CHAPTER 12

Amphibious Tales

Villagers and Strangers in a Border-Crossing World

SAMUEL TRUETT

Historians of early North America have been caught in a tug-of-war between continental and oceanic tales, one centered increasingly on interior spaces of Indigenous America and the other on the waves of an expanding European world. Despite calls for a “vast Early American” history that embraces what Karen Wulf calls the “geographically expansive and interconnected realms” of land and sea, scholarly practice has reinforced older metanarratives. Continental approaches focus chiefly on lands north of Mexico, with oceanic strangers entering largely from the east, from a more inclusive yet still familiar Atlantic. Whether we look east from Indian Country or west across a multivocal sea of settlers, slaves, and others, the figurative beach (as Greg Dening called it), where strangers met, entangled, struggled, and changed shape in tandem, has moved very little. Oceanic East meets continental West in an Early American epic that culminates, more often than not, in the modern United States.1

As a borderlands scholar who studies North American entanglements with Latin America and the Pacific, I see these relationships differently. In this chapter, I begin with the Atlantic and sail east rather than west, taking as my traveling companion an English orphan named John Denton Hall. As a youth, Hall drifted through the China Seas and the Pacific basin to the California gold fields, and from there to northwestern Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life in a small peasant village. Taking his path and those of others in his cohort as my points of departure, I situate the aqueous and terrestrial horizons of North America in a frame that disrupts state-centered, modernizing histories. In a volume devoted primarily to earlier-modern American and Atlantic histories, I conclude with a series of tales that circumnavigates those spaces, leading to alternative ends.

I first met John Denton Hall years ago as a reader in the the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California, and was drawn in by his memoirs, Travels and Adventures in Sonora. “In the summer of the year 1850, being then a gold digger in Angels Creek,” he began, “an opportunity offered to satisfy my wandering disposition by accompanying a Mexican gentleman, who was returning to his native state, Sonora.” His new companion, whom he simply referred to as Don Chico, hailed from the foothills of the Sierra Madres. He and two sons, a brother, and three Indigenous Ópata servants invited Hall to return south to their home village of Cucurpe—in the borderlands between Mexican Sonora and the Apache-controlled lands to the north. “I could not speak a word of Spanish, nor my companions English,” Hall would later confess. “But youth and the love of adventure . . . decided me.”2

Hall imagined that he’d spend a few years in Sonora, recoup his California losses in a Mexican bonanza, and sail on. But as months turned into years, he began raising a family with a local woman, and soon found himself entangled in the intimate affairs of his adopted village. When mining ventures failed, he became a jack-of-all-trades: a smuggler, a surveyor, a healer, a teacher, a village scribe. For a time, he kept a diary, recording adventures with the enthusiasm of a sojourner. By the early 1860s, older and perhaps more resigned, he began to convert this into a backward-looking account—taking fuller measure of the world around him. He lingered repeatedly on the state’s mineral wealth and his inability to turn it to his own advantage. He was hemmed in by his distance from outside markets, by revolts and chronic warfare, by unforeseen poverty. By January 1867, when he snuffed his candle for the last time, he had fit sixteen years into hundreds of manuscript pages. He affixed a preface, as if to prepare his tale for publication. And then he filed it away.3

In retrospect, it is surprising that Hall’s memoirs saw the light of day. They gathered dust for years. But then in 1879, he took them down, jotted a few notes in the margins, and appears to have handed them with a hand-drawn map of Sonora to a US Army quartermaster named William Myers. Myers was passing through Arizona from San Francisco to a new post as depot quartermaster in Chicago, having paused briefly in Tucson to scout local mining properties. Crews were building the Southern Pacific Railroad east from California, opening new connections to regional mines. Hall was also in Tucson, but for different reasons. He and other villagers were waiting out a revolt in Sonora. If Myers and Hall discussed these troubles, they certainly also discussed the mines that Hall described in the pages he carried with him for safekeeping. Perhaps they agreed that others ought to hear about these details. In Chicago, Myers had the manuscript typeset, the map traced, and a small run printed in 1881. Years later, a surviving copy made its way west to the Huntington Library’s rare book vaults.4

I initially took Hall’s Travels and Adventures in Sonora for a garden-variety nineteenth-century booster tract. In his preface, still dated 1867, he led with a discussion of Mexican mines. This seemed appropriate for the 1860s, as expertise from the Comstock Lode and new mining machinery from San Francisco sailed south along the coast to Sonora. Among those visiting the state was a young French American mining engineer, Louis Janin Jr. Trained at the Mining Academy of Freiberg, Janin had been hired by California investors to assess the mining claims around Cucurpe. Janin stayed with Hall, and even mentioned “Hall’s Book,” which was then probably a modest account of Hall’s adventures. Janin may have urged him to do more with it. Soon after his visit, Hall began weaving descriptions of mines into his tale, envisioning a book for a generation that was already projecting, if not yet building, cross-border railroads. The Mexican investment bubble soon burst, as civil wars broke out in both nations, but when railroads actually were built after 1879, Hall’s memoirs—half travel narrative, half booster account—were ready to dust off and print.5

And yet Hall’s memoirs were unlike any other booster or travel accounts that I had seen. Each of the six surviving copies appears to have been a presentation copy, owned privately by a prominent railroad or mining investor. They appeared briefly on the rare book market, years later, making them largely unknown. They were also unusual for their perspective. Mexican villagers rarely commit their tales to paper. Accounts like Hall’s were typically written by outsiders—men passing through, making superficial observations to be carted away in short order to distant readers. Hall’s portrait of Cucurpe was, by contrast, sensitive, precise, and immediate, reflecting his position as an adopted son. Through his intimate renderings of local life, he evoked George Simmel’s figure of the stranger—the newcomer who “comes today and stays tomorrow.” He was someone whose liminal and yet enduring (if not also useful) place in the village allowed him to bridge, to broker, to go between.6

His memoirs were also striking for what they left out. He began his story in medias res, at the point of leaving California. In the first few pages, he bids farewell to five nameless partners at Angel’s Camp and rides south. He never says how he got there, and in the 300 pages of his extensive narrative, he says nothing about his Mexican family. He never fully names Don Chico—the intrepid villager who brought him south—and “Mr. C” is the name he gives to his closest companion, a carpenter from Texas who joined Hall and Don Chico in their mining ventures. Hall’s decision to keep these personal details to himself makes my work hard. It has taken years to track down his wife and children; longer still to identify which of Cucurpe’s many “Chicos” (a diminutive for Francisco) was Hall’s Don Chico. And I’ve yet to fully unmask the enigmatic Mr. C.

Equally elusive, if also more intriguing, is Hall’s globetrotting past. He drops tantalizing hints throughout his memoirs, a trail of breadcrumbs to other worlds. A brief sojourn among the Quechan (Yuma) Indians on the road to Mexico reminds him of his youth spent among the Indigenous peoples of coastal Borneo. He finds himself fumbling, instinctively, for words in Malay and Bengali. The ways that Cucurpeños use tortillas as utensils reminds him of the use of chopsticks in opium-trading “chow chows” on the coast of China. Sugar mills in the countryside below Cucurpe remind him of sugar mills on the Ganges River in the foothills of the Himalayas. Then there is the English sea captain he meets on the coast of Sonora, Sir Henry Keppel, with whom he had fought pirates in the China Seas. “I shall never forget his surprise,” Hall says. “I must confess, I was not rigged in a sailor-like manner, my dress being a short Mexican jacket, long buckskin moccasins, and a tall Mexican hat.”7

These glimpses of Hall’s past life pulled me in. I began tracking clues, eventually setting off on a journey of my own, following ships, sailors, and drifters of all kinds around the world. With Hall as my traveling companion, I began cutting unfamiliar paths through the nineteenth century—between earlier and later modern worlds. My journey led me to see borderlands differently—as spaces bound to empires and nations, but also to autonomous itineraries, crossings, and histories that refuse state-centered frameworks. Seen at smaller scales, borderlands took shape less as spaces of differentiation or demarcation and more as spatial synapses where global vectors touched down and got tangled up in the contingencies of the local. Rethinking borderlands as portals to other realms, transfers in larger circuits, or webs of overlapping sovereignty has allowed me to ground my journey while also keeping an eye to paths that resist state-centered bifurcations, moving in unexpected directions.

