On the evening of 9 July 1847, a Chinese junk, the Keying, originally bound for London, reached New York and quickly became the talk of the city. Since the sixteenth century, the word “junk” has been specifically associated with ships made in East and Southeast Asia, marked by their fully battened lugsails (see Figure 1).Footnote 1 These vessels were a principal means of transport within traditional Chinese society and between China and its neighboring regions.Footnote 2 The First Opium War (1839–42), fought primarily between the British Royal Navy and the Imperial Chinese Navy, both heightened European and US curiosity about junks and exposed their vulnerabilities relative to steamers.Footnote 3
“The Chinese Junk Keying,” New York Herald, 13 July 1847, 1.
Many aspects of the Keying’s origin remain unresolved, as Stephan Davies’s most recent and comprehensive study of the vessel makes clear.Footnote 4 However, it is certain that this was a private and illegal venture: the ship was acquired in Canton, crewed by a mix of Chinese and European sailors, and smuggled to colonial Hong Kong at a time when such transactions with foreigners were forbidden by the Qing government.Footnote 5 Judging from the fact that the junk sailed with no cargo and instead carried “a small ‘collection’ of Chinese artefacts that would be displayed on the ship upon arrival, while the Chinese crew doubled as performers and musicians,” the aim, as Davies explains, was to create a Chinese curiosity exhibition tailored to European and US audiences.Footnote 6
As Arthur Bonner suggests, the Keying arrived at a time when “‘[c]uriosities’ were the vogue” in the United States.Footnote 7 Americans were already familiar with Chinese-themed exhibitions, including Nathan Dunn’s respected Chinese Museum, which opened in Philadelphia in December 1838 and later moved to London, as well as a recent display at Boston’s Marlboro Chapel (1845–47) assembled by John R. Peters Jr., a member of Cushing’s mission.Footnote 8 Yet the Keying also staged its Chinese crew in ways that connect it to what Sean Metzger calls “circus-like exhibitions of people.”Footnote 9 A well-known precursor was Afong Moy, the Chinese Lady who, as Nancy E. Davis explains, toured extensively “throughout the mid-Atlantic, New England, the South, Cuba, and up the Mississippi River” between 1834 and 1837.Footnote 10 For Americans who had never traveled to China, the Keying offered a rare encounter with around forty Chinese men, including a mandarin and an artist.Footnote 11 Their stay in New York also included festive events and performances of music and dance, which visitors attended as spectators.Footnote 12 Before large-scale Chinese immigration in the 1850s, such contact would have struck the US public as highly unusual.
Moreover, the Keying arrived at a moment of transition in China–US relations. Britain’s victory in the First Opium War dismantled the long-standing Canton system (1760–1842), which had operated under Chinese control, and imposed a new treaty port order on British terms. Seeking parity in the China trade, a US delegation led by Caleb Cushing traveled to China in 1843 and concluded the Treaty of Wangxia, which followed Britain’s coercive template. In December 1844, US newspapers announced the treaty and recast it as an emblem of liberalism, bringing formal China–US diplomatic relations into public view for the first time.Footnote 13
The shifting balance of power in trade and diplomacy between China and the Western nations also reshaped US popular imaginings of China. As Jacques M. Downs observes, before Cushing’s mission, “No one in America really knew much about China. Fewer than half a dozen Americans had ever learned Chinese, and published works in Western languages were rarely more reliable than the merchants and missionaries with whom Cushing was acquainted.”Footnote 14 This “absence of hard facts,” as John R. Haddad notes, allowed “greater license to construct a China that did not require much grounding in reality.”Footnote 15 European writings traceable to Marco Polo’s medieval accounts provided a ready source for imagining it as an exotic land endowed with wealth and civilization. China’s defeat in the First Opium War, however, greatly eroded this favorable image and helped popularize a contrasting view of the country as backward and stagnant. This portrayal, as Oliver Turner argues, “functioned to legitimise a treaty with China identical to that which had been secured by the imperial British Empire.”Footnote 16 After Chinese laborers began arriving in large numbers during the Gold Rush, labor competition further intensified anti-Chinese sentiment, which hardened into legal exclusion in the Gilded Age. The Keying thus arrived in the first decade of what Harold R. Isaacs calls the “Age of Contempt (1840–1905)” in American perceptions of China and the Chinese.Footnote 17
Scholarship on US images of China has focused more on pre-Opium War and post-Gold Rush periods, leaving the 1840s comparatively underexamined. This article treats the Keying exhibition and the media sensation it generated as a distinctive event through which to study how American popular culture began to recast China–US relations in this period. It centers on a largely overlooked set of periodical writings about the junk. In July 1847, Herman Melville, then a newly famous author of Pacific travel narratives, was contributing anonymously to the satirical weekly Yankee Doodle (1846–47) as a favor to his editor friend Evert Augustus Duyckinck. Among the pieces attributed to Melville through biographical and textual scholarship are several on the Keying exhibition.Footnote 18
Today Yankee Doodle is remembered chiefly as an ephemeral publication in both US periodical studies and Melville studies. Most critics avoid writing about it, and not without reason. As Hershel Parker explains, “the points of its jokes are now so blunted, the topicality of its reference so esoteric and so trivial (we perhaps ignorantly assume), that the wonder is that intelligent people spent as much time on it as they did.”Footnote 19 The Keying sketches have also received little sustained attention, with two notable exceptions. Elizabeth Schultz briefly discusses “the sketches’ graphic racist representations,” suggesting “Melville’s anxieties regarding his engagement in the perpetuation of such vicious cultural stereotypes and anticipating his conflicted response to his Asian characters four years later in Moby-Dick.”Footnote 20 From a different angle, Shogo Tanokuchi examines the pieces’ engagement with P. T. Barnum’s popular “freak” shows, arguing that they reveal “how white curiosity turns China and its people into exotic freaks” and “disclose the vulnerability of the naturalized border between the white spectator and the oriental curiosities.”Footnote 21 While both scholars read the Keying sketches chiefly in relation to the contemporary American racialization of the Chinese crew, I argue that Melville engages a more uneven representational terrain in his time, where “race” formed one strand among several concerns shaping China–US relations in popular culture.
By situating the Keying sketches within the contemporary periodical archive, this article makes three interventions. First, it extends current understandings of Melville’s literary imagination of China, areas that remain underexamined compared with his engagement with Pacific islands and West Asian cultures. Second, it repositions Yankee Doodle within the New York periodical culture, which turned the Keying into a media sensation that shaped American views of China and Chinese people before the Gold Rush. Third, by situating Melville’s sketches within contemporary reporting on the junk, China, and Chinese people more broadly, it offers a granular account of China–US relations in transition within 1840s American popular culture.
