Depicting Geographic Knowledge: Mariners’ Drawings from Salem, Massachusetts

PATRICIA JOHNSTON

THE ATLAS of the French Pacific explorer La Pérouse was one of the most popular books in Salem at the turn of the nineteenth century. Its title page illustrates contemporary ideas about the vital role that words, images, and objects played in conveying knowledge about the far reaches of the globe (fig. 1). In the 1797 image a winged figure holding an armillary sphere, likely a personification of the wind that drove La Pérouse’s sails, leads the classically draped figure of Navigation toward a large, unscrolled map. Navigation holds a paddle adorned with the image of a dolphin, as it was commonly portrayed on eighteenth-century decorative arts, with a flat rounded bill and split tail. The sea mammal, which in Greek mythology helped sailors by guiding their boats, symbolizes marine power. Circling around the map is a series of putti, some of whom hold the tools of navigation. Counterclockwise from the top, these include a sextant, telescope, hourglass, anchor, and a telltale compass. A large quadrant, a precursor of the sextant, is partially obscured by the map.

Though the map is clearly labeled at the top as the route of La Pérouse, it is somewhat difficult to read because the south is oriented toward the incoming figure on the right rather than toward the viewer. In contrast, the map’s labels are oriented toward the readers; thus the land and sea names are upside down when the map is studied to trace the explorer’s route. In a process perhaps analogous to the experience of Salem’s Federal-period citizens, the resulting initial confusion forces the reader to stop and study before new information can be integrated into existing conceptions of the charted world (fig. 2).

While the figure on the right introduces readers to the world, two on the left record it. At the bottom left, a figure with brushes and palette on the ground to her left sketches the peoples that La Pérouse encountered on his mission; the figure above her looks toward these same subjects with her pen poised to write about them (fig. 3). On his departure from France in 1785 La Pérouse was instructed to “observe the genius, character, manners, customs, bodily constitution, language, government and number of inhabitants.” These directions specified an interest in anthropological observation more intensive than comparable instructions to earlier European expeditions. La Pérouse was also directed to follow Captain Cook’s lead and continue to make botanical and zoological discoveries, to collect “natural curiosities, both of land and sea” that were “to be arranged in order; and a descriptive catalogue of each kind to be drawn up.”1

Fig. 1. Title Page to Atlas du Voyage de La Pérouse. Paris: L’Imprimerie de la Republique, 1797. Designed by J. M. Moreau le Jeune; engraved by Ph. Triere and L. Aubert. Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection.

Fig. 2. Detail of Title Page to Atlas du Voyage de La Pérouse.

Fig. 3. Detail of Title Page to Atlas du Voyage de La Pérouse.

Fig. 4. Detail of Title Page to Atlas du Voyage de La Pérouse.

The indigenous peoples that La Pérouse encountered are represented in striking contrast to the idealized Grecian beauties, perhaps arguing for the superiority of Europe and thus justification of exploitation (fig. 4). In the case of the two fur-clothed figures, who wear clothing similar to those of Alaskan natives pictured in later parts of the book, there is an obvious attempt to represent them as crude and animalistic; the illustrator emphasizes unique cultural practices, such as the labret implanted in the lips, that would be shocking to European readers. The three native figures in the background have more distinctive costuming, with headdresses that suggest Aleutian and Asian identities. At the bottom center, another putto holds up a botanical specimen. The native peoples and plants refer to the research goals of La Pérouse’s expedition. In essence, the title page of the atlas is an allegory of the acts of gathering and studying botanical and ethnographic information via text and image.

La Pérouse’s atlas was read by the intellectual and maritime elite in Salem, likely because it reinforced their belief in the value of studying the wider world. The atlas illustrated the importance of recording geographical and cultural information, just as Salem’s merchants and mariners were developing new American trade routes. British colonial regulations had limited American ships to the Atlantic Basin. Building new legal global trade after the Revolution required geographical information, such as the location and depth of harbors, channels, and shoals, and cultural knowledge, such as indigenous customs and currencies.

By 1800 Salem was a thriving seaport of 9400 people nestled along a shallow, protected harbor halfway between the bustling state capital of Boston and the small fishing village of Gloucester at the tip of Cape Ann. Vessels preparing for, or returning from, international voyages lined Salem’s nearly thirty wharfs. Tea, coffee, spices, wines, textiles, shoes, and ceramics packed its harbor stores. The Salem fleet traded from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific—truly a global reach. By 1800 international trade had transformed Salem into the sixth largest city in the new United States, after Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston.2

Salem’s merchants and mariners shared a remarkable visual culture of prints and drawings that provided specific knowledge of distant parts of the world at a level of detail that made them more competitive in the emerging Asian and Pacific trade. Part of this visual culture consisted of printed images—often expensive, luxurious illustrations for voyage narratives, such as those engraved for the La Pérouse atlas, which were typically imported from London or printed in the larger American cities.3 Another part of this visual culture was made up of unique images; these maps and sketches were drawn by mariners and incorporated into ships’ logs and other navigational documents. Both print and manuscript representations were significant in building the rich archive available in the town. Many Salem sea captains and traders felt an obligation to contribute to the archive, using the language of drawing to share information they gathered on their voyages.

Modes and venues for sharing geographic knowledge have existed for many centuries; for instance, manuscript maps circulated in the middle ages. In the colonial period, Americans shared knowledge primarily through kinship networks, fraternal organizations, and fledgling libraries. During the Early Republic, these venues for the circulation of information and ideas became more formalized. By 1800 Salem had flourishing networks for sharing information. Subscription libraries such as Salem’s Social Library acquired and circulated published materials to members, while fraternal organizations such as the East India Marine Society promoted exchanges of personal seafaring and trading experiences. These institutions strengthened ties among the community’s elite and provided them with a competitive edge in trade. Access to global geographic information—combined with navigational skill, business sense, and a measure of good luck—could lead to great wealth and prestige. This commercial success, built on international trade, reinforced a change in American identity from colonial subjects on the margin of empire to international trading partners in a thriving global marketplace.

The Social Library

Following patterns established in other American seaports, Salem quickly built institutions to provide the knowledge necessary for success in the expanded international economy.4 Founded in 1761, Salem’s Social Library grew out of an earlier intellectual men’s gathering called the Monday Night Club. The Social Library counted among its members many of Salem’s merchants and sea captains, along with doctors, lawyers, and ministers—and sometimes their widows and daughters, who could inherit shares. The original collection of the Social Library conformed to typical American eighteenth-century reading patterns: doses of Greek and Roman history, philosophical and theological treatises, and the new literary form of the novel. However, as might be expected in a seaport, the holdings also had a strong international focus with a large selection of published chronicles of sea voyages.5 The prominent physician Edward Augustus Holyoke donated a Book of Mapps. The original library also held the Koran Tales, the Life of Mahomet, Piratical States of Barbary, and the Life of Czar.6

In the Early Republic the continuing Social Library was a significant resource for global information in town, though as a private library access was restricted to the families of those who could afford to purchase a share. The library closed during the Revolution, and its archives show little activity through the 1780s, a period of economic depression in Salem. The phenomenal growth of shipping and disposable income in the 1790s, when Salem traders opened new paths to the East Indies, was matched by lively interest in the library. After a long lull, the library admitted eleven new members in 1796. Each year afterward, several members joined until 1810, when the Social Library merged with the Philosophical Library (whose members were largely ministers and its collections comprised primarily of science, philosophy, and theology texts) to form the present Salem Athenaeum.7 New members of the Social Library circa 1800 included physicians, lawyers, shopkeepers and pharmacists, as well as some of the town’s leading shipowners and sea captains.

The Salem Athenaeum archives hold extraordinary resources in the form of two charge books that record the books that Social Library members took home. The first one begins with the library’s establishment in 1761. The second begins with the influx of new members in 1796. Arranged by shareholder, these charge books allow study of both the popularity of specific books and the taste of individual readers.8 The acquisitions and circulation patterns reveal how widely read were Salem’s citizens and how wide-ranging their knowledge of the world.

The most in-demand books were voyage narratives. The publication of Cook’s Voyages set off a publishing trend on both sides of the Atlantic that was reflected in Salem’s libraries. It seemed that readers could not get enough illustrated natural history and travel adventure literature; tales by Anson, Volney, Park, Coxe, La Pérouse, Bruce, Shaw, Anacharsis, Ulloa, and Niebuhr were always checked out.

Two examples of members’ reading lists, one a merchant and one a sea captain, suggest the reading patterns of the elite. William Gray—shipowner, merchant, and one of the wealthiest men in Salem—preferred travels, histories, and nature studies. Much of his reading focused on the Middle East: Shaw’s travels to the Barbary Coast, Cyrus’s travels to Persia, Dallaway’s Constantinople, and the Life of Mahomet. Gray was equally interested in Europe; he checked out Nugent’s Grand Tour and Robertson’s History of Scotland, as well as compilations of comedies and tragedies. Like most other members of the Social Library, Gray did not seem concerned that information might be outdated. With equal regard, members checked out the new books and the original 1761 collection (which included books such as the Life of Mohamet, written decades before the library was founded).

Benjamin Hodges, who sailed to China in 1788–90 as captain of Gray’s ship, the William and Henry, had a reading list heavy on history, literature, and aesthetics. Typical of most library patrons, he examined Park’s travels to Africa, Moore’s travels to Italy and France, Bourgoanne’s travels in Spain, and Wilson’s account of the Pelew Islands. Though Hodges might be intrigued by such firsthand narratives, the books he took out had little to do with the destinations to which he actually sailed: China, Russia, India, the Caribbean, and others. Of these he had firsthand experience, and his charge records show no evidence of research or reading about these places. It might be however, that the Social Library was not Hodges’s key repository for research for his own travels. He was a founding member of the East India Marine Society, and thus had access to their more specialized library and owned a number of books himself, although it is impossible to say which, because the titles of his personal library were not listed in his estate inventory.

Other libraries in Salem followed much the same pattern. The Library of Arts and Sciences, another private subscription institution founded in 1802, was heavy on expedition narratives, with holdings such as the twenty-volume collection of Mavor’s Voyages, as well as history, theology, philosophy, and aesthetics. While some selections, such as Roman History or the Encyclopedia Britannica might have been found anywhere in the United States, some, such as Gentoo [Hindu] Laws, were unusual holdings but appropriate for an international seaport.9 Libraries continued to be founded in Salem; by 1830 there were seventeen specialized libraries in the city.

One of the most popular reading emporiums was run by John Dabney, a newspaper publisher who in 1786 started the Salem Mercury, then published the Salem Gazette. In his newspapers, Dabney advertised the great variety of holdings for sale or rent: “divinity, history, biography, travels, voyages, memoirs, miscellanies, novels and poetry.” While some holdings overlapped those of the other libraries in town, the titles here tilted more toward entertainment. Visitors could chose selections such as Henry Fielding’s Amelia, or the Distressed Wife, the Arabian Nights Entertainments, or other popular literature.10

Private collections augmented Salem’s libraries. In a town that had both money and culture, some personal libraries became quite extensive. Ministers, of course, collected books. Reverend Thomas Barnard had 600 volumes, which he frequently lent out.11 Reverend Bentley collected over 4000 books during his thirty years in Salem. Wealthy merchants also bought books; Elias Hasket Derby, for example, bought a London collection of 700 books that came on the market, practically sight unseen. Books from these personal libraries circulated among friends and family.

East India Marine Society: Books and Charts

The East India Marine Society, founded in 1799, was the most significant organization in Salem for sharing global knowledge. Marine societies, common in seaports, typically emphasized charitable activities. The EIMS was a more select marine society, with an elite membership limited to sea captains and supercargoes (that is, the head traders) who had rounded either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn to engage in Asian commerce.12 Global knowledge was traded at its regular meetings and dinners, and also through its map, book, and object collections. Unique among such organizations, members were required to collect objects for its museum and to keep voyage logs for its library.13 The EIMS collection of books and voyage logs provided the members with information, and thus a competitive edge, not available otherwise. Members could view visual records of the wider world in the illustrations of published voyage narratives, or in images drawn by their brother mariners for their own voyage logs.

Though large selections of published sea chronicles also filled other Salem libraries, the East India Marine Society library was designed to do more: it targeted acquisitions tightly rather than comprehensively. The book committee, authorized to use the dues to buy any published “Books of History of Voyages and Travels and of Navigation” that might be useful to members, focused on very expensive volumes that even their well-off members chose not to purchase for their personal collections. While no early catalogue of the books has survived, the minutes of the meetings mention some specific acquisitions, and the number of volumes seems to have reached about 250 by 1830. As would be expected, the library held an elaborate multi-volume edition of Cook’s Voyages, which was checked out by Captains Gardner, Pickman, and others. Most members, however, probably owned their own editions, even if they were less elegantly illustrated.14

One of the first purchases for the EIMS library was the large 1799 London edition of La Pérouse’s voyages, with deluxe engravings copied after the earlier French edition. The EIMS’s luxe edition of La Pérouse was continually checked out—to mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, then Captains Devereux, Lambert, and Prince.15 La Pérouse was one of the most popular authors in Salem, perhaps because he traveled to less well-known parts of the Pacific, such as the northwest coast and south sea islands, which Salem mariners targeted as the next areas of opportunity.16

In 1801 the East India Marine Society decided to purchase the heavily illustrated volume of Vancouver’s voyages. Vancouver also traveled to Pacific territories unknown to Salem voyagers. They paid book dealer John West the enormous sum of $39.12 for the three quarto volumes of text and a fourth folio of maps and engravings, then incurred the further expense of $8.25 for West to bind the volumes.17 No doubt Salem mariners were so eager to study La Pérouse and Vancouver because they planned to initiate trans-Pacific routes to replace the traditional Salem route to India and China by way of the Cape of Good Hope.

The EIMS also purchased fifteen of John Churchman’s variation charts for $52.50.18 Churchman’s variations were a series of sea charts of the Mid-Atlantic coast that were very useful for the frequent runs that distributed imported Asian goods to the American cities to the south. Churchman’s variations were among the library’s most valued items; individual charts were continually checked out by Captains Taylor, Sage, Orne, George Hodges, and Benjamin Crowninshield in preparation for their journeys.19

Voyage Logs and the Topographical

Perhaps most importantly, the EIMS library collected unique information valuable for international navigation and trade. The bylaws required that all members returning from voyages present their journals to the library committee, and beginning in 1801, the Society even provided blank printed journals for seafarers. As Inspector of Journals, Nathaniel Bowditch, author of the pathbreaking New American Practical Navigator, arranged and wrote a table of contents for the voyage logs, then had them bound. The blank logs provided form fields to systemize the requested information, yet left blank pages for flexibility in individual contributions. Following established maritime traditions of voyage logs, the book was labeled with the name of the ship’s master and the person keeping the journal (who might be the master, supercargo, or first mate), and the destination. The writer recorded each day’s longitude and latitude, and the “general state of the weather, winds, currents, bearings of capes, islands, &c. with their estimated distances and, any other remarks that may be useful to navigators.”

These journals were sometimes illustrated. Salem mariners’ drawings reflect the conventions of European naval illustration and charting, popular drawing manuals, and engraved voyage illustrations. They were following a long history of drawing as a language for communicating knowledge about the world. Mapping and some landscape representations were practiced in the ancient world. As early as the fourteenth century, meticulous botanical studies were drawn for Italian textbooks. Global exploration in the sixteenth century encouraged the development of images of panoramic views.20

In the eighteenth century, topographical studies provided both informational and aesthetic value.21 Artistic representation was an integral part of eighteenth-century expeditionary voyages; Captain Cook, for example, brought artists on each of his three voyages. Military officers in training at the Royal Naval College and men preparing to join the British East India Company received artistic training, particularly in drawing and watercolor, before they were deployed abroad.22 Drawing coastal outlines and perspective views for future ventures was perhaps an even more important visual task than recording scientific and cultural information, and voyage narratives such as Cook and La Pérouse often had an equal or greater number of charts than illustrations. Although much of the literature on the history of drawing in the eighteenth century has emphasized its role as a polite art, practiced by women, it was also a very practical and valuable masculine art, with military, scientific, and commercial applications.23

Salem mariners recognized the limits of published information and the dangers that could befall them in unfamiliar waters and ports. They also recognized the value of their experience for others. Luther Dana displayed such self-awareness when he served as the ship’s master and journal keeper of the Recovery on its voyage from Salem to Mocha, a port city on the coast of the Red Sea in Yemen, which was renowned for its chocolate flavored coffee. Referring to a compass that consistently gave him erroneous readings, Dana wrote that he, “The Journalist,” omitted the readings to avoid misleading others. Dana commented throughout the log that the charts he had were incorrect. He recorded no information about people or customs, rather his prose attempted to capture his views of the coast so that others could replicate his journey with greater ease. Passing “Cape Guardufoi” [Cape Guardafui] on the horn of Africa in present-day Somalia, Dana noted “This land is remarkable for appearing like two white Peaks, one with a block Top.” It reminded him of “a large rigged vessel.” He observed that at first it appears as five islands, but as one gets closer he can see they are joined as one. Perhaps Dana simply described landmarks rather than comment on them because he saw little charm in the landscape: a place “without the least appearance of verdure.”24

Dana’s drawing style parallels his prose style: it is informational. In his drawing of Cape Babel Mandel, his concern is to provide enough detail that future mariners can recognize they have reached the landmark, and know what to do to get from there to Mocha. In a sketch that he titled Appearance of Cape Babel Mandel as you come from the West^d, Dana labels five distinct landmarks with the letters A through E (fig. 5), and places a compass underneath. Dana’s drawing of the coastline spreads across the full length of the page. The sea is simply suggested: it is the void between bases of the horizontally aligned landmasses. Yet the implied sea passages between the land are as much the point of the drawing as the land forms. The key beneath the first land form on the left labels A as an island, but it is the empty area B that is more significant—the famous “Streights of Babel Mandel,” which voyagers must enter to reach their destination of Mocha. C labels Cape Babel Mandel itself, and D demonstrates the primary point of the drawing. This empty area to the left of the Cape could be treacherous: “At a Distance or in the dark thick weather a Stranger would likely to suppose this to be the Streights.” The sea at the letter E, where a landmass seeming to be an island is connected to the mainland by an isthmus, is another possible deception that “might Easily be taken for the Entrance.”

Fig. 5. Luther Dana, Appearance of Cape Babel Mandel as you come from the West^d. Log of the Recovery, Salem to Mocha, 1800–1801. East India Marine Society papers MH-88, Volume 1, p. 620. Courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Fig. 6. Nathaniel Bowditch. Longitude and Latitude of Trinidad. Log of the Astrea, Salem to Lisbon, Madeira, and Manilla, 1796–1797. East India Marine Society papers, MH-88, Volume 1, p. 255. Courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Dana’s drawing and its labeling warn his fellow seamen to be on the lookout for this critical juncture since they might easily be confused and drawn off course here. Since the sea is suggested rather than represented, it projects a calm presence between solid landmasses. But Dana’s words belie the idyllic scene: “Cape Babel Mandel first appears something like two Isl^d the Northernmost resembling gunners quoin rising gradually from the Northw^rd. Southerly where it is high and craggy,” it has a “dangerous bay where Strangers are likely to be deceived.”

Despite this geographic focus in Dana’s drawing, his visual vocabulary borrows from the fine arts. He uses delicate hatches that are arranged into lines that curve and change direction to suggest volumes and shifting planes on the hilly coast. This drawing style, and the convention of alphabetic labeling, are drawn from the long history of engraving, an art he was familiar with from illustrated voyage narratives.