My journey in search of Hall has also led me to a more amphibious approach, one that crosses land and sea while asking how terrestrial and aqueous spaces entangle. Such spaces of entanglement, whether straits, coasts, estuaries, watersheds, or interior networks connecting rivers, often structure mobility and flows but also serve as choke points, areas of friction, or places of shape shifting. They evoke in this last sense the Greek roots of amphibious, from amphibia, plural of amphibious, “living a double life.” Such spaces, Lauren Benton, James Scott, Eric Tagliacozzo, and others argue, can manifest as regions of refuge and escape; zones of piracy, captivity, and apostasy; places last seen. Whether in the form of beaches, swamps, shoals, concealed coves, or riverine capillaries, they have the potential to destabilize core and periphery, inside and out, here and there.8

In what follows, I cross nineteenth-century seas, continents, states, and nonstate realms with Hall at my side, but I do so with an eye to his ever-shifting cohorts. Their own stories allow me to pull my own across a wider canvas—and they let me do so in ways that take nothing for granted. At times, his cohorts move through the world in familiar ways, connecting distant shores in ways that we might expect. At others, they veer off our mental maps, compelling us to rethink the building blocks of world history. Sailing at humanized scales into the nineteenth-century world, we find Atlantic and American realms entangled, but not always in ways we expect.

*  *  *

John Denton Hall was born in 1827, a child of the Atlantic world. He spent his earliest years in a well-heeled household of pottery manufacturers in Burslem, Staffordshire, village kin to Wedgwoods and Darwins. Their world and its wares floated west on the Trent & Mersey Canal to the port of Liverpool and points beyond. John Hall & Sons (headed by his grandfather and namesake) were known best for their blue-on-white “Oriental” scenes, inspired by exotic lands and destined for North America. Their pottery sailed mostly to Boston’s North End, where Hall’s uncle John and aunt Caroline (daughter of a New England glass and earthenware merchant) were fighting a losing battle for New England dinner tables. In 1832, shortly after Hall turned five, John Hall & Sons went bankrupt. When Hall’s father ran off to America, presumably to avoid debtor’s prison, his mother, Hannah, gathered her five children and joined her younger brother, Ashlin Bagster, in Liverpool.9

Most considered it a family affair, meriting only two handwritten pages to the Court of Review in Bankruptcy. But to understand the trauma that set Hall in motion, I must open a wider lens. I must sail with the tall ships and their cargos of earthenware and china, and trace the webs of transnational capital. From Liverpool, I see a family dashed on the shoals of an Atlantic world and then reunited by the industrial infrastructures of a new railroad age. Ashlin Bagster, Hall’s then-twenty-two-year-old uncle, was a protégé of the English railroad pioneer, “father of the railways,” Robert Stephenson. Ashlin had cast his lot with Stephenson in 1829 as he completed the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, England’s first intercity railway. Not long after taking in Hannah and her children, Bagster and his household began to drift through the English countryside with Stephenson and his fellow engineers—first to Leicester (home of the coal-carrying Leicester & Swannington) and then to London, where Bagster became the manager of the new London & Birmingham Railway in 1837.10

Traveling east and then south across England, Hall’s family never drifted far from the Atlantic currents that set them in motion. By 1837, railroads had collapsed space and time between Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol, and London, giving England a new, modern coherence. But it was still an outward-looking coherence, tied as much to wind-powered vessels as to steam-powered engines. In Liverpool, railroad workers connected the mills of Manchester to the cotton plantations of the US South, and in Leicester, Swannington coal fired the machines that turned cotton into hose. In Birmingham, the “city of a thousand trades,” trains pulled traffic southeast instead of west, but built manufacturing capacity that fed increasingly to the Americas. Stephenson’s own career was tied to Atlantic crossings—having cut his teeth in railroad and mining ventures in Colombia in the 1820s. Here he joined other engineer-adventurers who envisioned new connections in contexts of Central and South American movements for independence. American and British infrastructures were, for Stephenson, part of a larger venture to make the Atlantic modern.11

It is hard not to think here of Hall’s future path. When Stephenson looked to American mining and railroad ventures, he initially looked to Mexico, not Colombia. Those who went to Mexico in the 1820s inaugurated a legacy of foreign investment that culminated with the railroad and mining dreams that later pulled Hall’s memoirs north. Perhaps stories of Stephenson’s America circulated in the Bagster-Hall household. What is more certain is that Hall absorbed something from the engineer’s technical worlds at a young age—perhaps attentive to his uncle’s work, maybe focused by his mother, who supplemented their itinerant household’s income as a teacher. This aptitude, more than anything, shaped his path ahead. Once settled in London in 1837, Hannah baptized John in the Church of England, a metropolitan rite of crossing from the Nonconformist Potteries. She then took him down to Newgate Street, near the Thames, and enrolled him in Christ’s Hospital.12

Christ’s Hospital was founded during the sixteenth century for poor boys cast into the streets by the dissolution of the monasteries. In 1837, it was still a charity school (a school for poor children), but it also took in children of better-off families that had fallen on hard times. Christ’s Hospital housed the Royal Mathematical School, established in 1673 as a “nursery” for future navigators. Its forty most talented, the so-called “King’s Boys,” were trained under royal subsidy. Their reputation was boosted in the 1770s under William Wales, who sailed the Pacific with James Cook and brought to the school his knowledge of hydrographic surveying. With a knack for math, maps, and technical drawing, Hall advanced quickly, becoming a King’s Boy at the age of twelve. In so doing, he joined the ranks of such students as Thomas Cass, John Septimus Roe, and John Bushnan, renowned for their surveys of New Zealand, Western Australia, and the Arctic. Following Wales, they trained for an amphibious empire that was moving out from the Atlantic to new frontiers.13

In entering Christ’s Hospital, Hall secured the patronage of John Pirie, a prominent shipping agent in the East India trade, and soon to be Lord Mayor of London. How Hall came to Pirie’s attention is not exactly clear, but it is likely that Stephenson or someone of his London railroad cohort made the introduction. He may have been introduced by Captain Constantine Richard Moorsom (the son of Admiral Sir Robert Moorsom), a director of the London & Birmingham Railway to whom Ashlin Bagster reported. With Pirie as a patron, Hall perhaps saw a future in the East Indies where, generations earlier, the East India Company had forged a lucrative trade between India and China. It was a path completed by family tragedy. The news came first of his father’s death, somewhere in America, and then Ashlin’s demise on railroad business near Derby. Then a few days shy of his thirteenth birthday, his mother, Hannah, passed in Birmingham. As aunts and uncles sorted younger siblings on a thread of households between London and Hampstead, Hall threw himself at his studies and the prospects of a life at sea.14

In less than a decade, a series of displacements had reoriented Hall from the Atlantic, by way of the English countryside, toward the trades of India and China. England had been pivoting east for generations, but Hall’s path was shaped at intimate scales by such men as Stephenson, Moorsom, and Pirie—members of an enterprising circle that coalesced locally in the railyards, docks, and taverns of a world-facing London. Unbound from the webs of family, forged anew in the imperial crucible of the Royal Mathematical School, and soon launched from the East India Docks, Hall would drift from prior Atlantic worlds into the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. But he did so in ways that London’s brokers and sea captains could not yet foresee.