Barnum and the sea serpent
In his research on the Keying’s New York reception, John R. Haddad describes the exhibition as “the Barnumization of China”: visitors treated the junk as an amusement and debated its “authenticity,” while Captain Charles A. Kellett, a Barnum-style showman, collaborated with the New York Herald to sustain public curiosity through daily sensational anecdotes about the Chinese crew’s “strange” customs.Footnote 22
As the city’s most famous showman, P. T. Barnum practiced what James W. Cook terms “artful deception” in nineteenth-century urban entertainment, dazzling the public with dubious spectacles designed for both talk and profit.Footnote 23 Yankee Doodle’s engagement with Barnum was prolific.Footnote 24 As Tanokuchi has argued, Melville’s Keying sketches also drew on Barnum’s cultural significance. Yet he appeared in them alongside another, more obscure, allusion: a sea serpent. This imagery concerns reported sightings off the coast of Nahant, Massachusetts, as recounted in June newspapers.Footnote 25 It also resonates with the author’s enduring fascination with oceanic monsters, most notably the Leviathan in Moby-Dick (1851). Alan Heimert further suggests that the “Great American Sea-Serpent” functions as a satirical symbol of Manifest Destiny, which Melville may have derived from The Knickerbocker magazine.Footnote 26 James Duban concurs, adding that the sea serpent serves as “another comic symbol of America’s political designs, including the implications of the Mexican War for the extension of slavery into the Southwest.”Footnote 27 However, these interpretations do not fully explain the fact that sea serpent imagery appeared in the July issue in a sketch about the Keying exhibition, in conjunction with Barnum. To account for this, I trace sea serpent accounts in early US newspapers, showing that Melville’s use mobilized a New England journalistic tradition.
Sightings of a sea serpent had already appeared in American newspapers in the late eighteenth century. Some of the earliest New York papers reported that a sea serpent had been seen at Portsmouth harbor, described as “near one hundred feet in length, as it shew itself out of water 40 feet” and “as big round as a barrel.”Footnote 28 In December 1815, the brig Trim arrived in Virginia from Gibraltar and claimed to have sighted a sea serpent during its journey. The local periodical, the Alexandria Gazette, reported the story, and many New York newspapers subsequently reprinted this article.Footnote 29 As the newspaper industry expanded nationwide, sea serpent sightings started to appear in various states, with the reported locations shifting rapidly, sometimes within only a few days. As the Evening Post summarized, the sea serpent was making multiple appearances in “different parts of our coast”: not long ago it was seen “off the mouth of Kennebeck river” in Maine, and more recently it appeared in Gloucester Harbor before soon “finding its way into Lake Erie.”Footnote 30 The next day, the same paper shifted from skepticism to a comic remark: “The sea-serpent continues to sport in the harbor of Gloucester, and to afford a fund of amusement to the whole country.”Footnote 31 The maritime myth was thus “Americanized” in early nineteenth-century news reporting, recast as a lighthearted Yankee humbug.
By 1847, anecdotes of sea serpent sightings had already become a journalistic cliché. Punch, or The London Charivari lampooned these American sea serpent accounts, which once in a while found their way into London newspapers as well:
it was nothing less than the American Sea-serpent, that from time to time has disturbed the usual current of news, overflowing the margin of the broad sheet. Witness tried to look at the thing minutely and attentively with his spectacles, but became so alarmed that he was compelled to desist. He could swear, however, that the whole thing seemed wriggling and twisting, and bore a very black complexion from beginning to end.Footnote 32
The editors of Punch critiqued the recurring sea serpent reports as rumormongering that compromised the integrity of news production. Crafted for spectacle rather than substance, these items circulated widely through the networks of reprinting that Meredith L. McGill identifies as central to the period’s publishing practices.Footnote 33
Most US newspapers, however, treated the gimmick with a lighter touch. The New-York Atlas listed the “American Sea Serpent” as one of the oldest journalistic clichés, both satirizing and celebrating the tradition.Footnote 34 In June 1847, the Boston Daily Mail reported a recent sighting of a sea serpent in the town of Nahant, which was essentially a promotional strategy for its debut of a new book titled The Sea Serpent.Footnote 35 The book’s advertisement had appeared a week earlier in the paper.Footnote 36 The National Era portrayed the Nahant sea serpent as a kind of “showman” in the resort town: “This annual attraction of New England watering places – the avant courier of sea-shore fashion and idleness – has been seen lately, near his old haunt, probably occupied, like other early visitors, in selecting his summer lodgings.”Footnote 37 The piece also comically suggested that the sea serpent, as a traditional curiosity, now faced competition from newer wonders: “Within the last year or two, we have heard rumors of a sort of fresh-water rival of our snake, who has been seen nibbling trout and stealing sheep in the waters and the bank of Lake Memphremagog.”Footnote 38 The New-York Atlas likewise highlighted the Nahant sea serpent’s “showmanship”: “It is stated that the muddy creeks and shoals around Bombay, in the East Indies, abound with a species of fish which produce the most exquisite music. The Nahant Sea Serpent would add to its attraction if it would give us a tune.”Footnote 39 These press accounts bear out Lara Langer Cohen’s observation that writers and editors turned fraud into a literary strategy amid antebellum crises of credibility.Footnote 40
Because Yankee Doodle was modeled on Punch, it is likely that the former’s editors were aware of the latter’s use of the sea serpent as a satirical emblem of American journalism.Footnote 41 Lampooning the New England frenzy over the Nahant sea serpent, Yankee Doodle’s 12 June issue folded the rumor into a cluster of contemporary press clichés:
A Bundle of Manuscripts, for the use of editors – containing touching accounts of Horrible Murders, Shocking Accidents, and the opinions of the oldest inhabitants on the state of the themometer [sic], the violence of storms and the aspect of crops; also an obituary notice on the death of General WASHINGTON’s last black servant, a full account of the Great Sea Serpent when last seen, and a statement of facts conected [sic] with a Shower of Meteors at New Haven, and a Shower of Frogs, Brimstone. &c., down South.Footnote 42
Revisiting the motif, the 19 June issue’s woodcut “Piscatory Sports at the Docks” (Figure 2) depicted two Americans fishing for the Nahant Sea Serpent.Footnote 43 One man hoisted a snake-like catch that visualized Punch’s description of the American sea serpent as “wriggling and twisting” with “a very black complexion from beginning to end.” His insistence that it must be the monster because it felt “slippery” echoed Punch’s critique of dubious journalistic ethics. Unlike the Punch piece, however, the woodcut rendered the scene in a light, playful air, aligning with the broader US periodical tendency to treat sea serpent reporting as entertaining humbug.
“Piscatory Sports at the Docks,” Yankee Doodle, 19 June 1847. Reproduced from Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 428.
