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ID:
158509
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| Summary/Abstract |
A tourist in Asia in the 1840s, Doctor B. L. Ball of Northborough, Massachusetts, felt the greatest pleasure in company with people like himself. He went often to American missionaries’ houses, U.S. consulates, and Canton’s “new American hotel” for evenings of “New England singing,” Fourth of July bacchanals, and talk of “home and home affairs.” From Manila, Ball sent a daguerreotype of himself to his mother, taken “by an American, and done as well as in America.” In Canton, he visited historic sites with college friend Elijah Bridgman, the first American missionary to China and a resident since 1830, and met for the first time a former schoolmate’s father, David Geisinger, commander of the U.S. sloop-of-war Plymouth. In Hong Kong, Ball conversed at length about home with another American naval officer from Northborough. And at Shanghai, when the U.S. consul introduced Ball to an American doctor, they were both startled to recognize each other from medical school in Boston. Early in his travels, after returning from supper at the Canton home of missionary Peter Parker, also a doctor from Massachusetts, Ball reported having “retired within my mosquito-net, my mind being full of the strange things of this strange country.” Months later in Shanghai, the jaded traveler remarked after a dinner at the U.S. consul’s, “I begin to think Americans are to be found in every part of the world. If I should go to Pekin or Kamtschatka, I should expect to find Americans already at each place.”
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