It began with a thirty-six-year-old adventurer named James Brooke and a voyage from Singapore to Borneo. Brooke, the son of a prominent East India Company judge, had been raised in a mixed Anglo-Indian household to the north of Calcutta. The East India Company was in decline, having severed its maritime branch in 1834. In 1839, as Hall puzzled over sextants, almanacs, and Bonnycastle’s Algebra, Brooke joined other free traders in the newly opened China Seas. He pointed his schooner east along the northwest Borneo coast to the mouth of the Sarawak River. He expected to trade with Indigenous Bidayuh and Chinese colonists upriver, but he soon found himself swept up in a fight between coastal Malay gentry and agents of the Sultan of Brunei, whose seat of power lay to the east. In return for his assistance, Brooke was given a position within the sultanate as a vassal ruler of Sarawak—a province that would later swell to the size of England.15

In 1842, as the self-styled “White Rajah of Sarawak” settled into the Malay village of Kuching, agents in London outfitted a 250-ton bark, Ariel, to prime the trade with Singapore. In January 1843, they visited Christ’s Hospital. In March, two apprentices, Henry Steele and John Denton Hall, boarded the Ariel with their new master, a former East India mariner named George Steward. As the mouth of the Thames faded behind them, Hall may have recalled the eastern romances of his family’s blue-on-white ceramics—but the romance of his own voyage was short-lived. After reaching Sarawak, Hall’s master began feuding with Brooke over the future of the adventurer enclave (roughly twenty strong), and in 1844, Iban and Samal-Iranun raiders from nearby rivers and the Sulu Sea—Indigenous peoples the British called the “pirates” of Borneo—began challenging their power. Steward joined Brooke and Captain Henry Keppel, a British naval officer on the East Indies and China Station, in brutal campaigns against their new foes. His companions last saw him as an Iban combatant dragged his body from his gig into the jungles of the nearby Skrang River.16

Apprenticeships dissolved, Henry Steele stayed on the island with Brooke, and Hall plunged headlong into the China Seas. After landing in Singapore, he volunteered for duty on HMS Samarang, a surveying vessel tasked to map saltwater passages through the East Indian Archipelago in the wake of the Opium War of 1839–42 (when the British sought new trade routes to the treaty ports of China). Parlaying his mathematical training into a position as assistant navigator, Hall drifted for two and a half years across a range of borderlands. Eastward the hydrographic crew sailed into the multiethnic fringes of the Brunei and Sulu sultanates; north to the Loo-Choo (Ryukyu) Islands that bridged China and Japan; south to the Sulu Archipelago and nearby Mindanao, a contested borderland (as it is today) between the Christian Philippines and Islamic Indonesia; then west across Dutch and English lines of influence into the heart of the Indian Ocean and points beyond.17

After the Samarang reached London in early 1847, Hall roomed at the city’s fringe with other sailors near the docks. By April, he was back at sea as second mate on the Royal Albert, a frigate bound for India and China. Captained by Irishman Anthony Scanlan, known on the docks as the first to sail a cargo of Chinese tea direct to Dublin, the Royal Albert carried Hall into a trader’s world based in the ports and estuaries of South and East Asia. For historians, this world is harder to see. It was preserved not in official accounts (trading knowledge was a guarded commodity) but by notes jotted at ports of call on crew agreements. They tell me the crew waited out monsoons in Bombay (where they boarded cotton and opium), then rounded India, threaded the Malacca Straits, and landed in Hong Kong. What they don’t say is that the crew then moved cargo along the coast, through a shadowy littoral of islands, coves, and anchorages between Canton and Shanghai. They then returned south to winter with other sailors at Whampoa, in the Pearl River. As spring monsoons let up, they went to Calcutta and then up the Hooghly and Ganges rivers in search of homeward-bound freight.18

From when the Ariel sailed for Borneo in early 1843, to when the Royal Albert returned to the East India docks in late 1848, Hall is mostly absent from the written record. His movements on HMS Samarang are the easiest to sort, in part because this was a state-sponsored expedition. The primary goal was to gather hydrographic data for imperial expansion, and its commander, Sir Edward Belcher, submitted not only the requisite log but also countless maps to the imperial archive. Belcher and one midshipman published accounts of the voyage, with another account circulating in manuscript form. None name Hall, but he appears on the ship’s muster and in Belcher’s letter book. In Sarawak, Hall is invisible—mentioned only obliquely by Brooke, upon his arrival (“I have had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of H— and S—, both excellent and gentlemanly fellows”). He appears in the opium trade only as a name (misspelled) on the Royal Albert crew list.19

Such adventurer realms avoid scrutiny by state actors—and in the opium trade, in particular, Hall’s path ventured off the London-centered grid into realms bound more tightly to Canton, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Manila, Boston, and Edinburgh. Scanlan had ties to the London agency house that launched Brooke’s first voyage to Borneo, but these were on-again, off-again connections. By the time Hall returned to London at the end of 1848, political crises in Europe had further unsettled the trade in India and China, and he soon slipped the city’s orbit altogether. A few months later, he boarded a Liverpool bark for Lima, Peru. The 350-ton Dickey Sam sailed for Antony Gibbs & Sons, a leader in the Atlantic guano trade between Peru, Bolivia, and England. This trade, led in 1849 by the Spanish-born Guillermo Gibbs and organized around new Latin American monopolies, was just as decentralized as the China Seas trade—further underscoring the power of local markets and politics far from England in the global rewiring of British empire.20

Hall was more than an ordinary sailor on this voyage, and he may have been seeking to invest profits from China in a return to Atlantic worlds—indeed, a space not too distant from that which had first set Robert Stephenson in motion. He spent a month or so, after reaching Lima, in assessing trade opportunities along the coast. But by then, all eyes were on California. When the Dickey Sam anchored in Callao (Lima’s port town) in August 1849, the crew could not have missed the Peruvian and Chilean fleets headed north to the gold fields. How Hall charted his own passage north remains a mystery. He may have boarded a local vessel, or hopped an English ship passing through the port. I have searched crew lists in the Board of Trade’s archive with this latter scenario in mind, in vain. Many of these lists never made it back to England—and many rotted with their ships in San Francisco’s harbor as sailors deserted in droves for the gold diggings. With them, Hall entered new orbits, far beyond the familiar littorals of London’s world-facing empire.21

*  *  *

Hall may have seen California as place to get rich, have adventures, and sell the tale before sailing on. This was how Frank Marryat saw it when he landed in 1850, seeking gold and a setting for Mountains and Molehills; or Recollections of a Burnt Journal (1855). Frank was a son of the sea novelist Frederick Marryat, known best for his 1836 novel, Mr. Midshipman Easy, a pioneering work in the field. His own father, Joseph, had been a leading merchant and ship owner in the British West Indies, but the 1807 abolition of the slave trade reversed the family fortunes. Young Frank, like Hall, turned east. The two met as teenaged messmates on the Samarang, and Marryat reached San Francisco shortly before Hall left Angel’s Camp for Cucurpe. Hall had surely read Marryat’s 1848 Borneo and the Indian Archipelago, a portrait of his youthful escapades on the expedition. Marryat emulated his father, and Hall emulated both. He likely adapted his title, Travels and Adventures in Sonora, from the elder Marryat’s Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas (1843), a tale of a French nobleman who fled France to seek a new life in America.22

If Hall charted a similar path to Frank Marryat, he lacked his pedigree and social connections (which had extended to the Samarang, commanded by Frederick Marryat’s first cousin, Edward Belcher). Hall found himself more exposed than his messmate to “dame Fortune’s ‘smiles and frowns.’” If love of adventure guided his journey south, he was also pushed on the road by a great fire in San Francisco that June, “whereby I, as well as many others, found ourselves ruined.” Riding south (and penniless) with his new friends, Hall wondered why he had traded the upper decks of a British vessel for the saddle of a Mexican mule. “I have taken the weather casing off the Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, but the pitching was nothing in comparison to what I experienced on the back of that confounded jade,” he wrote. “I was not adept at that kind of navigation.”23

Facing Apache raids and smallpox in Sonora, Hall returned briefly to California. He returned in 1852 with the Texas-raised Englishman Henry Clarke (Hall’s Mr. C). If Hall brought training in math and surveying to Mexican mines, Clarke applied carpentry skills to the building of headframes, shafts, and makeshift pumps. Waiting for their ventures with Don Chico and others to pay, Hall and Clarke began building families with two local women, Francisca Palomino and María Concepción Bonillas. These were not typical marriages between European American outsiders and higher-ranking Mexican villagers, as often seen on the coast or inland trade centers, which pulled strangers into positions of influence. Palomino and Bonillas are surnames associated with lower-ranking servant families, the Palominos most likely an Ópata family from a neighboring village. The women may have been camp or village servants before becoming partners and mothers, bound by patron-client relations to families of influence, but limited in their access to village networks. For Hall and Clarke, social and economic mobility was tied more to their relationships to such high-ranking men as Don Chico and Eduviges Sinohui (a prominent Ópata with close ties to Hall), as well as the labor they gave to the village. Hall and Palomino were born into different social worlds, but they found their journeys to the village center similarly mediated and constrained; and it would ultimately be up to future generations to finish the task. In their household, Tomás arrived first, followed by Carlos, named after Hall’s father and brother. Then came Guadalupe, María, and Enrique, the latter likely named after their fellow border crosser, Henry Clarke. This new generation, more than anything else, would build locally contingent relationships that anchored border-crossing fathers, mothers, and families in place.24

