Abstract
As scholars of maritime history and masculinity have shown, masculinity was a distinct marker of nineteenth-century Western concepts of civilisation, but the multifaceted definitions of both concepts were undergoing a profound transformation. For American mariners, these constructions of masculinity confronted them on several fronts. In the Atlantic of the Napoleonic Wars, American mariners had to deflect European, especially British, criticism that they were a backward, virtually barbaric people. As they reached into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, they confronted challenges to the idea of civilisation itself in the unfamiliar customs of other peoples they encountered. Exploration complicated these ideas by suggesting new forms of civility. In this project, masculine politeness was their most powerful tool.
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Notes
- 1.
Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery, in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands. 2nd ed. (Boston, 1818), 59–62.
- 2.
Delano, Narrative, 38.
- 3.
The literature on masculinity is extensive. For a sampling, see: Ava Baron, “Masculinity, the Embodied Male Worker, and the Historian’s Gaze,” International Labor and Working-Class History no. 69, Working-Class Subjectivities and Sexualities (Spring, 2006): 143–60; Joanne Begiato, “Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in Eighteenth- And Nineteenth-Century British Culture,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (2016): 125–47; R.W. Connell, “The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History,” Theory and Society, 22, no. 5, Special Issue: Masculinities (1993): 597–623; Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, “What Have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500–1950,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 274–80; Peter Jackson, “The Cultural Politics of Masculinity: Towards a Social Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, no. 2 (1991): 199–213; Isaac Land, “Gender History: Inclusion versus Integration,” Global Maritime History: Maritime History, Broadly Conceived (2 March 2014), https://globalmaritimehistory.com/gender-history-inclusion-versus-integration/, accessed 26 March 2014; R.A. Nye, “Review Essay: Western Masculinities in War and Peace,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 417–38; John Tosh, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History Workshop 38 (1994): 179–202.
- 4.
Dane A. Morrison, True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2014).
- 5.
Steven C. Bullock, Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
- 6.
Konstantin Dierks, “Letter Writing, Masculinity, and American Men of Science, 1750–1800,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 65, Explorations in Early American Culture (1998), 168; Steven Maynard, “Rough Work and Rugged Men: The Social Construction of Masculinity in Working-Class History,” Labour/Le Travail 23 (1989): 159–69.
- 7.
George E. Haggerty, “Thank God It’s Friday: The Construction of Masculinity in Robinson Crusoe,” Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximilian E. Novak and Carl Fisher (New York: Modern Language Association, 2005), 78–87; Joanne Begiato (Bailey), “Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, c. 1760–1860,” Journal for Maritime Research 17 (2015): 117–33; Michèle Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 312–29; Jeffrey D. Glasco, “The Seaman Feels Him-self a Man,” International Labor and Working-Class History 66, New Approaches to Global Labor History (2004): 40–56. Where Cohen asserts that politeness was dying out by the early nineteenth century, I suggest a different chronology: Politeness broke down for Americans, but later than Cohen suggests for Britain because they needed the concept to support their pretensions of national legitimacy.
- 8.
Samuel Shaw, The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw, the First American Consul at Canton (Boston, 1847); Delano, Narrative; Edmund Fanning, Voyages Round the World (New York, 1833) and Voyages to the South Seas (New York, 1838); and Richard Jeffry Cleveland, A Narrative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises (Cambridge, MA, 1842).
- 9.
For studies of masculinity in the US early republic, see: Jochen Achilles, “Purgers and Montaged Men: Masculinity in Hawthorne’s and Poe’s Short Stories,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 43, no. 4, Engendering Manhood (1998): 577–92; James E. Bishop, “A Feeling Farmer: Masculinity, Nationalism, and Nature in Crèvecoeur’s ‘Letters,’” Early American Literature 43, no. 2 (2008): 361–77; Dierks, “Letter Writing, Masculinity, and American Men of Science, 1750–1800,” 167–98; Toby L. Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” The Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (1994): 51–80; Myra C. Glenn, “Troubled Manhood in the Early Republic: The Life and Autobiography of Sailor Horace Lane,” Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 1 (2006): 59–93; Luis A. Iglesias, “‘And Yet He May Be Our Man’: The Cross-Dressing Sailor in Cooper’s Early Sea Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65, no. 3 (2010): 283–314; Linda K. Kerber, et al., “Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic,” The William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1989): 565–85; Carol Lasser, “Gender, Ideology, and Class in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 10, no. 3 (1990): 331–37; Brian P. Luskey, “‘What Is My Prospects?’: The Contours of Mercantile Apprenticeship, Ambition, and Advancement in the Early American Economy,” The Business History Review 78, no. 4 (2004): 665–702; Jeff Osborne, “Constituting American Masculinity,” American Studies 49, no. 3/4 (2008): 111–32.
