American Travelers on the Nile: Early US Visitors to Egypt, 1774-1839

by Andrew Oliver

Overview

The Treaty of Ghent signed in 1814, ending the War of 1812, allowed Americans once again to travel abroad. Medical students went to Paris, artists to Rome, academics to Göttingen, and tourists to all European capitals. More intrepid Americans ventured to Athens, to Constantinople, and even to Egypt. Beginning with two eighteenth-century travelers, this book then turns to the 25-year period after 1815 that saw young men from East Coast cities, among them graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, traveling to the lands of the Bible and of the Greek and Latin authors they had first known as teenagers. Naval officers off ships of the Mediterranean squadron visited Cairo to see the pyramids. Two groups went on business, one importing steam-powered rice and cotton mills from New York, the other exporting giraffes from the Kalahari Desert for wild animal shows in New York.
Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries together with previously neglected newspaper accounts, as well as a handful of published accounts, this book offers a new look at the early American experience in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean world. More than thirty illustrations complement the stories told by the travelers themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789774166679
Publisher:	American University in Cairo Press, The
Publication date:	03/27/2015
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Andrew Oliver is a retired art historian and museum administrator living in Washington, DC. With degrees from Harvard College and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, he was director of the Museum Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency in Washington, from 1982 to 1994. Earlier in his career, from 1960 to 1970, he was a curator in the Greek and Roman Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Table of Contents

Map of Egypt
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Americans in Eighteenth-Century Egypt
Ward Nicholas Boylston
John Ledyard
European Travelers of This Period and Their Accounts
Boylston in London and His Return to Boston
2 Napoleon and the French Savants in Egypt
3 Mehemet Ali’s New Egypt
Francis Barthow
4 American Trade and the Navy in the Mediterranean
The Barbary Pirates and the American Navy
Merhants in Smyrna and Constantinople
American Merchants in Yemen
Alexandria
Tourists Only as Far as Sicily
Tourists in Greece and Turkey before 1820
The War of 1812
5 The European Presence in Egypt from 1815 to 1825
European Diplomats
Europeans Working for the Pasha's Enterprises
European Merchants
European Collectors and Researchers
The British Passage to and from India
Tourists
6 Americans Return to Egypt
A Gentleman of Boston
The Alligator Episode
Cleopatra's Barge
George B. English, Luther Bradish, and George Rapleje
Egyptian Mummies
7 American Missionaries on Tour
Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons: Mission Postponed in Search of Health
The Reverend Eli Smith in Egypt in 1826
8 The Eastern Question
Americans and the Greek War of Independence
The Greek Boy
American Diplomacy
Greece, Egypt, the Sublime Porte, and the European Powers
American Shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1820s
9 The Lure of Egypt
Egyptian Revival and the Description de l'Egypte
Henry Oliver
Cornelius Bradford
Allen, Oakley, and Ferguson
The Obeslisk from Luxor to Paris
Mendes Israel Cohen
John Gliddon, United States Consular Agent
John Warren
Americans Who Almost Went to Egypt
Champollion and Pariset in Egypt
10 The US Naval Squadron: Egyptian Curios and Civilian Passengers
The United States Squadron in the Mediterranean
The First Encounter of the Squadron in Egypt
The Warren, Charles W. Skinner, in 1829
The Concord, Matthew C. Perry, and the Kirklands in 1832
The Delaware and Daniel T. Patterson in 1834
The Constitution, the United States, the John Adams, and the Shark in 1836
The Constitution, Jesse D. Elliott, the Hon. Lewis Cass, and Henry Ledyard in 1837
11 Keepers of Diaries: 1833 to 1835
Eli and Sarah Smith
John W. Hamersley
J. Lewis Stackpole and Ralph Stead Izard, Jun.
William B. Hodgson
Rush and Rittenhouse Nutt
John Lowell
Two Brigs from Boston Reach Alexandria
12 Traveling in Egypt
Travel in Europe
Passports and Letters of Introduction
Guidebooks
Funds
Hotels
Dress
Food
Guides and Security
Health
13 John L. Stephens and Fellow Tourists of the Mid-1830s
John L. Stephens
The Haights and the Allens
"Mr. Dorr and Mr. Curtis"
James McHenry Boyd
A New Yorker in 1837
Henry McVickar and John Bard
14 Steamship Travel
15 Professional Visitors
Rev. Edward Robinson, Biblical Archaeologist
Dr. Valentine Mott, Surgeon
Valentine Mott's Arabic Manuscript
Henry P. Marshall, US Consul to Muscat
16 Mills, Giraffes, and Skulls (and even the Telegraph)
Giraffes: From Sudan to Broadway
Morse's Telegraph: From Paris to the Pasha
17 Shall We Meet in Egypt?
Aaron Smith Willington, Publisher of the Charleston Courier
"Mr. L. and Miss H."
Simeon Howard Calhoun, Native of Boston
A Nameless American Tourist in May
18 Philip Rhinelander and His Friends
Rhinelander and His Friends on the Nile
"Dreadful Accident on the Danube"
Rhinelander and His Friends Leave for Vienna
19 After 1839
Illustration Credits
Endnotes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This highly readable book is a major contribution to the history of Egypology and to the study of the East-West encounter."—Jason Thompson, author of A History of Egypt from Earliest Times to the Present

"Andrew Oliver has rescued an earlier, happier American encounter with the Middle East—when Americans came to admire, to explore, and to record. . . . Indispensable for anyone interested in the history of travel and of the Middle East in the age of Mohammed Ali Pasha."—Philip Mansel, author of Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean

"This book on the little-known history of the American presence in Egypt, which was to have a continuing influence on American art and taste, fills a much-needed gap in the modern history of both Egypt and America."—Morris Bierbrier, Department of Egyptian Antiquities, British Museum

"For those interested in the study of travelers and travel in Egypt, this book is a welcome new source of information about many forgotten journeys and will be valuable for descriptions of Egypt and its monuments."—Neil Cooke, Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East

"A seminal work of outstanding and meticulous scholarship, American Travelers on the Nile: Early US Visitors to Egypt, 1774-1839 is an impressively detailed history that is enhanced with the inclusion of a map of Egypt, an informative Introduction, sixty-six pages of Endnotes; and a thirty-nine page Index. American Travelers on the Nile is a critically important and highly recommended addition to academic library Egyptian and American History collections and supplemental studies reading lists."—Midwest Book Review

From the Publisher