Hall’s transformation from British sailor to Mexican villager was far from typical—and it was also far from inevitable. It was far from inevitable because the United States, a nation with imperial inclinations, was on the move. When Hall arrived in 1850, the nearest US settlement to Cucurpe was Doña Ana, New Mexico, some four hundred miles northeast through Apache territory and the rugged Sierra Madres. This changed in 1854, when the United States annexed 30,000 square miles of land from Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase (which became southern New Mexico and Arizona), moving its border closer to Cucurpe. Within months, newcomers from the eastern United States and California began trickling into the annexed territory to prospect for silver and gold. Hall might have moved north—as working families from Sonora did in the mid-nineteenth century—to live alongside white English speakers. The border raises questions. Why Mexico? Why not something easier? Given the isolation of Cucurpe from global markets, why did Hall not choose something more lucrative?25

The answer was bound up in legacies of violence not unlike those that he had witnessed in the China Seas. During the 1850s, Sonora was plagued by filibusters (originally from the Dutch vrijbuiter, or pirate) from the north. Among the most notorious was the adventurer William Walker, who briefly invaded Sonora and Baja California with fellow California-based filibusters in 1853 and 1854, before moving in 1855 to take Nicaragua. Walker’s venture in Nicaragua resonated with Brooke’s own in Sarawak, placing both in a larger “Anglo-world” context of nineteenth-century adventuring. Two years later, a Californian named Henry Crabb, who had previously been associated with Walker, followed his footsteps into Sonora. Hoping to create an independent “Republic of Sonora,” Crabb and his freebooting cohort seized the borderland town of Caborca in 1857, only to lose their lives in a pitched battle with Mexican volunteers (many of them recruited from nearby Cucurpe).26

These events further unsettled a land wracked by generations of violence. Crabb’s filibuster, in particular, inflamed many in Sonora against Anglo-Americans, and for a while Hall and Mr. C sought refuge in Arizona. But Arizona was no better. In the former Mexican presidio of Tubac—now the local headquarters for US mining entrepreneurs in southern Arizona—they met Henry Titus, a soldier of fortune with Walker in Nicaragua with his eyes now set on former Spanish silver mines in the nearby Santa Rita and Patagonia Mountains. The three men initially hit it off, and in 1859, Titus hired Hall to bring Cucurpeños north to work his claims. That May, a mob of former Crabb supporters rode through the nearby Sonoita Valley, killing several Mexicans and terrorizing countless others. When Hall joined a posse to pursue the mob, he was thwarted by white Arizonans who labeled him a “greaser.” The so-called Sonoita massacre marked a line in the sand—compelling Hall to decide where his affinities and loyalties lay. Packing his saddlebags, he headed south, bidding adios to his short-lived venture in the barbaric American West.27

And so, the seasons passed as the former British sailor became a Mexican villager, perched at the edges of his adopted community. The uncertainties of prospecting kept him and his companions-in-mining in motion from one local mountain range to the next. When mining schemes failed, as they almost always did, he returned to the village. By the 1860s, now finding Hall’s Spanish up to the task, Cucurpe’s president municipal (mayor) enlisted him as his secretary and scribe. “All the writing in the city is done by Mr. Hall, who is also school teacher,” noted the mining engineer Louis Janin Jr. in 1864. Hall also worked as a healer (he preferred “country doctor”) in Cucurpe and its vicinity, augmenting training from the China Seas with Indigenous botanical and medical knowledge, possibly gleaned from his wife, Ópata workers on his mining ventures, and Indigenous patrons in the village. Whether prospecting or healing, his paths crossed multiple borderlands—between mestizo and Ópata enclaves in the river valleys, and between these villages and highland Apache camps. Cucurpe rooted him in place at some seasons, while local conflicts pushed him and his family on the road at others, to seek refuge in better-protected towns such as Magdalena or Tucson.28

The structures of power, violence, and mobility in Hall’s new home had much in common with worlds he left behind. In Sarawak and the China Seas, newcomers like Hall entered what the historian James Warren calls the “Sulu zone,” extending out from coastal Borneo into the Sulu Sea. At its center was the Sulu Archipelago, dividing the Sulu Sea from the Celebes Sea to the south. These islands were a contested choke point between the Philippines and Indonesia, dividing Christian and Islamic realms and entangling webs of Spanish, Dutch, British, Chinese, Bugis, and Malay trade influence. At its heart was the island of Jolo. Arab travelers had imported Islam to the Tausug of Jolo by the fifteenth century, laying a foundation for the Sulu Sultanate. By the nineteenth century, the sultan ruled the archipelago and the northeastern coast of Borneo from the island’s capital (also called Jolo)—an urban borderland divided into a “Malay” town, a ghetto of “birdcage-looking buildings” perched on a shoal for Chinese traders, and ships of all nations at the edges. It was a “rendezvous of pirates,” wrote Frank Marryat—with those not practicing piracy “always ready to aid, assist, and protect those who do.”29

What Marryat had in mind was a regime of saltwater nomads centered on the nearby islands of Balangingi and Basilan, and the southwest coast of Mindanao, to the east. This was a kinetic regime, to paraphrase Pekka Hämäläinen, in which people held power over maritime space by “keeping things—violence, markets, attachments, possessions, themselves—fluid and in motion.” This regime swirled around a demand for trepang (sea cucumber), pearls, pearl shells, tortoise shells, and birds’ nests, all of which could be traded in coastal China for tea; a demand for slaves to gather these goods; and a demand for arms for saltwater slaving. Slaves were procured largely by Samal and Iranun raiders, whose Basilan, Balangingi, and Mindanao refuges were connected with Malay-Tausug trading networks on Jolo—and Samal and Iranun raiders were augmented by Filipino renegados, captives who apostatized to Islam and then became raiders themselves, parlaying a local knowledge of reefs, coves, and coastal villages throughout the Philippine archipelago.30

If the Sulu Sea basin served as a maritime anchor for these denizens of the Sulu Zone, Iranun slaver-raiders also drew on other empire-repelling spaces and regions of refuge, all linked to a larger world of water. Several years before Hall and Marryat sailed through the Sulu Sea, British sea captain J. J. Blake complained that Iranun prahus (sailing boats) shook British and Spanish ships by vanishing into “the mangrove shores with which the islands thereabouts abound.” At the center of this maritime geography of concealment was a “continued line of mangroves and swamp” on the coast of Mindanao, fed by the marshy drainage of “an immensely extensive inland lake [which] . . . they consider as their stronghold and their home.” In these amphibious realms, the Iranun built and repaired prahus, raised families, and “carry on all intercourse with each other as an insulated and distinct community.” Other regions of refuge included the long and narrow island of Banguingui at the far eastern side of the Sulu Archipelago—a crescent twelve miles long and two miles wide, “principally mangrove growing upon coral banks,” Blake observed. It is “well calculated for protection and secure concealment,” he wrote, sheltering as many as 200 Iranun prahus at a time.31

Christian (or Christianized) captives-turned-renegados were only one indicator of the deeper crossings of this shape-shifting realm. Villagers and sailors incorporated strangers of all sorts in this space in their efforts to build entourages and maintain power. Shortly after arriving in Sarawak, Hall’s master George Steward and fellow apprentice Henry Steele forged sexual liaisons with Malay women, both men fathering local children. For Steele, who remained behind, this was a likely gateway for his fluency in Sarawak Malay—which secured him a place on the island as an interpreter and go-between. Malay men likely brokered these companionate unions to incorporate the men into their entourages, and while the women may have hailed from coastal gentry families, they may just as likely have been captives brought by Iban, Iranun, Samal, or Malay raiders from elsewhere. As Southeast Asian scholar John Walker observes, Sarawak Malay men often used captive women to pull outside men into mixed-community Malay entourages—and since Sarawak Malays were matrilocal, such women helped keep their male entourages anchored in place.32