Indeed, many of the illustrations in voyage logs were even more mathematical and less artistic in character. Nathaniel Bowditch, as journal keeper of the ship Astrea commanded by Henry Prince included a chart he made to plot the longitude and latitude of Trinidad (fig. 6).25 Bowditch’s visual language is comprised of numbers and triangles; his goal safer, more efficient navigation. It is based on standard conventions for sea charts, which he sought to make more reliable.

Drawings of harbors were very much tied to print traditions. William Haswell’s drawings of the port of Manila illustrate the standard conventions of how mariners used different types of topographical charts and views to synthesize crucial information. In one example, Haswell presents a Plan of the Bay of Manila in the Isle of Lucona, a sea chart of the harbor that echoes the standard conventions (fig. 7). In a decorative cartouche, he clearly labels it a copy, even as he signs it. The image is based on a survey of the harbor by Señor Don Malaspina. It includes the symbols necessary for decoding it: a scale, a compass, numbers indicating harbor depths, and the names of notable features. In both Bowditch’s visual computation and Haswell’s more accessible chart, the sea is enlivened with both visual description and data; the land is a void, terra incognita to the seafarer.

Fig. 7. William Haswell. Plan of the Bay of Manilla in the Isle of Lucona. Logs of the Elizabeth, Charlotta, and Pallas, 1801–1803. Courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Fig. 8. William Haswell. Appearance of the Entrance of Manilla Bay. Logs of the Elizabeth, Charlotta, and Pallas, 1801–1803. Courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Mariners sometimes used this information in conjunction with their own personal observations as the basis of landscape drawings to depict harbors as they were perceived during arrival by sea. In another image, Haswell provides an experiential image of the more informational hydrographic survey, an acknowledgement that mariners needed both, and perhaps referencing the long tradition of drawing coastal profiles (fig. 8). Haswell neatly labeled the Appearance of the Entrance of Manilla Bay in both its title and the names of the mountains and islands, the key landscape features seen on entering the bay. In images such as this, documentary goals combine with artistic landscape ambitions. Haswell’s pencil traces the light hitting the front of mountains and the islands rising out of the sea. Shadows emphasize their three-dimensionality. A single line separates the sea from the sky and the landforms are aligned on a single horizontal axis. A simple unlabeled compass placed in the center orients the viewer. The result is a drawing that captures the distinctive topography of Manila harbor. Only essential information is represented and a complex view is reduced to easily understandable information.

Like most mariners, Haswell came from a seafaring family. His father and grandfather had served in the Royal Navy; his brother Robert Haswell was a mate on the Columbia, which left from Boston to become the first American ship to circumnavigate the world, and his half-sister Susannah (Haswell) Rowson was the author of Charlotte Temple and founder of a school for girls in Boston.26 Both William and his brother Robert were talented draftsmen, but it is not clear where they acquired their training. They received an early education in Boston, but the Tory family was forced to move to England during the American Revolution.

Like his brother, William Haswell shipped out of Boston. He sailed to Batavia on the barque Lydia, keeping the voyage logs as first mate. In Batavia he became master of the snow Elizabeth, sailing to Manila and Guam and back to Manila. There he joined the Charlotta to Calcutta, and returned to Salem on the Pallas under its master John Dallings. Haswell’s career path was unusual for a Salem mariner of the period. Unlike most seamen, Haswell apparently looked for new employment at each major destination. He kept his logs with him, for despite the different ship’s owners and masters that he worked for, his four logs were bound together in Salem, his final destination. Dallings was a member of the East India Marine Society, and thus under obligation to donate his voyage records. Haswell might have been pleased to see his work of the past two and one-half years enter a library and museum, for the three earlier logs are bound with the required one.

Haswell, with his long family ties to the sea, was undoubtedly steeped in the conventions of maritime representation. Like other mariners in the Atlantic basin, Salem seafarers were intimately familiar with the English Pilot, a series of books that were continually in print from the first editions in 1671 until the early nineteenth century.27 This series disseminated visual conventions for geographic representation. Each of the five parts of the English Pilot was devoted to a different region. Originally compiled by John Seller, royal hydrographer, the first book focused on Europe and was illustrated with 29 double-page plates. In words echoed on the first page of the Salem voyage logs, the title page of the English Pilot explained its goals: “Describing the sea-coasts, capes, head-lands, bays, roads, harbours, rivers and ports together with the soundings, sands, rocks and dangers in the southern navigation upon the coasts of England, Holland, France, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, to the straits-mouth, and so off to the Western Islands. Shewing the courses and distances from one place to another: the setting of the tydes and currents: the ebbing and flowing of the sea.” The title page of the second book, on the Mediterranean, emphasized the Pilot’s visual resources and its eyewitness authority: “furnished with new and exact charts, draughts, and descriptions, gathered from the experience and information of divers able and judicious navigators.” The third book was intended to ease “oriental navigation”; the fourth book, exploration of the Americas; and the fifth book, Africa.28 Like the later founders of the EIMS, the compilers of the English Pilot recognized the value of their enterprise to their nation: “Published for the benefit of our country-men.”

The maps and drawings in the many volumes and editions of the English Pilot standardized conventions of geographic representation that had been developing for over a century and presented the most current state of knowledge. But they were not perfect guides. Salem mariners carried their Pilots with them, using them for reference, and correcting them where they fell short.

The need for this was clear; despite expert sailing skills and centuries of charting the seas and coasts, geographic knowledge was still incomplete and this hindered trade. Salem mariners were continually frustrated. Dudley Pickman, the journal keeper of the ship Anna, frequently corrected a latitude or longitude on a published map, and warned that maps of Tappanooley on Sumatra could not be taken at face value: “The English E. I. [East India] Pilot shews a plan of this Bay, which however is totally inaccurate & affords no Idea of the Place.”29 On his voyage to Sumatra, George Nichols complained that “my Port of Destination Mucat not being describ’d in any of my Books, and its Latitude given by Several Persons not corresponding nearer than 12 miles embarras’d me very much & was oblig’d to proceed with great Caution.” This was despite his access to the most current knowledge: “The Charts which I have are English and the latest extant State the Coast about Mucat is very badly laid down & the winds & Weather not better described in the E. I. [East India] Directory. After several days of anxiety and Fatigue, came to anchor at Mucat May 14^th 1802.”30 Lack of information could be distressing, and even dangerous. By sharing their newfound information, American mariners gained a safer, more competitive edge over the British.

And information was currency. The directions in the blank logbooks handed out to ship’s masters requested specific information in the directions printed on the first page: “an account of the coin, weights and measures . . . with the imports, exports, and manner of transacting business . . . Whatever is singular in the manners, customs, dress, ornaments, &c. of any people.” A number of the EIMS members followed these suggestions and wrote detailed discussions of local currency and valuations. James Deveraux, who commanded the ship Franklin from Salem to Batavia and Japan and back to Salem, provided fascinating directions on how to negotiate the complex Japanese requirements for trade, including impersonating Dutch traders by flying a Dutch flag.31 George Nichols shared his disappointment in market conditions in Manila, noting the great quantity of European goods depressed prices for American goods.32 On sailing to India, Nichols advised it was not worth trying to trade at Columbo or Pondicherry where he had little luck because of recent political changes, but to continue on to Madras, a more lucrative port.33 Luther Dana warned of the dangers of trading in Sumatra, where one should seek permission of the local rajah. Dana observed, “I should not feel Safe in a vessel doing Business at any of the out ports without a Sufficient number of hands & arms on board to defend her in case of any difficulty or attempt to surprise. A strong and vigilant watch is at all times required.”34 It is clear that these journals were not simply private memoirs; journal keepers expected their fellow ships’ masters to read their words. When captains were venturing to new ports, they provided detailed descriptions. When they were following well-worn paths, they barely mentioned their experiences. About his stop on the way to India, Nichols was concise: “the manner of doing business in Madeira is so generally known, it is unnecessary to say any thing respecting it.”35

Manners and Customs

Following eighteenth century practice of observing “the genius, character, manners, customs, bodily constitution, language, government and number of inhabitants,” as the instructions to La Pérouse put it, some Salem captains recorded keen observations of their trading partners. Nichols described the physical aspects of people he met as he tried to locate new ports to open up trade with Salem vessels. He found the population of Columbo large, and “the people are of Midling Stature and in general darker complexion than the Natives of any other place I have been at in India, but their features and dress are not Materially different from the Jentoos in Bombay.”36 Dudley Pickman noted in Madras, “The natives are of different castes or religions. The Gentoos do not shave the upper lip and wear a mark on the forehead resembling sealing wax generally a single perpendicular line. The Malabar caste shave the upper lip and daub over the forehead with something resembling blue paint. The Moormen cast have no mark.”37

These descriptions were frequently mixed with commentary that shows that American traders perceived strong cultural differences between their own culture, which they saw as based on hard work and rational religion, and that of the people they encountered. In reading their words, however, it is important to keep in mind their comments referred to the class of working men in each port, not the elites with whom they did business. In Madras, Nichols found people “much like the other Natives of India in being indolent and Inofensive.” Regarding the customs of the people, “I can only observe that they possess a great Deal of Superstition with Regard to their Religion &c.”38 Nichols echoed this observation on his voyage to Sumatra the next year: “They are Naturally a very lazy Indolent people, dirty in their Persons & scarcely any uniformity in their dress; on their heads they wear a handkerchief, done up a little like a Turban, and about their loins several yards of cloth which reaches a little below their knees, which is their only dress.”39 Luther Dana reported on Sumatra, “There is no such thing as hiring the Malays or Accheenese to labour they are too lazy and Indolent to handle their own pepper unless obliged too.”40 On trading in Manila, Bowditch noted “The natives are about as honest as their neighbours the Chinese; they stole several things from us, but by the goodness of the police, we recovered most of them.”41 Nichols complained “it is not prudent to intrust any of them with business of importance, without looking much after them, as it is the natural dispositions of the Natives of India to defraud at all opportunities.”42

Despite the pervasive impression, the mariners must have recognized that many people were required to work hard. They recognized, for example, that while they and their elite trading partners lived in relative luxury—as Dudley Pickman observed, “Every gentleman keeps his palanquin”—this must have been very difficult on those who served them.43 The palanquin clearly fascinated American traders. Many journalists remarked on it in their voyage logs. Five sea captains acquired one in 1803, and donated it to the East India Marine Society Museum on their return to Salem to use in the parades preceding their annual meeting.44 William Haswell provided a drawing of a Palanquin and Bearers to illustrate the intriguing sight of a palanquin in use in India. Four laborers, with a distinctive topknot hairstyle and dressed only in a piece of cloth wrapped around their loins, carry the handles of the elaborate conveyance on their shoulders (fig. 9). Surely such backbreaking labor by the very poor must have challenged their ideas of the natives’ work ethic. In Haswell’s drawing, we see that visual culture was used to convey cultural as well as geographic information to other mariners. Haswell chose as his subject one of the most unusual, and thus frequently described, sights of contact with India, and uses it to convey potentially useful information about customs, caste, and class.

Fig. 9. William Haswell. Palanquin and Bearers. Logs of the Elizabeth, Charlotta, and Pallas, 1801–1803. Courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Religion was perhaps the primary cultural characteristic the Salem voyagers saw as distancing themselves from the people they met. The Americans were fairly sophisticated about the distinctions between the religious practices of their various trading partners, even if ultimately they characterized all non-Protestant practices with the same pejorative adjectives. In India, they were aware of Hindu practices (which they called Jentoo or Gentoo). On Sumatra, Nichols observed “They are of the Mahometan Religion, but not very Superstitious, excepting in the food of which they are very much.”45 William A. Rogers noted that just north of the Malabar Coast he “Passed Mangalore, seaport of some importance . . . Inhabited by Gentoos and Mahomeddans. The Gentoos on their festivals carry their idols in triumph in a wagon, to the wheels of which are affixed crooked iron hooks, on these they throw themselves and are crushed to pieces.”46

And there was always a good measure of anti-Catholicism. Bowditch observed, “There are great numbers of Chinese at Manilla, but they are all obliged to become catholics.”47 George Nichols thought that if Madeira were “Inhabited by any other People than Portuguese it would produce, exclusive of the Wine, every Necessary of Life, instead of which they are dependent upon other Nations for almost every thing they want. I think this might be remidied by banishing the greater part of the many Priests & Friars, who serve only to oppress the Inhabitants & encourage Indolence.”48

In most instances, trade went smoothly. In Sumatra, Dana reported “in these excursions we always met with the utmost attention & civility from the Inhab,” which he attributed to American manners and honesty: “Probably that if we had treated them as Europeans in general are disposed to treat the meaner Casts of the Inhabitants of India we should not have had these priviledges & many others.”49 Dana showed unusual sensitivity to his trading partners’ perspectives: “Sometimes traders get into a quarrel with the natives by the frauds used in their dealings with them. The natives do not easily forget it but embrace the first opportunity of doing themselves justice.”50

The illustrations and written descriptions in the otherwise prosaic ships’ logs provided a way to share cultural as well as geographical information as Salem mariners developed Asian and Pacific trade. Personal global experience helped develop American commercial networks.

Language of the Picturesque

Describing landscape was an everyday activity for ships’ journal keepers. On the open seas they were required to record the weather, the currents, and the stars that helped them plot their location. As they approached land they described in words and images the coastal features. Most of the time, their images primarily reflected geographic and topographic traditions. But the late eighteenth century was also the time when picturesque traditions of landscape representation became widespread in the Anglo-American world. Salem mariners were well aware of representation in both topographic and picturesque traditions and incorporated aspects of both into their drawings.

A brief look at merchants’ and mariners’ reading on aesthetics, as revealed by their charge records at Salem’s Social Library provides insights into their artistic knowledge and level of sophistication.51 Many members read Edmund Burke’s philosophical treatise on the fine arts in the Sublime and the Beautiful, or Robert Dossie’s analysis of the commercial potential for applied arts in Handmaid to the Arts.52 Fresnoy’s Art of Painting circulated, as did Nugent’s Grand Tour.53 Both of these provided Salem readers with education in classical and Renaissance arts. However, the most popular book on the arts in Salem was William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty with its companion folio of plates, which was checked out by sea captains Jacob Ashton, William Cabot, and James King among others.54 Rather than a history of arts or compilation of significant architectural sites, Analysis of Beauty provided a method of understanding the formal qualities of art and appreciating visual experience. Books on aesthetics and applied arts were held at other Salem libraries as well. Thus Salem mariners had many opportunities to become familiar with modes of representing landscapes.

Sometimes the aesthetic sophistication of a voyage’s log keeper can be seen in his writing. Captain Benjamin Hodges, for example, kept track of the weather on his voyage to China as master of the William and Henry. Most entries are routine: “fair,” “pleasant,” “hot.” Some are more elaborate, but still primarily descriptive, as the day the ship was loaded and ready and stalled in Salem harbor waiting for an auspicious beginning:

Coald & much snow the Wind Northe

Lying at Anchor in Misery Harbour

at 6 AM Weighed Anchor & came to Sea

the Wind NNW a large swell from ENE

& very Coald55

But rare entries described the weather in more curious and aesthetic terms. As he approached Sumatra, Hodges noted: “Light winds & squally weather the water much discolloured but no bottom--- Middle part light breezes & Calm Lay by the Night, the Sea covered with Luminary Particles which in Washing decks covered them in a Romantick maner, on examination we found them to be small pieces of (Gilly) round the size of small bird shot.”56

Sometimes the men commented on the beauty of the landscape, including their native land. Leaving Salem harbor for a Boston departure to Bombay, William Rogers recorded: “I had an opportunity of witnessing the beauty of the scenery for which the entrance of the port is so justly celebrated. It was a most delightful morning and nothing could have interrupted the enjoyment of the view which would have enriched the imagination of a Vernet.”57 Later, appreciating the beauty of Ceylon and the coast of India, Rogers “took sketches as I passed along.”58 George Nichols was also impressed with Ceylon: “in sailing this Coast, the land had a beautiful appearance, being very level & quite covered with Coconut Trees.”59 Nichols was delighted by Madeira:

The best Season for visiting the Island is in the Summer when the weather is always warm and pleasant & the Isl^d under a State of Cultivation. I never was more pleased with any place although it was in the Winter Season all the Time of my being there. from the Roads you have one of the finest prospects imaginable; the great number of handsome Seats rising one above another almost to the summit of the highest mountains (which are frequently lost in the clouds) together with the beautiful verdure which appeared upon every part.60

Fig. 10. Benjamin Carpenter, A View of Gingeram on the Malabar Coast. Log of the Hercules, Salem to Calcutta, 1792–1793. Courtesy of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

“One of the finest prospects.” With this phrase Nichols reveals his familiarity with the language of landscape aesthetics and the picturesque.

The illustrations that Benjamin Carpenter drew in his journals demonstrate familiarity with picturesque conventions of landscape. A small drawing that he labeled A View of Gingeram on the Malabar Coast illustrates the journal Carpenter kept in 1792–93, when he went to Calcutta as commander of the ship Hercules (fig. 10). Born in 1751, Carpenter was a career merchant mariner who engaged in sea trade from before the Revolution. He was among the first captains to go to Asia after direct trade began in 1784; and, since he also served in the role of supercargo on other voyages, he had a sharp eye for commercial possibilities in addition to maritime skills.61

Carpenter’s Gingeram is a phonetic transcription of Janjira. The island fortress Janjira was legendary for remaining unconquered—first repelling rival Asians, then later attempts by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English. Said to originate in the fourteenth century, it was fortified and shaped into its present form in the seventeenth century. The structure towers ninety feet above the sea, with thick stone walls rising more than forty feet directly out of the sea at high tide. There are nineteen rounded bastions heavily armed with cannon, connected by a rhythmic line of dark windows piercing a crenulated horizontal battlement. The fort’s interior held a palace, mosque, and deep well for access to fresh water.

Though the island is sited about a mile out to sea, there is little in Carpenter’s drawing to suggest that the fort is surrounded by water. The space is compressed and the fort reads as connected to the hilly shore rather than isolated by the sea. The landscape is constructed from a highly decorative series of lines; these hatchings change direction as needed to suggest sunlight and shadow on the planes of the architecture and landscape elements. Bursts of circles that make up the clouds animate the sky and lighten the ominous mood of the fort standing guard over the bay.

Carpenter’s drawing style seems to embrace picturesque ideas of balance. He plays against each other the light and the dark, the organic and the geometric, the moving and the still. The stylistic approach of the drawing seems to echo the linear treatment Carpenter would have seen in the engravings that accompanied the many illustrated voyage narratives that circulated in Salem. While some fine engravings, such as the La Pérouse title page (fig. 1) are built from barely discernible lines and stipples that read as tonal areas, other engravings retain the prominence of their linear components. Though Carpenter seems not to have had the classical training nor belonged to subscription libraries as other sea captains did, he would have had exposure to aesthetic and classical ideas through his very active participation in the civic life of Salem. Along with Hodges and many other sea captains, he was a member of the Essex Freemasons, a member of the Salem Marine Society, and a founding member of the East India Marine Society to which he donated several significant items. His landscape drawings, executed in a style easily readable because its visual language derived from widely accessible engraved illustrations, made his first-person accounts more vivid for his brother mariners.

As the title page of La Pérouse’s atlas illustrates, geographic and cultural representations in both words and images transmitted global knowledge—which was essential for trade and wealth in seaports such as Salem. Access to this knowledge became a bond that formed and united an elite class of merchants and mariners. Visual culture played a significant role in circulating this information, in both print and manuscript. Visual culture was essential to the transmission of information along personal networks, which were established various ways—through kinship, business relationships, membership in social or professional organizations, or other venues that were gradually becoming more institutionalized in the Early Republic. Salem’s mariners both collected and created visual representations, and shared them along these dense and interconnected networks for their mutual benefit and that of American commerce.

