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Chapter 6 The Importance of the China Trade in American Exploration and Conquest in the Pacific, 1830–1850 Michael Block It has often been pointed out that American interest in the Pacific Coast of North America rose in parallel with the China trade. Sydney and Marjorie Greenbie (1925), argued that trade with China drew Americans to the area that is now the states of Oregon and Washington.1 Some historians have been particularly fascinated with the idea of California being a gateway to China. After the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, there was much optimism that this new route would accelerate American access to the Pacific and China. Early California historians such as Robert Glass Cleland (1922),2 the Greenbies, Foster Rhea Dulles (1930),3 and others, wrote extensively about the connections between the Pacific Coast and China.4 As will be shown below, the factual historical records support a more tenuous and less direct connection between California and China. After this brief flowering in the 1920s of interests in Sino-PacificAmerican connections, subsequent historians largely abandoned these ideas. The more recent “Pacific Histories” have begun to bring the American Pacific back into focus, while often omitting the role of China altogether. In their efforts to catch up with the more plentiful popular histories of the Pacific Basin, academic historians have mainly relied on old notions of manifest destiny, with its emphasis on land-based territorial aggrandizement, as they once again make connections between America and the Pacific.5 Academic historians have paid little attention to the Charles Wilkes Exploring Expedition, which roamed the Pacific from 1838 to 1842, instead leaving it to popular historians, and academics in fields like anthropology.6 Popular historian Nathaniel Philbrick (2003) connects the Charles Wilkes Exploring Expedition in the Pacific from 1838 to 1842 to protests among New Englanders demanding the government help them 96 Michael Block find new whaling grounds.7 While Philbrick correctly describes the Wilkes Expedition as a “forgotten” part of American history, he might also have noted that the more significant part of the history that has been overlooked (and that he himself overlooked) is the connections between American exploration and expansion in the Pacific and American trade with China. Retired seal hunter Edmund Fanning, for example, had proposed sailing to the South Pacific earlier than Wilkes in search of “new” islands with resources that could be traded in China, which he promised to share with the government upon his return. If he found whaling grounds while searching for seals and edible sea cucumber,8 then so much the better. But in Fanning’s mind, exploring the Pacific was all about China. American historians have also underestimated or omitted the role that American aspirations for trade with China played in inspiring the United States invasion of California (which had been a province of Mexico) in 1846. For these historians, the conquest of Mexican California by the United States was simply part of wider American interest in expanding the territorial extent of the United States.9 Trade with China plays little or no part in this insular view of American territorial expansion during the nineteenth century. Historian Neal Harlow (1982), for instance, sees the U.S. invasion of California in 1846 as purely a result of American ambitions driven by manifest destiny to extend the United States from Atlantic to Pacific.10 Harlow dismisses and reduces Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones’s “accidental ” or “premature” invasion of Monterey in 1842 to a few sentences , which effectively masks its importance. Other California historians have similarly downplayed the importance of the 1842 incident , and have missed the significant role that the China trade played in Jones’s ill-fated decision to invade California in 1842.11 Jones, who had initially been selected to lead the Exploring Expedition mentioned above, seized Monterey for a day on the basis that California was worth invading because of its importance as a gateway to China. Interest in sending an official exploring voyage into the Pacific had already begun by 1825, when the House of Representatives debated sending the U.S. sloop of war Boston into the Pacific to explore the Northwest Coast.12 The Navy Department responded early in 1826, claiming that all of its ships were deployed, and if one became available, it would be too large to explore the region safely and effectively because of its deep draught.13 When petitions reached Congress demanding Pacific exploration in 1828, the focus had shifted from...

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