When Melville took up the subject for Yankee Doodle in July 1847, he was working with experienced editors and journalists and thus had ready access to the circulation of sea serpent imagery in the US press. It offers a useful frame for reading his piece “Curious Exhibition,” published in the 17 July issue, which imagines the sea serpent as a showman recruited by Barnum to promote the Keying exhibition:
The Chinese Junk, we understand, is to be exhibited this week at Barnum’s Museum. After “indefatigable exertions,” and at “an enormous expense,” the enterprising manager of that laudable institution, has fitted up a large tank upon his premises, filled with water, on the surface of which the Junk will glide rapidly to and fro, its latteen sails filled full with the breeze of popular favor, while the Nahant Sea Serpent, engaged for this occasion only, will gracefully disport itself in a curious combination of circles, and at last, taking its tail in its mouth, conclude its performances by swallowing itself entirely, and disappearing to the eyes of the enraptured spectators.Footnote 44
If we read the sea serpent as symbolizing press culture, the sketch’s imagined partnership between the monster and Barnum echoes what John R. Haddad describes as a “symbiotic relationship” between the New York dailies and the Barnum-like showman Captain Kellett.Footnote 45 Moreover, two additional notes on the Keying’s reception appear beneath the sketch: one clarifies that the junk is not “as has been currently reported, a junk of gingerbread,” and the other notes that “although curiosities are bought and sold on board it, the vessel is not indictable, as has been supposed, as an unlicensed junk shop.”Footnote 46 Yet, on the extant evidence, neither gingerbread nor junk shops figured in the Keying’s July coverage. Both images carry symbolic meanings here. As Michael T. Gilmore explains, gingerbread was a common metaphor for cheap literature in the antebellum literary marketplace; writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne used it to mock the indiscriminate taste of mass culture.Footnote 47 By linking “gingerbread” with “junk,” a common word for garbage, the first note in Melville’s sketch satirizes the Keying sensation as widely consumed yet offering little intrinsic value. The second note likewise plays on the multiple meanings of “junk.” A junk shop deals in secondhand goods.Footnote 48 Melville insinuates that the press and Kellett collaborated to promote the Keying exhibition by cashing in on clichéd, stereotyped depictions of China.
In depicting the Chinese junk as exhibited at Barnum’s Museum, Melville further engaged with a popular rumor that the vessel was a humbug.Footnote 49 In “A New Planet,” published in the 24 July issue of Yankee Doodle, he treats the Keying as one of the many sensational hoaxes promoted by Barnum:
It is unquestionably a most potential planet, and has presided over the birth of a great many wonderful and curious creatures. It was under this star, we think, that Mrs. JOYCE HEATH attained her 104th birth-day and came to be the nurse of General WASHINGTON. This was the natal star, also, we believe, of the Feejee Mermaid. It ruled for a time the destinies of General TOM THUMB, and now culminates powerfully, according to popular belief, in the direction of the Chinese Junk.Footnote 50
In the idiom of popular astrology, the sketch imagines Barnum’s Museum as a planet (or star) and, through mock praise, recasts his tactic of fabrication as a power of “creation.” Echoing this imagery but not its irony, an article published the next day in the New-York Atlas invoked Prometheus, describing the museum’s Drummond light as “pouring its brilliant flood of fire first on one prominent object and then on another” and rendering Broadway “rather some imaginary scene which we have pictured in an eastern tale, than plain, matter-of-fact New York.”Footnote 51 The “prominent” exhibits listed in Melville’s sketch were notorious for varying degrees of deception: Joice Heth was a formerly enslaved woman whom Barnum trained for public display.Footnote 52 The Feejee Mermaid was another of his hoaxes, which turned out to be a grotesque combination of monkey and fish.Footnote 53 Barnum’s “General Tom Thumb” was in fact Charles Sherwood Stratton, a five-year-old from Connecticut whom Barnum introduced as an English-born dwarf performer.Footnote 54
Melville included the Keying in this array because the public suspected it to be Barnum’s newest production. Walt Whitman may have helped spread this rumor, or at least was aware of it. His biographer records that he visited the Keying in person.Footnote 55 At the time, he was serving as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, one of the first newspapers to warn its readers that the Keying might be yet another hoax orchestrated by Barnum. A piece titled “That Tallest of Small Potato Humbugs, the ‘Chinese Junk’,” published in the 14 July issue, was convinced that “[s]he was built recently near the city of Philadelphia, under the direction and superintendence of a man who belongs to that city of humbugs, New York.”Footnote 56 In early August, newspapers across the country began reprinting a squib titled “Which Is Which?”. It claimed that the Illustrated London News reported the Keying’s arrival in Falmouth on 10 July, the day after a Chinese junk reached New York, and asked, “Can the latter be a Yankee ‘Keying?’”Footnote 57 In reprinting the squib, Albany’s Weekly Argus directed its readers to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “It will be recollected that before this, this vessel has been denounced by a Brooklyn paper as a hoax.”Footnote 58 These records offer one possible answer to Stephen Davies’s observation that Whitman’s “views of the vessel are not reported.”Footnote 59 Because it would have been simple to verify that no such vessel was in Falmouth at the time, the squib was likely a newspaper hoax that capitalized on the public’s suspicion. Whoever orchestrated it successfully reignited interest in the Keying and prompted a fresh wave of coverage after the initial buzz had faded. The rumor also functioned as publicity for the junk: in late August, several Boston newspapers reprinted the squib and advertised that the Keying would soon depart New York for Boston.Footnote 60
In the two Chinese junk sketches discussed in this section, Melville draws on Barnum and sea serpent imagery to satirize how the city’s cultures of journalism and showmanship reduced the Keying exhibition to an object of public consumption stripped of genuine knowledge of China and Chinese people. Yet the journalistic and showman practices that the sea serpent and Barnum respectively symbolize serve not only as targets of satire but also as sources for parody. This approach suited a publication like Yankee Doodle, which embraced lowbrow styles of the city’s popular culture without claiming refined taste. In a contemporaneous piece, “View of the Barnum Property,” Melville wryly comments on a tawdry woodcut in the magazine that, in his view, created an even more “economical” sensation for readers than Barnum’s exhibits, “thus out-Barnuming BARNUM, by giving for a sixpence what the father of TOM THUMBS would have charged a quarter for.”Footnote 61 To use Melville’s own witty phrase, I suggest that his sketch about a visit to the Keying exhibition sets out to “surpass the sea serpent” by recycling journalistic clichés about China and to “out-Barnum Barnum” by amalgamating them into a “counterfeit” report on the junk. I use “counterfeit” in Yankee Doodle’s own sense, as the preface to the first volume juxtaposed the magazine’s aim with the era’s banking system:
Indeed, as a broker’s children are said to be born with a perfect model of every genuine coin in the heart and the last number of the Bank-Note List printed on the tunica arachnoides, so the sons and daughters of America appear to inherit from nature a microcosmic, standard YANKEE DOODLE, rendering ludicrously preposterous any attempt at beguiling them of their laughter and tears by a counterfeit.Footnote 62
Both claims, “a perfect model of every genuine coin” and “a microcosmic, standard YANKEE DOODLE,” inverted the period’s reality; as Stephen Mihm suggests, “debates over counterfeiting, currency, and capitalism repeatedly raised unanswered questions about national identity, and indeed, about whether this was really a nation at all.”Footnote 63 Taking its name from a “characteristically national” revolutionary-era song, Yankee Doodle confronted antebellum American cultural divisions by invoking a national spirit of humor, what it termed “the LAUGHING DIVINITY OF AMERICA,” and by offering apocryphal stories that made no claim to authority.Footnote 64 In this vein, Melville crafted a “counterfeit” account of the Keying to probe the unstable representational system through which popular culture framed China–US relations.
