Skip to main content

A Note About The Peabody Museum

April 2023
1min read

The East India Marine society, organized in Salem in 1799, was made up of shipmasters and super-cargoes (owner’s representatives) who “shall have actually navigated the Seas near the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.” The Society, which had 403 members before the last India captain died, had three purposes. One was to help the needy families of mariners engaged in a hazardous enterprise. Another was to gather a library of information tending to improve navigation. The third was to form a museum of objects found on distant shores.

To each member bound to sea the Society gave a blank journal, to be filled with the log of the voyage, descriptions of channels, ports, reefs and headlands and, in some cases, with sketches or even water colors of coastlines and foreign craft. Salem mariners made the first navigational charts of the waters in and around the Malay archipelago. Their sea journals now stand, row on row, in the Peabody Museum of Salem, a unique record of an era in maritime history.

The Museum itself had its start when Captain Jonathan Carnes, returning from his second pepper voyage, brought it an elephant’s tooth, a Batta pipe and a rhinoceros-horn goblet. Over the years it accumulated one of the world’s great collections of Oriental objects.

The Society’s proudest day came in 1824 when President John Quincy Adams dedicated its present building. After eighteen toasts were drunk Mr. Adams retired—but the hardy mariners styed on to drink 25 more. Some forty years later, when the decline of Salem’s foreign trade threatened the Society with extinction, its collection was saved by a gift from the great Salem-born London merchant, George Peabody, whose name the Museum now bears.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "February 1955"

Salem found its fortune in the East Indies trade

Authored by: Duncan Emrich

Chief, Folklore Section, The Library of Congress

Authored by: Paul A. W. Wallace

The “Long House,” characteristic lodging of the Iroquois, also described their political union in which each Iroquois nation remained sovereignty under a common roof which sheltered them all.

Authored by: Boyd B. Stutler

Harper’s Weekly refused to print the story “Porte Crayon” wrote at the scene. Brought to light 95 years later, it is presented here.

Authored by: Willard King

A new picture of prairie lawyers coping with bad roads and worse inns on the Illinois frontier, drawn from David Davis’ letters

Authored by: Fairfax Downey

Gallant exploits against long odds helped the American militia capture the famous French citadel.

Authored by: M. M. Marberry

A curious example of the way the metropolis could lose its head over a visiting celebrity before the day of modern press-agentry

Featured Articles

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.