* * * * *

I thank Martha McNamara, Georgia Barnhill, Jessica Lanier, Emily Murphy, Joanne Lukitsh, and Josilyn DeMarco for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. I am also very appreciative of the research librarians who suggested sources and located specific editions of books known to have circulated in Salem, particularly Jean Marie Procious and Gus Sousa of the Salem Athenaeum, and Barbara Kampus, Kathy Flynn, Irene Axelrod, Andrew French, and other librarians of the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. I also thank members of the Salem State University Academic Writers Group: Peter Walker, Elizabeth Kenney, Avi Chomsky, Nancy Schultz, and Elizabeth Blood.

1. I would like to thank Rebecca Bedell, Alice Friedman, Alison Isenberg, Jane Kamensky, and Liam Riordan for their thoughtful comments on this essay. I would also like to thank my co-editor Georgia Barnhill for her wonderful insights, patience, and good humor as we worked together on this volume. The creation of “Old New England” through images and artifacts in the late nineteenth century and its relationship to national interest in the American past is discussed extensively in William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, eds. Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

2. For an overview of the history of “material culture” as an academic field of study, see Helen Sheumaker and Shirley Teresa Wajda, eds., Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2008). Scholars of early New England have notably worked with artifacts on a wide variety of scales from landscapes and buildings to textiles and decorative arts. See, for example, Joseph Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001) and David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). For an insightful and beautifully illustrated exploration of New Englanders’ objects as seen through the collections of the nation’s first historic preservation organization (founded in 1910) see Nancy Carlisle, Cherished Possessions: A New England Legacy (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 2003).

3. For some visual culture scholars, the field’s location “betwixt and between” disciplines is precisely the point: they argue that the radical nature of the field requires it to resist institutionalization as a discipline. For a classic statement of this position, see W.J.T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 540–44.

4. Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (no. 1), 1982; Sheumaker and Wajda, “Introduction,” in Material Culture in America, xi–xii. For a sample of the diversity of approaches to material culture studies, see Robert Blair St. George, “Introduction” and the essays by Prown, Rhys Isaac, and Henry Glassie in St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600–1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).

5. For a cogent overview of debates about “visual culture” and “visual culture studies” see Deborah Cherry, “Art History Visual Culture,” Art History 27 (September 2004): 479–93. For a discussion of the impact of “visual culture studies” on scholarship in American art, see John Davis, “The End of the American Century: Current Scholarship on the Art of the United States,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 540–80.

6. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

7. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture,” in Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader, 2d edition (London: Routledge, 2002), 5–6.

8. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, “Visual Culture’s History: Twenty-First Century Interdisicplinarity and its Nineteenth-Century Objects,” in Schwartz and Przyblyski, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–14; Deborah Cherry, ed., Art: History: Culture (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). For a study of the relationship between late nineteenth-century visuality and the rise of mass culture see Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998).

9. For a groundbreaking study that analyzes the densely associative nature of early New England culture as a “poetics of implication,” see Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

10. Boston Prints And Printmakers, 1670–1775, edited by Walter Whitehill and Sinclair Hitchings (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973); Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Walter M. Whitehill, Brock Jobe, and Jonathan Fairbanks (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974); Architecture in Colonial Massachusetts, edited by Abbott Lowell Cummings (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1979); Seventeenth-Century New England, edited by David D. Hall, David G. Allen, and Philip C. F. Smith (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001); New England Silver & Silversmithing, 1620–1815, edited by Jeannine Falino and Gerald W. R. Ward (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001).

11. New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston : Museum of Fine Arts, 1982).

12. The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635–1820 (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985).

13. Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce, and Art In Southern Maine, 1780–1830, edited by Laura Fecych Sprague ; essays by Joyce Butler, et al. (Kennebunk, Me.: Brick Store Museum ; Boston: Distributed by Northeastern University Press, 1987).

14. The absence in this volume of scholarship on Native American culture reflects the content of the proposals submitted for the conference from which these essays were drawn. For recent work on early New England Native communities that addresses material and visual culture, see Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, eds., Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003).

15. For a recent synthesis of early New England history see Joseph Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

1. York Deeds (Portland, Maine: Brown, Thurston and Co., 1889), 5, pt.1:82; Sybil Noyes, Charles T. Libby, and Walter G. Davis, eds., Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1979), 134, 184–85.

2. Emerson Baker, “The Chadbourne Site (1643–1690): Gentrification on the Early Maine Frontier,” paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Meeting, Williamsburg, Va., January 2007.

3. Emerson Baker, “The Great Works River and Humphrey Chadbourne,” in Jeffrey Bolster, ed., Cross-Grained and Wily Waters: A Guide to the Piscataqua Maritime Region (Portsmouth, N.H.: Peter Randall Publisher, 2002), 176–77; Elaine Chadbourne Bacon, comp., The Chadbourne Family in America: A Genealogy (Camden, Maine: Penobscot Press, 1994), xxxiii-17.

4. Noyes et al., eds., Genealogical Dictionary, 133–34, 623–24; Emerson Baker, The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 52–53, 117–18. The Shapleigh trading network extended northward in 1652 when Oliver Cromwell appointed Lucy’s brother as governor of Newfoundland.

5. Baker, “The Great Works River and Humphrey Chadbourne,” 176–77; York Deeds, 2:30–31; Noyes et al., eds., Genealogical Dictionary, 133–34.

6. York Deeds, 2: 30–31.

7. For a discussion on the rarity and symbolic importance of silver in early Maine see Edwin A. Churchill, “Glistening Reflections of Stability: The Roles of Silver in Early Maine,” in Jeannine Falino and Gerald Ward, eds., New England Silver and Silversmithing, 1620–1815 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001), 213–45; York Deeds, 2: 30–31; 5:13, 16. The quote is from York Deeds, 2: 30.

8. Amanda Lange, Delftware at Historic Deerfield, 1600–1800 (Deerfield, Mass.: Historic Deerfield, 2001), 108. For the Chinese Scholar pattern, see Sarah Fayen, “The Chinese Scholar Pattern: Style, Merchant Identity, and the English Imagination in the Late Seventeenth-Century Tin-Glazed Earthenware,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the World History Association, Salem, Massachusetts, June 2009.

9. York Deeds, 5, pt. 1: 23–24: Kathleen Deagan, Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500–1800 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 1: 76–77.

10. York Deeds, 2: 30.

11. Noyes et al., eds., Genealogical Dictionary, 101, 246–47.

12. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses and Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993), i–ii.

13. Charles Bradley, Phil Dunning and Gerard Gusset, “Material Culture from the Elizabeth and Mary (1690): Individuality and Social Status in a Late 17th Century New England Assemblage,” in Christian Roy, Jean Belisle, Marc-Andre Bernier, and Brad Loewen (eds.), ArcheoLogiques; Collection Hors-Serie 1. Mer et Monde: Questions d’archeologie maritime, 2003, 152–55, 160–67.

14. Emerson W. Baker, “The 1991 Excavations at the Richard Hitchcock Site (ME 041–12),” report on file at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine, 1991.

15. Emerson W. Baker, “The 1995 York County Archaeology Survey: A Report on ME 041–12, the Richard Hitchcock Site,” report on file at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine, 1995; Noyes et al., eds., Genealogical Dictionary, 339; Charles T. Libby, ed., Province and Court Records of Maine (Portland, Maine: Maine Historical Society, 1931), 2:453–55.

16. Emerson W. Baker, “The 1995 Survey of the Lower Kennebec River: A Report on ME 168–3, Sagadahoc Island,” report on file at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine, 1995.

17. Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New England (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988), 142; for Sewall’s mill see Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), 1:148–50; Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 94–103.

18. Emerson Baker, “The World of Thomas Gorges: Life in the Province of Maine in the 1640s,” in Emerson Baker et al., eds., American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 267–71; Peter Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 151–55, 240–42.

19. Cary Carson, Norman F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Garry Wheeler Stone, and Dell Upton, “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern America Colonies,” Winterthur Portfolio 16:2/3 (1981):136.

20. Emerson Baker, Robert Bradley, Leon Cranmer, and Neill DePaoli, “Earthfast Architecture in Early Maine,” paper presented at the Vernacular Architecture Forum annual meeting, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1993; Carson et al., “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern America Colonies,” 135–96; for the quote see Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, 142; Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 52–53.

21. Carson et al., “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern America Colonies.”

1. Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, Voyage of La Pérouse Around the World, 4 vols, ed. M. L. A. Milet-Mureau (London, 1798), I: 37–38. For discussion of the directions given to La Pérouse see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 137–40.

2. There are few modern histories of Salem; a good summary is National Park Service, Maritime Salem in the Age of Sail (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1987). For recent cultural analysis of the city see Salem: Place, Myth, Memory, Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, eds. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). There is a significant body of literature on the city’s infamous witch trails and its colonial and federal architecture. Most histories of the city, however, date to the colonial revival period, particularly the work of James Duncan Phillips, Salem in the Eighteenth Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1937); and Salem and the Indies: The Story of the Great Commercial Era of the City (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947). An excellent study of the career paths of mariners is Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). For a study of how international trade influenced the early American economy see James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

3. There is an extensive bibliography on eighteenth-century voyage narratives. Some key works that connect art and science include Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984); Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Rudiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). More recent literature in this area has focused on exploring the colonizing or imperial eye, such as Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).

4. For a discussion of the movement to found comparable subscription libraries, on Charleston and other cities, see James Raven, “Social Libraries and Library Societies in Eighteenth-Century North America,” and James Green, “Subscription Libraries and Commercial Circulating Libraries in Colonial Philadelphia and New York,” both in Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, eds. (Amherst, Mass. and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 1–23; 24–52. Like the Salem Social Library, libraries in other seaports functioned as elite social institutions collecting a wide range of books; like the East India Marine Society, they collected unusual objects for their cabinet of curiosities. See also Martha McNamara, “Defining the Profession: Books, Libraries, and Architects,” in American Architects and Their Books to 1848, Kenneth Hafertepe and James O’Gorman, eds. (Amherst, Mass. and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). For extensive study of American imprints and their circulation see the series A History of the Book in America, particularly Volume 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Volume 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: American Antiquarian Society and University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

5. My account of the holdings and charge records of the Social Library is derived from its archives held at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., collection MSS 56. The Social Library published its holdings several times. See for example, Bylaws and Regulations of the Incorporated Proprietors of the Social Library in Salem (Salem, Mass.: Printed by Thomas C. Cushing?, c. 1797); Evans 32800 in Early American Imprints digital database. The Social Library’s books are held by the Salem Athenaeum, which was formed in 1810 when the Social Library and Philosophical Library merged. Secondary sources on the Salem Athenaeum include Cynthia B. Wiggin, The Salem Athenaeum (Salem, Mass.: Forest River Press, 1971) and the Athenaeum’s website at www.salemathenaeum.net.

6. See for example, Bylaws and Regulations; Evans 32800 in Early American Imprints.

7. The records of the Philosophical Library are at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, MSS 56. They include financial, catalogue, and charge records.

8. The charge books are presently held for the Salem Athenaeum in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, MSS 56.

9. Rules and Regulations of the Library of Arts and Sciences (Salem, Mass.: Printed by Thomas C. Cushing, 1802); Shaw & Shoemaker 2532.

10. John Dabney, Catalogue of Books, for Sale or Circulation in Town or Country, by John Dabney, at His Book and Stationary Store, and Circulating Library, in Salem (Salem, Mass.: J. Dabney, 1801).

11. Harold L. Burstyn, “The Salem Philosophical Library: Its History and Importance for American Science,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 96 (1960): 169–206.

12. The most synthetic history of the EIMS is Walter Muir Whitehill, The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem: A Sesquicentennial History (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1949).

13. Daniel Finamore, “Displaying the Sea and Defining America: Early Exhibitions at the Salem East India Marine Society,” Journal for Maritime Research (May 2002) [On-line edition: http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk]; and James M. Lindgren, “’That Every Mariner May Possess a History of the World’: A Cabinet for the East India Marine Society of Salem,” The New England Quarterly 68 (June 1995): 179–205.

14. Papers of the East India Marine Society, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. MS 88, Box 1, Folder 1. The EIMS Library charge records are intermingled with the Society minutes each month.

15. Ibid.

16. Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, a highly experienced French naval officer and explorer, left Brest in 1785 on an expedition funded by Louis XVI. Over the next three years, La Pérouse crossed the Atlantic and rounded Cape Horn; stopped at Easter Island and the Hawaiian archipelago, then sailed to the west coast of North America, exploring from Alaska to California. He crossed the Pacific to Macao and Hong Kong, then headed north to Taiwan, the Phillipines, Korea, Japan, and Siberian Kamchatka, then turned south to Tonga, Samoa, Australia, and eventually the 1788 wreck of his ship on the coral reefs of Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands. Fortunately for his legacy, La Pérouse had the foresight to send back to Europe from Australia via a British ship, his journals to date and some works by the three ship illustrators. This was the basis of the sumptuously illustrated atlas published in French in 1797.

17. Papers of the East India Marine Society, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. MS 88, Box 4, Folder 2.

18. Papers of the East India Marine Society, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. MS 88, Box 4, Folder 2.

19. Papers of the East India Marine Society, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. MS 88, Box 1, Vol. 1.

20. “Landscape,” in Oxford Art Online.

21. For a study of ideological aspects of mapping see Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

22. For example, John Thomas Serres was a drawing instructor at the Chelsea Naval School in London and published Liber Nauticus, and Instructor in the Art of Marine Drawings in 1805–06. See David Cordingly, Marine Painting in England, 1700–1900 (London: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, 1974). A catalogue of East India Company drawings is published in Mildred Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1972).

23. On drawing as a polite art for men and women see Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2000).

24. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Mocha, December 1800 to October 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 568–621, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. There are approximately 3000 ships’ logs in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum; references to logs below are drawn from this repository.

25. Nathaniel Bowditch, Log of the Astrea, Salem to Lisbon, Madeira, and Manilla, March 1796 to May 1797, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

26. Frederic W. Howay, Voyages of the ‘Columbia’ to the Northwest Coast 1787–1790 and 1790–1793 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1941).

27. These books, as well as maps and atlases were easily available. For an overview of the market, see David Bosse, “The Boston Map Trade of the Eighteenth Century” in Mapping Boston, Alex Krieger and David Cobb with Amy Turner, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 36–55.

28. See the British Library Integrated Catalogue online for many of the editions of the English Pilot, http://catalogue.bl.uk.

29. Dudley Pickman, Log of the Anna, Salem to Sumatra to Boston, January 1801 to November 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

30. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to Sumatra to Manila, December 1801 to March 1803, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 122.

31. James Deveraux, Log of the Franklin, Salem to Batavia and Japan, December 1798 to May 1800, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

32. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to Sumatra to Manila, December 1801 to March 1803, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 129.

33. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 558–64.

34. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Sumatra, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 200–1.

35. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 556.

36. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 561, 563–64.

37. Dudley Pickman, Log of the Belisarius, 1799–1800; quoted in Susan Bean, Yankee India (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Essex Museum, 2001), 95.

38. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 561, 563–64.

39. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to Sumatra to Manila, December 1801 to March 1803, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 124.

40. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Sumatra, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 202.

41. Nathaniel Bowditch, Log of the Astrea, Salem to Lisbon, Madeira, and Manila, March 1796 to May 1797, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

42. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 563.

43. Dudley Pickman, Log of the Derby, 1803–04; quoted in Bean, Yankee India, 113.

44. The EIMS palanquin is reproduced and discussed in Bean, Yankee India, 79–81.

45. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to Sumatra to Manila, December 1801 to March 1803, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 124.

46. William A. Rogers, Log of the Tartar, September 1817–18, quoted in Bean, Yankee India, 153. Log in Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum.

47. Nathaniel Bowditch, Log of the Astrea, Salem to Lisbon, Madeira, and Manila, March 1796 to May 1797, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1.

48. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 556.

49. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Sumatra, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 201.

50. Luther Dana, Log of the Recovery, Salem to Sumatra, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 2, 200.

51. For a comparison with holdings on aesthetics in other libraries, see Janice G. Schimmelman, Books On Art In Early America: Books on Art, Aesthetics and Instruction Available in American Libraries and Bookstores Through 1815 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2007). On sailors’ literary culture and reading on the high seas see Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

52. Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London 1757); Robert Dossie, Handmaid to the Arts, 2nd ed. (London: J Nourse, 1764).

53. Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy, The Art of Painting, trans. William Mason (York, Eng., 1783); Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour (London, 1749).

54. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753).

55. Benjamin Hodges, Log of the William and Henry, Salem to Canton, December 1788 to 1790, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. Entry for December 18, 1788.

56. Benjamin Hodges, Log of the William and Henry, Salem to Canton, December 1788 to 1790, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. Entry for July 25, 1789.

57. William A. Rogers, Log of the Tartar, 1817–18, quoted in Bean, Yankee India, 143. Log in Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum.

58. William A. Rogers, Log of the Tartar, 1817–18, quoted in Bean, Yankee India, 149. Log in Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum. The sketches are reproduced in Bean, 150.

59. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 559.

60. George Nichols, Log of the Active, Salem to East Indies, September 1800 to September 1801, in the East India Marine Society logs, Volume 1, 556.

61. For a discussion of Carpenter’s career as well as extensive excerpts from his Journal of the Ruby, 1789–90, see Bean, Yankee India, 44–63.

1. New-England Courant, 8 October 1722; 12 November 1722; and 13–27 May, 1723, quoted in Henry H. Edes, “The Burgis-Price View of Boston,” in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 1906–07, 11 (1910): 246–47. Edes suggests that this print was never produced, however, it was; see John W. Reps, “Boston by Bostonians: The Printed Plans and Views of the Colonial City by its Artists, Cartographers, Engravers, and Publishers,” in Boston Prints and Printmakers, 1670–1775 (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973), 33–35.

2. On Burgis and his works, see Richard B. Holman, “William Burgis” in Boston Prints and Printmakers, 57–81.

3. On subscriptions for prints, see Timothy Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (London: Yale University Press for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1997), 52–57.

4. New-England Courant, 23 December–6 January, 1723–24, quoted in Edes, 247.

5. Ibid. See also Reps, 34.

6. John Harris is identified on the finished print as the engraver. On Harris, see Clayton, 21; and Edes, 253–54.

7. New-England Courant, 17 July–28 August, 1725, quoted in Edes, 247.

8. According to Reps, writing in the early 1970s, the only known copy exists at the Essex Institute (now the Peabody Essex Museum); see Reps, 33.

9. For a catalogue of these images, see Reps, 38–49.

10. On nationalism and landscape painting, see Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–75 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1–20, 65–105.

11. For these interpretations, see Reps, 33–42; and John Hallam, “The Eighteenth-Century American Townscape and the Face of Colonialism,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4: 3/4 (Summer/Fall 1990): 144–62.

12. See for example, the May 6–13, 1723 issue of the New-England Courant.

13. On the Townhouse, see Martha J. McNamara, “‘In the Face of the Court . . .’: Law, Commerce, and the Transformation of Public Space in Boston, 1650–1770,” Winterthur Portfolio 26:2/3 (Summer-Autumn 2001): 126–31, 134–35.

14. For a short list of the items for sale at Price’s shop, see New England Courant, 17 July–28 August, 1725 quoted in Edes, 247. For a brief biography of Price see Edes, 257–62.

