Who Was Sam Coverly?

Sam Coverly, Jr. was born in Boston in 1793, the same year as George Washington began his second term as President of the United States. Both his mother’s and father’s families had lived in New England since the seventeenth century. His mother’s family were Winslows, descendants of Mary Chilton, a passenger on the Mayflower and John Winslow, brother to Plymouth Colony’s first governor. The Coverly men were sea captains, merchants, and printers. Sam himself received a secondary education in religion, Latin, and classical literature at Boston Latin, one of the first public schools in the country. When the United States declared war on England in 1812, he drilled as a private in the Massachusetts Militia and worked in his father’s shop. In May 1815, less than three months after news of the armistice reached Boston, he sailed for Canton, China. This was the first of eight trips that would take him also to London, Manchester, and Liverpool in the United Kingdom, to Montreal in Canada, and to St. Louis, Detroit, New York City, and Washington, DC. He began a journal for his own “amusement” on the voyage to Canton on the ship, Alert, and concluded it on his final trip to Detroit in 1822.

I remember my parents discussing a ship called the Alert and wondering whether a place like the New Bedford Whaling Museum might have information about its demise. Years later, my mother gave me the Journal and correspondence between Sam and his wife, Jane Chrichton Clarke. Reading the Journal in bed one evening, I came to the point on his return from China where the Alert dropped anchor off the west coast of Africa at Ascension Island. It was boarded by the British Navy and no one was allowed to disembark, because Napoleon Bonaparte was being held prisoner on neighboring St. Helena Island. I was hooked and started my search for the Alert and the reasons why Sam went to China.

I loved the description of life aboard the ship and his examples of the Pidgin English used in Canton. I knew from the Journal that he took $300,000 in silver specie to buy “China Goods” and that the Alert needed to load more ballast at the mouth of Boston harbor for such a long voyage, but I did not know what the ship looked like nor what he brought home from China. From the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, NY, I learned there were several other ships on the seas by that name, including the Alert in Richard Dana’s Two Years before the Mast. I wanted the one commanded by Dixey Wildes. At the Maritime Division of the Federal Archives in Waltham, Massachusetts, I learned that the Boston/Charlestown Customs House fire of 1844 had destroyed all customs records. At the research library at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, the American Consul’s ledger of Canton imports and exports was missing the pages for 1815, but there I found Sam’s ship. I learned that the Alert was a “regular trader” of 376 tons rigged for speed with three masts, two decks, a squared stern, and a figurehead.

The helpful archivist in Waltham had suggested I check the American Historical Newspapers database for “shipping news,” and indeed a Boston newspaper announced the arrival of silks, teas, and Chinaware aboard the ship Alert in July 1816. That was something, so I started transcribing his account of the voyage for a journal of maritime history and culture called The Nautilus. The journal’s editor requested an image of Sam to accompany the article, and ,while searching for a portrait of Sam, I came across a citation on the National Archives (UK) website for a manuscript archived at Cambridge University Library: “Samuel Coverly: Journals of a Voyage to Canton and Return to England, 1815-1818.” This was puzzling. The journal I was transcribing recorded Sam’s voyages from Boston to China in 1815 and to England in 1818. Was this the same Sam Coverly? The Superintendent of the Manuscript Reading Room thought so, but suggested I send a scan of a page from my journal for him to compare with his. He confirmed that the handwriting was the same in both documents, and soon I had a facsimile of the Cambridge manuscript in hand. It was in fact Sam’s Memorandum Book where he drafted entries for his Journal. Most of it was similar to the Journal I had, with one significant exception: it contained a complete inventory of his purchases in Canton. Listed were dinner sets including pudding dishes and large tureens, and high gilt tea sets; varieties of silks including crapes, florentines, sarsnets, sinchaws, and cotton napkins; Hyson, Souchong, and Campoy teas; and miscellaneous items like cassia (a type of cinnamon) and rattans.

Up until that point, I had assumed that the Journal and letters in my possession were Sam’s only surviving documents. If the Memorandum Book had survived, perhaps his logbook from the voyage to China had also. Further digging revealed that the Memorandum Book was left to the Library by Mark D. Kaplanoff, a native of San Francisco and graduate of Yale University and Trinity College, Cambridge. At the time of his untimely death in 2001, he was University Lecturer in American History and a Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. I also learned that Yale had established the position of Kaplanoff Librarian for American History. The bearer of that title informed me that the Yale Library held some of Kaplanoff’s publications but none of his historical manuscripts. However, that was not all. Curious about Coverly, he uncovered another manuscript. The Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum in Rowley, Massachusetts, owned a fragmentary Accounts Book and several letters related to Sam’s trading in the Caribbean and South America in the late 1830s. This important piece of the puzzle (along with announcements in Boston newspapers) told me where he was trading and what he was buying in the years following the Journal: Havana brown sugar, boot blacking, anchor gin, and wine.

Sam’s journeys sent me on journeys of my own. I traveled with him on period maps and a road atlas of the United States. I imagined the bustle along Old China Street where Sam bought his China Goods and the smell of the fish market near the river’s edge. I imagined the jarring of the steam works on his first steamboat ride along Long Island Sound from New London to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1817. I saw him clutching the side of a Conestoga wagon drawn by stout draft horses over the treacherous Allegheny and Laurel Mountains in Pennsylvania on his way to St. Louis. I sensed his amazement at the sight of a cotton factory with three hundred windows on one side in Manchester, England, a city twice the size of Boston in 1818, and his dismay at the presence of beggars on the streets.

He also sent me on journeys to find the Alert and his purchases in Canton. The most difficult journey was to discover who he was. Though parsimonious with personal details in the Journal, it was clear he could only be happy living in Boston. The farther he traveled, the more Boston drew him back. On his way home from St. Louis on horseback (a distance of 1,349 miles that took him forty-nine days), he stopped at cabins and small farms for the night and a meal. After breakfast on a Saturday in July, a Kentucky landlord offered Sam his well-situated plantation and slaves. A few days later, he recounted the type of questions he was asked during a meal. The first was usually why he wore “specks.” Sam then concludes that, despite the good soil and abundant harvests all around him, he preferred the rocky shores of New England “with their manners and customs” to the company he kept there.

The journey to find Sam raised new questions. Why, for example, did he head west again in 1838, only months after the birth of his and Jane’s third and only surviving child? Why did he not resume the practice of writing in his Journal on this trip? Why around this time did his father, Samuel Sr., name Sam’s cousin Edward as executor of his estate? Was Sam in financial trouble? What about the narrow red brick row house on Beason Hill, where he spent almost forty years of his life? A deed of sale to Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher and abolitionist, survives; however, Suffolk County records indicate Sam sold the house to his daughter, Sarah Jane, for $1.00.

Despite these and other questions, I think it safe to paint Sam as a reserved and literate observer of his time, who enjoyed the adventures of sailing to China and England and took pride in his rapidly developing country. As a merchant, he also experienced financial uncertainty at a time when banks were unregulated and there was no single currency. He suffered illnesses and personal losses. I imagine he would be pleased by the fact that his Journal survived and perhaps amused by the years-long journey he took me on to piece together some details of his life and character.

John Albertini taught linguistics, English as a second language, and writing to deaf and hearing students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, USA. While there, he authored 27 research articles, 17 book chapters, and two books on language learning and the teaching of reading and writing to deaf students. He found that writing in journals (especially dialogue journals) tapped into knowledge and personal experience, and that it promoted reflection and the development of language and writing.

Sam Coverly’s Journal with Historical Notes: Traveling and Trading in the Early Republic is available now in Hardback at a 25% discount. Enter the code PROMO25 at checkout to redeem. 

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