The crew and the junk
Melville’s “Yankee Doodle’s Visit,” published in the 24 July issue of the magazine, is essentially a fabricated account of a visit to “the famous far-fetched Junk.”Footnote 65 Invoking the popular epithet “Celestial Empire” for China, the narrator adopts the voice of a Christian moralist, recalling that he “was much pleased to see the near approach of something Celestial to his countrymen, who like all mortal sinners, take so much pains to keep away from things heavenly, and in cordial good-heartedness greeted the great gathering.” Yet his sentimental tone quickly turns ironic in the long sentence that follows:
If there was any one thing more than another, that gave him particular pleasure, it was the affectionate entertainment of the swarthy pilgrims by his fair countrywomen, who hung over and thrust their arms and heads into, and felt about, the narrow closets where the Chinese kept their fleas, and pipes, and musty bedding, and their own oily, long tailed carcasses.
The narrator’s racialized and gendered gaze darkens what initially appears to be an amicable greeting scene: foregrounding skin color and sexual difference, he depicts the Chinese sailors as “swarthy pilgrims” welcomed by the “fair countrywomen” in the United States. A sequence of verbs emphasizing bodily intrusion – “hung over,” “thrust their arms and heads into,” and “felt about” – further darkens this “affectionate entertainment,” recasting it as a scene of prying into the Chinese crew’s sleeping cabin. Darker still, the mention of opium pipes and “long tailed carcasses” trades in racial stereotypes before the next sentence abruptly pivots from sardonic insinuation back to the initial sentimentality: “It showed a warm and vigorous sympathy for the weary, toil-worn, home-sick stranger, that cannot be too highly commended.” The tonal uncertainty in these opening lines reflects Melville’s characteristic skepticism in his treatment of religious subjects. Moreover, the uneasy convergence of intrusive curiosity and missionary zeal fuses two otherwise divergent practices for representing the Chinese crew in the US press. As John Kuo Wei Tchen argues in his comparison of the “sensational” New York Herald and the “moralistic” American Magazine, “In both cases, the coverage served mainly to promote in a popular format a particular set of moral values and a particular point of view.”Footnote 66
Turning his focus from the Chinese crew to the vessel, Melville’s narrator continues his inspection of the Keying’s construction: “YAN-KEE examined with much care and much interest the apparatus for navigating this curious craft. He clambered to the gallery across the bow, and surmounted the toppling poop-deck at the stern. He stumbled over slippery planks and useless cable, and curious dogs.” Promoted as the first traditional junk to cross the Pacific without iron or steam, the Keying’s design invited “much care and much interest” yet resisted explanation for visitors accustomed to modern naval technology. As Hans K. van Tilburg argues, the Keying remained an inscrutable curiosity in contemporary reports; even the technically oriented British journal the Mariner’s Mirror observed, “Much of the contemporary information fails in technical clearness, and no scientific account of the Keying seems to have been written.”Footnote 67 The narrator’s bodily actions – “clambered,” “surmounted,” and “stumbled over” – translate that interpretive difficulty into embodied strain. Modern naval standards of neatness, practicality, and order fail to make the junk legible: the “slippery planks,” “useless cable,” and “curious dogs” hinder his inspection, materializing the epistemic obstacle.
Presented in Kellett’s words as “a living monument of antiquity, complete and unchanged,” the Keying also helped reinforce a post-Opium War image of “Chinese backwardness.”Footnote 68 After his strenuous effort to examine the junk’s construction, Melville’s narrator turns to this popular conception of China:
He climbed up steps so short and close together that he was obliged to step on three or four at once. It is said this ship and appurtenances are just the same as those in use 2000 years since, and it is also said the Chinese have made no progress in civilization in that length of time. Query. If steps were two inches apart 2000 years ago, and are eight inches apart now, how long will it be before we can go up stairs without any?Footnote 69
By posing a mock-serious “Query” that mimics the rhetoric of civilizational hierarchy, the narrator gestures toward a nineteenth-century pattern in which Asian cultures were subjected to curious scrutiny while being constructed as inferior Others in relation to the modern West, as Edward W. Said argues.Footnote 70 This dynamic also marks later representation of the Keying during its transatlantic tour. Charles Dickens, for example, visited the junk in London and reflected on it in an article for The Examiner, asking “whether the hoarse old ocean can ever have been seriously in earnest with this floating toyshop, or merely played with it in lightness of spirit.”Footnote 71 Several years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne saw the Keying in Liverpool and noted in his journal, “all manner of odd-looking craft; but none so odd as the Chinese Junk, which lies by our pier, and looks as if it were copied from some picture on an old tea-cup.”Footnote 72
In the sketch’s first third, different popular modes of representing the Keying converge in the narrator’s account: the Chinese crew is viewed through a blended tone of moralizing sympathy and prying curiosity, while the junk’s construction is apprehended as at once a naval puzzle and an index of “Chinese backwardness.” In the sketch’s next third, however, Melville shifts strategy and subverts the Keying’s familiar image in contemporary reports.
In contrast to the junk’s “rough” construction, newspaper coverage highlighted its conspicuously exotic ornamentation. As the New-York Commercial Advertiser reported, “The cabin is decorated with a host of painted birds, tigers, and other animals. She has an idol set up on board, representing a woman having ten pairs of arms, and ornamented with flowers, beads, rings, and a variety of trinkets.”Footnote 73 Designed for entertainment, the painted animals and the idol readily activated the period’s popular fascination with Chinese art and religion. Yet Melville turns this crowd-pleasing show into a sinophobic scene:
YAN-KEE plunged into the cabins and bent his neck beneath some frightful beams, that crossed at intervals, elevated some three or four feet above the floor. He bruised his shins against sharp edges and angles of rough, carved, stone cushioned chairs. He caught his toe in the chain of an extremely slender monkey and flung himself on his face, prostrate, before the multi-armed idol, Ching-too. He periled his life in straggling through a crowd of needle-pointed, razor-edged rapiers and breechless carbines disporting themselves at the expense of numerous curious bipeds and bi-legs who suffered themselves to be horsed about by these death-dealing foreigners.