15. On Selby’s coffeehouse, see David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Williamsburg, Va.: University of North Carolina Press for The Institute for Early American History and Culture, 1995), 88–96. On Selby himself, see also Edes, 254–57.

16. On the rise of a capitalist ethos in New England, see Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3–12, 71–106.

17. The following discussion is drawn from P. J. Marshall, “Introduction” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2 The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1998) 1–22; Jacob M. Price, “The Imperial Economy, 1700–1776,” in Ibid., 78–104; Patrick O’Brien, “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire,” in Ibid., 59–63; and Jeremy Black, The British Seaborne Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 56–87.

18. On merchants and gentility, see Hunter, 71–146.

19. On the introduction of the picturesque to early eighteenth-century English elites, see Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790, 4th ed., (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 154–56. On the rise of the picturesque, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986), 57–85.

20. Private schools in colonial Boston often taught commercial skills, including surveying, navigation, and bookkeeping, see Robert Francis Seybolt, The Private Schools of Colonial Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 10, 14, 86–7. Obadiah Brown, a member of the Rhode Island family of successful merchants, served as supercargo on his brother James’s ships. Obadiah subsequently became a merchant, owner of sloops, brigantines, and schooners see James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 5–8.

21. James Brown, founder of the Rhode Island merchant dynasty, began his career as a ship’s captain see Ibid., 2.

22. On the basics of navigation, see Alfred Gell, “How to Read a Map: Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation,” Man, n.s. 20:2 (June 1985): 271–86.

23. This procedure is the one typically used for coasting. Out of sight of land, mariners estimated the distance and direction sailed, measured the angle of the sun to determine latitude, and calculated longitude via mathematical equations in order to determine their ship’s position. Until the invention of the chronometer, however, this procedure was prone to error, so landfall sightings—navigational elevations—were particularly important.

24. For an well-illustrated overview of early modern sea charts and sea atlases, see John Blake, The Sea Chart: The Illustrated History of Nautical Maps and Navigational Charts (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2004), 8–27

25. For Seller’s reputation and other developments in maritime cartography in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, see A. H. W. Robinson, Marine Cartography in Britain: A History of the Sea Chart to 1855 (Leicester, Eng.: Leicester University Press, 1962): 34–113.

26. On the development of more accurate survey methods, see Ibid., 47–70.

27. As Martin Brückner has shown, map literacy increased dramatically among the general population of colonial British North America, but of course merchants had a vested interest in maps; see Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Williamsburg, Va.,: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006), 16–50. Incidentally, in the same advertisement published in the New-England Courant announcing the availability of the southeast view, William Price also announced a “new chart of the British Empire in North America,” quoted in Edes, 247.

28. The following discussion draws on Marshall, 11–12; and Price, 81–91.

29. For an example of smuggling, see the activities of Thomas Hancock as discussed in W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–1775 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), 69–73, 114–18.

30. On eighteenth-century men-of-war, see E. H. H. Archibald, The Fighting Ship in the Royal Navy, AD 897–1984, rev. ed. (Poole, Eng.: Blandford Press, 1984), 33–50.

31. On station ships, see John W. Gordon, South Carolina and the American Revolution: A Battlefield History (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 26–7.

32. On merchants and the changing urban fabric of New England, see Hunter, 84–88, 113–24.

33. By identifying specific structures in the print, Burgis, Price, and Selby might hope that individuals associated with these structures would purchase the print. Alternatively, they might have included the identifying numbers and labels only after subscriptions were paid.

34. On Faneuil’s house, see Hunter, 120–21.

35. On King’s Chapel and Brattle Street Church, see Hunter, who notes that a diversity of faith represented a shift away from Puritan control of Boston, 92–96.

36. On shipyards and shipbuilding, see Joseph A. Goldenberg, Shipbuilding in Colonial America (Newport News, Va.: The Mariners Museum, 1976), 68–76, 82–95.

37. The print’s text is quoted in Edes, 248–49.

38. On Long Wharf, see “Long Wharf,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 9:2 (March 1935): 17–22.

39. Quoted in Edes, 248–49.

40. On cargo carried by Boston-based vessels and the complexities of the transatlantic trade, see the career of Thomas Hancock as discussed in Baxter, 45–91.

41. On types and rigs of eighteenth-century sailing vessels, see Roger Morris, Atlantic Seafaring: Ten Centuries of Exploration and Trade in the North Atlantic (Camden, Maine: International Marine Publishers, 1992), 101–23.

42. On merchants commissioning ships, see Goldenberg, 82–86.

43. For a brief discussion of the sailing characteristics of a fore-and-aft rigged vessel, see Douglas Phillips-Birt, A History of Seamanship (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), 120, 128–29.

44. See William Armstrong Fairburn, Merchant Sail (Center Lovell, Maine: Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation, Inc., 1945), 1: 237. Depending on their size, sloops could also make transatlantic voyages, as did Thomas Hancock’s Sarah in 1733; see Baxter, 57.

45. On the sailing characteristics of a square-rigged vessel, see Phillips-Birt, 120–21.

46. The American Magazine was published for just over three years, from 1743 to 1746. On The American Magazine, see Moses Tyler, A History of American Literature (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 305.

47. For an overview of the scope of trade and the individuals affected, see Price, 78–103.

48. For example of this approach, see Ralph Hyde, Gilded Scenes and Shining Prospects: Panoramic Views of British Towns, 1575–1900 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1985). Interestingly, Hyde omits views of towns in the colonies.

49. For a short account of this incident, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 35–46.

1. Robert Blair St. George, “’Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England,” (1982) in Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens, Ga. and London: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 336–37.

2. For instance, Henri Lafebvre’s La Production de l’Espace (1974) appeared in English translation in 1991 (Oxford, Eng. and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell) and Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (1975) appeared in translation as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). For an overview of the spatial turn, see: Denis Cosgrove, “Landscape and Landschaft,” GHI Bulletin 35 (Fall 2004): 57–71.

3. This tendency is most incisively and comprehensively described and critiqued in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, Calif. and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

4. Richard M. Candee, “Maine Towns, Maine People: Architecture and the Community, 1783–1820,” in Charles E. Clark, James S. Leamon, and Karen Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic: From Revolution to Statehood (Hanover, N.H. and London: University Press of New England, 1988), 29.

5. James F. O’Gorman, The Perspective of Anglo-American Architecture: Notes on Some Graphic Attempts at Three-dimensional Representation in the Colonies and Early Republic (Philadelphia: Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 1995).

6. Fisher received an invitation to become minister at Blue Hill on October 5, 1795, according to his diary entry for that day, although he had preached in Blue Hill during the summer months in previous years.

7. The chronology of drawings for the house is laid out in Abbott Lowell Cummings, “The House the Parson Built,” Old-Time New England, Vol. 56, No. 204 (April-June 1966): 91–107.

8. Diary entries for October 13 and 15, 1824. Throughout the text, diary references are to the typescript translation now in the Blue Hill Library, Blue Hill, Me. This discussion of Fisher closely follows the text of my book, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

9. On April 19, 1825 Fisher wrote in his diary: “Began to sketch on canvas a view of Bluehill village.”

10. The painting is in the collection of the William A. Farnsworth Museum and Library, Rockland, Maine (FM). In Fisher’s time, his town’s name was written as one word (“Bluehill”) whereas today it is customarily written in two words (“Blue Hill”). Except when quoting directly from Fisher, or referring to a period title, the modern form is used here.

11. Joseph S. Wood, The New England Village (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

12. David C. Smith has borrowed the definition of the hill country from Harold Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936) in his Studies in the Land: The Northeast Corner (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). The first chapter (“The Changing Landscape of Maine to 1820”) is a useful overview and originally appeared as chapter one in Clark, Leamon, and Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic.

13. Charles E. Clark, The Eastern Frontier: The Settlement of Northern New England, 1610–1763 (Hanover, N.H. and London: University Press of New England, 1983), 354–55; Jamie H. Eves, “’The Acquisition of Wealth, or of a Comfortable Subsistence’: The Census of 1800 and the Yankee Migration to Maine, 1760–1825,” Maine History Vol. 35, No. 1–2 (1995): 6–25.

14. A useful overview of the impact of international conflict on Maine shipowners and merchants is found in Joyce Butler, “Rising Like a Phoenix: Commerce in Southern Maine, 1775–1830,” in Laura Fecych Sprague, ed., Agreeable Situations: Society, Commerce, and Art in Southern Maine, 1780–1830 (Kennebunk, Me.: The Brick Store Museum, 1987), 15–31; Mary Ellen Chase, Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson, 1768–1847 (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 236; Smith, Studies in the Land, 3–5.

15. The commonplace book was titled “National and Political” by Fisher and is now in the collection of the Jonathan Fisher Memorial, Blue Hill, Me. Also see: Diary entry of 1813 or 1814, quoted in Chase, Jonathan Fisher, 247, and Diary entries of 6/27/1812 and 4/7/1815.

16. On Federalist opposition in Maine to the War of 1812, and its impact on the statehood movement, see Ronald F. Banks, Maine Becomes a State, The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785–1820 (Somersworth, N.H. and Portland, Me.: New Hampshire Publishing Co. and Maine Historical Society, 1973), 57–66.

17. The generally modest character of American houses, and particularly those in frontier regions, is discussed on the basis of the 1798 direct tax lists by Carole Shammas, “The Housing Stock of the Early United States: Refinement Meets Migration,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, Vol. 64 (July 2007): 549–89.

18. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 142.

19. Richard M. Candee, “’The Appearance of Enterprise and Improvement’: Architecture and the Coastal Elite of Southern Maine,” in Sprague, ed., Agreeable Situations, 75.

20. Candee, “’The Appearance of Enterprise and Improvement’,” 71, 75; Candee, “Maine Towns, Maine People,” 41, 45–46.

21. Denis Cosgrove, “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1985): 55–56.

22. Candee, “‘The Appearance of Enterprise and Improvement’,” 79; Kevin D. Murphy, “The Architecture of Summer Street, Kennebunk, Maine,” Magazine Antiques 168, No. 2 (August 2005): 55–58; Arthur J. Gerrier, “Thomas Eaton (Active 1794–1831),” in A Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Maine Vol. 5, No. 8 (1988): 3–4.

23. Edward Emerson Bourne, History of Wells and Kennebunk, from the Earliest Settlement to the Year 1820: At which Time Kennebunk was Set Off, and Incorporated (Portland, Me.: B. Thurston & Co., 1875), 576, 758–59.

24. Candee, “Appearance of Enterprise,” 75.

25. Paul Coffin, “Memoir and Journals of Rev. Paul Coffin, D.D.,” Collections of the Maine Historical Society, 1st ser., 4 (1856): 327; Carolyn S. Parsons, “’Bordering on Magnificence’: Urban Domestic Planning in the Maine Woods,” in Clark, Leamon, and Bowden, eds., Maine in the Early Republic, 62–68.

26. Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 39–40.

27. Contract made between Henry Knox and Ebenezer Dunton and Tileston Cushing, April 7, 1794; Knox Papers, Maine Historical Society, Portland, Me. Transcribed in James H. Mundy, “Two Early Building Specifications in Maine,” Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology Vol. 7, No. 1 (1975): 103.

28. Cyrus Eaton, History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine, 2 vols. (Hallowell, Me.: Masters, Smith & Co., 1865), vol. 1, 231; quoted in Parsons, “Bordering on Magnificence,” 65. Also see: Samuel M. Green, “The Architecture of Thomaston, Maine,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Vol. 10, No. 4 (Dec. 1951): 24–25.

29. Coffin, “Missionary Tour in Maine,” 327.

30. Green, “Architecture of Thomaston, Maine,” 26. Among Green’s sources were two elderly women who preserved local oral traditions from the nineteenth century: Mrs. Richard Eliot of Thomaston and Mrs. William R. Tobey who was 90 years old in 1948.

31. Taylor, Liberty Men, 41–44. The quotation is from page 43.

32. Roger G. Reed, unpublished study of the Ruggles House, 2007–8, 4–6. The author kindly made his manuscript available to me for consultation.

33. “Wilderness Elegance Restored: The Thomas Ruggles House,” Early American Homes (April, 1998): 45–52; personal correspondence (3/1/2006) with Roger Reed. Also see the documentation of the Ruggles House produced by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC and available online at http://memory.loc.gov.

34. Reed, Ruggles House, 9.

35. The fundamental treatment of this conflict is found in Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects in Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

36. Anon., The Black Mansion: Historical Introduction (n.p.: n.d.), 10; quoted in Woodlawn Museum, “Woodlawn: An Estate of History” (2008); http://www.woodlawnmuseum.com/historyfull.html. Accessed 12/8/2011.

37. Woodlawn Museum, “Woodlawn: An Estate of History” (2008); http://www.woodlawnmuseum.com/historyfull.html. Accessed 12/8/2011.

38. Some of Black’s neighbors doubted his patriotism, and prior to leading his military company on a march to Mt. Desert Island, the site of a feared British attack, Black assured the men that despite any rumors as to his allegiances, “I will defend your wives, children, and property, and the Constitution of our country, as far as my abilities permit, against the attacks of all enemies whatsoever” (emphasis present in the original). Biographical Encyclopedia of Maine of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Metropolitan Publishing and Engraving Co., 1885), 214–15; quoted in Rebecca Robbins, Colonel John Black of Ellsworth (1781–1856) (np: nd), np, reprint from the Maine Historical Society Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter 1978).

39. David Cobb to C. W. Hare, 11/10/1810; quoted in Robbins, np.

40. “Woodlawn Museum.” The property has subsequently reduced to about 180 acres.

41. Walter Knight Sturges, “The Black House, Ellsworth: An Asher Benjamin House in Maine,” Magazine Antiques Vol. 56 (May 1954): 398–400.

42. The discipline of cultural geography has been effective in describing the ways in which landscape and architecture were manipulated (in early America and elsewhere) as means of reproducing social relations. See, for example: Richard Peet, “A Sign Taken for History: Daniel Shays’ Memorial in Petersham, Massachusetts,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 1996): 21–43; and for an overview, Donald Mitchell, Cultural Geography, A Critical Introduction (np: Blackwell, 2000), especially Part II, “The Political Landscape” (89–144).

43. Alan Taylor, “From Fathers to Friends of the People: Political Personas in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 11 (Winter 1991): 466–91.

44. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 1986): 23. The text originated as a lecture given in 1967 but not published until October 1984 as “Des Espaces Autres” in Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité.

1. For a dramatic account of Oliver’s midnight ride as told by a descendent, see Peter Oliver, “Judge Oliver and the Small Oliver House in Middleborough,” in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 1947–1951, 38 (1959): 302. For information regarding the sugar box crafted by Winslow, see Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, Style, vol. 3 of New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1982), 498–99.

2. This figure is the most conservative within the recently published literature on the loyalists, and another 15,000 can be added to the total if one counts slaves that were brought with fleeing loyalists. See Maya Jasanoff, “The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 65 (April 2008): 208. Peter Coldham has recently set the figure at 70,000, although both historians agree that quantifying the number of loyalists that entered into exile is extremely difficult given the numerous destinations of flight and the ambiguities surrounding definitions of loyalism. See Peter Wilson Coldham, American Migrations, 1765–1799: The Lives, Times and Families of Colonial Americans who Remained Loyal to the British Crown Before, During and After the Revolutionary War, as Related in their own Words and through their Correspondence (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 2000), ix.

3. For a case of a loyalist leaving possessions with patriot family members, see Elizabeth Gray Otis to Harrison Gray, undated, as quoted in Mabel Swann, “Furniture of the Boston Tories,” Antiques 41 (March 1942): 187. For an attempt at retrieving abandoned property, see Andrew Spooner to Thomas Hutchinson, April 12, 1786, Hutchinson and Oliver Papers, Vol. 3, 1775 – 1811, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. Many loyalist refugees also filed claims requesting compensation for lost property from the British government; for a summary of these claims, see Mary Beth Norton, The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 196–222. These three strategies operate at the center of my dissertation, and this essay serves as an overview of the predominant themes of the larger project. See Katherine Rieder, “‘The Remainder of Our Effects We Must Leave Behind’: American Loyalists and the Meaning of Things, 1765–1800” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009).

4. Samuel Quincy to Hannah Hill Quincy, 1 January 1777. Papers Relating to the Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Families, Massachusetts Historical Society.

5. For inheritance patterns in the eighteenth century, see Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michael Dahlin, Inheritance in America From Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 3–79; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the Decorative Arts,” in American Furniture, Luke Beckerdite and William Hosley, eds. (Hanover, N.H.: Chipstone Foundation, 1995), 39–68; Amanda Vickery, “Women and the World of Goods: a Lancashire Consumer and her Possessions, 1751–81,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 247–301; and the classic text on inheritance in colonial New England, Philip Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,1970). For the structure and unreliability of transatlantic networks, see Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 26–27, 50–51.

6. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66–67, 83. For recent works relating to the movement of colonial objects through space and time, see Margaretta Lovell’s consideration of John Singleton Copley’s c. 1770 portrait of Joshua Henshaw; the author follows the portrait through the circumstances leading to its production, to the interaction of Henshaw and Copley, and then through its progression through a line of descendents and institutions. See Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 94–140. Jennifer Roberts has taken the issue of movement more literally, proving the centrality of spatial issues such as transmission and mobility in the Atlantic world, especially in relation to the objects that connected the widely dispersed subjects of the British crown; see Jennifer L. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo: Boy with a Squirrel and the Dilemma of Transit,” American Art 21 (Summer 2007): 20–41. For readings of portraiture and other objects as inert objects in schemes of self-fashioning and social emulation, see Paul Staiti, “Character and Class,” in John Singleton Copley in America, by Carrie Rebora et al. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 53–77; T. H. Breen, “The Meaning of ‘Likeness’: American Portrait Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society,” Word and Image 6 (October-December 1990): 325–50; and Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

7. Walter Benjamin’s musings on the object’s use by “primitive society,” the collector, and the allegorist are indicative of his conception of the obdurate object, which conceals its many meanings; see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 210–211.

8. For a discussion of the inalienable spirit, or hau, at the center of gifts and the social networks they create, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), viii, 11–12, 18. Mauss’s work has become a seminal text in anthropology and cultural studies, producing a number of further meditations on the hau of objects and the function of gifts within contemporary and historical societies. See, for example, Marshall Sahlins, “The Spirit of the Gift,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, Alan D. Schrift, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 70–99; Nicolas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 14–34 in particular; and Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992). Weiner’s introductory discussion of the “paradox of keeping-while-giving,” or forcing common memory into the future through the repeated inheritance of an object, is particularly relevant, see Weiner, 6–8.

9. Oliver, “Judge Oliver and the Small Oliver House in Middleborough,” 302.

10. Fairbanks and Trent, Style, 498–99 and Ian M. G. Quimby, American Silver at Winterthur (Charlottesville, Va.: Winterthur Museum in association with the University Press of Virginia, 1995), 184. The above sources disagree, however, in relation to the name of the female recipient of the sugar box; Fairbanks and Trent stated it was Mary Belcher Oliver while Quimby named the recipient as Elizabeth Belcher Oliver. Given the inscription on the box: “O/D·E/ Donnum W:P 1702,” and the fact that Elizabeth Belcher Oliver (not Mary Belcher Oliver) is listed in family genealogies, Quimby’s account is likely correct. For a genealogical chart of the Oliver family, see Andrew Oliver, Faces of a Family: An Illustrated Catalogue of Portraits and Silhouettes . . . (Privately Printed, 1960), 34–35. Such an elaborate gift between in-laws—Elizabeth Oliver’s brother Jonathan married William Partridge’s daughter Mary—may seem strange, but as Ian Quimby described it, “Given the Puritan habit of not distinguishing between blood relatives and those acquired by marriage, the relationship was more important than it might appear to today’s readers.” See Quimby, American Silver at Winterthur, 183.

