THE VIEW OF COLONIAL AMERICAN HISTORY FROM THE PACIFIC

by David Igler

Historical anniversaries are highly significant events, but only rarely for the reasons reported by the media. While purportedly about the past, commemorations actually tell us far more about present-day culture, politics, and historical memory. For instance, Christopher Columbus’ 1492 “discovery” received great fanfare at the 400-year mark in 1892, but flash-forward to 1992, and we witnessed a far more controversial “celebration.” Frankly, Columbus did not sell well to a late-20th-century public well versed in disease epidemics, enslavement, and catastrophic population declines among Native Americans.

This map of the Pacific (detail, ca. 1595), by Antwerp-born Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), represented the most advanced, printed cartographic information about the west coast of North America known at the time of Jamestown’s founding.

During this past year, Jamestown’s quadricentennial—dubbed “America’s 400th Anniversary!”—has saturated U.S. media, and to a lesser extent, British news outlets as well. Museums across the nation, from the Smithsonian Institution to the Huntington Library, have exhibited artifacts and documents to a highly interested public. Visitors to Virginia toured the recently discovered and excavated site of Jamestown, President George W. Bush waxed semi-eloquently about a “Tidewater settlement that laid the foundation of our great democracy,” and Queen Elizabeth II accepted some credit for her country’s contribution to the origins of our nation. Historians of colonial America, meanwhile, found themselves on the nightly news as narrators of the current drama as well as the 400-year-old story of Jamestown’s settlement: “Tell us, Professor X, did the original Jamestown settlers really engage in cannibalism and other acts of barbarism?” (Yes, most historians responded, far more than we could ever imagine.)

If coverage of the 400-year anniversary often bordered on historical sensationalism, a significant question did make its way to the fore: To what extent does Jamestown actually represent our nation’s colonial past? Jamestown, in the broadest of terms, represents a “first encounter” that led to sustained British settlement on the eastern edge of North America. The new colony also provided a small toehold—and a very unstable one at that—for England’s trans-Atlantic ventures in the 1600s. In this way, Jamestown formed an initial building block for the creation of what colonial historians now call the “Atlantic World.” But as first encounters go, such a permanent settlement was rare; more typical were encounters involving trade or rudimentary diplomacy. The British Atlantic World is at best only one way of representing our colonial past. The time has come for our nation to recognize—and possibly even celebrate—multiple versions of our colonial past: its international origins, its western seaboard, and that other oceanic world, the Pacific.

One approach is the study of California, both its indigenous history before “contact” and its colonial incarnation as Alta California (the northernmost province of New Spain, and later, Mexico). We now understand that Alta California was not only a Spanish and Mexican province, but also a site of burgeoning international commerce on the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean. As such, it offers an important, fresh perspective on our nation’s colonial and more recent past.

In other words, Jamestown is but one scene in a multifaceted play about the nation’s beginnings. While trans-Atlantic exploration led to settlement along America’s East Coast, equally significant activities were beginning to play out 3,000 miles to the west. Trade vessels in early California, for instance, tell us a lot about the types of connections forged between this colony and the surrounding world. Decades before the 1849 Gold Rush and California statehood the following year, commercial ships from at least 22 different nations or companies appeared on the coastline. Thus, many people from around the globe were well aware of California’s opportunities before “the world rushed in” in the mid-1800s. A similar international convergence transpired elsewhere in the Pacific Ocean, from Peru to Hawaii to mainland China. Along coastal North America, trade vessels trafficked up and down the future U.S. territories from San Diego to Sitka, Alaska. “The new account of American history in the 16th and 17th centuries,” historian Karen Kupperman recently wrote, “demonstrates that America was international before it became national.” Kupperman set her stance firmly on the Atlantic Coast, and yet we find a remarkably similar set of interactions among nations and peoples along America’s Pacific Coast. The American West—specifically California and the Northwest Coast, as well as Hawaii and Alaska—was also “international before it became national.”