As Stuart Creighton Miller argues, the rise of mass media in the 1840s heightened the visibility of sinophobic discourse that had appeared sporadically in US newspapers and magazines since the early nineteenth century.Footnote 74 Melville channels the period’s growing anti-Chinese sentiment into his narrator’s experience of the visit, turning the detached spectator into a cultural intruder and recoding the urban sightseeing tour as, in his narrator’s phrase, “exciting ‘incidents of travel.’” Formally, this representation of the Keying follows the pattern of Typee (1846), the Pacific travel narrative that had made Melville famous in the popular literary marketplace. In the opening chapters of Typee, Nukuheva’s natural environment both enchants and imperils the traveler–narrator.Footnote 75 Similarly, the Keying sketch frames Chinese objects as simultaneous sources of allure and menace. Beams become “frightful,” stone chairs threaten with “sharp edges and angles,” the monkey’s chain becomes a trap waiting to trip the passerby, and decorative statues of mounted soldiers are reimagined as “death-dealing foreigners” whose weapons force visitors to “straggle through.” If, as Samuel Otter suggests, Typee crystallizes the white narrator’s fear of tattooing “the sacred symbol of the Caucasian face, whose impeccable features secure identity,” the Keying sketch extends that strategy and describes sinophobia through bodily injury.Footnote 76 Like the perilous descent into the Typee valley, the narrator’s “plunge” into the Chinese cabin “bent his neck,” “bruised his shins,” “caught his toe,” and “flung himself on his face, prostrate” before an idol, accidentally surrendering his Christian identity. Rewriting the Keying spectacle through the conventions of his Pacific travel narrative, Melville departs from the jocular yet detached tone of contemporary sightseeing accounts and instead offers a “contact zone” narrative, to borrow Mary Louise Pratt’s term, that portrays sinophobic psychology.Footnote 77
Returning to the deck, the narrator encounters Captain Kellett, described as a “an Englishman, it is true, by birth, but a genuine cosmopolite, a universal spirit that finds a home and countrymen wherever man is found.” This portrait is largely Melville’s construction and diverges from contemporary newspaper representation. July coverage mentioned Kellett only in passing, routinely identifying him as the Keying’s captain. In early September, he entered the press spotlight as a labor dispute erupted between him and his twenty-six Chinese crew members.Footnote 78 As Stephen Davies notes, “The fundamental message and tone of the exhibition … were denigratory in a distinctly condescending and belittling way,” which irritated sinophilic Americans such as Samuel Wells Williams and Chinese residents of the city such as Lin King Chew, both of whom helped defend the Chinese crew during the September trial.Footnote 79 Melville’s sketches suggest that he, too, found Kellett’s Barnum-style representation of China absurd. Yet he also refashions the Keying’s captain into a familiar figure in his corpus: the cosmopolite. This Kellett then spins a sailor’s yarn: the reason for the junk to have a crooked mainmast is that the Chinese
say that after old KO-KA-POO, who built the first ship five thousand years ago, died, his spirit used to come every day at sundown and put his hat upon the top of the mainmast and sit there upon it till dark. He was a “heavy dog,” and in time his weight made the mast crooked. In honor of KO-KA-POO they always get a crooked stick for the mainmast till this day.
However, Kellett’s own visitor’s guide offered a different account, explaining the crooked mast as a deliberate choice by the Chinese crew for added strength:
This mast is hooped round in consequence of being cracked while it was undergoing the process of hardening, which consists in burying it in the ground for a time. It is said teak wood when thus inhumed in marshy ground will become as hard as iron. The crook in the mast, so far from being considered a disadvantage, is to the Chinese seamen conclusive evidence of the goodness of the spar.Footnote 80
This original explanation is matter-of-fact, adopting a quasi-authoritative tone as it introduces Chinese maritime practices to a Western readership. Portraying Kellett as a sailor–narrator, Melville transforms the guidebook’s account into a sailor’s yarn that veers toward the spiritual and the fantastical. As Paul A. Gilje explains, “Ghosts and the supernatural filled the sailor’s yarn. Such stories appealed to mariners, who were notoriously superstitious.”Footnote 81 Here, Melville offers a Chinese variant of that genre. Kellett’s cosmopolitan pose, together with the conventions of the sailor’s yarn, recasts the Keying from a Chinese curiosity show into an oceanic romance of the China trade, animated by what Kendall A. Johnson describes as “the optimism and energy of international commerce as it captured the imaginations of early American citizens striving for the fruits of free-trade liberalism after the Revolution.”Footnote 82 In Melville’s later sea novels Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), that romance recurs in sailors’ yarns that boast of journeys “to China for his silk handkerchiefs” or “voyages to China after tea-caddies.”Footnote 83 This vision of the Far East as a key node in an supposedly free and frictionless global commerce helped legitimate the coercive 1844 treaty.
Thus, in depicting the crew and the junk, Melville pursues a consistent strategy that, as I have proposed earlier, seeks to “surpass the sea serpent” and “out-Barnum Barnum”: by reworking popular accounts of the Keying and circulating sentiments about China, Melville constructs a “counterfeit” visit to the exhibition that would have struck contemporary readers as both familiar and odd. The sketch moves among different representational modes, giving it an uneven texture and making its meaning resistant to easy definition. This eclecticism prizes formal variety and tonal uncertainty over settled authorial judgment, thereby opening its representation of China and Chinese people to a radically democratic range of perspectives. In the remainder of the sketch, the junk becomes a speculative site for probing China–US relations, as Melville’s narrator interviews a Chinese passenger about his views of Americans.
A Chinese passenger meets “Jonathan”
Introduced by Captain Kellett, the narrator meets a Chinese passenger: “the great man, CHANG-FOUE, or KE-SING.” The name “Ke-sing” fuses two Chinese figures. It invokes Keying, the Chinese aristocrat who managed foreign relations after the First Opium War and for whom the junk was named. His reported status as a relative of Emperor Daoguang informs Melville’s characterization of Ke-sing, whom Kellett introduces as “a Mandarin at home … as high in quality and rank as a Lord in England, or say as the President here.” Accepting Kellett’s account, the narrator refers to Ke-sing as “his highness.” At the same time, the name draws on Hesing, a Chinese landlord aboard the vessel, described in contemporary accounts as “a man of some intelligence” and “a Mandarin of the Red button, who came out a passenger with Capt. Kellett, and exercises a sort of paternal authority over the forty of his countrymen on board.”Footnote 84 Chang-foue, the alternative name attributed to Ke-sing, might allude to Afong Moy, whom newspapers sometimes introduced with derogatory overtones as “Miss Ching-Chang-foo.”Footnote 85 In July 1847, Barnum was exhibiting Afong Moy at Niblo’s Saloon on Broadway.Footnote 86 City newspapers reported a meeting between her and the Chinese crew and even rumored that she was cultivating a romantic relationship with Hesing.Footnote 87 By collapsing the three Chinese names most widely circulated in the US press into a single character, Melville concentrates within his sketch the distinct cultural associations attached to Keying, Hesing, and Afong Moy.