11. Fairbanks and Trent, Style, 498. The catalogue entry for the object describes the iconographic elements as follows: “The mounted knight, bands of myrtle, amorini, and allegorical busts are all derived from illustrations in editions of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Homer’s Iliad, where they accompany texts dealing with martial prowess and courtly love.”

12. The box was likely given to commemorate the birth of Daniel Oliver, born June 13, 1702, who did not survive infancy. See “Object Report, Sugar Box,” Silver Sugar Box (1959.3363), Curatorial Files, Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Del. Peter Oliver, although the couple’s third son, inherited the sugar box as both his elder brothers—another Daniel and Andrew—predeceased him. For information regarding the Oliver family genealogy, see Oliver, Faces of a Family, Appendices 5 and 6.

13. Linda Ayres, Harvard Divided (Cambridge, Mass.: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1976), 20–21.

14. For the inherent liquidity of silver objects, see Mark A. Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (April 2001): 327, 331–34 and Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution, 106. Given silver’s complex role as both money and a material used to constitute decorative objects, it is important to note that prior to the advent of “modern banking,” silversmiths and goldsmiths often took on the “many of the functions of a banker and a broker.” See Fairbanks and Trent, Style, 480.

15. For a discussion of the inalienable spirit of objects enmeshed in social networks, see Mauss, The Gift, 11–12 and Weiner, Inalienable Possessions, 4–6.

16. There is some disagreement as to when the sugar box left the Oliver family’s possession. The New England Begins catalogue posits that the English branch of the Oliver family sold the sugar box to a dealer in 1937, who subsequently sold it to American collector Henry Francis du Pont, upon which it became part of the Winterthur Museum’s collection. See Fairbanks and Trent, Style, 498. The provenance of the object at Winterthur, however, maintains that it left the family at some point in the nineteenth century and entered the collections of a Scottish Church, where the same American dealer found it in the 1930s. See “Object Report, Sugar Box,” Silver Sugar Box (1959.3363), Winterthur Museum Curatorial Files, Winterthur, Del.

17. Mary Beth Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (Jul. 1976): 398. As Samuel Quincy wrote to his wife in regard to her fear of transatlantic travel: “If therefore Things sh^d not wear a more promising aspect upon the opening of the next year, by all means summon resolution enough to cross the Ocean. M^rs Hutchinson tells me this was your greatest dread. Believe me you will find it infinitely less dangerous & terrifying than your imagination suggests. The recompence which awaits you, shall be the careful attention of friendship & the embrace of a faithful partner,” see Samuel Quincy to Hannah Hill Quincy, 15 October 1777, Papers Relating to the Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Families, Massachusetts Historical Society.

18. Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 141–43.

19. See Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1980), 120; Joan R. Gundersen, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,” Signs 13 (Autumn 1987): 59–61, 63; Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Woman and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 11–15; and Linda Kerber, “Paradox of Women’s Citizenship in the Early Republic: the Case of Martin v. Massachusetts, 1805,” American Historical Review 97 (Apr. 1992): 349–78. Coverture has also been defined in legal terms as “unity of person,” meaning that the husband and wife together formed one legal entity rather than two. See Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America, 14–15.

20. Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, 14.

21. Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, xv. The adoption of the principle of separate estates largely depended on a colony adopting the dual system of English law, which involved establishing both courts of law and courts of equity (chancery courts). These equity courts then enforced the right of families to endow women with separate estates, which were meant to remain in their control rather than their husband’s, a precedent that was based on the example of English chancery courts. While Salmon states that the Puritan bias against chancery courts prevented them from being established in New England, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina did establish chancery courts. Pennsylvania did not, but did give its courts of law the ability to rule in cases of equity, giving the courts some teeth in terms of enforcing separate estates. See Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, 81–84, 120–23. For colonial women who articulated political opinions, particularly in opposition to those of their spouse, see Cynthia Kierner, Southern Women in Revolution, 1776–1800: Personal and Political Narratives (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 100, 151–58; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 119–55; and Gundersen, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,” 68–71.

22. The exception of course, is the aforementioned settlement of a separate estate within a marriage contract. Separate estates, however, were not available to women in all thirteen colonies (see n21, above), and were employed by only a few families. Salmon labels them “not numerous”, and Gunderson states that they failed to grant women any real measure of economic independence. Furthermore, even if a colonial woman was endowed with a separate estate, her husband’s political opinions still “covered” her own. The separate estate did not translate into an opportunity for political agency, which a woman’s marriage continued to nullify. See Salmon, Women and the Law of Property, 83 and Gunderson, “Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution,” 72–73.

23. Confiscation laws varied by state, although all state governments acted against the estates of loyalists in some manner. For confiscation law in Massachusetts, see Richard D. Brown,“The Confiscation and Disposition of Loyalists’ Estates in Suffolk County, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21 (Oct. 1964): 534–50; Andrew McFarland Davis, “The Confiscation Laws of Massachusetts,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 1902–4, 8 (1906): 50–72; and David Edward Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1989), 270–337. For Connecticut, see Oscar Zeichner, “The Rehabilitation of the Loyalists in Connecticut,” New England Quarterly 11 (June 1938): 308–30. For New York, see Harry B. Yoshpe, The Disposition of Loyalist Estates in the Southern District of the State of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 13–27. For Pennsylvania, see Anne M. Ousterhout, A State Divided: Opposition in Pennsylvania to the American Revolution (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 148, 172–73, 279, 288 and Anne M. Ousterhout, “Pennsylvania Land Confiscations During the Revolution,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102 (July 1978): 328–43. For Georgia, see Robert S. Lambert, “The Confiscation of Loyalist Property in Georgia, 1782–1786,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 20 (Jan. 1963): 80–94. For an excellent summary of the confiscation policies of the four southern states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—see Kierner, Southern Women in Revolution, 7. For the hope that loyalist objects entrusted to women would remain safe from confiscations, see Kerber, Women of the Republic, 9–10.

24. Samuel Eliot Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 1765–1848: The Urbane Federalist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), 28.

25. If Gray were dead, the case for Elizabeth’s possession would have been stronger, although the property would have most likely devolved to her brother or her son. Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 18; Samuel Eliot Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray, Loyalist,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, 1911–13, 14 (1913): 324–27. Art historian Ellen Miles has also noted that Gray initially “opposed the use of violence by either side,” see Ellen G. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 34.

26. Elizabeth Gray Otis to Harrison Gray, 6 July 1776 as quoted in Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray,” 328.

27. For one of the Gray homes remaining in the possession of Elizabeth Gray Otis and her husband, Samuel Alleyne Otis, see Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray,” 330–31. Morison declared Gray’s other real estate, and the implied goods within it, “long past recovery” by the end of the Revolution. The outstanding debts were recoverable because Gray’s grandson, Harrison Gray Otis, had them assigned to him, thus preempting the appeal that would undoubtedly arise—that the debts were owed to a loyalist and should therefore be exempt from repayment. See Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 61 and Morison, “The Property of Harrison Gray,” 336–50.

28. Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo,” 26–28.

29. Jonathan Lamb, “The Crying of Lost Things,” English Literary History 71 (2004): 949–58.

30. Lamb, “The Crying of Lost Things,” 955.

31. Massachusetts General Court, An Act to Prevent the Return to this State, of Certain Persons Therein Named, and Others, Who Have Left This State, or Either of the United States, and Joined the Enemies Thereof, (16 October 1778), The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Wright & Potter, printers to the state, 1905), 5: 912 (hereafter Acts and Resolves).

32. Massachusetts General Court, An Act for Confiscating the Estates of Certain Persons Commonly Called Absentees, 4th sess. (1 May 1779), Acts and Resolves, 5: 971. The act went on to explain that “her dower therein shall be set off to her, by the judges of probate of wills, in like manner as it might have been if her husband had died, intestate, within the jurisdiction of this state.”

33. There is some disagreement as to when Ann repurchased the property; one source states the purchase occurred in 1781, another cites Ann’s intervention as taking place in October, 1785. See Tim Clark, “The Saga of Aunt Bessie’s Chest-on-Chest,” Yankee (April 1988): 81 and Wendell Garrett, “The Story of a Boston Merchant,” in Sotheby’s New York, Important Americana Sale, 19–21 January 2007, 150.

34. Although Gilbert died in England in 1791, he returned briefly to Boston in 1789 and while there, made a will. An inventory of his possessions followed in 1792 and included a large number of goods, all of which Ann Deblois likely played a role in preserving. See Gilbert Deblois Inventory, 13 March 1792, docket no. 19898, Suffolk County Registry of Probate. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston also holds a c. 1740–1750 clothespress with a Deblois family provenance, as well as a portrait of Gilbert Deblois (1990.300) painted by John Singleton Copley while both men resided in London during the Revolution. See Clothespress (1987.254), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Curatorial Files, Boston, Mass.

35. The desk-and-bookcase is missing some of its original ornament—the upper portion of the bookcase most likely included a finial and three small holes above the arched central prospect door indicate the possible presence of nail/sprigs that once secured a piece of carving—yet its overall condition is remarkable given its age. This is evidenced by the fact that all the original hardware is intact and most of the damage sustained has been the result of wood expansion and shrinkage related to natural shifts in climate. See Robert Mussey Associates, Inc., “Treatment Report,” 26 March 2007. The fact that the desk-and-bookcase was constructed of a grade of particularly hard, dense mahogany also made it less susceptible to the dents, bruises, and dings that occur with the passage of time. Robert Mussey, email message to author, 15 June 2010.

36. Lewis Deblois to Steven Deblois, 10 March 1951, Private Collection. The Deblois desk-and-bookcase proceeded down a direct line of family descent until 2007. See Lot 294, Sotheby’s New York, Important Americana Sale, 19–21 January 2007, 154. For a detailed description of the object’s provenance to 1896, and its unique hold on the Deblois family’s collective memory, see Wendell Garrett, “The Story of a Boston Merchant,” 152–53. The Deblois clothespress, or chest-on-chest, has a similar provenance, remaining in the family until the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston acquired it in 1987. See Edward S. Cooke, “Boston Clothespresses of the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts 1 (1989): 94n15.

37. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 1 January 1777, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777, Folder 1.3, Reference Collection, Morris-Jumel Mansion, New York, N.Y.

38. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 4 October 1775 and 23 December 1775, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777. For additional considerations of the difficulty accompanying the receipt of transatlantic letters and the anxiety that accompanied such an uncertain exchange, see Jennifer Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo,” 26–27 and Sarah Pearsall, “‘After All These Revolutions’: Epistolary Identities in an Atlantic World, 1760–1815” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2001), 92, 94–95, 104–6.

39. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 4 July 1775, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777.

40. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 14 March 1775 and 23 December 1775, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777.

41. Anne Verplanck, “The Social Meanings of Portrait Miniatures in Philadelphia, 1760–1820,” in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field, Ann Smart Martin and Ritchie Garrison, eds., (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum), 201–2; 206–7.

42. Art historian Marcia Pointon has noted the similarity between portrait miniatures—which she terms “portrait-objects”—and letters as agents of personal connection, a relationship I believe can be extended to other, larger objects as well. See Marcia Pointon, “‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” Art Bulletin 83 (March 2001): 65–67.

43. Pointon, “‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” 52–66.

44. In some cases the artist crafting the miniature mixed hair into the pigment used to create the image, inserting the body even further into the object’s inextricable fabric. See Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven: Yale University Press), 109–17.

45. In 1735, William Byrd wrote his good friend John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, that he had had “the pleasure of conversing a great deal with your picture.” See Marion Tingling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684–1776 (Charlottesville, Va.: The Virginia Historical Society in Association with The University Press of Virginia, 1977), 487. Byrd also talked with another portrait in his home, that of his sister-in-law, Jane Pratt Taylor. Byrd wrote Pratt, “We often discourse with you in effigie, and call the painter a bungler for falling so short of the original.” See David Meschutt, “William Bryd and his Portrait Collection,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (May 1988): 26–27. I owe this citation to the collegiality of Jennifer Van Horn.

46. Belting credits the quote to Erhart Kästner via a parenthetical quotation, but does not provide a full citation in an endnote or bibliography. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9.

47. Both Margaretta Lovell and Marcia Pointon have discussed this function of portraiture; Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution, 29, 34–35 and Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press, 1993), 159–75. Pointon’s consideration of the issue of absence is double-layered. Not only does she liken the conversation piece to a will, in which the person responsible for the object’s creation is now (and necessarily) absent, but she also considers how literal absences are painted into conversation pieces, which highlights the complicated line drawn between the “real” and the “representation.”

48. Roger Morris to Mary Philipse Morris, 2 September 1775, 4 October 1775, and 23 December 1775, Roger Morris Letters 1775–1777.

49. Mary Morris changed residences several times during Roger’s absence, shifting possessions to and from the couple’s two country estates—one in Harlem, the other in Dutchess County—a rented house in Manhattan, and her family home in Yonkers. The Copley portrait evidently made some, if not all, of these trips with her. Although the series of letters between husband and wife ceased before the couple’s final move to England in 1783 (Roger had by then returned to British-controlled New York and the couple undertook the move together), the provenance of the painting has led scholars to believe that the portrait also undertook the Atlantic voyage. See Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 300 and Wendy A. Cooper, An American Vision: Henry Francis du Pont’s Winterthur Museum (Washington, D.C.: Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, 2002), 112.

50. For example, a pair of pendants painted in 1769 by John Singleton Copley for Massachusetts native Isaac Royall shared in their owner’s political exile in London by 1778, see Jules Prown, John Singleton Copley (Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 1966), 2: 266. The pendants of James and Susannah Boutineau painted by Robert Feke in 1748 are also believed to have made the trip from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia with fleeing loyalists; see Richard H. Saunders and Ellen G. Miles, American Colonial Portraits: 1770–1776 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1987), 167–69.

51. Art historian Ellen Miles calls the Fitch portrait the largest of Copley’s surviving group portraits. Only The Knatchbull Family (c. 1800–01) was larger, and it has since been cut down. See Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82, 86n9. For comparative purposes, Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch measures 101½ x 134 inches while two of Copley’s other large group portraits, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard (1775) and The Copley Family (1776–77), measure 69 x 88½ inches and 72½ x 90¼ inches, respectively.

52. Memorandum, 26 August 1988, Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch (1960.4.1), Curatorial Files, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. See also Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82 and Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:419. There is some debate regarding who was the intended recipient of the painting. Although both the artist and the donors of the portrait believed it was intended for Dr. James Lloyd, the Fitch sibling’s uncle, earlier owners maintained it was intended for Lloyd’s son, also James Lloyd. The fact that father and son had the same name has certainly contributed to this confusion. See Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 86n1. Whoever the intended recipient, however, the painting’s function as a means to reunify strained family bonds remains the same.

53. Samuel Fitch Claim, undated, T 12/105/90, Public Records Office, Kew, Eng.

54. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82.

55. Most historians link the beginning of the cultural turn to the “white wedding,” particularly in Great Britain and the United States, to the wedding of Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha that took place on February 10, 1840. Contrary to tradition, the young Queen eschewed state robes and court dress, wearing a white silk satin dress (made of English cloth no less) instead. While the Queen’s sartorial choice cemented the widespread shift to the white wedding dress, some brides did choose to wear the color prior to 1840 and, like Queen Victoria, also wore veils. In 1801, the Peirce family of Salem, Massachusetts, initiated an extensive refurbishing of their east parlor in preparation for their daughter Sally’s wedding, to which she wore a white muslin empire-waist dress and a lace veil “put on turban fashion,” an ensemble that very closely resembles that of Sarah Fitch in the Copley portrait. See Paula Bradstreet Richter, Wedded Bliss: The Marriage of Art and Ceremony (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Peabody Essex Museum, 2008), 117–20, plate 4, and Barbara Penner, “‘A Vision of Love and Luxury’: The Commercialization of Nineteenth-Century American Weddings,” Winterthur Portfolio 34 (Spring 2004): 2.

56. Margaretta Lovell has argued that “almost all private portraits were made at the time an individual’s achievement of majority, inheritance, marriage, or first issue—moments that mark the movement of family substance in an orderly, prescribed manner.” See Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution, 10.

57. Richter, Wedded Bliss, plate 4

58. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82.

59. For the description of the ground the Fitches stand upon as a “terrace” see Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 84.

60. Ann Uhry Abrams, “Politics, Prints, and John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” The Art Bulletin 61 (June 1979): 267.

61. See Abrams, “Politics, Prints, and John Singleton Copley,” 268, 276 and Maurie McInnis, “Cultural Politics, Colonial Crisis, and Ancient Metaphor in John Singleton Copley’s Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard,” Winterthur Portfolio 34 (Summer-Autumn 1999): 90. I, however, believe that Copley was much more of a loyalist than scholars tend to admit. The fact that he never returned to the United States after the Revolution, despite a more willing and established clientele in the former colonies, leads me to this conclusion. Although the financial situation of the colonies was precarious post-revolution, Copley had to struggle for a British audience and rely heavily upon the financial support of his father-in-law, putting him in a similarly unpredictable financial situation. See Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:259n2.

62. It is important to note that Susanna left one of the couple’s four children, Clarke Copley, in Boston under the care of Copley’s mother, Mary Copley Pelham. It was not unusual for women to leave infant children behind with relatives while the remainder of the family embarked on a transoceanic trip as it was feared that their bodies could not withstand the physical difficulties associated with a long sea voyage. Clarke Copley, who had been born in January 1774, was simply too young to take with the family in May 1775. He was left in the care of Copley’s mother, Mary Copley Pelham, who was expected to venture to London soon. Clarke died in January 1776 and Mary Copley Pelham could never be persuaded to make the trip to England; she died in Boston in 1789 after successfully serving as Copley’s agent for his Beacon Hill property for nearly fifteen years; see Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:262, 341. It is believed that the reaching infant in the portrait was initially conceived by Copley as Clarke, as the family did not learn of his death until after work on the portrait had begun. His wife was expecting, however, so the child was not omitted from the composition, and has since been referred to as Susanna, who was born in London in October 1776. See Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 48 and Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:262.

63. The popularity and influence of antiquity in eighteenth-century arts and letters has been well demonstrated in recent years, and there is no doubt of its cultural force. See, for example, Colin B. Bailey, The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting From Watteau to David (New York: Rizzoli,1992), 99–515; Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Cutlure, 1665–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 173–227; Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 40, 86; and Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), 26–27. While Hades and the River Styx were not often used as visual motifs in this period, they did serve as potent literary references ranging from Odysseus’s visit to Hades in the Odyssey to Dante’s discussion of his journey, accompanied by Virgil, down the River Styx into the Inferno. Such references would have resonated with those viewing the image who recognized William Fitch’s portrait as posthumous. Notably, the River Styx was also supposed to ascend from a great height at its origin, as explained in Apuleius’s tale of Venus’s trials for Pysche in The Golden Ass, further likening the falls in the Fitch portrait with those of the mythical river.

