteenth century, when industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie (1887–1919) and J. P. Morgan (1837–1913) helped establish the museums still familiar to us, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

As private cabinets of curiosity fell out of fashion in Europe in the mid- to late eighteenth century, they emerged in America as the cabinets of learned societies in several colonial cities. For members of these institutions, the collections were local centers of scientific knowledge—essentially a form of a democratic enlightenment.15 In the mid-Atlantic region, Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, pursued “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things,” according to its founding member, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90).16 The collection featured scientific apparatuses, natural history specimens, Native American objects, and historical mementos such as the chair in which Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was believed to have written the Declaration of Independence. Further south, the Library Society of Charleston, South Carolina, started in 1773, collected material relating to local natural history and mechanical contraptions such as a telescope and a camera obscura, which served as visible indicators of the institution’s purported scientific goals.17 In New England, learned societies such as the Massachusetts Historical Society, founded in 1791, and the Anthology Society, founded in 1804 (which became the Boston Athenaeum in 1807), were primarily focused on creating exclusive subscription libraries but did promote collecting and displayed artwork.18 Eventually, the majority of these institutions donated their cabinets to the large art and natural history museums that emerged during the Gilded Age (such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston).19

Along with the cabinets of American learned s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index