These amphibious, shape-shifting dynamics took shape on multiple fronts. The British cohort of adventurers at the Sarawak River and the crew of hydrographic surveyors on the Samarang relied heavily on a Sulu Sea go-between named William Wyndham. Born in Ireland (or Scotland or England, the reports vary), Wyndham was said to have cut his mariner’s teeth as a mate or midshipman under Lord Thomas Cochrane in the Chilean Wars of Independence (1818–22). He then crossed the Pacific, married a Filipina mestiza from Iloilo, purchased a schooner, and drifted south to Jolo. His personal ties to the Sultan of Sulu, an apparent mastery of the Spanish, Visayan, and Tausug languages, and his success in the pearl and tortoise shell trade of the Sulu Sea catapulted him to prominence. The sultan eventually granted him the position of datu, or aristocratic chief. “Dressed in Malay costume and from long residence among them,” wrote Spenser St. John, Brooke’s private secretary, Wyndham had taken on “the appearance and manner of a native.”33

Wyndham seemed to shift and drift across the greater China Seas as comfortably as his Samal and Iranun neighbors did. As a merchant, he linked imperial and Indigenous markets within the China trade; as a datu, he controlled labor and mediated disputes; and as a trade and political representative of Manila, Singapore, or the Sultan of Sulu (as it suited him), he served as a diplomat, aided smugglers, purchased, sold, or redeemed captives, and harbored fugitives of all kinds. Not unlike Joseph Conrad’s fictional character Tom Lingard—whose border-crossing ventures into the Malay world were drawn from stories Conrad later heard in the China Seas about William Wyndham—the sea “took him young, fashioned him body and soul.” Wyndham seemed to sail into the right place at the right time, but the waters all about were teeming with his kind. Whether they sailed Chinese junks, Spanish brigs, Malay prahus, Bugis pinisi, US whaling ships, or British barks, they were pragmatic shape-shifters. Men of the sea, they were also denizens of Greg Dening’s figurative “beach,” men who prospered in the seams between cultures and regimes.34

In Sonora, Hall moved within a similar kinetic realm, a space shaped in part by the unsettling forces of Mexican, US, and Indigenous territorial expansion, and in part by local dynamics of mobility. Ever since Spanish newcomers first lay claim over Cucurpe in the early seventeenth century, this had been a contested terrain in the borderlands of O’odham, Eudeve, Teguïma, and Jova (the latter three glossed by the Spanish as Ópata) villages, with occasional intrusions of the more mobile, desert-living Comcaac (Seris) to the west and highland Jocomes to the northeast. At a divide between watersheds to the north and south, and a confluence of desert, upland steppe, and montane ecosystems, this was a multiethnic, polyglot space. The northward expansion of the Spanish reorganized these borderlands in open-ended ways, as reflected in Hall’s networks with both Ópata and non-Ópata families. The southward expansion of various Apache groups added another layer of entanglement. When Hall came on the scene, Chokonen, Chihene, and Nedni bands (which US Americans glossed as Chiricahua Apaches) had already claimed prior Jocome homelands in the Sierra Madres as their own and were expanding their territorial claims in the wake of Mexican independence and renewed cycles of violence with both Mexican and US settlers.35

The highlands near Cucurpe where Hall, Don Chico, and Mr. C prospected for gold and silver—the Sierra Azul, Sierra San Antonio, and ranges farther afield—were within these expanding Apache territories. To the extent that Chiricahua raiders seasonally tapped Cucurpe and its sister villages for livestock and captives, these riparian communities were in a sense part of Apache territory, if only as villages held in a condition that the Mexicans would call vassalage. Regardless of where villagers and raiders marked the border between their worlds, this was a realm in which Apaches held power over others by staying in motion and obliging others to follow suit. Like the Samal and Iranun of the China Seas, Apaches absorbed goods and captives with great skill—focusing, like their marine counterparts, on women and children, captives who were more useful and could be more easily incorporated. They built regional reputations for their conversion of mestizos, Ópatas, and others into an Apache way of life (much as Sulu Sea regimes were famous for their renegado fleets). For Hall, it was as if grasslands had become seas of a different sort, with horses replacing Malay proas and grass replacing saltwater—embodying for imperial agents all that sedentary “civilization” was not.36

As with the Malay villages and Iranun fleets of the China Seas, these spaces and relationships looked different from different sides. What empires saw as realms of fugitivity, illegibility, and spaces beyond the pale—in the Sulu Sea, coral reefs, mangrove thickets, coastal swamps—were, for the other side, regions of refuge, passages to home, inlands. Spaniards saw the Sierra Madres east of Cucurpe as “craggy mountain strongholds” for “apostate” mission Indians and “savage Apaches.” Well into the nineteenth century, Mexicans characterized these spaces as impregnable barriers to non-Indigenous settlers. Apaches saw it differently. With “trees, grass, game, one’s friends and relatives, safety, and a happy life,” the Sierra Madres was as close as it came to the “Happy Place,” or Apache heaven, recalled Asa Daklugie, born into the Nedni band of northern Mexico in the 1860s. He recalled traveling south along the sierras with his father, Juh (a Nedni chief), to a cave “sacred to Ussen,” the Apache god. Here was not only a strategic stronghold but a center of ceremonial space, a spiritual crossroads. And when the US-Mexico border was fixed in 1854, setting legal limits to how far US and Mexican armies could pursue them in times of war, political boundaries seemed to reinforce divides between those peoples in motion and those who sought to remove them or fix them in place.37

And yet distinctions between Apache and non-Apache spaces were never so clear-cut. In the uplands of Sonora, as in the archipelagos and seaways of Island Southeast Asia, denizens of sedentary and settler regimes rarely stood still. Ópatas and mestizos moved seasonally into Apache lands when Apaches followed the seasons to more distant mountain ranges on the US side, to hunt feral livestock that had wandered into Apachería and plunder old mines abandoned by prior Spanish or Mexican owners in the face of Apache expansion. The seasonal anchors of this kinetic world surely resonated for Hall, who had come of age in a world shaped by “pirate winds,” as Dutch and English sailors called the China Seas monsoons that signaled seasons of maritime raiding. Mestizo and Indigenous captives also drifted in open-ended ways across landscapes of cultural interiority—including a former captive from the nearby village of Sinoquipe who was adopted into an Apache family, escaped, then returned to Apache lands as a guide for Cucurpe prospectors. These were some of the moving parts that turned Cucurpeños into consummate shape shifters—an aptitude that Hall took to heart as he tried to master on land what his Sulu Sea counterpart, William Wyndham, mastered at sea.38

*  *  *

Hall’s amphibious, shape-shifting journey—his transformation from British sailor to Mexican villager—had consequences. He rode south from California on the back of a mule, hoping to strike it rich and sail on. But he never did. Years later, his children buried him in desert soil, a poor stranger in a foreign land. “I shall never forget his surprise,” Hall had written of his chance encounter with Keppel in 1851, on the coast of Sonora. Hall stood before him, dressed in local leather head-to-toe, like a character in one of James Fenimore Cooper’s terrestrial novels.39 Like Wyndham, Hall had taken “the appearance and manner of a native.” The resonances between Sonora, Sarawak, and the Sulu Sea, though worlds apart, were, no doubt, apparent to both men. They gave Hall’s path powerful coordinates: the familiar drift of unfixed identities, the power of local protocols over distant dictates, the challenge of drawing distinctions, between here and there, inside and out, us and them.

