Delano's Voyages of Commerce and Discovery (American Classics) - Softcover

"Captain Delano's Voyages provide a vivid record of early American seafaring, and a no less vivid self-portrait of an American seafarer entirely free of the self-justifying piety of his age. For better and for worse, along the coasts of five continents and among scores of islands in between, through shipwreck and combat and the capture of a slave ship, Amasa Delano reported exactly what he saw and heard and felt. The result is priceless." -Geoffrey C. Ward, author of Before The Trumpet and A First-Class Temperament; co-author of The Civil War

Amasa Delano (1763-1823) was a descendant of the shipbuilding Delanos of Duxbury, Massachusetts, a family that was engaged in Far Eastern trade for several generations and whose members included forebears of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves has been a librarian, educator, bibliographer, and researcher in the humanities.

William T. La Moy is director of the James Duncan Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and editor, Peabody Essex Museum Collections.

It was an age when new enterprise, philosophies, and exploration stirred throughout Europe, the Americas, and much of the rest of the world. Our own Declaration of Independence was thirteen year old and France was beset by violent revolution. The same year of 1789, the United States federal government began to function under its own Constitution, the Bill of Rights ratified two years later. George Washington had just been elected to his first term as President. The Pacific Northwest fur trade was in full swing, and American merchants were testing the Canton market for the first time.

The noted mutiny in 1789 aboard the English ship Bounty was of particular interest to Delano. In his travels he became a good friend to Captain Mayhew Folger of the American ship Topaz who, in 1808, was the first person to bring news to the world of the fate of some of the men who had rebelled against Captain Bligh. Of those mutineers (led by Fletcher Christian) who escaped English search parties, one survivor and his colony of women and children were discovered accidentally by Folger on "Pitcairn's Island." Folger, though he spent only a few hours with Alexander Smith of the original Bounty crew, was fascinated by this long-lost colony of people, and his story along with several letters corroborating his evidence was told many times to Delano, who included it in his own book.

Perhaps the most poignant chapter for modern readers is one Delano entitled "Particulars of the Capture of the Spanish ship Tryal at the island of St. Maria (Isla Santa Maria, off the coast of Chile). The year was 1805. The unknown ship carried African slaves -- men, women, and children destined for the Spanish kingdoms of western South America. A key group of male captives had seized control of the crew and captain Benito Cereno. Such a situation was far from the thoughts of Delano and his men when they first viewed the ship, or even when several of them boarded the Tryal to offer assistance. Indeed, physical need was apparent, and Delano sent to have food and water brought over from his own vessel. However, as the hours passed, the unusual state of affairs came to a head with a battle to retake the ship. In acting against mutiny and salvaging "property," Delano's action coincided with historical law of the period. And, of course, he and his men thought they would receive a fair reward from the Tryal's owners, if they succeeded. The outcome, when the Tryal and her "cargo" were delivered to port, is filled with tragedy and irony.

American novelist Herman Melville fictionalized the Tryal story, altered the characters of people involved, while frequently retaining the exact language and descriptive details Delano supplied. His "Benito Cereno: is one of six novellas published in 1856 in a collection entitled The Piazza Tales. It is interesting to note that 72 years passed before the Amasa Delano account was publicly identified as Melville's source.

Amasa Delano's book was privately printed in Boston in 1817. In the Berkshire House edition, the words are Delano's own, except where noted: italicized parenthetical explanations are provided to summarize eliminated passages or to define an unfamiliar term. Some punctuation and paragraph adjustments have also been made for easier transition; and headings of many chapters simplified to reflect the contents. His adventures, observations, descriptions of people and places, animals and plants are all here, occasionally abbreviated. Much reduced in length are long navigational explanations, such as landmarks, shoal and reef locations, exact passages taken, or conjectures about possible alternatives -- all written up by the author who hoped they would aid other navigators of the day.

We have retained the original orthography nearly entirely. However, for the convenience of a new audience, current place names are used whenever possible.

A complete facsimile of the original work was issued by Praeger Press in 1970, and also by The Gregg Press the same year.

C. Hartley Grattan, general editor of the Praeger Scholarly Reprints series, wrote an interesting introduction to the facsimile in which he points out that Delano "is considered at distant relative of the Delanos of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's line, although the connection is not certainly known. He died in Boston on April 21, 1823, at the age of sixty. He had married, but he left no children."

Recently, the archives at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, sent me a section of a genealogy chart which show a distant cousinship, going back about five generations, between F.D.R. and Amasa, the common ancestor being Jonathan de Lannoy, 1647-1720.

Today we are bombarded, and sometimes bewildered, by a welter of instant communication. Two hundred years ago, it took weeks, months, even years for most news to travel across several counties, let alone between continents. The chroniclers, writers of history, literature, and everyday letters were the journalists and commentator of Delano's day. They lived in their own present, as we do in ours; and like us, they struggled to make sense of what they knew and what they feared. Many people kept diaries or journals, and wrote poems and songs of commemoration. Most were so-called "ordinary" folk -- wanderers, surveyors, seafarers, pioneers, soldiers, slaves or ex-slaves, women and men who had something to tell about life because they lived it hard, and gave thought to their experiences. Most of them died young, or barely middle-aged.

We share with them those mirrors to human nature, behavior, and events, large and small, and make the connections necessary to extend our own humanity. Philosopher Karl Laspers wrote in Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1971), "We know nothing essential of one another except when we enter into communication."