Tea at Trianon: Captain Kendrick’s 1791 Mission to Japan

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, August 18, 2023

Captain Kendrick’s 1791 Mission to Japan

From The Sunday Guardian:

It was 1 October 1787, soon after the American War of Independence from Britain, April 1775 to September 1783, that left seething anger among the British that spilled over into attempts to wreck the fledgling nation’s trade and investment. It was then believed in the British Royal Court that the US experiment with democracy would fail and the former colonies would come begging to rejoin the British Empire. America was highly indebted as a percentage of GDP after defeating the world’s then-leading superpower. Therefore, in order to break the British trade stalemate or embargo and to establish a presence in the Pacific, American pioneers set out in two ships, The Lady Washington a sixty-foot single masted sloop with eleven men (partly financed by Martha, the wife of General George Washington) and the Columbia Rediviva, an 83 feet three-masted brig with a captain and crew of 40 sailors. This fascinating story is told by Historian Scott Ridley in his book “Morning of Fire: America’s Epic First Journey into the Pacific” (Reference 1) as well as other historians referenced in this article, and in historical records and documents, now located in museums in the US and Japan. It is a Trans-Pacific story in pursuit of capital for the then-fledging new nation’s development to sustain independence and freedom.
At the time, over a century before the Panama Canal, ships sailing from Boston had to go around Cape Horn, southern tip of South America, before heading towards Asia. Commanded by Captain John Kendrick, who had been a whaling captain, a sea captain during the American Revolutionary War and a Privateer (officially sanctioned by the new nation to attack and take ships at sea) and therefore a war hero who had with another captain captured two British merchant vessels for which King Louis XVI of France had awarded the duo 400,000 French livres (French currency until 1794) in exchange for the prize ships that carried muscovado sugar (mineral-and-molasses-rich brown cane sugar) and rum from Jamaica to London. It is even hypothesized that the desire to take the ships among King Louis’ ministers made France to move from “neutral” to the side of the revolutionaries. Such stories of his daring escapades circulated through the social media of that era and some of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and indeed George Washington, knew Kendrick. (Read more.)