And yet by the end of Hall’s life, these things were far more fixed in place—and as states began to deploy new space-fixing technologies (railroads, steamships), so too did they have more say in the mapping of local geographies and identities. In Cucurpe, this shift was most clearly articulated in the conquest of the Chiricahua Apaches in the 1880s—a conquest that coincided with the suppression of Samal and Iranun raiding-and-slaving regimes on the far side of the Pacific. Whether through British merchant fleets, Spanish naval campaigns, or US and Mexican armies, empires and nations built their power by the century’s end through brutal acts of incorporation and sorting. They banked on keeping others in motion, to be sure. But modern grids choked and reorganized these crossings. The shifts of the 1880s would tip the global balance of power toward larger-scale, state-centered networks based on new technologies and practices of territorialization and containment.40

In Hall’s Mexican borderlands, these shifts were bound up with the railroad, that space-fixing technology that had first set him in motion as a youth in England—and which, by his own story’s end, had caught up with him on the far side of the world. In 1879, when Quartermaster Myers took Hall’s manuscript north to Chicago, the Chicago-based Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (AT&SF) had started to build south from Albuquerque toward Mexico. In company with Mexico-based entrepreneurs who had negotiated new railway concessions from the Mexican government, AT&SF elites organized new Mexican railroads to connect to their US-based network at the border. The first of these, the Sonoran Railway, was completed between the port of Guaymas and the Arizona border in 1882. The second, the Mexican Central Railway, was completed between El Paso and Mexico City two years later. Both would effectively extend the reach of US-centered infrastructures across the continent to the Pacific coast of Mexico and the terrestrial heart of Mexico, respectively.41

Myers had already been enmeshed in AT&SF circles. Through the US Army, he used their new rail system to begin supplying the nation’s renewed war against Chihene and Chokonen bands of the Chiricahua Apaches. Under such leaders as Victorio and Geronimo, they had begun to evade government-enforced containment on Arizona’s San Carlos Apache Reservation—fleeing into their former regions of refuge in the Sierra Madres of Sonora and Chihuahua. Myer’s relationship with the AT&SF help me to make sense of the peculiarities of Hall’s memoirs—why they were printed when they were; why it appeared that such care and expense was put into the printing (as evidenced by such things as their elaborately marbled fore-edges), but with a surprisingly small run (one that could hardly pretend to pay back expenses); and why it took so long for them to appear on the rare book market. Four of the surviving six copies, it turns out, were signed by AT&SF railroad magnates. One copy, at the Beinecke Library, contains Hall’s map, traced in 1879 or 1880 by George Henckel—a civil engineer on Myers’s Chicago staff. Henckel added a dotted line depicting the path of the Sonora Railway as it was projected in 1879. The line ran diagonally from eastern Arizona through the Mexican highlands that Hall called home, and which he described so carefully. A new cohort of adventurers had their eyes set on Mexico, and Hall’s memoirs and map pointed the way.42

Chicago seemed to be at the center of it all, but most of the men interested in Hall’s tale—and, indeed, those who invested in AT&SF development west and south across the continent—hailed from Boston, where the Hall family business had foundered so many years earlier. And these men, like Hall, approached the continent by way of Pacific worlds. Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, who was president of the AT&SF (and who owned a copy of Hall’s memoirs that would later wind up in Harvard’s Houghton Library), hailed from a prominent opium trading family in Boston. Elijah Smith, the railroad magnate who owned the copies at the Huntington Library and the University of Western Ontario, was the son of a New Bedford whaling merchant and ship builder. The AT&SF owned much to the capital that the progenitors of its Boston-based directors accumulated in the China and Pacific trades. Perhaps these men saw something of their own family stories in Hall’s tale. George Taber, from Smith’s New Bedford cohort, saw the resonances this way when pitching Hall’s mines to friends. Hall came to Mexico as a “sea-captain,” he said, and then became “‘capitan’ of the district where he now resides.” It was a path that the US sons of Pacific maritime entrepreneurs, turning maritime capital to new continental ends, might emulate in their own crossings south.43

At some point in the 1880s, after Myers printed Travels and Adventures in Sonora in Chicago, the original manuscript appears to have drifted west to San Francisco. Toward the end of the decade, the well-known California bibliophile Hubert Howe Bancroft referred to it twice in his multivolume works on Pacific North America. These are fleeting citations, but enough to tell us that the manuscript was organized differently than the printed version. How Bancroft got his hands on the manuscript or where it went next, I do not yet (and may never) know. I assume, due to the attention that Myers gave to the account (he went so far as to take out a copyright in his own name), that he kept it. I cannot find any evidence that Hall himself ever went to Chicago—and I have no idea whether he even got a copy of the printed book. According to family lore, all of his belongings were burned in a fire years ago. In 1881, Myers was reassigned to the Department of Dakota. Not long after that, he fell ill—and by 1883, he had retired from active service. He died in 1887 in New York City.44

If he still had Hall’s manuscript at that time, it probably went to his daughter, Sallie, who had married in San Francisco in 1878 and stayed there after her father relocated to Chicago. Her husband, Charlie Page, was a California lawyer with a specialty in admiralty law, but he was also a well-known book collector, a member of a cohort in San Francisco that included Bancroft. To get Hall’s manuscript from Myers to Bancroft, one could hardly envision a better go-between than Sallie Myers Page. Charlie Page may have even heard of Hall’s adventures before Myers did. He had co-founded the Yale Club of California, and one of the active members of that association was the mining engineer Louis Janin Jr. There is nothing in the Page family papers today to suggest any relationship with Hall or his tale. The San Francisco law office of Charlie Page burned in the fire that attended the great earthquake of 1906, an echo of the fire in that same city fifty-six years earlier that pushed Hall on the road with a villager named Don Chico. It may be that my trail ends there.45

If Hall’s manuscript did wind up with Page, if even for a short time, he may have also found a great deal of resonance in its storyline. For Page knew something about washing up in a foreign land. As a young boy, he had sailed north to California from his childhood home in Valparaiso, Chile, with his parents: a New Jersey-born adventurer, Thomas Stokes Page, and Anna María Liljevalch, the latter born and raised in a household of US and Swedish immigrants to Valparaiso. Like Hall, Thomas Stokes Page had jumped ship to become a healer in the Spanish-speaking Pacific—parlaying his more formal US training in medicine to work as a doctor in Valparaiso. In 1849, he sailed north with other Chilean adventurers to try his luck in California. Where others went for gold, he went for land, acquiring the 17,234-acre Rancho Cotate near Sonoma that same year. He then returned to Valparaiso—operating his new investment as a cattle ranch from afar into the late 1860s, when he and his family bid farewell to Chile for the last time and moved north to San Francisco.46

I often wonder if Thomas Stokes Page and John Denton Hall boarded the same vessel in 1849 as they pursued new ventures in a foreign country. Once off the standard historical script, it becomes hard to know what to expect. When Hall later met Sir Henry Keppel on the beach in Guaymas, Keppel was astonished. “What are you doing here, Mr. Hall?” Keppel asked. Hall might have asked Keppel the same question. The English sea captain had come north from Valparaiso on an unexpected detour to pick up a load of silver. There he conducted business with Don Juan Robinson, a New York–born sailor who had jumped ship in Guaymas in 1823, married locally, and had a run of good luck. That luck later turned. The same battles that plagued Hall in the 1860s pushed Don Juan north as a political exile. He and his family settled into a new home at 59 South Park, San Francisco, to start over. Two years later, a new family moved next door to the Robinsons—a New Jersey–born doctor and his Chilean wife, said to be invested in land up north.47

“What are you doing here, Mr. Page?” I ask. But I let it go. Little about this amphibious, border-crossing realm surprises me anymore.