64. According to art historian Maurie McInnis’s analysis of the iconography of the Izard portrait—the elements of classical Greek sculpture and pottery in particular—the image presents a moment of contemplation on Ralph’s part with symbols of both loyalism and patriotism included in the work. The eighteenth-century metaphor that figured the colonies as belligerent children who rebelled against their wise mother England serves as the basis of her argument, which she then relates to the antiquities present in the painting. McInnis identifies the mythical scene portrayed on the volute krater, located in the upper-right-hand corner of the image, as one of matriarchal tyranny. Leto, angered that Niobe boasted that her happiness outweighed Leto’s, ordered her children, Artemis and Apollo, to kill Niobe’s sons and daughters. Conversely, the statue portrayed in the background of the canvas and on the sketch that Ralph holds relates to the story of Papirius and his mother, the former being a virtuous young man who refused to tell his mother the proceedings of the Roman senate, which he recently witnessed, despite her urging. The mother acts dishonorably in both narratives, but it is Papirius, in his virtuous immunity to his mother’s wrongful appeals, that signifies patriotism while Artemis and Apollo’s blind faith in their mother’s request conveys loyalism. McInnis ultimately concludes, based on the double inclusion of Papirius and His Mother and the positive connotation of its narrative, that the painting evidences Ralph’s ultimate alignment with the patriot cause. See McInnis, “Cultural Politics,” 103–6.

65. Jules Prown has also noted the similarity of the vases in the Fitch and Izard portraits; see Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2:419–20.

66. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 82.

67. “Royal Academy,” Morning Post and Gazetteer, 27 April 1801, 3 and “Exhibition of Paintings &c. At the Royal Academy, Somerset-Place,” The St. James Chronicle: or, British Evening-Post, 7–9 May 1801, 4. Both are quoted in Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 85. See also Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch (1960.4.1), Curatorial Files, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

68. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 84.

69. “Royal Academy, III,” Morning Herald, 1 May 1801, 2; Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch (1960.4.1), Curatorial Files, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

70. Susanna Clarke Copley to Elizabeth Copley Greene, undated, as quoted in Martha Babcock Greene Amory, The Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley, R.A.: With Notices of his Works, and Reminiscences of his Son, Lord Lyndhurst, High Chancellor of Great Britain (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882), 195–96.

1. The life of Elizabeth Freeman is discussed in Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Mumbet,” unpublished mss., Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.; Mary Kelley, ed., The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 69–71, 124–26; Theodore Sedgwick, The Practicability of the Abolition of Slavery: A Lecture (New York: J. Seymour, 1831). Freeman’s legal case is discussed in Arthur Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser. (Oct. 1968): 614–24. Quote is from Sedgwick, “Mumbet.”

2. My discussion of Betsey Way Champlain’s life is drawn from Ramsay MacMullen’s invaluable collection of the Way-Champlain Family correspondence, Sisters of the Brush: Their Family, Art, Lives, and Letters, 1797–1833 (New Haven: Past Times Press, 1997). The original letters, and many unpublished examples of Betsey Way Champlain’s literary activities, can be found in the Way-Champlain Family Correspondence, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

3. This argument is developed at length in my “Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment,” Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 124–43. A rare example of an ivory miniature painted by a “schoolgirl” who attended Mrs. Morris’s Philadelphia academy is included in Dale T. Johnson, American Portrait Miniatures in the Manney Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), 156. For general descriptions of the art made by female students, see Lynne Templeton Brickley, “Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy, 1792–1833” (Ed.D. Diss, Harvard University, 1985); Catherine Keene Fields and Lisa C. Knightlinger eds., To Ornament Their Minds: Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Academy, 1792–1833 (Litchfield Conn.: Litchfield Historical Society, 1993); Suzanne L. Flynt, Ornamental and Useful Accomplishments: Schoolgirl Education and Deerfield Academy, 1800–1830 (Deerfield, Mass.: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1988); Betty Ring, Let Virtue be a Guide to Thee: Needlework in the Education of Rhode Island Women (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1983) and her Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1690–1850 (New York: Knopf, 1993), vol. 1–2.

4. “RUDIMENTS OF TASTE and a POLITE FEMALE EDUCATION,” Juvenile Port-Folio and Literary Miscellany 1:38 (July 3, 1813): 150. See also the letters of the fictional Miss Penelope Airy, who supports herself with her needle after the premature deaths of her parents in [Judith Sargent Murray] The Gleaner. A miscellaneous production. In three volumes. By Constantia (Boston: I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews, 1798), 176–78.

5. Susan Ridley Sedgwick’s titles included The Morals of Pleasure: Illustrated by Stories Designed for Young Persons (1829), Allen Prescott: or, the Fortunes of a New England Boy (1834), Alida; or, Town and Country (1844), and Walter Thornley, or, a Peep at the Past (1859). On Susan Ridley Sedgwick’s life and place in the Sedgwick clan, see Kelley, Autobiography, 90–94; Timothy Kenslea, The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2006), 48–50, 225 n. 48. On the fraught relation between creative women and publicity in the nineteenth century, see Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Anne Sue Hirshorn, “Anna Claypoole, Margaretta, and Sarah Miriam Peale: Modes of Accomplishment and Fortune,” in Lillian B. Miller, ed., The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870 (Washington, D.C.: Abbeville Press in Association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions and the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 220–47.

6. Elizabeth Way Champlain to Mary Way, May 1822 and 1819 in Sisters, 242, 129. Lizzie W. Champney, “Sea-Drift from a New England Port,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Dec. 1879 (60:355): 62. Betsey Champlain’s career is summarized in MacMullen, Sisters, 33–44; for a detailed description of taking the likeness of a corpse, see Betsey Way Champlain to Eliza Way, c. 1822, Sisters, 242–43.

7. Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). For a different perspective on the psychological resonances of miniatures, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 125–27. Katherine C. Reider astutely analyzes the gifting of miniatures in the construction and perpetuation of status in “Gifting and Fetishization: The Portrait Miniature of Sally Foster Otis as a Maker of Female Memory,” unpublished paper in author’s possession. On exchange and status more generally, see Chris Packard, “Self-Fashioning in Sarah Goodridge’s Self Portraits,” Common-place 4:1 (2003); Marcia Pointon, “‘Surrounded by Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England.” Art Bulletin 83:1 (March 2001): 48–71; Anne A. Verplanck, “The Social Meanings of Portrait Miniatures in Philadelphia, 1760–1820,” in Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, eds., American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; Knoxville, Tenn.: Distributed by University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 195–223.

8. On miniature prices, see Reider, “Gifting and Fetishization;” Verplanck, “The Social Meanings of Portrait Miniatures,” 195–223, 201–3; Mona Leithiser Dearborn, Anson Dickinson: The Celebrated Miniature Painter (Hartford Conn.: Connecticut Historical Society, 1983), 155–68; MacMullen, Sisters, 24, 92.

9. See Eliza Champlain to Betsey Way Champlain, January, 1818, Sisters, 98. Way’s business and her faltering eyesight encouraged her to dictate letters through Eliza when the young woman was visiting. The history of the correspondence is described in Sisters, 477–78, n. 2.

10. Kelley, ed., Autobiography, 68; 125–26; Sedgwick, “Mumbet.”

11. The tombstone inscription is quoted in Kelley, ed., Autobiography, 71, n. 33. Practicability, 18. Authorities disagree over who delivered the lecture; some attribute it to Henry Dwight Sedgwick, others to Theodore Sedgwick II. I have here followed the lead of Sedgwick specialists.

12. For example, Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (Washington, D.C.: New York Graphic Society in association with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973), describes the image as “lovingly painted in watercolors,” 217. For similar references, see Jon Swan, “The Slave Who Sued for Freedom,” American Heritage (March 1990): 51–55.

13. Ivory miniatures depicting African-descended people are exceedingly rare. But for examples of a different strategy for representing people of color, see the portraits of Haitian-born hairdresser Pierre Toussaint, his wife, Juliette Toussaint, and his niece Euphemia Toussaint, all painted by Anthony Meucci around 1825. Now part of the collection at the New-York Historical Society, they can be viewed online (www.nyhistory.org). On racialized aesthetics and the representation of race in the long eighteenth century more generally, see Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Andover, Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy; Seattle, Wash.: In association with the University of Washington Press, 2006); David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England & America, 1780–1865 (London: Routledge, 2000); Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

14. See John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon, and Roy Strong, The English Miniature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 85–157.

15. My account of the process draws on T. S. Cummins [sic], “Practical Directions for Miniature Painting,” printed in William Dunlap’s 1834 Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York: Dover Publications, 1969) vol. 2, part 1, 10–13. Significantly, Dunlap himself struggled with the technical aspects of miniature painting; he managed to work as a miniaturist for years before Edward Malbone showed him how to prepare the ivory. Dunlap, “Autobiography of the Author,” in Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design, vol. 1, 269–70. For further discussions of the technical difficulties presented by ivory miniatures, see Murdoch, et al., English Miniature, 16–19; 163–95; Frank, Love and Loss, 1–13, 155–230; Carol Aiken in Johnson, American Portrait Miniatures, 13–26; Harry B. Wehle and Thomas C. Bolton, American Miniatures, 1730–1850 (New York: Doubleday, 1927).

16. See Murdoch, et al., English Miniature, 16–19; 163–95; Frank, Love and Loss, 1–13, 155–230; Johnson, American Portrait Miniatures, 13–26; American Miniatures.

17. For a complementary discussion of racialized portraiture in eighteenth-century Britain, see Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture,” Art History 27:4 (September 2004): 563–92. The literature on sensibility is too large and complex to be cited here in any detail. But on sensibility among eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American elites, see esp. Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).

18. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, with an Appendix (New York: T.B. Jansen & Co., G. Jansen & Co., 1801), 205. On the political and cultural significance of transparent skin as an index of individual sentiment and character, see Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 192–95.

19. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), especially chapter 1, 2–48.

20. Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, second edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: J. Simpson & Co. and Williams and Whiting, NY, 1810), 49, 66, 67–68, 162, 168. Scholarly discussions of Smith include Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 41–49, Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 207–14; Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 251–53; Scott Juengel, “Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science,” ELH 68 (2001): 897–927; Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1815 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1968), 486–88.

21. “Complexion in the Human Species,” Port-Folio, July 1814, 30.

22. “Familiar Letters on Physiognomy,” The Visitor, 1809, vol. 1, p. 148.

23. Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1795), v. 1, 375.

24. Elizabeth Way Champlain, “On Flattery,” in Sisters, 40–42. On skin and representations of skin as communicative surfaces, see Mechthild Fend, “Bodily and pictorial surfaces: skin in French art and medicine, 1790–1860,” Art History 28:3 (June 2005): 311–39; Susan Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,” American Art 15:3 (Fall 2001): 8–33.

25. P[eter] F. Cooper, The Art of Making and Colouring Ivorytypes, Photographs, Talbotypes, and Miniature Paintng on Ivory, &c. By PF Cooper, Miniature, Portrait, Pastil, and Equestrian Painter, and Photographer (Philadelphia: Published by author, 1863), 28.

26. John Dougall, The Cabinet of the Arts; Being a New and Universal Drawing Book, second edition (London: Ackermann, 1821), 226.

27. Ibid., 268.

28. Cooper, Art, 26.

29. John Russell, Elements of Painting with Crayons (Dublin, 1773), 70–75.

30. Mr. Hayter, Introduction to Perspective, Drawing, and Painting (London: Black, Parry, & Co., 1815), 180–81.

31. W. M. Craig, A Course of Lectures on Drawing, Painting, and Engraving, Considered as Branches of Elegant Education (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 350–55.

32. Dougall, Cabinet, 268–70.

33. See Mary Way to Betsey Way Champlain, c. 1814, Sisters, 27–30; Mary Way to Eliza Champlain, Dec. 1816, Sisters, 59.

34. Betsey Way Champlain to Eliza Champlain, 16 Nov. 1824, Sisters, 322–23.

35. Betsey Way Champlain to Eliza Champlain, 1822, Sisters, 264.

36. Betsey Way Champlain to Eliza Champlain, January 1825, Sisters, 327; William Champlain to Eliza Champlain, 13 February 1825, Sisters, 328.

37. John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). Barbara Ryan situates Elizabeth Freeman and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s fiction in the context of racialized service and dependence in Love, Wages, and Slavery: The Literature of Servitude in the United States (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006), chapter 1.

38. Last Will and Testament of Elizabeth Freeman, Oct. 18, 1829, Sheffield Historical Society, Sheffield, Mass. Located at www.mumbet.com, accessed Feb. 1, 2007.

39. Practicability, 16, 18; Sedgwick, Autobiography, 69; Sedgwick, “Mumbet” mss.

40. “Africans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts,” on-line exhibition, Massachusetts Historical Society (http://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/?queryID=54), accessed Oct. 15, 2007.

41. This perspective significantly revises the standard historical accounts of race in North America, which associate nineteenth-century whiteness with masculinity, commerce, and politics. Women, and the family more generally, enter the equation only when abolitionist and feminist agitators together raise the specter of race and slavery in the private sphere. The classic accounts are David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995); Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Scholars considering the visual representation of race and racial identity look to the Civil War to structure their inquiries. In their telling, the nineteenth-century imaginary juxtaposed black/slave/South against white/free/North. See, for example, Mary Niall Mitchell’s “‘Roseboom and Pure White,’ Or So It Seemed,” American Quarterly, (Sept. 2002): 369–410.

1. Lauren B. Hewes, Portraits in the Collection of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 2004), 145–47; on the portraits of Benjamin Franklin wearing glasses, see Charles Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 68–69, 71, 73, 329.

2. There are many books and articles that address The Spectator and its relationship to eighteenth-century American and British culture and society, in addition to recent work on coffeehouses as historical sites and literary venues, and of course Habermas’s seminal work on the public sphere [Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991)]. Most helpful to me have been: Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler and Spectator Papers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

3. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996), “The Book Fool,” esp. 296.

4. For general information about the history of spectacles, see the collectors’ website, www.antiquespectacles.com; Richard Corson, Fashions in Eyeglasses from the Fourteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Peter Owen, 1967; second revised edition, 1980); Frank W. Law, The Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers: A History (London: The Company, 1978); Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, Glass: A World History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Edward Tenner, Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (New York: Vintage, 2003). See also, Manguel, A History of Reading.

5. On the political economy of fashion see Linzy Brekke, “The ‘Scourge of Fashion’: Political Economy and the Politics of Consumption in the Early Republic,” Early American Studies, 3, No. 1 (Spring 2005): 111–39. On the problem of vision, glasses, and fashion, see Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses: American Spectacles in the Age of Franklin (Ph.D. diss. Boston University, 2007), 297–98.

6. See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Chapters 2 and 3; Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America; and Warner, The Letters of the Republic. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), especially Chapters 2 and 3, which deal in part with the presentation of the self through the exchange of letters and the regulation of the body.

7. [Samuel Dexter, son], “Biographical Notice of the Hon. Samuel Dexter,” The Farmer’s Museum, Vol. 16, No. 45 (August 27, 1810). This is the same notice that appears in Monthly Analogy and Boston Review, IX (July 1810): 3–4, as well as other magazines of the time. The quote regarding the father’s attitude toward Calvinism and the reaction of his parents comes from this source, and thus should be understood as from the perspective of Samuel’s son. Orrando Perry Dexter, et al., Dexter Geneaology, 1642–1904; Being a history of the descendents of Richard Dexter of Malden, Massachusetts, from the notes of John Haven Dexter and original researches (New York: J. J. Little, 1904), 53–58 [Hereafter Dexter Genealogy].

8. Dexter Genealogy, 53–58; Carlton Albert Staples, Samuel Dexter, 1726–1810: A Paper Read Before the Dedham Historical Society, February 3, 1892 (Dedham, Mass., 1892), 6–11; William Pencak, “Dexter, Samuel,” American National Biography Online (http://www.anb.org/articles/01/01-00217.html); Clarence Winthrop Bowen, The History of Woodstock, Connecticut (Norwood, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1926), Chapter 14.

9. Bowen, History of Woodstock, 185. Staples, Samuel Dexter, 8–9.

10. [Samuel Dexter, son], “Biographical Notice of the Hon. Samuel Dexter,” The Farmer’s Museum, 16:45 (August 27, 1810).

11. Samuel Dexter, Commonplace-book, 1763–1809, P-201, 1 reel (microfilm), Ms. SBd-219, Massachusetts Historical Society, p. 94. (Hereafter referred to as Commonplace-book.)

12. Staples, Samuel Dexter, 9. Jane Kamensky has traced some of the Dexter family’s history in her book, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008). Many thanks to Dr. Kamensky for allowing me to read an early draft of Chapter One.

13. Commonplace-book, 231, 234–235.

14. Dexter Genealogy, 53–54.

15. Bowen, History of Woodstock, 189.

16. Dexter makes reference in his Commonplace-book (p. 251) to hitting his head above the eye in an accident in January of 1788 as he prepares to depart for church. By January of 1802, he is complaining of ophthalmia and fears “total blindness” (p. 308) but it is very difficult to say whether the one followed from the other. “Ophthalmia” referred very generally to eye problems, ranging from errors of refraction and accommodation to infectious diseases, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. David Fleishman, an expert collector, has dated the spectacles at 1785, and they could have easily been bought before Dexter starts mentioning these eye problems in the commonplace-book. In theory, he could have bought them as early as before the beginning of the Revolution, in 1774 or 1775, when he was in his late fifties; styles like his were available from the 1750s onward.

17. Readers with spectacles means older people no longer require the assistance of younger people; see Tenner, Our Own Devices, 217.

18. Dexter Genealogy, 36, 59.

19. See Deborah Jean Warner, “Optics in Philadelphia During the Nineteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 129, No. 3 (September 1985): 291–99.

20. See T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 144, 146; and John Van Solingen v. Benjamin d’Harriette, July 14, 1730, in Richard B. Morris, ed., Select Cases of the Mayor’s Court of New York City, 1674–1784 (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1935), 554–60.

21. See, for example, Benjamin Franklin to Jane Mecom, London, July 17, 1771, ALS, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Penn. The major works by members of the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers that circulated in the colonies were: Benjamin Martin, An Essay on Visual Glasses (Vulgarly Called Spectacles) (London: Printed for the Author, 1756); James Ayscough, A Short Account of the Eye and the Nature of Vision, Chiefly Designed to Illustrate the Use and Advantage of Spectacles (London: E. Say, 1752); and George Adams, An Essay on Vision, Briefly Explaining the Fabric of the Eye and the Nature of Vision. . . , second edition (London: Printed for the Author, by R. Hindmarsh, 1792). See also William Buchan, Domestic medicine: or, A treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases, by regimen and simple medicines, Twentieth edition (Waterford [N.Y.]: Printed by and for James Lyon & Co., 1797).

22. “Spectacles” (Advertisement for J. Deverell, watchmaker) The Massachusetts Centinel, September, 3, 1785. “Fresh Goods” (Advertisement for Amos Atwell and Son) The United States Chronicle, June 6, 1791. Kamensky discusses Andrew’s business in Chapter One of The Exchange Artist.

23. Refer to the Daniel Henchman Papers, microfilm collection at the American Antiquarian Society for examples of this. Henchman’s customers are discussed in Chapter 2 of Reading Glasses, and digested in Appendices 1, 2, and 3. See Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, 383–94. These calculations are based on population estimates for 1710, 1720, 1730, 1742, and 1760, as listed in Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City Upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst, Mass.: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Alan McBrayer to David Fleishman, Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey, Laura Brandt, and Charles Letocha, June 20, 2007, email correspondence in the possession of the author.

24. Again, refer to advertisements in the colonial papers from the era, as well as the Daniel Henchman accounts, both digested in Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, Chapter 2, and 383–94.

