Objects of distant exchange: The Northwest coast, early America, and the global imagination

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 64, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 592-620

  Zilberstein, Anya ^a  

^a Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67449135786     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/25096732     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. Mary Malloy, "Souvenirs of the Fur Trade, 1799-1832: The Northwest Coast Indian Collection of the Salem East India Marine Society," American Indian Art Magazine 11, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 31-35, 74
2. For Jewitt's published works, see John R. Jewitt, A Journal, Kept at Nootka Sound . . . Interspersed with Some Account of the Natives, Their Manners and Customs (Boston, 1807)
3. For a modern edition of the narrative, see John R. Jewitt, The Adventures arid Sufferings of John R. Jewitt, Captive of Chief Maquinna, ed. Hilary Stewart (Seattle, Wash., 1987)
4. Mary Malloy, Souvenirs of the Fur Trade: Northwest Coast Indian Art and Artifacts Collected by American Mariners, 1788-1844 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 52-53, 68, 85
5. On the early collection of the East India Marine Sociery and the construction of American national identity, see Daniel Finamore, "Displaying the Sea and Defining America: Early Exhibitions at the Salem East India Marine Society," Journal of Maritime Research (May 2002), http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/ conJmrArticle.4
6. James R. Fichter appraises the sea otter trade for early U.S. economic development and international business in the Pacific. See Fichter, "The United States, Britain, and the East Indies, 1773-1815" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2006), esp. 75-86, 326-55
7. See also Ernest S. Dodge, New England and the South Seas (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)
8. James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841 (Seattle, Wash., 1992)
9. Jacques M. Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784-1844 (Bethlehem, Pa., 1997)
10. Paula Findlen's study of the history of early modern cabinets and museums in Italy has broad relevance to the culture and politics of collecting. See Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1994)
11. For the history of early learned and scientific societies in North America, see Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn C. Brown, eds., The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War (Baltimore, 1976)
12. By-Laws and Regulations of the East India Marine Society, Massachusetts: An Association of Masters and Commanders of Vessels . . . (Salem, Mass., 1800)
13. For an overview of Pacific Northwest Coast objects in New England museums, see Malloy, Souvenirs of the Fur Trade
14. "To the East India Marine Society," Salem [Mass.] Gazette, Nov. 5, 1805, [2]
15. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York, 1986), 67
16. Laurier Turgeon, "The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object," Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1-29
17. Fred R. Myers, introduction to The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, ed. Myers (Santa Fe, N.Mex., 2001), 3-61
18. See also William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983)
19. Richard White, "Animals and Enterprise," in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York, 1994), 237-73. Cronon's study might be amplified to account for the globalization of American business beginning in the eighteenth century
20. For a review of debates about the effects of contact, see Cole Harris, "Social Power and Cultural Change in Pre-Colonial British Columbia," BC Studies, nos. 115-16 (Autumn-Winter 1997-98): 45-82
21. Anne Newport Royall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States by a Traveller (New Haven, Conn., 1826), 29-30 (quotation)
22. M. C. D. Silsbee, A Half Century in Salem (Boston, 1887)
23. Caroline Howard King, When I Lived in Salem, 1822-1866 (Brattleboro, Vt., 1937)
24. [Boston] Columbian Centinel, July 31, 1790, 167 ("Nootka Sound"). The northern sea otter has been distinguished biologically and commercially from Enhydra lutris nereis, the southern sea otter. Furriers and taxonomists have treated them as distinct subspecies because they considered the pelts of northern sea otters plusher and more opulently colored
25. See Adele Ogden, The California Sea Otter Trade, 1784-1848 (Berkeley, Calif., 1941), 5