Keying’s cultural image warrants a fuller account here. After the First Opium War, his compliant diplomacy toward Western powers replaced the earlier defiant stance of Chinese officials such as Lin Zexu. Keying’s openness to negotiation was strategic: it intended to avert further military threats to the northern capital, confine foreign trade to southeastern coastal cities, and postpone treaty signings for as long as possible in order to “tactfully pass on the coercive orders of the British” to Emperor Daoguang, as Haijian Mao explains.Footnote 88 In British newspapers, Keying’s diplomatic compliance inspired anecdotes that presented him as the emblem of a wise and peaceful China. Such an image fit comfortably within a rich tradition of Renaissance and Enlightenment travel writing produced by Jesuit missions, which “fuse[d] Catholicism and Confucianism” to “portray China as an idyllic kingdom with the aura of Eden,” as Song-Chuan Chen suggests.Footnote 89 Keying thus served as a useful figure in postwar press portrayals of Sino-British relations to reassure domestic readers.
American newspapers quickly reprinted these Keying anecdotes. On 22 November 1843, the New York Journal of Commerce reproduced a letter from London’s Standard, allegedly written by a respected British naval officer, recounting his experience at the “closing ceremonies of the Nankin treaty of peace” that ended the First Opium War:
They drank an enormous quantity of wine; chatted, laughed, and finished every glass, turning it over to show it was empty, and helping themselves from the decanters. Old Keying, the Chief Commissioner, must have taken fifty large glasses of wine at least.Footnote 90
The letter depicted a festive scene in which Chinese officials celebrated the treaty with their British counterparts. It evoked the spirit of Dionysus – full of wine, laughter, and music – to accentuate an image of amicable relations between the two countries. Moreover, Keying was dubbed “Old Keying,” casting him as a sage of “ancient times,” someone “renowned in history or legend.”Footnote 91 These classical framings facilitated Keying’s transformation from an official of a secluded, elite China in the Jesuit tradition, now subjected to British intrusion, into a jovial, worldly, and cosmopolitan figure. This portrait persisted in subsequent coverage. In December, the New-York Commercial Advertiser published a private letter from Henry Pottinger, featuring “an amusing account of his intercourse with the imperial commissioner, Keying”; the editors added, “There seems to be a good deal of fun among the Celestials.”Footnote 92 In January, The Albion; or, British, Colonial, and Foreign Weekly Gazette contained a letter from Keying addressed to Horatio Nelson Lay, the newly appointed British consul at Canton; the editors hailed it as a “bright beginning of an enlightened and liberal feeling on the part of the Celestials.”Footnote 93
In addition to reprinting British accounts, US newspapers borrowed the term “Old Keying” but reinterpreted it to suggest that he embodied the traits of a seasoned Yankee character. In March 1844, a letter by the American opium merchant John Murray Forbes circulated in the New York press. Forbes detailed Cushing’s meeting with “Old Keying”:
Keying is represented as large, rather corpulent, and of harsh features and complexion, but with a countenance expressive of good nature, though not of much intelligence. His manner was perfectly easy and polite as well as dignified, and his whole bearing to the Americans was extremely kind.Footnote 94
A few months later, the paper ran a notice from the US embassy suggesting that treaty negotiations were proceeding effectively: “There is an excellent feeling in China toward the people of the United States.”Footnote 95 Portraying Keying as especially amiable toward Americans reflected the republic’s self-image in early China–US relations: a benevolent presence set against British imperial aggression in the Pacific. Yet this posture of goodwill masked the coercive pressures at work. To expedite the process, Cushing sent the US man-of-war Brandywine to Whampoa as a “courtesy,” emulating the British Navy’s practice of “gunboat diplomacy” during the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing.Footnote 96
Moreover, portraying Keying as congenial to Americans reactivated an older tradition of treating China as a resource for self-cultivation and a means of imagining cultural independence from Europe. As Jim Egan argues, tracing writings from Anne Bradstreet to Edgar Allen Poe, early American literature consistently engaged with
the East as a solution to America’s inferior civilized status by suggesting that America become more civilized, not by becoming more European – or perhaps not only by becoming more European – but by adopting aesthetic styles and standards long associated with an East cast as superior aesthetically to both America and Europe.Footnote 97
Although this respect for Chinese culture waned after the First Opium War, interest in Chinese teachings persisted. Transcendentalist writers placed Chinese philosophy in dialogue with ancient Persian and Hindu texts.Footnote 98 Confucian aphorisms also circulated widely in periodicals and lectures as practical guides to self-culture, consumed as an ancient Chinese counterpart to Poor Richard’s Almanack. The founding of the American Oriental Society in 1842 signals the growing institutionalization and professionalization of Eastern studies.Footnote 99 In October 1844, the New-York Commercial Advertiser extracted an article from the Pekin Gazette that provided an overview of Keying’s character and the country’s legal system.Footnote 100 The Pekin Gazette, a local government publication, was one of several Chinese gazettes initially translated by individual missionaries; as Emily Mokros explains, it began to reach the English-speaking world more regularly in the early nineteenth century through “academic institutions and learned societies devoted to the study of China.”Footnote 101 This expanding infrastructure of knowledge across intellectual and public spheres enabled Americans to conjure an older, romantic vision of China in the figure of Keying. In late 1845, Daniel Fletcher Webster, who had accompanied Cushing to China, delivered two lectures on Chinese culture in New York City. In the second, he burnished the mission’s public image by idealizing the Chinese diplomat: “Keying is 60 years old – tall, large, and dignified. His face expresses talent and decision. He is one of the most able and influential men in an empire of three hundred millions.”Footnote 102
At the same time, US burgeoning mass culture was actively remaking Keying’s popular persona. As John Kuo Wei Tchen argues, New York City’s expanding world of “[t]he penny press, combined with the Bowery culture of theaters, dime museums, lectures, merchandising, and public spectacle,” produced a coexistence of traditional “patrician orientalism” and rising “commercial orientalism.”Footnote 103 During the mid- to late 1840s, Keying became increasingly legible as a portable cultural commodity. His portraits began to circulate in public venues. In late May 1845, the New York press announced that Cushing had returned with “a fine portrait of Keying,” to be displayed at the Boston Athenaeum.Footnote 104 In September, Boston dailies promoted the Chinese Museum at Marlboro Chapel, featuring portraits of Keying and his associates.Footnote 105 In March 1847, advertisements for “The Great Chinese Museum” appeared in Philadelphia, indicating that these portraits now resided in Nathan Dunn’s former museum building.Footnote 106 Keying’s representation was also responsive to popular taste. In March 1846, the New-York Commercial Advertiser reprinted an anecdote about Keying’s trip to Hong Kong from the China Mail, the official publication of the British colonial government:
A man so famous in the Western world as Keying was of course the observed of all observers during his visit … As we saw him on three public occasions, his bland countenance was beaming with good-humored benevolence; but it is of an intellectual cast, and lighted up with a twinkling eye, which as occasion demands would be equally expressive of penetrating shrewdness as of social glee.Footnote 107