25. I have found concave lenses to be very rare in the material record for this period, even though they were highly advertised at the time. They do not show up until the mid-nineteenth century or later in collections such as those at the Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburg, Vt.; the New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, N.H.; the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn.; the Maine Historical Society, Portland, Me.; the Massachusetts Historical Society; and the private collection held by the Stout family of Ipswich, Mass. Instead, single lens perspective glasses seem to have been used by myopes. See also Daniel Henchman Papers. Microfilm collection at the American Antiquarian Society, in particular, the purchases of Rev. Thomas Foxcroft, on August, 15, 1748; August 9, 1732; and December 5, 1732.

26. An early example of this would be The Most Wonderful Relation of Master John Macklain ([London]: Printed for T. Vere & W. Giberson, 1657), title page, 2–5, 8–9, 12. A later example of this would be James Calder, “Information to Old People,” New York Magazine, Vol 2 (1797): 568.

27. Commonplace-book, 4, 114, on p. 270–71 he writes “There seems to be no end of burning old wills, and executing new ones”—dated Weston, June 14, 1792; he describes his mother’s will on p. 296–99. The obituary is copied in Dexter Genealogy, 42–43, and appeared in The Columbian Centinel, June 21, 1797. The palimpsest is listed as a commonplace-book, and it is housed in a folder with the Ward-Perry-Dexter Papers, 1733–1927, Ms N-1727, Massachusetts Historical Society.

28. “Philotheorus” (Samuel Dexter) Thoughts on Several Passages of Scripture. . . . (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1791), 7–8, 10, 14–18, 45.

29. Samuel Dexter’s will is listed in the Worcester County Probate Records for 1810, Vol. 39, beginning on page 391; these are available on microfilm at the Massachusetts State Archives, see page 399 [Hereafter Will]. The sermon is Samuel Kendal, A Discourse Delivered at Mendon, June 14, 1810 (Boston, Mass.: John Eliot, 1810).

30. Will, 399; Kendal, A Discourse Delivered at Mendon.

31. This general sense of the cost of the spectacles is based on the John McAllister account books: Account and day books, John McAllister, Philadelphia optician, Downs Special Collections, Winterthur Library, Winterthur, Del. Prices are listed in the appendices of Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, 391–97, especially 397.

32. See, for example, the early spectacles shown in Corson, Fashions in Eyeglasses.

33. Spectacles were sold under a wide variety of signs in many shops that didn’t specialize in them, but the spectacle makers had early on regularized their signage, advertising, and trade cards. E. G. R. Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor & Stuart England (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1970), especially pages 248–49, 256–59, 262–63, 276–77, 280–91, 294–95, and 302–3; Corson, Fashions, 47; Law, A History, Chapter 3. Only a handful of cards are left from that earliest period, in the collection of the British Museum, and they are often reproduced in secondary sources, such as Corson, Fashions, 47. When compared to the print ads and descriptions of signage in Taylor, they suggest a strong degree of uniformity among spectacle makers. See also D. J. Bryden and D. L. Simms, “Archimedes as an Advertising Symbol,” in Technology and Culture, 34, No. 2 (April 1993): 387–91; as well as Bryden and Simms, “Archimedes and the Opticians of London,” in Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 35 (1992): 11–14., D. J. Bryden and D. L. Simms, “Spectacles improved to perfection and approved of by the Royal Society,” Annals of Science, 30 (1993): 1–32. See also, Adams, An Essay on Vision; as well as E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England, 1714–1840 (Cambridge, Eng.: For the Institute of Navigation at the University Press, 1966).

34. Laura Rigal, “Electric Books of 1747,” Common-place, 1, No. 2 (January 2001). For more on mining in Brazil, see also Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Minas Gerais (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1999). On the importance of situating materials in their historical eras (and the revelations that frequently follow), see Robert Friedel, A Material World (Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1988). Many thanks to John Mayer for calling my attention to this excellent work. Richard Bushman, “The Complexity of Silver,” in New England Silversmithing, 1620–1815, Jeannine Falino and Gerald W. R. Ward, editors (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001); Silvio Bedini, Thinkers and Tinkers: Early American Men of Science (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 299.

35. See, for example, the advertisements copied in Law, A History, as well as Ayscough, A Short Essay on Vision, and especially the pamphlets of Benjamin Martin, all cited in note 21.

36. See especially Appendix 1 in Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, 383–90 to track this trend.

37. Annapolis, Md., “Annapolis (in Maryland) June 22, 1769. We, the Subscribers . . . [to] prevent the Use of foreign Luxuries and Superfluities . . .” (Annapolis, Md.1769), 2; similarly, in “An Inventory of Goods on hand taken 20^th August 1770,” the Merchant Firm of Briggs & Blow of Williamsburg listed “16 pair spectacles, 10 pair Temple, 5 Plain Irons” under their account of cutlery. See “Prentis Store Historical Report Block 18–1 Building 5 Lot 46,” Colonial Williamsburg Digital History Center Archive, available at http://www.pastportal.com/, accessed August 4, 2005. The original papers are available in the William and Mary College Archives, Williamsburg, Va.

38. Hewes, Portraits in the Collection of the American Antiquarian Society, 145–47.

39. Except for Benjamin Franklin, spectacle-wearers uniformly declined to be shown in their spectacles in formal portraits until the nineteenth century. This statement is based in part on my survey of the portraits in collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn., but reviews of collections of portraits by Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, and Charles Willson Peale all confirm this trend.

40. Bushman, The Refinement of America, 45, and Chapter 3.

41. Commonplace-book, 276.

42. Will, 404, 406; Kendal, A Discourse, 23; Staples, Samuel Dexter, 17.

43. Commonplace-book, 302, 332.

44. Will, 404, 406; Kendal, A Discourse, 4–5.

45. Lucius M. Sargent, Reminiscences of Samuel Dexter, Originally written for the Boston Evening Transcript, by Sigma (Boston: Henry Dutton & Son, 1857), 71.

46. The US Treasury has a brief general biography of Samuel Dexter available on its website. See http://www.treas.gov/education/history/secretaries/sdexter.shtml. For insight into Samuel Dexter Junior’s career, see Kamensky, The Exchange Artist, Chapter One.

47. Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, Appendix 2, 391–93.

48. See for example the early Robinson family spectacles in the collections of the Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburgh, Vt., and also the Isaiah Thomas spectacles in the collection of the New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, N.H.

49. [Dexter], “Biographical Notice.”

50. Samuel Dexter catalogued his library in his Commonplace-book, 8–20. He most likely added to this list, started early in the book, as he acquired books, just as he made notes when he lent them (for example, to his son Samuel, see p. 15). Dexter makes note of his 9-volume set of The Spectator on p. 18, and to Horace on p. 251.

51. For John Adams’s use of Horace, including in his letters with Dexter, see Dorothy M. Robathan, “John Adams and the Classics,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 1946): 91–98.

52. Daniel Henchman records John Dennie, a frequent purchaser of spectacles as far back as April 9, 1720, as buying “1 set of Spectators” on September 24, 1722, for example.

53. The Tatler, No. 103, December 6, 1709; Donald F. Bond, ed., The Tatler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 364. See also The Tatler, No. 88, November 1, 1709; Bond, The Tatler, 273ff. The Tatler, No. 64, September 6, 1709; Bond, The Tatler, 110ff. The Tatler, No. 176, May 23–25, 1710; Bond, The Tatler, 321ff. The Tatler, No. 93, November 12, 1709; Bond, The Tatler, 303–04.

54. Quoted in, among other places, Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 12. For examples and a discussion of coffeehouse engravings, see Stebbins McCaffrey, Reading Glasses, 187–92.

55. The Spectator No. 206, Friday, October 26, 1711 (Steele); Bond, The Spectator, Vol. 2, 307. See also The Tatler, No. 145, March 11–14, 1709–10; Bond, The Tatler, 165.

56. Commonplace-book, 166–72.

57. See Sargent, Reminiscences, Chapters 4 and 5.

58. This is the case made in Kamensky, The Exchange Artist, Chapter One.

59. Horace, The satires, epistles and art of poetry of Horace, translated into English verse by John Conington (London: Bell, 1888).

60. Ketcham, Transparent Designs, 1–3.

61. The Spectator No. 111, Saturday, July 7, 1711 (Addison); Bond, The Spectator, Vol. 1, 456–59.

62. See Hans-Gert Bachmann, et al., Gold: The Noble Mineral (East Hampton, Conn.: Lapis International, 2003).

63. The quote is from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 7.

64. Sargent, Reminiscences, 36–38; See also Samuel Dexter, “Thoughts on the Immortality of the Soul,” MS 724, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

65. Sargent, Reminiscences, 71.

66. Sargent, Reminiscences, 20–23. Jane Kamensky notes that during the end of the Adams administration, Dexter the younger was skewered by Democratic-Republican newspapers with the accusation that he seemed like a “doddering grandmother”; because old women were often depicted in drawings as sporting spectacles, it is possible this was a coded reference to his own use of vision aids, however, it seems slim in comparison with other descriptions that make no mention of the use of spectacles, even in his office. Kamensky, The Exchange Artist, 47.

67. See, for example John McAllister to Thomas Jefferson, Philadelphia, December 1, 1806.

68. Cynthia Wall, “The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, No. 1 (1997): 1–25, especially page 8.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. See Dexter’s Will; Bowen, History of Woodstock, 187–89; Staples, Samuel Dexter, 11–13; Dexter Genealogy, 55–57.

72. Will, 403–4.

73. Will, 402–3; Staples, Samuel Dexter, 10; Sargent, Reminiscences, 14–15.

74. Sargent, Reminiscences, 8, 41. See also Joseph Story, A Sketch of the Life of Samuel Dexter (Boston: John Eliot, 1816).

1. “A Memorandum of persons invited to Wait Winthrop’s Funeral, Nov. 14, 1717, with the distribution of Mourning Emblems,” The Winthrop Papers, 6 vols, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser., (Boston, 1892), 5:354–56. All information below about the presents given at the Winthrop funeral comes from this list, which is hereafter cited as “Winthrop List.” The editors suggest that the “Memorandum” is “somewhat confused and probably imperfect.” (II, 356) They do not reveal if the heading given the document, which is not in the Massachusetts Historical Society collections, appears in the original. The purpose of the list was probably more to plan for distributing gifts rather than deciding who would attend. New England funerals in this period did not rely upon invitations and were open to all who wished to attend.

2. Boston News-Letter, November 18, 1717; Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. [paginated continuously.] (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1973), II, 867 (November 14, 1717). Hereafter cited as Sewall, Diary.

3. Winthrop List.

4. The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, vol. 2 (Boston, 1874), 80–84. See also Alvin Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America: 1607–1775 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. 2008), 462.

5. Acts and Resolves, II, 229–30.

6. Among the large literature, see Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fashions in Old New England (London, 1893), 373–75; David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Gordon E. Geddes, Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan New England (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981); Laurie Hochstetler, Sacred rites: Religious rituals and the transformation of American Puritanism (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2007), 207–60. There is also a large literature on gravestones, a topic that I do not discuss here. See, for example, James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1977), 89–124; Peter Benes, ed., Puritan Gravestone Art, 2 vols. (Boston: Boston University, 1976, 1978); Dickran and Ann Tashjian, Memorials for Children of Change: The Art of Early New England Stonecarving (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1974).

7. Sewall, Diary, I, 582 (December 12, 1707). These figures are calculated from an examination of all funerals noted in Sewall’s diary.

8. The standard biographies of Sewall are T. B. Strandness, Samuel Sewall: A Puritan Portrait (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1967); and Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Samuel Sewall of Boston (New York: Macmillan, 1964).

9. Samuel Sewall to Rev. Thomas Cotton (London), August 28, 1717, II, 79; Samuel Sewall to Gurdon Saltonstall, January 15, 1717/8, II, 81, Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall (1686–1729), 2 vols., in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser., 1–2 (1886–88); Sewall, Diary, II, 874 (December 16, 1717).

10. Sewall, Diary, II, 864 (October 20, 1717); John Danforth, Greatness & goodness elegized, in a poem, upon the much lamented decease of the honourable & vertuous Madam Hannah Sewall, late consort of the Honourable Judge Sewall . . . [Boston, 1717].

11. Westminster Assembly of Divines, A Directory for the Publique Worship of God, Throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1644), 35. See also the attack on Anglican funeral services for the same reasons by John Canne, A Necessity of Separation from the Church of England Proved by the Nonconformists’ Principles, ed. Charles Stovel (London, 1849; originally pub. Amsterdam, 1634), 112–13.

12. Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing or News from New England, ed. J. Hammond Trumbull (Boston: J. K. Wiggin & W. P. Lunt, 1867; originally pub. London, 1642), 87–88.

13. Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1957), II, 96 (August 17, 1711).

14. John Danforth, Profit and loss: an elegy upon the decease of Mrs. Mary Gerrish . . . [Boston, 1710].

15. Sewall, Diary, I, 582 (December 12, 1707).

16. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1628–1686, 5 vols. (Boston: W. White, 1853–54), II, 239; III, 162.

17. Samuel Willard, The High Esteem Which God hath of the Death of his Saints (Boston, 1683), 14–15. Samuel Sewall to Rev. Thomas Cotton (London), August 28, 1717, Sewall, Letter-Book, 2:79.

18. Samuel Sewall to John Storke, October 30, 1717; Samuel Sewall to John Storke, July 31, 1696, Sewall, Letter-Book, 2:76; 1:164.

19. Sewall, Diary, I, 431 (May 25, 1700).

20. Samuel Sewall, Jr., Note Book, (August 16, 1724) as quoted in “Introduction,” Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, 3 vols., in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th ser., 5–7 (1878–82), 1:xix. This edition of Sewall’s diary, with a variety of material not found in the later edition, is hereafter cited as Sewall, Diary (MHS ed.).

21. Sewall, Diary, II, 974 (February 16, 1720/1).

22. See “The Interment of William Lovelace, New York, 1671,” The American Historical Review, 9 (1904): 522–24, for the extensive use of mourning in an elaborate earlier funeral.

23. John Cotton to Rowland Cotton, November 7, 1717, Miscellaneous Bound Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. (hereafter MHS).

24. The New-England Weekly Journal, September 15, 1729.

25. Samuel Sewall to Thomas Burbank of Rumsey, July 22, 1695, Letter-Book, 1:154. Sewall had earlier that year noted mourning for the Queen in England by merchants as well as courtiers. I, 329, 331 (March 29, April 30, 1695).

26. Sewall, Diary, I, 451 (July 27, 1701).

27. Benjamin Walker, Jr., Diary, MHS, March 23, 1737/8; Boston Evening Post, March 20, 27, 1738. See also the diary of Benjamin Lynde, Jr., March 23, 1738, in The Diaries of Benjamin Lynde and of Benjamin Lynde, Jr. (Boston, 1880), 153. I am grateful to Sally Hill of the New England Historic Genealogical Society for generously sharing her transcriptions of the Walker diary.

28. Sewall, Diary, I, 160 (February 10, 1687/8); Boston Evening Post, March 27, 1738.

29. Sewall, Diary, I, 387 (February 14, 1697/8); II, 618 (May 2, 1709).

30. Henry Wilder Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel from the puritan age of New England to the present, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1882, 1896), I, 350.

31. [Thomas Paine], A discourse, shewing, that the real first cause of the straits and difficulties of this province of Massachusetts Bay, is it’s extravagancy (Boston, 1721), 3.

32. Sewall, Diary, II, 307 (January 8, 1727/8).

33. Sewall, Diary, II, 794–95 (July 30, 1715).

34. Benjamin Walker Jr. regularly uses the term in his diary. See, e.g., December 26, 1729, January 1, 1729/30, June 6, 1733.

35. “Of the Extravagance of our Funerals,” The Independent Reflector, 29, June 14, 1753, 116.

36. Winthrop List; Sewall, Diary, II, 867 (November 14, 1717). Because of the declining value of Massachusetts currency, the expenditures in the paragraph cannot be compared precisely.

37. Winthrop Papers, 3:412–13.

38. Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel, I, 360–61, 355, 336; New-England Weekly Journal, March 11, 1728.

39. Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives, of his Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, in New England: Begun and Held at Salem, in the County of Essex, on Wednesday, the Twenty-eighth Day of May . . . 1729 (Boston, 1729), 81–83, 109. William Winslow to [David Ayrewell?], September 22, 1729, Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS.

40. Sewall, Diary, II, 1008 (August 29, 1723).

41. Sewall, Diary, I, 396 (July 18, 1698). See the letters of Sewall to John Ive (Sr.), June 10, October 28, November 4, 1698 in Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall, 1, 201, 204, 206–7. For the comment on Winthrop, see Sewall, Diary, II, 716 (May 27, 1713).

42. Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1957), I, 83 (February 9, 1683/4); II, 461 (June 28, 1717); [Cotton Mather], A Christian Funeral (Boston, 1713), 21. For some indication of the length of a funeral, see Sewall, Diary, I, 560–61 (January 24, 1706/7).

43. Sewall, Diary, I, 601 (August 28, 1708). For other examples of prayer, see I, 74 (August 19, 1685); I, 565 (April 23, 1707).

44. Cotton Mather, Ratio disciplinae fratrum Nov-Anglorum. A faithful account of the discipline professed and practised; in the churches of New-England (Boston, 1726), 117.

45. Sewall, Diary, I, 66 (June 9, 1685).

46. Cotton Mather to John Winthrop, December 16, 1707 in “The Mather Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., 8 (Boston, 1868): 407.

47. Sewall, Diary, I, 565 (April 23, 1707).

48. This is stated more clearly in two later sources: Connecticut Courant, December 26, 1774, datelined Boston, December 22, italicized in original; Samuel Stearns, The American Oracle (New York, 1791), 243.

49. Sewall, Diary, I, 667 (August 11, 1711). See Jeremiah Bumstead, Diaries, 1722–1733, American Antiquarian Society, August 23, 1723.

50. Sewall, Diary, II, 1045–6 (April 14, 1726), clarifies some of the system that Sewall used. For an example of room left for unknown names, see the entry for January 27, 1710/1 (II, 652). The practice may suggest that Sewall may have filled in unknown names later in other places.

51. Sewall, Diary, I, 582 (December 12, 1707).

52. For examples, see Sewall, Diary, II, 945 (April 8, 1720), II, 1016–17 (May 6, 1724); see also I, 572 (September 15, 1707). For Mather’s funeral, see II, 1059–60 (February 19, 1727/8).

53. Sewall, Diary, II, 667 (August 3, 7, 1711).

54. Sewall, Diary, II, 891 (March 26, 1718).

55. Sewall, Diary, II, 623 (August 6, 1709).

56. Sewall, Diary, I, 493 (December 14, 1703); see also I, 439 (December 5, 1700).

57. [Cotton Mather], A Christian Funeral: A brief Essay, On that Case, What should be the Behaviour of a Christian at a Funeral? (Boston, 1713), 6.

58. Sewall, Diary, II, 891 (March 26, 1718).

59. Sewall, Diary, I, 585–86 (January 23, 1707/8); for the same experience, see I, 586–87 (January 31, 1707/8).

60. Sewall, Diary, I, 267 (September 23, 1690).

61. Sewall, Diary, I, 586–587 (January 31, 1707/8).

62. Sewall, Diary, I, 565 (April 23, 1707).

63. Cotton Mather, Ratio disciplinae, 117.

64. Sewall, Diary, I, 444 (January 15, 1700/1).

65. Sewall, Diary, I, 511–12 (July 24, 1704).

66. Sewall, Diary, II, 1044 (March 25, 1726).

67. Sewall, Diary, II, 1060 (February 19, 1727/8). See also I, 560–61 (January 24, 1706/7); II, 631 (January 10, 1709/10).

68. [Mather], A Christian Funeral, 21–22.