Notes

1. 1.  Karen Wulf, “Vast Early America: Three Simple Words for a Complex Reality,” Humanities 40, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 26–47; Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774–1880 (University Press of Hawaii, 1980). Wulf gestures to a broader tapestry of Atlantic and continental histories, but individual studies contributing to this tapestry tend to be divided along older temporal and spatial divides, with work on Mexico and the Pacific at the margins, viewed separately.
2. 2.  Dr. J. [John Denton] Hall, Sonora: Travels and Adventures in Sonora: A Description of its Mining and Agricultural Resources and a Narrative of a Residence of Fifteen Years (Chicago: J. M. W. Jones Stationery and Printing Co., 1881), 9–11.
3. 3.  Most of this I draw from his memoirs, apart from the details about his family (which he does not discuss).
4. 4.  For Myers in Arizona, see “From Monday’s Daily,” The Citizen (Tucson), 2 May 1879; “Silver King Mine,” Daily Arizona Citizen, 8 May 1879. For his larger trajectory, see George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., From Its Establishment in 1802 to 1890, 3rd ed. (Boston and New York, 1891), 2:502–3; for refugees, see The Citizen (Tucson), 28 March 1879. This revolt put Cucurpe at risk given the role of Francisco Altamirano y Altamirano, Don Chico’s son. “Latest News from Sonora,” Arizona Weekly Citizen (Tucson), 7 March 1879; “Sonora Revolution,” Arizona Weekly Citizen (Tucson), 11 March 1879; and “Latest from Sonora,” Arizona Weekly Citizen (Tucson), 28 March 1879.
5. 5.  Janin diary HM 64295 (1863–64), Papers of Louis Janin (Addenda), Huntington Library, San Marino, California; but also see his report in Reports, Prospectus, and By-Laws of the Santa Teresa de Jesus Silver Mining Co. (Turnbull & Smith, 1864), 10–26. For early railroad visions, see Captain T. J. Cram, Memoir Showing How to Bring the Lead, Copper, Silver, and Gold of Arizona into the Marts of the World (R. V. Wilson, 1858). For context, see Sarah E. M. Grossman, Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910 (University of Nevada Press, 1995), esp. 21–50.
6. 6.  For Simmel’s figure of the “stranger,” see George Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (University of Chicago Press, 1971), 143–49.
7. 7.  Hall, Travels and Adventures, 23, 36, 48, 53.
8. 8.  W. E. Duellman and G. R. Zug, “amphibian,” Encyclopedia Britannica; Lauren Benton, Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2010); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009); and Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (Yale University Press, 2009).
9. 9.  John Denton Hall entry, 17 March 1837, in Children’s Registers (1827–42), Christ’s Hospital Ms. 12818/015, Guildhall Library, London, England; Gordon Lang and Ellen Paul Denker, Pottery and Porcelain Marks (Miller’s, 1995), 300; Gillian Neale, Encyclopedia of British Transfer-Printed Pottery Patterns, 1790–1930 (Miller’s, 2005), 172; London Gazette, 10 July 1832; and The Staffordshire Advertiser, 14 July 1832.
10. 10.  Notes on Bankruptcy of John Hall & Sons, 814–15; Bankruptcy Enrolment Books; Certificates of Conformity; B 5/38, TNA; For Staffordshire’s transatlantic trade, see Neil Ewins, “Supplying the Present Wants of Our Yankee Cousins . . .”: Staffordshire Ceramics and the American Market, 1775–1880 (City Museum & Art Gallery, 1997). For Bagster’s moves, see directors’ minute, Liverpool & Manchester (RAIL 371), Leicester & Swannington (RAIL 359), and London & Birmingham (RAIL 384), but also “Letters from Superintendent A. Bagster,” RAIL 1008/98, TNA. For Stephenson, see Michael Bailey, ed., Robert Stephenson: The Eminent Engineer (Ashgate, 2003).
11. 11.  For Stephenson’s work in South America, see Bailey, ed., Eminent Engineer, 14–21.
12. 12.  John Denton Hall entry, 17 March 1837. For Hannah’s work as a teacher of “young gentlemen,” see “Warwick-Place Small Heath,” and “Warwick-Place,” Birmingham Gazette, 11 June 1838. I suspect this shaped Hall’s work, later, as a teacher in Cucurpe.
13. 13.  For Christ’s Hospital and its Royal Mathematical School, see Ken Mansell, Christ’s Hospital in the Victorian Era (Ashwater, 2011); for Hall’s movements through the Royal Mathematical School, see Minutes of Committee of Almoners, 18 January and 7 June 1839, Committee Minutes Book for 1836–1840, 432 and 488–89; and 30 November 1841, 25 May, 29 November, and 6 December 1842, and 3 January 1843, Committee Minutes Book for 1840–1845, 131, 191, 256, 260, and 264 in Christ’s Hospital Ms. 12811/019, Guildhall Library, London, England. For Cass, Roe, and Bushnan, start with Peter Bromley Maling, “Thomas Cass,” An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. Alexander H. McLintock (R. E. Owen, 1966), I:318; Luciana Martins and Felix Driver, “John Septimus Roe and the Art of Navigation, c. 1815–30,” in Art and the British Empire, ed. Tim Barringer et al. (Manchester University Press, 2007), 53–66; and “Lt. John Bushnan,” The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (1 November 1824), 520.
14. 14.  Staffordshire Gazette (Stafford), 16 May 1840; Derby Mercury (Derby), 10 July 1839. For Pirie, see “Alderman Sir John Pirie, Bart.,” The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review (May 1851), 551–52. For Bagster and his business relationship to Moorsom, see A. Bagster, Superintendent of Coaching Department, to Capt. Moorsom, RAIL 384/282, TNA.
15. 15.  John C. Templer, ed., The Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., Rajah of Sarawak, Narrating the Events of his Life from 1838 to the Present Time, 3 vols. (Richard Bentley, 1853), esp. 1:1–278.
16. 16.  A Selection from Papers Relating to Borneo and the Proceedings at Sarawak of James Brooke, Esq., Now Agent for the British Government in Borneo (Robson, Levey & Franklyn, 1846); Henry Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido for the Suppression of Piracy, 2 vols. (Chapman and Hall, 1846), II:99–116; 305–6. For raiders from the Sulu Sea, begin with James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asia Maritime State (Singapore University Press, 1981); and J. H. Walker, Power and Prowess: The Origins of Brooke Kingship in Sarawak (University of Hawaii Press, 2002).
17. 17.  Capt. Edward Belcher to Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane, H.M.S. Samarang, Hong Kong, April 26, 1845, Orderbook and Letterbook of H.M.S. Samarang, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England (hereafter NMM). For the larger itinerary of HMS Samarang, see Edward Belcher, Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Samarang, During the Years 1843–46 (Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1848); and Frank S. Marryat, Borneo and the Indian Archipelago (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848).
18. 18.  Royal Albert schedules in the Port of Registry: London Ships Names: RI–RZ, 1848, Records of Board of Trade, Registry of Shipping and Seamen: Agreements & Crew Lists (BT 98/1680), TNA; “First Tea Sale in Ireland,” Morning Post (London), 24 March 1835; and Hall, Travels and Adventures, 48, 53. My sense of the shadowy littoral comes from business records of Jardine, Matheson & Co., a China-trading company with whom Scanlan was associated, in the Jardine Matheson Archive, Cambridge University Library, UK.
19. 19.  Belcher, Narrative; Marryat, Borneo and the Indian Archipelago; and George F. McDougall, typescript journal kept in H.M.S. Samarang 1842, MSS 89/105.0, NMM; Royal Albert schedules; Templer, ed., Private Letters of Sir James Brooke, 286.
20. 20.  For Hall’s arrival in Lima, see “Puerto del Callao,” El Comercio (Lima, Peru), 16 August 1849 (where his name is misspelled as Juan Jonton Wale), and “Razon de los pasaportes presentados y expedidos,” El Comercio (Lima, Peru), 22 August 1849.
21. 21.  Hall, Travels and Adventures, 16. A study of the ships that remained and rotted in San Francisco Bay is James P. Delgado’s Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront (University of California Press, 2009). For a view of the connections between South America and California, see Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (University of California Press, 1973).
22. 22.  Frank Marryat, Mountains and Molehills, or Recollections of a Burnt Journal (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1855); Marryat, Borneo and the Indian Archipelago; Belcher, Narrative; Frederick Marryat, Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1843). For Frederick Marryat and the Marryat family, see Florence Marryat, The Life and Letters of Captain Marryat, 2 vols. (Richard Bentley and Son, 1872).
23. 23.  Hall, Travels and Adventures, 9, 14.
24. 24.  For Hall’s 1851–52 travels to California and return with Clarke, see Hall, Travels and Adventures, 47–98. For a more in-depth discussion of these families and my efforts to place them in village networks, see Samuel Truett, “Border-Crossing Microhistories: Reconnecting Small Worlds in the Global Nineteenth Century,” in To See the World: Microhistories of the Global United States, ed. David Sim and Nora Lessersohn (Cornell University Press, forthcoming). For intermarriage patterns in contexts of coastal and inland trade, start with Louise Pubols, The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California (University of California Press, 2010), and Anne Hyde’s Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (University of Nebraska Press, 2011). After visiting Hall and Palomino in 1864, Louis Janin sent “a case of ladies instruments for sewing” as a gift for her hospitality, indicating to me a sense of household parity, and possibly gesturing to the labor that Palomino gave to the village. Loose paper in Janin diary HM 64294 (1863), in Papers of Louis Janin (Addenda), Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