26. Thomas Vaughan, Soft Gold: The Fur Trade and Cultural Exchange on the Northwest Coast of North America (Portland, Ore., 1982)
27. See Gibson, Otter Skins, 6, 177, 311 (table 2), 315 (table 7)
28. C. F. Newcombe, ed., Menzies' Journal of Vancouver's Voyage, April to October 1792 (Victoria, British Columbia, 1923), 96 (quotation, Apr. 6, 1792)
29. On the historical ecology of sea otters, see T. A. Rickard, "The Sea Otter in History," British Columbia Historical Quarterly 11, no. 1 (January 1947): 15-31
30. A. Birron and Z. S. Cole, trans., The Sea Otter (Kalan) (Jerusalem, Israel, 1962)
31. Karl W. Kenyon, The Sea Otter in the Eastern Pacific Ocean (Washington, D.C., 1969)
32. M. L. Riedman and J. A. Estes, "History, Distribution and Present Status of Populations," in The Community Ecology of Sea Otters, ed. G. R. VanBlaricom and Estes (New York, 1988), 7-12
33. Gibson, Otter Skins, 175-79, 277
34. David Igler, "Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770-1850," American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (June 2004): 693-719. Archaeological evidence suggests that sea otters in the North Pacific were overhunted in the precontact past, but estimates have been difficult to date or quantify
35. Kathryn M. Holland, "In the Wake of Prehistoric North Pacific Sea Mammal Hunters," Arctic Anthropology 29, no. 2 (1992): 63-72
36. For a contrary account of the advent of firearms, which minimizes their effect on native society, see Robin Fisher, "Arms and Men on the Northwest Coast, 1774-1825," BC Studies, no. 29 (Spring 1976): 3-18
37. John Ebbets to John Jacob Astor, Jan. 11, 1811, in John Jacob Astor Collection, vol. 33, folder 1, documents 1788-1812, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Mass. For the sketchiness of knowledge about marine (compared with terrestrial) extinctions with special reference to the regional extinctions of sea otters, see James T. Carlton et al., "Historical Extinctions in the Sea," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 30 (1999): 515-38
38. For statistics on the earlynineteenth-century commercial extinction, see Ogden, California Sea Otter Trade
39. Kenyon, Sea Otter in the Eastern Pacific
40. For a critical approach to the historical geography of the Northwest Coast, see Daniel W. Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver, Brirish Columbia, 2000), 155
41. Gibson, Otter Skins, 61
42. On the ecological effects of long-distance trade in other parts of the Pacific, namely Oceania, see J. R. McNeill, "Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific," Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 299-349
43. "Memoranda," Columbian Centinel and Massachusetts Federalist, Apr. 25, 1804, [2]
44. Jewitt, Journal, Kept at Nootka Sound, 4. John Thompson and John Rodgers Jewitt were companions in captivity, but the sailmaker apparently died in Philadelphia soon after their return to New England and little is known about him
45. Mark D. Kaplanoff, ed., Joseph Ingraham's Journal of the Brigantine Hope on a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of North America, 1790-92 (Barre, Mass., 1971), 224 (quotation, Aug. 7, 1792)
46. F. W. Howay, "Indian Attacks upon Maritime Traders of the North-West Coast, 1785-1805," Canadian Historical Review 6, no. 4 (December 1925): 287-309
47. Mary Malloy, "Boston Men" on the Northwest Coast: The American Maritime Fur Trade, 1788-1844 (Fairbanks, Alaska, 1998), 26
48. Kaplanoff, Joseph Ingraham's Journal, 225 (Aug. 8, 1792)
49. Kaplanoff, Joseph Ingraham's Journal, 222-23 ("great decency," Aug. 4, 1792)
50. Expansionists in Britain and the United States considered late-eighteenth-century colonization projects in the Northwest Coast. John Kendrick, the commander of the first American vessel to the coast, was instructed: "If you make any fort or improvement of land upon the coast, be sure you purchase the soil of the natives." Kendrick secured five deeds for land held by Maquinna and five other Nootka chiefs, named one tract Massachusetts Bay, and sent the attested copies to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in March 1793. See F. W. Howay, "An Early Colonization Scheme in British Columbia," British Columbia Historical Quarterly 3, no. 1 (January 1939): 51-63 (quotation, 51)
51. On American merchants' entry to the Pacific trade, see Gibson, Otter Skins, 36-38, 100-107
52. For the history of the Spanish and British at Nootka Sound, see Cook, Flood Tide of Empire
53. Gough, Northwest Coast
54. Clayton, Islands of Truth, 105