The Pacific functioned much like the Atlantic Ocean did in facilitating the circulation of people, commercial goods, and ideas. And yet, in looking at seminal events, America seems to focus almost entirely on all things eastern. If we fail to consider the Pacific’s influence on our nation’s past, we risk isolating today’s Asian Americans from their 150-year trans-Pacific heritage. Or try to imagine the American classic Moby-Dick without, as Melville wrote, “this mysterious, divine Pacific [that] zones the world’s bulk about.” It would be a dry story, indeed. More broadly, think about when the United States emerged as a truly global economic player. One could argue it happened in the Pacific Ocean: By 1820 more vessels from America than from any other maritime nation crisscrossed the Pacific for purposes of trade, thereby linking the U.S. economy with the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific ocean markets.

In fact, almost 500 U.S. ships traded along the California coastline before the Gold Rush. Some California-bound vessels are fairly well known because they appeared in bestselling voyage narratives, such as the Pilgrim and Alert, featured in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Others are rather obscure, like the Spanish brig Activo, which for almost two decades shuttled supplies and soldiers from the Mexican mainland to the struggling Alta California missions. None of these vessels has the same celebrity status as the Godspeed, which crossed the Atlantic in 1607 bound for Jamestown, but ships headed for California nevertheless provide us with a broader understanding of early colonial encounters—far beyond British schemes for settlement.

Take, for instance, the Spanish frigate Nuestra Señora de Buena Esperanza, which crossed the Pacific Ocean from Macao and entered California waters in October 1587. (By my count, that allows us a 420-year anniversary this year.) The Nuestra Señora did not transport settlers for a new North American colony, but that fact alone makes it more representative of “first encounters” and America’s colonial past. The Spaniard Pedro de Unamuno purchased this ship in Macao after Spanish authorities repossessed the two Manila galleons under his temporary command. Unamuno had goods—quite likely contraband—for Mexico’s markets, and the Nuestra Señora appeared seaworthy enough for a Pacific crossing. Such a homespun private venture makes it delightfully representative of our colonial past, as does the diverse crew of Spaniards, Portuguese, Luzon indios from the Philippines, and a Japanese cabin boy.

On Oct. 17, 1587, Unamuno sighted a bay (presumed by most scholars to be Morro Bay) on the coast of upper California, and the next day he noted “the smoke of many fires” just inland from the bay. The events that followed during the next two days could form a stand-in for almost any “discovery” and “contact” by Europeans in the Americas. Unamuno ordered a small party to “look about to see if there were any settlements or other signs of inhabitants, and to see if there were any minerals in the [area].” Finding neither the Indians who built the fires nor the hoped-for gold or silver deposits, Unamuno described the next order of business: he “quietly and pacifically” took possession of the land in the name of his king, Philip II. That “pacific” conquest lasted less than two days. Chumash Indians attacked two different landing parties on Oct. 20, and these “skirmishes” encouraged Unamuno to hold council aboard ship, where they “resolved that it was advisable to continue on our voyage…and not go ashore to the enemy.” The vessel sailed south without further ado.

This incident is an exquisite example of America during the earliest days of colonialism. First, it shows that Native Americans frequently resisted and drove off European colonizers. Europeans were viewed as temporary guests at best, hostile invaders at worst; disease played a far stronger role in conquest and settlement than did superior military power. Second, it enriches our understanding that a diverse and international cast of seafarers made landfall in the Americas during the colonial period. The British, as significant as they were to our national origins, comprised only one such group. Third, voyages for the purpose of trade, rather than permanent settlement, were far more typical of early American encounters between Europeans and Native Americans. Finally, the Atlantic Ocean and the North American eastern seaboard was only one site of contact, conquest, and settlement. The other ocean—the Pacific—provided a second, highly significant, avenue to the Americas and the future United States.

Alas, the 420th anniversary of the Nuestra Señora’s visit to Morro Bay is unlikely to catch on to the extent of Jamestown’s 400th celebration. However, by the time Jamestown’s 500th anniversary rolls around, I’m willing to wager that American society will recognize and celebrate a much broader range of early encounters and colonial origins.

David Igler is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is organizing a conference titled “Pacific Passages: Reconnecting East, West, and Center in the Pacific Basin.” It will take place at The Huntington April 4-5, 2008.   

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