In February 1847, the same paper revisited this “British gentleman Keying” in its coverage of Samuel Wells Williams’s lectures on China, framing Chinese bureaucratic hierarchy through a British aristocratic model: “There are earls, barons, baronets and knights … Keying is an earl.”Footnote 108 These constructions of a Victorian Keying mobilized what Elisa Tamarkin describes as the period’s affective attachment to British traditions.Footnote 109
Thus, by the junk’s arrival, the “Keying” phenomenon in the US press had come to intersect with competing currents in antebellum popular culture, including Anglophobia and Anglophilia, and to serve as a hinge between inherited images of China from European and New England traditions and newer, market-driven forms. In July 1847, when the junk was celebrated as amusement, Keying started to appear in troubling reports of escalating conflict in Canton between foreigners and local residents. These reports dampened the commercial and diplomatic optimism that earlier American images of Keying had sought to sustain. In April 1847, Hong Kong governor John Davis captured the Bogue forts and threatened to bombard Canton unless Keying implemented treaty concessions for foreigners and curbed “a vast number of annoyances and encroachments” by protesting civilians.Footnote 110 On 20 July 1847, the New York Journal of Commerce reprinted an article from the Hongkong Register describing the situation as volatile:
All business was interrupted at Canton, and the merchants were removing all their property, being apprehensive either of a rising of the people, who would plunder them as well as the foreigners, or of a new attack on the part of the English, who, they supposed, were expecting reinforcements from India. Menacing placards against the English and Governor Keying had been posted up through the city.Footnote 111
Kellett’s visitors’ guide also alluded to the news in its conclusion: “It appears by the latest advices from China, that the English have captured all the forts commanding the entrance to Canton, in consequence of a violation of the late treaty on the part of the Chinese.”Footnote 112 In the same issue of Yankee Doodle that printed Melville’s “Yankee Doodle’s Visit,” a sketch placed beside “The New Planet” burlesqued the Canton crisis. Its jab at missionary expansion in the Pacific echoes the critique in Typee and Omoo, suggesting that the piece might also be Melville’s:
IN THE CHINESE SEAS the British have been spiking 870 guns in the forts of the Celestials, after which KEYING, the Chinese Commissioner – no relation to Keying the Chinese Junk now here – consented that an English church might be built wherein the outside barbarians might worship the Prince of Peace.Footnote 113
Given these accounts, Melville’s integration of Keying with the passenger Hesing into the single figure “Ke-sing” is situated within a transitional moment in US perceptions of Keying during the eponymous junk’s exhibition: from an elite and popular Keying to one cast as submissive and victimized.
Melville’s sketch portrays the relationship between Ke-sing and Captain Kellett. When the narrator asks whether “his highness” is “sometimes troublesome” in the voyage and whether he “long[s] for his country and its luxuries and make[s] disturbance on ship board,” Kellett replies with contemptuous brutality: “If he makes any noise or becomes impertinent, we just wring his nose a little or put his queue in a windlass and wind him up, and it’s all right again very quick.” Contemporary records, however, suggest that Hesing and Kellett cultivated a mutually beneficial partnership. As a passenger, Hesing was not among the twenty-six Chinese sailors involved in the September labor dispute. Instead, he remained with the Keying tour to Boston as Kellett’s performer and was advertised in the Boston press as “the first and only person of Chinese rank that ever visited this part of the Globe.”Footnote 114 During the junk’s 1848 exhibition in London, his portrait appeared in Kellett’s informational pamphlet, accompanied by a line of Chinese text identifying him as “Cantonese Landlord Xisheng (希生广东老爷).”Footnote 115 At the 1851 Great Exhibition, Hesing even attended the opening ceremony to compensate for the absence of an official Qing representative.Footnote 116 In light of these records, Melville’s depiction of Kellett’s treatment of Ke-sing reads less as an account of Hesing than as a geopolitical allegory of Davis’s coercive diplomacy toward Keying in the July reports.
Melville’s narrator then solicits Ke-sing’s views of Americans; Ke-sing responds by complaining that “plenty Flun-kees come to junk”:
YAN-KEE then desired to know how he liked this country so far.
“Um—um,” whispered KE-SING from behind his fan. “Me like you Yan-kee! – me no like all these many Flun-kees,” said the mandarin, looking anxiously around upon the crowd whose mingled breath rendered the air almost suffocating, “me no like Flun-kee.”
When a visitor identified by the narrator as “Jonathan” approaches Ke-sing and asks his name, Ke-sing takes offense:
The Chinaman looked at him and muttered, “Flunk-kee – no like Flun-kee.”
Jonathan not liking to be put off so, went at him again. “Are you a Chanyman?”
“Iss,” said KE-SING.
“Where did you sail from?”
“London!” bellowed KE-SING, as loud as a Chinaman can roar, and covering his face with a fan, went out of the cabin.
The sketch concludes with the narrator’s reflective punchline: “It is no wonder he don’t like ‘Flun-kees!’ YAN-KEE DOODLE himself don’t like Flun-kees.”
“Flun-kee” follows the sketch’s pattern of hyphenated name spellings, alongside “Yan-kee,” “Ke-sing,” and “Chang-foue.” Melville thus mimics a contemporary convention of rendering Chinese names through loose phonetic approximation. He wryly pokes fun at similar efforts to transcribe Pacific languages in the 10 July piece “A Short Patent Sermon”: “Owyhee, (or Hawaii, as it is now-a-days spelt – fonography probably).”Footnote 117 In Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man (1857), he revisits this practice by spelling the Yellow River as “the great canal of Hang-Ho” and “[t]he great ship-canal of Ving-King-Ching.”Footnote 118 Moreover, “Flun-kee” is presented as a deliberately crafted counterpart to “Yan-kee,” and the sketch invites readers to weigh the two terms against each other. John Russell Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms defines “flunky” (a variant of “flunkey”) as a “servant in livery. A term now used contemptuously.”Footnote 119 Yet Melville may be using the term in a specifically nationalist sense, as his 1850 essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” suggests: “Let us away with this Bostonian leaven of literary flunkeyism towards England. If either must play the flunkey in this thing, let England do it, not us.”Footnote 120 Based on this record, the sketch’s dismissal of “Flun-kee” and endorsement of “Yan-kee” echoes the literary-nationalist ethos that Yankee Doodle and its Young America editor actively pursued.
However, in having Ke-sing reject “Flun-kee,” Melville further brings contemporary China–US relations into view, casting US diplomacy with China as a form of “flunkeyism.” As John King Fairbank argues, “the American self-image of a separate American national China policy before 1898 is a misconception,” for despite claims of ideological distance from Europe, the republic’s practice closely followed the British model.Footnote 121 The 1844 treaty that formalized China–US relations reaped the benefits of Britain’s victory in the First Opium War. It set a pattern that would persist through the rest of the century, which Thomas J. McCormick calls “hitchhiking imperialists” living off “the commercial leavings” of British supremacy in the region.Footnote 122 If Jonathan, a generic name for Americans in the early nineteenth century, serves as an emblem of the nation, then the scene stages an encounter between “the United States” and “Ke-sing,” whose name evokes Keying, the Qing diplomat in charge of China’s foreign relations.Footnote 123 By having this Chinese diplomatic figure reject a relationship with Americans marked by “flunkeyism” and instead affirm “Yankeeism,” Melville projects an idealized nationalist vision of China–US relations as independent of British influence.