55. On the nature of relationships between whites and Indians in the maritime trade, see Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (Vancouver, British Columbia, 1977), 1-23
56. Malloy, "Boston Men" on the Northwest Coast, 44-60
57. On changes in the potlatch in the early contact period, see Erna Gunther, Indian Life on the Northwest Coast of North America: As Seen by the Early Explorers and Fur Traders during the Last Decades of the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 1972)
58. Douglas Cole and Ira Chaikin, An Iron Hand upon the People: The Law against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast (Seattle, Wash., 1990)
59. Katherine L. Reedy-Maschner and Herbert D. G. Maschner, "Marauding Middlemen: Western Expansion and Violent Conflict in the Subarctic," Ethnohistory 46, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 703-43 ("gaining status," 716)
60. Joyce Wike, "Social Stratification among the Nootka," Ethnohistory 5, no. 3 (Summer 1958): 219-41, ("'bad chief,'" 222). Wike's work has been associated with the much-disputed cultural enrichment hypothesis: the argument that contact not only intensified but also enhanced native social and cultural forms. For the purposes of the present analysis, the first part of her formulation and its application to the potlatch remain useful
61. For a reappraisal of the enrichment hypothesis, see Harris, BC Studies 115-16
62. For a discussion of the role of status bargaining in the early modern history of global trade, see Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 - the Present (Armonk, N.Y., 1999)
63. For similar explanations of Indian attacks on trading ships as acts of revenge, see Howay, Canadian Historical Review 6
64. Frank E. Ross, "American Adventures in the Early Marine Fur Trade with China," Chinese Social and Political Science Review 21, no. 2 (July 1937): 221-67
65. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (Boston, 1961), 55
66. For interpretations that contextualize the 1803 attack in terms of native history, see Fisher, Contact and Conflict
67. For a broader discussion of the historiographical influence of noble savage stereotypes, see Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, 1999)
68. Journals of Captain Cook, 542, 545-46
69. "The Journal of Jacinto Caamano," ed. Henry R. Wagner and W. A. Newcombe, trans. Harold Grenfell, in British Columbia Historical Quarterly 2, no. 3 (July 1938): 203 ("sheath knife")
70. Fisher and Bumsted, Voyage to the North West Coast, 108 ("great inconstancy"), 36 ("Artificers")
71. Archibald Menzies to Joseph Banks, Apr. 4, 1790, in Richard H. Dillon, "Archibald Menzies' Trophies," British Columbia Historical Quarterly 15, nos. 3-4 (July-October 1951): 151-59 ("old bayonets," 155-56)
72. Jewitt, Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings, 16
73. Jewitt, Journal, Kept at Nootka Sound, 6 (Mar. 30, 1803)
74. On slavery among Northwest Coast natives, see Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America (Berkeley, Calif., 1997)
75. Jewitt, Journal, Kept at Nootka Sound, 12 (Nov. 29, 1803)
76. Frederic Howay, in Gibson, Otter Skins, 58
77. Jewitt, Journal, Kept at Nootka Sound, 27 (July 20, 1804)
78. For a comprehensive statistical study of postcontact epidemics on the Northwest Coast, see Robert Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Popidation Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874 (Seattle, Wash., 1999)
79. Igler, American Historical Review 109
80. King, When I Lived in Salem, 28-31
81. Commonplace 5, no. 2 (January 2005), http://www.common-place.org/vol-05/ no-02/
82. Paul W. Mapp, "Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 713-24
83. See Morison, Maritime History of Massachusetts
84. Walter Muir Whitehill, The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem: A Sesquicentennial History (Salem, Mass., 1949), 34-75 (quotations, 36-37)
85. On the creation of an Ethnology Department in the museum and the reorganization of its collections, see Whitehill, East India Marine Society, 34-53
86. For souvenirs as art commodities, see Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Seattle, Wash., 1998)
87. See also Grant Keddie, "Kwah's Dagger: The Early Use of Iron by First Nations" (Victoria, British Columbia, 2002), http://www .royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/Content_Files/Files/KWAHsdaggernewversion.pdf
88. East-India Marine Society of Salem (1831), 151 ("Three thousand yards"), 64 ("war dress"), 46 ("Djerid")
89. Royall, Sketches of History, 362 ("repetition")