East India Marine Society


The East India Marine Society of Salem, Massachusetts, United States, was "composed of persons who have actually navigated the seas beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, as masters or supercargoes of vessels belonging to Salem." It functioned as a charitable and educational organization, and maintained a library and museum. It flourished especially in the 1800s–1830s, a heyday of foreign trade. In 1910 the society reincorporated as "Trustees of the Salem East India Marine Society."

Museum

History

The society founders were invested in the establishment of a museum from the beginning: their third objective was "to form a Museum of natural and artificial curiosities, particularly such as are found beyond the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn." Within three years, their collection had grown too large for their building, so they relocated to the Salem Bank building, constructed by Colonel Benjamin Pickman, on Essex Street.
In 1825 the society dedicated the newly constructed East India Marine Hall, designed by architect Thomas Waldron Sumner. It shared the building with the Asiatic Bank and Oriental Insurance Company. Museum staff included Seth Bass, Malthus A. Ward, and Henry Wheatland.
The museum existed under the East India Marine Society name from 1799 until 1867, when it was purchased by George Peabody for $140,000. The East India Marine Hall and its collections were combined with those of the Essex Institute in the fields of natural history and ethnology, and reimagined as the Peabody Academy of Science. In 1915, the Peabody Academy of Science transitioned into the Peabody Museum of Salem; after merging with the Essex Institute completely in 1992, it became the Peabody Essex Museum.
The East India Marine Society museum and its collections were significant in several ways. Firstly, the society's members were obligated to donate "curiosities" from their travels; not only did the museum help make Salem a vital location for learning about European and Asian visual and intellectual culture, it signaled America's success and prosperity in global trade. It also established that American cultural institutions were of comparable quality to their European counterparts. On a larger scale, the museum combined the economics of trade with enlightenment philosophy and was believed to have an important role in the study of science and society.

Collections

The collection was started by donations from Captain Jonathan Carnes; items as diverse as an elephant's tooth and a pipe from Sumatra set the standard for the museum's acquisitions. Because of the society's requirement for its members to donate a diverse range of objects from their travels, the collections were specifically related to their business endeavors, which explains the predominance of Pacific artifacts on display. The museum received so many objects in the first two decades of its existence that it hired a curator to fill in gaps in the collection, reorganize the displays, and create a catalogue. This catalogue of the museum's collections was published in 1821, listing 2,269 objects.
At the time of the first catalogue's publication, the society owned a variety of objects including shells; coins; other ethnological artifacts such as costume, musical instruments, statuary, weaponry; and manuscript journals of sea voyages between Salem and places including Batavia, Bombay, Calcutta, Canton, Ceylon, Isle de France, Manila, Mocha, Sumatra, and Tranquebar. Donors of objects included members, New England locals such as William Bentley, non-member seafarers such as John Derby, and others such as merchant Nusserwanjee Maneckjee of Bombay.
Ten years after the first catalogue, a second was released, with a total of 4,299 objects. These catalogues contained objects including:

"Natural curiosities"

The collection also included several objects that were especially valuable due to factors including rarity, origin, and historical significance. One such artifact is an idol of Kolia Moku, the medicine god, from the Sandwich Islands, donated by John T. Prince in the late 1840s. There are only two other surviving idols of this type.
One of the more notorious objects was the embalmed head of a New Zealand chief, donated by William Dana; it had to be displayed behind a veil.
An earlier object of importance to the collection is the sculpture donated by Captain Benjamin Hodges in 1790, Figure of a Chinese Man. Scholars have reported that it was one of the first sculptures to enter the American market from China.

Collection gaps

Even though the society's cultural collections largely focused on items gathered from international trade, it still displayed a small number of objects from Native American tribes. Because there was no strong financial reason to expend concerted effort on collecting Native objects, scholars have reported that the museum's representation of Eastern tribes was small and used to compare them to ancient civilizations: items such as arrowheads that had come up during excavations in New England were displayed with classical artifacts.

Methods of display

There are not many remaining records of the exhibition style of the museum, but a few observations have survived. For example, when the society moved into the newly-constructed East India Marine Hall, tall cases filled with artifacts lined the walls—often with nautical models displayed on top—and more cases were arranged in the center of the room.
In addition, the museum was decorated with life-size sculptures of merchants from China and India. They were placed in strategic locations throughout the exhibition hall, which allowed them to serve not only as objects within the collection themselves, but also as contextual aids for other objects.
Not much is known about the specific groupings of the collection prior to the 1830s; near the end of the decade, however, records state that items were displayed based on their general function, such as weaponry or musical instruments. The curator, Dr Malthus Ward, did this in an effort to assemble objects that shared similar roles in their various countries of origin.

Visitorship

The museum had no admission fee, but it required visitors to be introduced by a society member. Prominent visitors to the society's museum included William Bentley, James Silk Buckingham, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Smith, Andrew Jackson, Anne Newport Royall, and Martin Van Buren.
It was one of Salem's most vital attractions, and visitors consistently reported feelings of awe and as though they were entering a separate world: Martha Nichols, the granddaughter of Salem mariner Captain George Nichols, wrote that its "magic door opened onto so many wonders," and a guestbook from 1860 contains a visitor's opinion that "to walk around this room was to circumnavigate the globe." These impressions taught the younger generations of Salem knowledge of the global marketplace that was valued highly in the early 19th century: the possibilities for trade relations were enhanced by their prolonged exposure to foreign nations.
According to scholars, the exhibits in East India Marine Hall presented visitors with the idea that their sailors had brought them a personalized microcosm of the world. The objects and their displays were meant to do more than just illustrate the rich diversity of other cultures; they were also strongly associated with their donors. This was underscored by the presence of donor portraits hung above the objects, as well as the former sailors serving the society as tour guides. This emphasized the personal connections that surrounded the objects, and demonstrated the sailor's autonomy and success in an international arena.

Visitor controversies

The 1830s presented several challenges to the museum's relationship with its visitors. In 1833, the society created and enforced a rule that banned African Americans from attending the museum, despite the fact that it had not previously restricted their attendance. In addition, an entrance fee was briefly charged as an attempt to "remedy evil" of their popularity; the more than 2,000 annual visitors, coupled with the society's responsibility to care for its members' families experiencing financial hardship, had become too difficult to maintain.

Members

Nathaniel Hawthorne described a fictionalized version of the society's museum in his 1842 short story A Virtuoso's Collection.