True Yankees: The South Seas & the Discovery of American Identity

“A fascinating perspective on how America’s early voyages of commerce and discovery to the exotic South Seas helped the new nation forge its identity. ” —Eric Jay Dolan, bestselling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters

Drawing on private journals, letters, ships’ logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, 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 travellers 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.

“The book is informative and entertaining, a rare combination. Highly recommended. ” —Choice

© 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press (Ebook): 9781421415437

Release date

Ebook: 4 December 2014