- 10.
Dierks, “Letter Writing,” 167.
- 11.
Salem Gazette, 7 June 1799.
- 12.
Fisher Ames, “Eulogy of Washington,” 8 February 1800, Works of Fischer Ames, I, ed. W.B. Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 523.
- 13.
Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, 5 March 1784.
- 14.
Commendation for the Empress’s voyage came from Congress of the Confederation of the United States; Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, 11 March 1784.
- 15.
Salem Gazette, 4 March 1784; Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, 11 March 1784.
- 16.
New Hampshire Mercury and General Advertiser, 19 July 1785; Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, 11 March 1784.
- 17.
Shaw, Journals, passim.
- 18.
Shaw, Journals, 153; Shaw to Jay, 19 May 1785, in Shaw, Journals, 337.
- 19.
Shaw, Journals, 153–157; Henri Cordier, “Américains et Français à Canton au XVIIIe siècle,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 2 (1898): 1–13.
- 20.
Shaw, Journals, 153–55, 338.
- 21.
Shaw, Journals, 181.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Shaw, Journals, 164.
- 24.
Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser, 16 September 1785.
- 25.
Shaw, Journals, 180–81, 317.
- 26.
Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9–17.
- 27.
Delano, Narrative, 59.
- 28.
Delano, Narrative, 59–60.
- 29.
Delano, Narrative, 63.
- 30.
Delano, Narrative, 60.
- 31.
Delano, Narrative, 67.
- 32.
Delano, Narrative, 65.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London; Routledge, 1992).
- 35.
Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 31–34.
- 36.
Fanning dedicated his book “[t]o the American People,” noting “his high admiration of their character as an enlightened nation.” The Introduction expressed his “earnest desire that his friends and countrymen may obtain such information … as when faithfully followed will promote their advantage, and be of service to them.” Fanning, Voyages Round the World, iii, x.
- 37.
Scholars have elided the concern for civility and reception overseas as a central trope of the American sea narrative. Hester Blum, for instance, depicts such passages as a “tiring sequence of encounters in ‘Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and American Sea Narratives’”, Early American Studies (2003), 138. Americans of the early republic and antebellum periods, however, would have appreciated the form of Captain Robinson’s conversation. In Joanne Freeman’s study of honour in the early republic, these forms structured national politics, and “Congressmen were no less skilled at deploying insults of honor. Indeed, carefully phrased honor attacks shaped and channeled congressional debate to an extraordinary degree.” Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 29.
- 38.
Walter Frederic Brooks, History of the Fanning Family: A Genealogical Record to 1900 of the Descendants of Edmund Fanning, 2 vols. (Worcester, MA: n.p., 1905), 250–51; Fanning, Voyages Round the World, iii, x–xii.
- 39.
Morrison, True Yankees, 100–101.
- 40.
Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 67–71.
- 41.
Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 73, 75.
- 42.
Fanning, Voyages, 75–76, 81–82, 118–21, 189–90.
- 43.
Fanning, Voyages, 254–57.
- 44.
Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 257–62.
- 45.
Cleveland, Voyages and Enterprises, 27–30.
- 46.
Cleveland, Voyages and Enterprises, I: 108–12.
- 47.
Cleveland, Voyages and Enterprises, II: 16.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Cleveland, Voyages and Enterprises, 237–38.
- 50.
Cleveland, Voyages and Enterprises, 238–39.
- 51.
Cleveland, Voyages and Enterprises, 233–45.
- 52.
Shaw, Journals, 317.
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Morrison, D.A. (2021). ‘He Was Possessed of the Very First Natural Abilities’: American Mariners’ Construction of Masculinity on the Far Side of the World. In: Downing, K., Thayer, J., Begiato, J. (eds) Negotiating Masculinities and Modernity in the Maritime World, 1815–1940. Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77946-7_3
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