69. Sewall, Diary, I, 565 (April 23, 1707).

70. Sewall, Diary, I, 1021 (August 18, 1724); II, 1038 (October 17, 1725).

71. Sewall, Diary, II, 1044 (April 4, 1726).

72. Ann F. Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 92–184.

73. Isaac Watts to Benjamin Colman, October 12, 1739, in Charles C. Smith, “Letters of Dr. Watts,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2d ser., 9 (1894–95): 369; Colman to Watts, January 16, 1740, in Thomas Milner, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Rev. Isaac Watts (London, 1845), 654; “Of the Extravagance of our Funerals,” The Independent Reflector, 29, June 14, 1753, 117.

74. Winthrop List.

75. Winthrop List. The connections between the Dudleys and the Wainrights is noted in Sewall, Diary (MHS ed.), 3:14n.

76. Sewall, Diary (MHS ed.), 1:469–70; 2:10–11.

77. Sewall, Diary (MHS ed.), 1:469–70; 2:10–11.

78. Sewall, Diary, II, 671 (November 15, 16, 1711).

79. Sewall, Diary, I, 612 (December 22, 1708); II, 870 (November 22, 1717). Winthrop List.

80. The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay . . . (Boston, 1874), II, 229–230; Benjamin Colman to Isaac Watts, January 16, 1740, in Thomas Milner, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Rev. Isaac Watts (London, 1845), 654.

81. Winthrop List.

82. Sewall, Diary, I, 581 (December 4, 1707), II, 945 (April 8, 1720), 1016–17 (May 6, 1724).

83. Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly, April 1684–June 1692, Archives of Maryland (Baltimore, 1894), XIII, 290; Jonathan Belcher to Richard Waldon, April 25, 1737, Jonathan Belcher Letter-Books, MHS, V, 179.

84. Sewall, Diary, I, 153 (November 11, 1687). See also I, 396 (July 18, 1698).

85. Sewall, Diary, I, 364–65 (December 25, 1696).

86. Winthrop List; John Boydell to John Yeamans, March 8, 1737/8, D. S. Greenough Collection, MHS.

87. Walker, Diary, July 2, 1728.

88. The only use of hatbands that I have found is in the funeral of Rev. Samuel Myles of the Anglican King’s Chapel in 1728. Walker, Diary, March 8, 1727/8.

89. John Boydell to John Yeamans, March 8, 1737/8, D. S. Greenough Collection, MHS.

90. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, Genealogical Memoir of the Family of Elder Thomas Leverett, of Boston (Boston, 1850), 12n. On poems on the hearse, see Stannard, Puritan Way of Death, 203; [Cotton Mather], An Elegy on the Much-to-be-deplored Death of That Never-to-be-forgotten Person, the Reverend Mr. Nathaniel Collins . . . (Boston, 1685), front matter, n.p.

91. John Cotton to Rowland Cotton, November 7, 1717, Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS. Cotton notes six ministers before adding an “&c.” The ministers from Old South, Belcher’s (and Sewall’s) church, are not listed. Sewall’s account enumerates the bearers but does not mention the ministers. Sewall, Diary, II, 866 (November 6, 1717).

92. Sewall, Diary, I, 396 (July 18, 1698).

93. Sewall, Diary, II, 741 (October 27, 1713).

94. Sewall, Diary, I, 600 (August 23, 1708).

95. Sewall, Diary, II, 945 (April 8, 1720).

96. Mather, Diary, II, 96 (August 17, 1711).

97. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967), is the classic study. See also Mark Osteen, ed., The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines (London: Routledge, 2002); Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1979).

98. Boston Evening Post, October 18, 1736.

99. Henry Newman to Benjamin Colman, May 31, 1722, Henry Newman, New England Letter-Book, February 2, 1721/22–September 13, 1723, Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Manuscripts, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, Eng. The second minister was Boston’s Andrew Eliot; Lucius Manlius Sargent, Dealings with the Dead, By a Sexton of the Old School (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1856), I, 91–92. For another minister who passed on a tankard of rings to his heirs see, Lura Woodside Watkins, “Middleton Buries its Dead,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 98 (January 1962): 28.

100. Anita Schorsch, Mourning Becomes America: Mourning Art in the New Nation (Clinton, N.J.: Main Street Press, 1976).

101. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in Winthrop Papers, 6 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929–1992), II, 294. Quotation from modernized text at http://www.lewishyde.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ModernText; Boston Evening Post, October 18, 1736.

1. For an introduction to the history of New England maps see Barbara McCorkle, New England in Early Printed Maps, 1513 to 1800 (Providence, R.I.: John Carter Brown Library, 2001) and her “The Mapping of New England before 1800,” in Mapping Boston, eds. Alex Krieger and David Cobb with Amy Turner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 23–35; Peter Benes, New England Prospect: A Loan Exhibition of Maps at the Currier Gallery of Art (Boston: Dublin Seminar, 1981); the Osher Map Library exhibit, “The Cartographic Creation of New England,” posted at http://www.usm.maine.edu/~maps/exhibit2/; and David Bosse, “‘To Promote Useful Knowledge’: An Accurate Map of the Four New England States by John Norman and John Coles,” Imago Mundi 52 (2000): 138–154. See also the brief entry in Robert C. D. Baldwin, “Colonial Cartography under the Tudor and Early Stuart Monarchies, ca. 1480– ca. 1640,” in The History of Cartography. Cartography in the European Renaissance, Vol. 3, Part 2, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1774–1779.

2. Similar map designs can be found in most small-scale maps that supplemented geography books and atlases published by Patrick Gordon, Herman Moll, or Robert Wells. See also the anonymous “An Exact Mapp of New England and New York” (1702) inserted into Cotton Mather’s opus, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). In many examples the maps’ cartographic rendering of “New England” does not always reflect the territorial dimensions dictated by royal charters. On charters and New England in geopolitics see Philip S. Haffenden, New England in the English Nation 1689–1713 (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1974).

3. Nathaniel Mather to Increase Mather, Dublin, 26. Feb. 1676/77 in “The Mather Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., 8 (1868): 9.

4. Leo Bagrow, The History of Cartography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 22.

5. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, Eng.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 249. On the cartographic reformation see also Matthew H. Edney, “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making,” in Geography and Enlightenment, eds. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 165–198.

6. For similar patterns among prominent maps of America see the work by John Mitchell, Thomas Kitchin, Emmanuel Bowen, Malachy Postlewayt.

7. It’s not absolutely clear that Jefferys—an engraver by training—created the cartouche himself since it is by now assumed that the map itself was co-authored by his employee, John Green. See the excellent discussion in “The ‘Percy Map.’ The Cartographic Image of New England and Strategic Planning during the American Revolution,” Osher Map Collection (http://www.usm.maine.edu/~maps/percy/). On the difficulty of attributing primary authorship to the map or cartouche see J. B. Harley, “The Bankruptcy of Thomas Jefferys: An Episode in the Economic History of Eighteenth Century Map-Making,” Imago Mundi 20 (1966): 27–48; and Joan Winearls, “Thomas Jefferys’ Map of Canada and the Mapping of the Western Part of North America, 1750–1768,” in Images and Icons of the New World: Essays on American Cartography, ed. Karen Severud Cook (London: The British Library, 1996), 27–54.

8. Norman J. W. Thrower, Maps and Man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972), 168.

9. A. H. Robinson, The Look of Maps (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), 17.

10. G. N. G. Clarke, “Taking Possession: the cartouche as cultural text in eighteenth-century American maps,” Word & Image 4, 2 (1988): 471, 455.

11. See also J. B. Harley, “Text and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps,” in The New Nature of Maps, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 33–49; and William Boelhower, “Inventing America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis,” Word & Image 4, 2 (1988): 475–97; and debates published in Cartographica and Imago Mundi during the 1990s.

12. Clarke, 455.

13. Eileen Reeves, “Reading Maps,” Word & Image, Vol. 9, No. 1, (January-March 1993): 51 [51–65].

14. See Stephanie Pratt, “From the Margins: the Native American personage in the cartouche and decorative borders of maps,” Word & Image 12, 4 (October-December 1996): 349–65. For studies discussing New England maps in relation to the dispossession of Native Americans, see J. B. Harley, “New England Cartography and the Native Americans,” in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, eds. Emerson W. Baker et al. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 287–313; or, Margaret Wickens Pearce, “Native Mapping in Southern New England Indian Deeds,” in Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Uses, ed. G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 157–186.

15. See Pratt, 362; also Clarke, 474.

16. My choice of New England maps for explaining the morphology of the cartouche is motivated in part by the genre’s unique cartographic archive. Maps of “New England” continued to be defined consistently throughout the eighteenth century and as a result of this stable definition is today a well-documented thematic map genre within which it becomes possible to trace formal developments of the cartouche over an extended period of time.

Most of the maps consulted for this essay are now available in digital archives offered by the Library of Congress; the New York Public Library; the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine; and the David Rumsey collection. Maps consulted but that cannot be found online are in William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (New York: Abrams, 2002); Seymour T. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York: Abrams, 1980); and Barbara McCorkle, New England in Early Printed Maps, 1513 to 1800 (Providence, R.I.: John Carter Brown Library, 2001).

17. For critical discussions see David Woodward, ed. The History of Cartography. Vol. 3. Cartography in the European Renaissance. Part 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For visual examples, see Pierluigi Portinaro and Franco Knirsch, The Cartography of North America 1500–1800 (New York: Crescent Books, 1987), 57, 73, 79, 83, 102.

18. Clarke, 464; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983).

19. Throughout the essay I use the term “Indian” rather than “Native American” because the essay addresses artifacts and images coming out of a European lexicon of representation; conversely, this kind of address should therefore not to be mistaken for past or present representatives of American peoples.

20. On the mapmakers’ use of White and de Bry in New England maps see McCorkle.

21. Pratt, 352–56.

22. See John Seller, A Chart of the West Indies (1675); John Senex, North America (1710); Henry Popple, A Map of the British Empire (1733); Johann Homann, Americae (1746).

23. On the Indian as allegory of America see Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 84–117. Also see Clare Le Corbeiller, “Miss America and Her Sisters: Personification of the Four Parts of the World,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 19, 8 (April 1961): 209–21; E. McClung Fleming, “The American Image as Indian Princess, 1765–1783,” Winterthur Portfolio 2 (1965): 65–81; John Higham, “Indian princess and Roman goddess: the first female symbols of America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 100, 1 (1990): 45–79. See also J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, Power,” in The New Nature of Maps, 51–81; Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

24. Pratt observes that the relationship between figure and architecture serves to “to produce a balanced design.” Pratt, 356.

25. See also cartouches such as Seller’s cartouche of A Chart of the West Indies (London 1675); Lea’s A New Map of America (1690).

26. Joseph Roach, “The Global Parasol: Accessorizing the Four Corners of the World,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2003), 94. He applies the concept developed by Arjun Appadurai, “Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, 2 (1990): 1–24.

27. On the rationale of depicting Native Americans in a black color see Ellwood Parry, The Image of the Indian and the Black Man in American Art, 1590–1900 (New York: Braziller, 1974); Alden T. Vaughan, “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review 87, 4 (October 1982): 917–53; Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origins of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 247–64; Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

28. Alpers, 163–64; see also Dorinda Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment (Los Angeles: Thames & Hudson and The Getty Museum, 2006).

29. Jefferys’s focus on the Indian is unique in more than one sense. Mapmakers were hesitant to allow Indian figures to enter the actual tablet or interior space of the cartouche; after viewing much of the cartographic archive pertaining to New England and North America, I found only two examples in which engravers placed Indian figures on the inside of the cartouche frame.

30. Thomas Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern . . . Vol. 1–4 (London, 1757–1772); the Dutch figure is from Dresses, Vol.2, 62; the Indian figure, Vol. 4, 114; and the figure of Liberty, Vol. 4, 156.

31. Here I expand from the reading by Clarke, 459–60.

32. Jefferys, Collection, Vol. 3 and 4.

33. See T. W. Craik (ed.), The Revels History of Drama in English, Vol. V, 1660–1750 (London: Methuen, 1976), 145 and Plate 27; and Honour, 88. Also see Steven Mullaney, “The New World on Display: European Pageantry and the Ritual of Incorporation of the Americas,” in New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700, ed. Rachel Doggett (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1992), 105–113.

34. Alice Nash, “Antic Deportments and Indian Postures,” in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, eds. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 163–76. On actor training see Marion Jones, “Actors and repertory,” in The Revels, 119–57.

35. Jefferys’s cartouche is not the only one to activate or mobilize Indian figures along theatrical lines. Other mid-century cartouches, such as those prefacing John Mitchell’s A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (1755) and Emmanuel Bowen/Henry Gibson’s An Accurate Map of North America (1755), show actor-like Indian figures engaged in some form of dramatic dialogue.

36. For studies addressing Indians in eighteenth-century plays see, for example, Eugene H. Jones, Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, 1753–1916 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988) and Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

37. On the context for this play see Eric Hinderaker, “The ‘Four Indian Kings’ and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire,” William Mary Quarterly 53, 3 (July 1996): 487–526. The irony is that the Native American guests, while being presented as Indian puppets on the playbill, were supposed to see a show in the Punch-and-Judy tradition, and thus would have not seen themselves presented as puppets.

38. My interpretation of Indians as puppets, marionettes, and automatons is shaped by Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

39. Roach 93, 94; he cites Katherine S. Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1976). For studies on the history of moveable scenery see Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery. Its Origin and Development in the British Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) and his “Theatres and Scenery,” in The Revels History of Drama in English, Vol. V, 1660–1750, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1976) 83–118; Richard Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); and Roy Strong, ed., Festival Designs by Inigo Jones (London: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1969).

40. In A. M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover, 1952), 205. Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery and his earlier Proscenium and Sight-Lines (1939; London: Faber, 1964); and Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (New York: Harcourt, 1927).

41. Southern, Changeable Scenery, 206. See also Louise Pelletier, Architecture in Words: Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture (London: Routledge, 2006), 80.

1. “Astonishing Invisible Lady” (Wilmington, Del., [1804]), broadside, American Antiquarian Society. I explore the North American history of the Invisible Lady and its cultural functions at greater length in Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011).

2. This engraving, accompanied by an explanation of the illusion, was published in William Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy (London, 1807), 69–71. Nicholson’s exposé (but not his picture) was quickly reproduced in several American publications; see “British and Foreign Intelligence, Chiefly Scientific,” The American Register; Or, General Repository of History, Politics, and Science, vol. 1 (Jan. 1, 1807), 67; “Literary and Philosophical Intelligence . . . Great Britain,” The Christian Observer (Boston) vol. 6. no. 2 (Feb. 1807), 127.

3. Less frequently, the exhibition took the form of a rectangular glass box suspended from the ceiling by chains at each corner. On this construction, which was originally exhibited in Paris, see Jann Matlock, “The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9:2 (Fall 1996): 175–221.

4. “Last Week of Exhibition,” Salem Gazette, Dec. 11, 1804. Previously, the woodcut had been featured in an advertisement for the Newburyport exhibition; see “The Astonishing Invisible Lady,” Newburyport Herald, Nov. 9, 1804. For exhibitions elsewhere in New England, see “Astonishing Invisible Lady,” Salem Gazette (Salem, Mass.), Oct. 5, 1804; “An Extraordinary Aerial Phenomenon,” Columbian Centinel (Boston), Sept. 1, 1804; and “The Exhibition of the Invisible Lady,” Eastern Argus (Portland, Me.), Oct. 4, 1804.

5. William Frederick Pinchbeck, The Expositor; or Many Mysteries Unravelled, Delivered in a Series of Letters, between a Friend and a Correspondent (Boston, 1805), esp. 27–37, 85–87. For a discussion of Pinchbeck’s exposé of the Invisible Lady in relation to contemporary discourses of acoustical deception, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

6. See, for example, the terrors visited by the ventriloquist Carwin upon a Pennsylvania community in Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland, ed. and intro. by Jay Fliegelman (New York: Penguin Classics, 1991). It may be no coincidence that the Invisible Lady enjoyed its greatest popularity during 1804–05—the very years in which Brown’s sequel to Wieland, the unfinished Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, was serialized in The Literary Magazine.

7. The scholarly literature on visual culture has grown to proportions too vast to cite adequately here. On the points briefly discussed in this essay, see Angela Miller, “Breaking Down the Preserves of Visual Production,” American Art 11:2 (Summer 1997): 11–13; Nicholas Mirzoeff, “What is Visual Culture?” in The Visual Culture Reader (New York, 1998), 3–13; James D. Herbert, “Visual Culture/Visual Studies,” in Critical Terms for Art History, 2d ed. (Chicago, 2003), 452–64.

8. Victor Buchli, “Introduction,” The Material Culture Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), 13.

9. For a sampling of recent approaches to material culture studies in different fields, see Sophie White, “‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans,” Gender & History 15:3 (Nov. 2003): 528–49; Elizabeth DeMarrias, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew, eds., Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World (Cambridge, Eng.: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004); Susan Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); Bernard L. Herman, Townhouse: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005), esp. 1–32; Kariann Yokota, “Postcolonialism and Material Culture in the Early United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d series, 64:2 (Apr. 2007): 264–74; Shirley Wajda and Helen Shoemaker, eds. Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2008); Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

10. Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004), esp. 1–7.

11. Like visual culture and material culture, the image/word relation has been the subject of long and extensive scholarly treatment. Print culture studies have a more recent genesis. For recent scholarship that usefully models an integrated approach to visual and/or material culture and print culture, see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 1993); David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998); Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006).

12. “For Sale or To Let,” The New-York Evening Post, May 3, 1806; John Mix, see “Left with the Subscriber,” Connecticut Herald (New Haven), Dec. 30, 1806.

13. “An Extraordinary Aerial Phenomenon,” Columbian Centinel (Boston), Sept. 1, 1804.

14. Here I mean to recognize the enduring influence of the exhibition and exhibition catalogue New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1984), which remains an indispensable source for research about early New England material culture.

15. For an excellent introduction to the history of colonial Canada, see Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

16. On the concept of the “middle ground,” see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and “Forum: The Middle Ground Revisited,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63:1 (Jan. 2006): 3–96.

17. Mary Cochrane Rogers, Glimpses of an Old Social Capital (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) (Privately printed, 1923), 72. See pp. 72–81 for an account of the Rogers’s marriage and biographical data about Elizabeth.

18. On the painting, and Blackburn’s possible use of a print source for the composition, see “Elizabeth Browne Rogers, 1761,” in Barbara Millhouse, American Originals: Selections from Reynolda House, Museum of American Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 23.

19. On these points, see ibid., 22.

20. Robert Rogers, A Concise Account of North America (London, 1765); idem, Journals of Major Robert Rogers (London, 1765); idem, Ponteach: The Savages of America; A Tragedy (London, 1766).

21. Rogers’s military exploits have attracted the attention of a range of scholarly and popular writers, including Burt Garfield Loescher, The History of Rogers Rangers, Vol. 1: The Beginnings, Jan. 1755–April 6, 1758 (San Francisco, 1946); James Cuneo, Robert Rogers of the Rangers (New York, 1959); Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2005); Walter Borneman, The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). In 1937, Kenneth Rogers published a fictionalized novel about Rogers—Northwest Passage (New York: Doubleday, 1937)—that MGM made into a movie of the same title.

22. On this point see Wayne Craven, American Art (Madison, Wisc.: Brown and Benchmark, 1994), 97.

23. On the tendency to overlook the significance of the southern colonies in art-historical scholarship, see Maurie McInnis, “Little of Artistic Merit? The Promise and Perils of Southern Art History,” American Art 19:2 (Summer 2005): 11–18.