Yet “Jonathan” can also be read as a veiled allusion to Barnum, since this Jonathan is described as “a sun-burnt, bleached-haired, corpulent, quick-wit, from the State of Connecticut, with peacock plumes in his hand.” Barnum was the quintessential Yankee, who was from Connecticut and known for his sharp wit and flamboyant style. The detail “with peacock plumes in his hand” further portrays Jonathan as a showman poised to sign up a Chinese sailor as his performer. This reading is reinforced by Ke-sing’s alternative name Chang-foue and its possible association with Afong Moy. It also creates a textual bridge to Melville’s Zachary Taylor anecdotes in Yankee Doodle, where Barnum tries to recruit the Mexican–American War general as a performer for the Keying exhibition: “Think General, of yourself reclining on the poop of the Chinese Junk, receiving the visits of your friends; adopt this course and you must be elected President; reject it and perhaps – but I forbear to press this matter.”Footnote 124 The scene simultaneously trades on two popular speculations in the press: that the junk was a Barnum production and that Taylor was pursuing the Whig presidential nomination.
Therefore the Chinese character’s two names – Ke-sing and Chang-foue – correspond to two plausible meanings of Jonathan; together, they produce two parallel narratives within a single scene: a geopolitical allegory of China–US relations, if Jonathan stands for Americans and Ke-sing evokes Keying, and an urban spectacle of the Keying exhibition, if Jonathan is Barnum and Chang-foue alludes to Afong Moy. Through this doubled cultural resonance, Melville grafts a national political issue to street-level entertainment. This writing strategy reflects the texture of Yankee Doodle. When Melville began contributing to the weekly in July 1847, Duyckinck’s associate, Cornelius Mathews, had recently taken over the editorship and hoped to revive its appeal.Footnote 125 A leading figure in New York’s Young America movement, Mathews pursued what Edward L. Widmer describes as “a literary interest in nurturing the folk traditions and popular culture of the country as a subtle form of political protest.”Footnote 126 The magazine also belonged to a cluster of New York periodicals of the 1840s and 1850s marked by what David S. Reynolds calls urban humor: “In general, urban humor was conservative politically, often making a mockery of sober national issues, but at the same time quite radical stylistically, reproducing linguistically the fragmentations and tensions within modern American culture.”Footnote 127 The way Melville articulates his view of China–US relations was thus informed by both the magazine’s literary–political concerns and a broader New York periodical subculture within which he wrote.
The sketch’s subtle satire of American “flunkeyism” in China–US relations further echoes passages elsewhere in Yankee Doodle that fold the issue into a broader critique of US imperialism, especially as exposed by the contemporaneous Mexican–American War. The magazine cast the otherwise unrelated Treaty of Wangxia and the war with Mexico as ethically continuous and ideologically alarming. In the 12 December 1846 issue, a sketch titled “Mexico Shall be Civilized” targeted Cushing’s expansionist ethos; as John M. Belohlavek notes, only months after returning from China, he “threw aside the cloak of subtle diplomat and assumed the mantle of saber-rattling warrior” to promote westward expansion.Footnote 128 The sketch repurposed Cushing’s widely publicized China treaty and its “civilizing” rhetoric to satirize the republic’s coercion toward Mexico:
Hon. Mr. CUSHING, who studied political economy under the celebrated HUM-HUM in China, recently said in a lecture delivered in Newburyport, that he “did not doubt that Mexico would be ultimately benefitted by the detachment and occupation effected by our troops of a large portion of that country.” If the Mexicans are not duly sensible of the efforts which YANKEE DOODLE and Gen. TAYLOR are making in their behalf, they are a set of the most ungrateful, kinky-headed, copper-colored rapscallions in the universe, and ought to be “civilized” off the face of the earth.Footnote 129
In another instance, the 14 August issue featured a woodcut of a boxing match between Zachary Taylor and Viscount Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary in 1847, with a roadpost reading “To the Pacific” behind them (see Figure 3).Footnote 130 The image dramatized an ideological competition between British radical liberalism and American Manifest Destiny, both of which invoked civilization as a rationale for expansion.Footnote 131
“Lord Palmerston and Old Zack,” Yankee Doodle, 2, 45 (14 Aug. 1847), 185.
Quite radically, these two Yankee Doodle pieces linked together US relations with China and Mexico in the 1840s, two domains that the Monroe Doctrine kept rhetorically distinct, into a single narrative of burgeoning US imperialism cloaked in liberal language. In the rest of the century, the tension between a trade-driven, outward-looking United States and a hemisphere-bound, inward-looking one continued to generate uneasy narratives about the republic’s drift toward empire in the Pacific region. As Gretchen Murphy argues, Frances Lister Hawks’s official account of Matthew Perry’s 1853 Japan expedition is “an ill-fated attempt to revise [John Quincy] Adams’s invented tradition of hemispheric, anticolonial isolation into a destiny of progressive and mobile U.S. global power.”Footnote 132 Mounting unease about US expansionism also gave rise to an image of “two Americas” in Mark Twain’s “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901): one aiding Cuban independence and the other annexing the Philippines during the same Spanish–American War (1898). Twain thus echoed Melville’s concern about American “flunkeyism” of half a century earlier: as Amy Kaplan argues, “Twain saw this America as not acting American at all, but as slavishly imitating the European game of colonial conquest.”Footnote 133
Taken together, Melville’s Keying sketches engage, lampoon, and reshape the representational landscape of China in contemporary New York on three distinct levels. First, they satirize the city’s cultures of journalism and showmanship, which sensationalized the Keying exhibition as a public spectacle driven by rumors and hoaxes rather than offering reliable representations of China and Chinese people. Second, the sketches combine a range of popular periodical accounts and rework them into a “counterfeit” report on the Keying. The result is a tone that reads as playful rather than assertive, and portrayals of China that are democratic rather than definitive. Third, in voicing his political concern over China–US relations, Melville does not claim the authority of serious commentary on national issues. Yet his zany style does not dilute political thought so much as it enables sober reflection on the republic’s troubling drift toward empire. Moreover, it directs us to the magazine’s radical effort to link US policy toward China at the time with the Mexican–American War, two subjects with little historical or conceptual relation that the magazine recast as connected concerns in its framing of American expansionism. The eclectic form of Melville’s Keying sketches thus reveals how the rise of popular print culture generated a richly varied representational field through which American writers and readers imagined China, Chinese people, and the political implications of China–US relations in the 1840s.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
