wrote journals of the extraordinary episode. For these mariners
alone was the curtain lifted which concealed the feudal Japan
from the eyes of the civilized world. Alert and curious, these
Yankee traders explored the narrow streets of Nagasaki, visited
temples, were handsomely entertained by officers and merchants,
and exchanged their wares in the marketplace. They were as much
at home, no doubt, as when buying piculs of pepper from a rajah
of Qualah Battoo, or dining with an elderly mandarin of Cochin
China. It was not too much to say that "the profuse stores of
knowledge brought by every ship's crew, together with unheard of
curiosities from every savage shore, gave the community of Salem
a rare alertness of intellect."

It was a Salem bark, the Lydia, that first displayed the American
flag to the natives of Guam in 1801. She was chartered by the
Spanish government of Manila to carry to the Marianne Islands, as
those dots on the chart of the Pacific were then called, the new
Governor, his family, his suite, and his luggage. First Mate
William Haswell kept a diary in a most conscientious fashion, and
here and there one gleans an item with a humor of its own. "Now
having to pass through dangerous straits," he observes, "we went
to work to make boarding nettings and to get our arms in the best
order, but had we been attacked we should have been taken with
ease. Between Panay and Negros all the passengers were in the
greatest confusion for fear of being taken and put to death in
the dark and not have time to say their prayers."

The decks were in confusion most of the time, what with the
Governor, his lady, three children, two servant girls and twelve
men servants, a friar and his servant, a judge and two servants,