Bangor man sailed to Japan with Perry

Dr. Sewall at Great Banquet,” trumpeted a headline in the Bangor Daily News on Nov. 16, 1903. “Was Speaker at Brilliant Dinner at Sherry’s, New York, Last Week.”

As if to reinforce the impact of the headline, the reporter declared, “The banquet … attracted very wide attention in New York, where it takes a sizable thing to make a person look twice.”

I immediately wondered who this Dr. Sewall was, and why it was such big news that he gave a speech at a fancy dinner party, even in the Big Apple. What I found was a man who spent his adult life reliving a single event embedded in a blaze of experiences that had come to haunt him.

The story starts quietly enough. After he graduated from Bowdoin College in 1850, John Smith Sewall joined the Navy to get some money to pay his college bills. He was appointed captain’s clerk aboard the USS Saratoga, cruising the China seas for a couple of years uneventfully chasing pirates and mutineers, and riding out typhoons and dodging shoals. He also spent a great deal of time in Chinese ports, where he learned a respect for Chinese culture.

Then in 1853, Sewall sailed onto the pages of history. His ship was attached to the little squadron commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry that was on its way to Japan to demand trading privileges for the United States and an end to the mistreatment of shipwrecked American sailors. Sewall was one of 40 officers who attended the exotic negotiations. Less than a year later his ship carried home the completed treaty that would allow the U.S. to establish a consulate and permit American vessels to trade and resupply in certain Japanese ports.

The rest of Sewall’s life was a distinguished, but relatively staid affair. He left the Navy in 1854 and earned further academic credentials at Bangor Theological Seminary. He was a minister for awhile in Massachusetts, and served a regiment from that state as chaplain in the Civil War. He returned to Maine to become a popular professor at Bowdoin and then Bangor Theological Seminary. He married and had two children, one of whom, a son, drowned tragically while a student at BTS. Sewall outlived both his wife and his daughter and died of pneumonia at his home at 20 Fifth Street, Bangor.

In an effort to sum up his character, the obituary writer at the Bangor Daily Commercial wrote on Oct. 11, 1911, “[He] was one of the most genial and polished of men and was held in the highest regard by all who knew him.”

But one can’t help wondering if the Rev. Sewall hadn’t wanted a little more. His experiences cruising the China seas remained the dramatic touchstone of his life – more important to him than the rhetoric and English literature courses he taught. Like some character in a Conrad novel, he once wrote, “Ever since then the sea has followed me – haunted me with its visions, with its memories, with its infinite suggestions of stress and peril, of melancholy and music, of gallant life and lurking death.”

Over and over, perhaps 500 times, he gave a speech about his adventures. We can speculate that it was this speech he gave at the “Great Banquet” in 1903 in honor of the Mikado’s birthday. The august attendees included the consul general of Japan, who organized the event, along with many people with impressive titles and huge fortunes – all dutifully listed in the newspaper story.

In 1905, Sewall published a book about his adventures called “The Logbook of the Captain’s Clerk.” One can find it, worn and frayed, in the stacks of the Bangor Public Library. The copy I read was dedicated by Sewall in his handwriting to his friend and neighbor Gen. Charles Hamlin, son of Lincoln’s vice president.

By then the Japanese had evolved into a world power, having recently defeated the Chinese and the Russians in major military engagements. Sewall was impressed by these and other accomplishments.

He had no way of knowing what would occur a few decades later on Dec. 7, 1941, or of the importance of U.S.-Japanese trade relations in the decades after World War II. He could only look backward at events that were receding farther into the past. He couldn’t see that the country he had helped “open” would become a double-edged samurai sword for the generations of Westerners who would follow him.

In 1905, there were only about 20 survivors of the thousands who had been on the American ships that had sailed into Japanese waters a half-century before to force the Empire of the Rising Sun to open its ports. In the end, Sewall said he felt like “a relic” every time he got up to deliver his famous speech.

“I feel as if I were alone with my memories, a survivor of a vanished epoch of history,” he wrote in his book. And, indeed he was.

Wayne Reilly writes a history column each Monday in the Style section. During his 28 years at the Bangor Daily News, he worked as a reporter, editorial page writer and assignment editor. He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.