Navigating the Other North American Coast: New England Merchants and Sailors Approach the North American Pacific, 1780s-1820s

This program will present research from a project that investigates social and environmental change along the far Pacific coast of North America from 1760 through 1820 by focusing on knowledge of and labor in the region’s oceanic and littoral landscapes. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Spanish missionaries and soldiers, Russian hunters, and British traders, as well as New England-based merchants and sailors, began traversing North America’s Pacific coast, forming new relationships between these ocean-based travelers, North American indigenous peoples, and the coastal environment. Using the logs and diaries of sailors as well as the journals, account books, and letters of merchants, the brown-bag presentation will focus on the specific ways that “Boston men” and their backers understood, approached, and literally navigated the physical and the social geographies of the North American Pacific.