“A Country by Itself”

A mayoral task force commission has been meeting for the past few months, called to contextualize charges that Salem’s City Seal is demeaning to Asian Americans and explicity rascist. The image in question depicts an apparent native of Sumatra’s westernmost province of Aceh in the foreground, with a pepper plant alongside and (an apparent) Salem ship in the background: a rare 19th century acknowledgement that a western society’s (Salem) prosperity was tied to its trade with the East. I posted about this issue back in the fall of last year, when my stance was generally supportive of the 1839 seal but open to a community dialogue. I’m doing so again because I’ve watched (there is no other way to “participate” besides a form you can send in) four of the Task Force’s meetings and after looking at images of the Sumatran figure presented alongside Sambo images as “proof” of racism and hearing an assertion that the seal is the equivalent of the Confederate flag I am convinced that this is not a serious inquiry. The Task Force has scheduled a listening session for July 14 and one member who is a Salem native and expert in Indonesia’s history and culture has yet to make an appearance so perhaps things will get a bit more substantive but I don’t have high hopes at this point. That a tradition of such longstanding should be given such short shrift is unfortunate—actually more than unfortunate, unsettling.

Salem’s City Seal was adopted as the insignia of the City in March 1839, and it was a rather “flexible” image for the next fifty years or so: the central figure even changed from a man to a woman!  In 1888, artist Ross Turner was commissed to paint the orginal seal (bottom left) and it was pretty much standardized after that. For the 1926 Tercentenary of the founding of Salem, the City produced Seal medals (bottom right). There has been no attempt by the Task Force as of yet to place this image—or its evolution—in any historical context; the assumption seems to be that the existence of an 1839 rendering of an Acehnese Native is without question objectionable and the best way to modify the Seal is simply to remove said Native and have a lovely Sumatran scene sans person. The City motto, “Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum” – “To the farthest port of the rich East” – never changed and doesn’t appear to bother the Task Commission. It has inspired a number of artistic creations: the piece below is quilted fabric but I’ve seen the same in tile and as a painting and print.

I really don’t want to watch these meetings anymore.; I come away from them feeling quite sad. I know why Salem people are troubled by the prospect of an altered seal because I’ve heard from some: for some civic service or upon retirement fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters received a seal from the Mayor of the moment as a photograph was taken and a memory made. It’s not so personal for me, but I do have a somewhat-related memory from around the time I first moved to Salem. I was still in graduate school, working on my dissertation, and I used the purchase of my first house and the move as a rationale to procrastinate as much as possible from working on it: I had four new (old) fireplaces and suddenly it was really important to deck them out with andirons and everything—even though it was June! So I drove around the North Shore, poking around every antique shop that I came upon. In Essex (most definitely the antique capital of the North Shore) I got into a really nice discussion with a man who told me (I’m paraphrasing from memory here) that in its heyday Salem was so prosperous and Salem ships so numerous that all of its trading partners in the East Indies thought it was “a country unto itself.” To them, Salem was the United States or the United States was Salem. I was looking at maps in his shop (because of course I had to have antique maps all over my new walls) and he said something like—and there’s a map somewhere, with Salem depicted as the United States. Well, for the next decade or so, I was looking for that map. I thought it would look something like this:

Well maybe a less strident SALEM but you get the point. Of course I never found this map, because it never existed! Once I started reading about Salem history (which was pretty much when I started this blog) I soon realized that my antique dealer had it wrong or I had it wrong: but the perception behind the nonexistent map was very, very real. It is expressed generally in all the maritime histories of the nineteenth century, as well as texts that probe the cultural history of America’s encounters with the East. Samuel Eliot Morison gives the most detailed description in his Maritime History of Massachusetts: While Boston ships followed Magellan westward around the Horn, Salem sent her vessels eastward to the Dutch East Indies, Manila, both coasts of Africa and the smaller islands of the Pacific, and so thoroughly did they pre-empt this trade that as late as 1833 Po Adam, the wealthiest merchant of Quallah Battoo ‘‘believed Salem to be a country by itself, and one of the richest and most important sections of the globe.” I’m not sure Po Adam was the wealthiest merchant of Quallah Battoo (Kuala Batu), the major pepper port in Aceh, but he was a well-known friend of the American traders who disembarked there, warning Captain Charles Endicott of the impending attack on his ship Friendship in 1831 which resulted in the retaliatory attack by the U.S. Naval Frigate Potomac in the following year. In his account, Endicott called him “my old and tried friend” and captains for the ships owned in part or whole by Salem’s largest pepper trader, Joseph Peabody, expressed the same sentiments. Trade is always about human relationships, for better or for worse, and I think that’s why Joseph Peabody’s son George, the Salem alderman who is universally credited with the conception and depiction of the Salem Seal in 1839, placed a person in the center of it. And when that figure is stripped from Salem’s seal, inevitably it seems at this point, all we will have left is a commodity (like a Witch here in the Witch City).

Drawing of Po Adam from James Duncan Phillips, Pepper and Pirates, 1949; George Peabody by John Singer Sargent, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.