25. 25.  For changes following 1854, see Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2006), 33–51.
26. 26.  For context, see Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Harvard University Press, 2018); Joseph Allen Stout, Jr., The Liberators: Filibustering Expeditions into Mexico, 1848–1862 and the Last Thrust of Manifest Destiny (Westernlore Press, 1973); and my own, revisionist take on Crabb’s filibuster in Samuel Truett, “Borderlands and Border Crossings,” in Cambridge History of America and the World, ed. Mark Bradley, Vol. 2, 1812–1900, ed. Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 594–616. For the notion of the “Anglo-world,” I draw on James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford University Press, 2009).
27. 27.  Hall, Travels and Adventures, 174–96, 198–209. For a more in-depth discussion of the Sonoita Massacre and Hall’s eyewitness account, see Truett, Fugitive Landscapes, 45–47.
28. 28.  For Indigenous borderlands, see David Yetman, The Ópatas: In Search of a Sonoran People (University of Arizona Press, 2010); Campbell W. Pennington, The Pima Bajo of Central Sonora, Mexico, 2 vols. (University of Utah Press, 1980); José Refugio de la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford University Press, 2012); and Lance R. Blyth, Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwest Borderlands, 1680–1880 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). For Hall’s work as a scribe and teacher, see Janin diary HM 64295 (1863–64); his work as a healer runs throughout his memoirs, but I also draw on the testimony of descendants: email from Aída Bustamante to Samuel Truett, November 17, 2009, and Rafael Bustamante in Carlos Sánchez, “Cómo es vivir en Soledad en estos días de Lluvia,” https://elmineral.com.mx/ver_anterior.php?artid=37368. Hall built a close relationship not only to the Sinohui family, but also to that of Don Chico’s brother Atenogenes, who was connected to Ópata families by marriage and godparentage, if not also ethnic identity.
29. 29.  For the history and social relations of Jolo, see Warren, Sulu Zone; “birdcage-looking buildings” comes from Keppel, A Sailor’s Life, 2:100–101. See also Belcher, Narrative of the Voyage, 1:114–18. For Marryat quote, see Marryat, Borneo and Indian Archipelago, 41.
30. 30.  For these spatial dynamics, see James Francis Warren, “Saltwater Slavers and Captives in the Sulu Zone, 1768–1878,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 3 (September 2010): 429–49. For “kinetic power,” I draw on Pekka Hämäläinen, “Empires in Motion,” Kinetic Empire Workshop, Oxford Centre for Global History, November 6, 2013.
31. 31.  Blake gathered most of his information from informants in Manila. Captain J. J. Blake, “Information Regarding Illanoon Pirates,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 7, no. 83 (1838): 979–82. See also discussion of the Iranun inlands in Warren, Sulu Zone, 149–51.
32. 32.  Walker, Power and Prowess, 6–9. For a discussion of British-Malay intimate networks in Brooke’s Sarawak, see Robert H. W. Reece, “European-Indigenous Miscegenation and Social Status in Nineteenth-Century Borneo,” in Female and Male in Borneo: Contributions and Challenges to Gender Studies, ed. Vinson Sutlive (Borneo Research Council, 1991), 455–88.
33. 33.  Spenser St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East (London: Smith Elder & Co., 1862), II: 171–203; and Nicholas Loney, A Britisher in the Philippines; or, the Letters of Nicholas Loney (Manila: [National Library], 1964), 64.
34. 34.  For shape shifting, I draw from James Scott, who notes that in spaces of weak state power, a “mixed portfolio” of identities may offer “great protective value,” especially in contested contexts where “a definite, fixed identity might prove fatal.” Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 256. For Conrad and the use of Wyndham as a basis for the Lingard character, see Laurence Davies et al., The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 9, Uncollected Letters and Indexes (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56–57.
35. 35.  For the longer history of these Apache groups and their political organization in the region, see Paul Conrad, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
36. 36.  For these dynamics, see, for instance, Hall, Travels and Adventures, 38–40, 47–49, 64–70, and 92–96, but also see Western Apache Raiding and Warfare, from the Notes of Grenville Goodwin, ed. Keith H. Basso (University of Arizona Press, 1971); Morris E. Opler, “Chiricahua Apache,” in Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz; Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant (Smithsonian Institution, 1983), 401–18; and Morris Edward Opler, An Apache Life-Way: The Economic, Social, and Religious Institutions of the Chiricahua Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 1941).
37. 37.  Juan Nentvig, Rudo Ensayo: A Description of Sonora and Arizona in 1764, trans. and annot. Alberto Francisco Pradeau and Robert R. Rasmussen (University of Arizona Press, 1980), 70; Ignaz Pfefferkorn, Sonora: A Description of the Province, trans. and annot. Theodore E. Treutlein (University of New Mexico Press, 1949), 70–71; Asa Daklugie testimony in Eve Ball, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey, rev. ed. (University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 57, 76.
38. 38.  For relations of borderlands mobility noted here, see John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, 2 vols. (D. Appleton, 1854), I:398–401, and Hall, Travels and Adventures, 44–45. For Apache control of the area around Cucurpe, begin with Edwin R. Sweeney, Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief (University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); see Hall, Travels and Adventures, 64–70, for the border-crossing story of the captive who guided Hall’s companions into the land of his adopted kin.
39. 39.  Cooper was also known at the time for his sea novels.
40. 40.  I echo arguments in Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014); and Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 805–31. For the state conquest of Apaches, see Conrad, Apache Diaspora, esp. 209–48; for the conquest of Samal and Iranun waters at this same time, see Warren, Sulu Zone, 104–43.
41. 41.  For Mexican railroads, see John H. Coatsworth’s classic Growth Against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico (Northern Illinois University Press, 1981); for larger contexts, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W. W. Norton, 2011).
42. 42.  Copies at the Weldon (Western Ontario) and Huntington libraries are inscribed by Elijah Smith; a copy at the Houghton Library (Harvard) has the bookplate of T. Jefferson Coolidge and is inscribed by S. A. Kent; and a fourth, at the Beinecke Library (Yale), is inscribed by H. C. Nutt. All were associated in one way or another with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, though Smith, in particular, moved through several railroad circles based out of Massachusetts. I suspect these men gathered together less as railroad and army men, and more as brokers of inside knowledge for land speculation.
43. 43.  See the dedications and other bibliographic data for the various copies of Hall’s Travels and Adventures in the libraries noted above for relevant clues to the larger cohort of railway engineers. For Taber quote, see “Notes,” Boston Daily Advertiser (Boston), March 12, 1881. For a larger context for these railway magnates (and ties to the earlier China and Pacific trades), see Barry Supple, Boston Capitalists and Western Railroads: A Study in the Nineteenth-Century Railroad Investment Processes (Harvard University Press, 1967).
44. 44.  See Hubert Howe Bancroft, Works, Volume XIV, History of Mexico, Volume VI, 1861–1887 (The History Company, 1888), 329; and Works, Volume XVII, History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1580–1888 (The History Company, 1889), 401, 499. For Myers’s movements after Chicago, see Cullum, 2:502–3, and “Mustered Out,” The National Tribune (Washington, DC), 24 November 1887.
45. 45.  “Death of Noted Admiralty Lawyer,” Railway and Marine News (15 March 1912), 21–22, Prudence and Lloyd Draper, Cotati (Arcadia, 2004), and Flora H. Loughhead, The Libraries of California; Containing Descriptions of the Principal Private and Public Libraries Throughout the State (A. L. Bancroft and Co., 1878), 239; 24 March 2013 email with John Page for Page papers; for Page, Janin, and Yale Club of California, see San Francisco Blue Book and Club Directory (Hoag and Irving, 1891), 145–46.
46. 46.  For Thomas Stokes Page, Anna María Liljevalch, and their family (and its various peregrinations), begin with Draper and Draper’s Cotati; but also see the family tree with documents at https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/21499153/person/110155710628/facts?_phsrc=wNz668&_phstart=successSource.
47. 47.  Hall, Travels and Adventures, 53; For Keppel’s unexpected detour north, see Sir Henry Keppel, A Sailor’s Life Under Four Sovereigns, 2 vols. (Macmillan and Co., 1899), II:181–90; Sir Henry Keppel’s logbook-journal of HMS Maeander (HTN/69, NMM). For Page at 58 South Park and Robinson at 59 South Park Street, see 1870 US Federal Census for San Francisco Ward 9, image 197 of 274, accessed through Ancestry.com on March 9, 2025.