As I have written in a previous article, I believe the intentions of the aldermen who approved Salem's seal nearly 200 years ago have no bearing on the seal's harmful impact on Salem's AAPI residents and visitors today. I stand by this assertion. Nonetheless, I think it's important to highlight the ways in which the seal's proponents whitewash Salem's nineteenth century maritime history. This is the first in a series of articles that critically examines the supposed iron clad case that Salem's merchants and seafarers were peaceful, respectful and fair in their interactions with Acehnese locals.
Proponents of this "Clear Cut" Evidence
The idea that that anyone who finds Salem's seal offensive does not grasp its history originated from Dr. R. Michael Feener. He emerged as one of the leaders in the campaign to retain Salem's seal after he had sent a letter to Salem's City Council in September 2024. This same letter also called for centering the perspectives of present-day Acehnese in this debate. (See this analysis of why this focus is so problematic.)
Feener's letter was so compelling to some city councillors that they referenced it as grounds for voting against establishing a City Seal Task Force. At the City Council meeting held on September 26, 2024, they repeatedly asserted that a task force should not be formed until there was a "full understanding" of the seal's history. Councillor Conrad Prosniewski said that establishing a task force before researching the seal's history was akin to 'putting the cart before the horse'. John Harvey, who was the Ward 4 City Councillor at the time, used the same analogy in his remarks that night.) Ultimately, their argument failed and the Council approved establishing the City Seal Task Force.
Feener then applied to join this task force as one of its two requisite historians, and was appointed by the Mayor in early 2025. He is a professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and is an Associate Member of the Faculty of History at Oxford University. Though he has not lived in the United States for decades, Feener was born in Salem and has family and friends who still live here. Prior to leaving the U.S., he received his doctorate in Religious Studies at Boston University. His research has primarily focused on Islamic law in 20th Century and present-day in Aceh, Indonesia.
The other designated historian on the City Seal Task Force was Vijay Joyce, who has a bachelor's degree from Boston Architectural College (BAC). His LinkedIn profile says he has degree is in "Historic Preservation and Conservation and Design History, Theory, and Criticism. BAC does not offer undergraduate degrees in these areas, though, and Joyce does not list any advanced degrees on his profile. BAC does offer elective liberal studies coursework focused on architectural history and coursework on historic preservation though.
Joyce is also steward of the Pickering House and the Executive Director of the Pickering Foundation. He's discussed architectural history on HGTV and is the owner of Rekindled History, which offers historic tours of Salem and architectural studies of historic houses. He also works as a project manager for Cummings Architecture + Interiors. All of this is to say that Joyce is not an academic historian.
From the beginning of their tenure on the City Seal Task Force, Feener and Joyce have remained steadfast in their conviction that the seal should not be changed. After the task force released its report with recommendations to change the seal, they released their own unofficial version in protest, which they dubbed the 'Minority Report'.
In their alternative report, Feener and Joyce insist that Salem's merchants eschewed the violent imperialism of the 1800s and instead pursued business relations with Acehnese merchants that were grounded in respect and fairness. They contend that the seal's design was an expression of "reconciliation and goodwill" in response to the brutal massacres of Acehnese people conducted by the U.S. Navy and Marines in 1832 and 1838.
Uncritical Acceptance of Primary Sources
The 'Minority Report' relies heavily upon the logbooks and journal entries of Salem sea captains. Feener and Joyce insist that their source material "makes it clear that relations between Salem seafarers and the merchants of Aceh’s west coast in the early 19th century cannot be simplistically characterized as ‘colonial encounters.’"
These source materials are indeed important glimpses into Salem's maritime history. But they must be examined critically and not accepted at face value. Simply quoting entries in journals and outdated history books does not offer definitive proof of past events.
In fact, the American Historical Association recognizes the importance of critically examining primary sources in its Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct:
"We honor the historical record, but understand that its interpretation constantly evolves as historians analyze primary documents in light of the ever-expanding body of secondary literature that places those documents in a larger context....At the most basic level, though, the professional practice of history means respecting the integrity of primary and secondary sources while subjecting them to critical scrutiny and contributing in a fair-minded way to ongoing scholarly and public debates over what those sources tell us about the past and also what they fail to illuminate."
For his Substack, History's Confluences, historian and researcher Robert Scott Vierick explains why sources must not be taken at face value:
Source analysis is a key part of the historian’s job, and understanding the bias of various records and narratives is part of the training historians go through. Historians know that people have reasons to distort the truth, and so part of their research is determining what information can be gleaned from a source and what information needs to be taken with a small (or large) grain of salt. In the past half-century, historians have worked to look at sources in new ways to provide more information about people and communities that were often overlooked or marginalized in the past.
Vierick had spent 7 years as a history interpreter at George Washington's Mount Vernon. He praises historians Mary Thompson and Bruce Ragsdale, who wrote books about our first President that critically examined his journal entries about the enslaved community at Mount Vernon.
"The books they’ve written are not whitewashed accounts that treat Washington as a benevolent enslaver. Rather, because both historians are skilled at reading between the lines, they can create a picture of the enslaved community that endured Washington’s punishments, worked to resist his orders, and, in a few instances, even outwitted or escaped from the first president. Neither historian accepts Washington’s writings at face value, and they also utilize other sources to add additional context and perspectives."
Contextualizing Feener and Joyce's Source Materials
Just as historians writing about Mount Vernon's enslaved community did not accept at face value our first president's journal entries, so too we must examine historical sources about Salem's maritime history with a critical eye. Here are some important considerations that were absent from the 'Minority Report'.
Logbooks and Journals Were Marketing Materials
Both Feener and Joyce neglected to note that investors reviewed the logbooks and journals of sea captains when evaluating whether to hire them. In an article for the Journal of the Early Republic, Dr. Michael Verney writes:
“Whether as merchant-mariners or missionaries, Americans wrote of their interactions with South Asian peoples and cultures for different reasons. American merchants may have had a professional interest in mustering written evidence of friendly relations with South Asian partners. This was largely because sea officers' present and future employers might scrutinize their ships' journals or logbooks when weighing hiring decisions and vessel destinations. Such scrutiny may have guided merchant-mariners to treat their logs and journals as de facto resumes as well as reports encouraging the next investor.” (page 401)
(Unlike the 'Minority Report', this article appears in a peer-reviewed academic journal and is not self-published.)
In his article, Verney acknowledges that John Crowninshield—whose writing is excerpted in the 'Minority Report'—was indeed extraordinarily tactful in his dealings with locals across the East Indies. He recounts a passage in the Log of the America III, Sumatra, 1801, in which John Crowninshield had assured new trading partners about his open-mindedness:
"Crowninshield then clarified to them that he was a very different breed of American: "but then I was used to [it] having been almost all over India & that a traveling merchant after seeing a few differ ent nations would soon learn to accommodate himself to the customs of the people who he came to trade amongst." "I had no prejudice against any Nation or religion at all."
While this incident does indeed present Crowninshield in a favorable light, we must not lose sight of his potential motivations for sharing such a self-congratulatory story. He must have realized that prospective investors would be impressed by his ability charm Asian merchants who were understandably wary of Americans.
With Friends Like These?
In his article, Verney recognizes that some of relationships between U.S. merchants and their foreign counterparts could "verge on friendship". But he also notes that they were financially incentivized to court the favor of Acehnese locals:
American merchants tended to see India and the East Indies as stepping stones to wealth, honor, and comfort. That perspective likely influenced their perceptions of the country and their indigenous business partners.
For this article, I reached out to Dr. Anthony Guidone who has extensively researched Salem's maritime history for his doctoral thesis. He didn't think the merchants were deceitful in their log books and journals, but he also recognizes that they were motivated to form relationships with their Asian trading partners. He wrote via email:
"I don't think merchants were lying when they wrote positive things about their relationship with local merchants, but I think it is important to remember that the financial incentive for developing a positive relationship is immense. And, when considering some of the violent encounters, a good relationship with local connections could also be lifesaving."
It's also important to note that the writings of Salem's sea captains still revealed racist attitudes indicative of the antebellum era. In that very same log in which John Crowninshield recounts how he won over his new trading partners, he also had noted that the Sumatrans he encountered as "much more indolent than the natives of Bengall" though "equally as harmless".
It's worth noting that the 'Minority Report' had cherry picked quotes from this very same source (Log of the America III, Sumatra, 1801) in which Crowninshield had characterized Sumatrans in a much more favorable light.
There's ample evidence of the racist attitudes of Salem's sea captains, which I will examine in a follow-up article in this series. In the meantime, I highly encourage watching Dr. Erika Lee's presentation to the City Seal Task Force. Lee is scholar of U.S. history at Harvard University and the author of several acclaimed books on Asian American history and culture.
An Incomplete Picture
All of the journals and logbooks cited by Feener and Joyce were written by wealthy educated white men. This paints an incomplete picture of the behavior of Salem seafarers in Aceh. Furthermore, most sailors did not keep journals. In his book With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire, Dr. Brian Rousseau notes that diaries, logbooks, correspondence and memoirs from the 1800s reflect only "a small fraction of a much larger workforce."
Unlike Feener and Joyce, Rousseau looked at source materials from American sailors from different ranks and classes. It's not surprising that he unearthed less flattering accounts of their conduct while overseas. Referring to U.S. maritime history of this period, he writes:
It is a complex story of seafaring laborers who in the course of their multifarious voyages assaulted others even as authoritarian officers abused them, could be cheated and kept poor by swindling ship owners while they simultaneously stole from destitute shopkeepers, and who might find fellowship with diverse men even as that camaraderie was constructed in the context of the brutal mistreatment of women overseas. There are, in other words, no simple answers or easy explanations in detailing the lives of this miscellaneous mass of men.
Additional Reading
History
