American Missionaries and Russian Explorers Close in on China

By Col. George W. Carrington

The book is about several semester essays he consolidated in pursuit of a MA degree at The American University some 45 years ago. He found them on a shelf in his library. And at that time he was in the Pentagon as aide to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff. However that does not justify saying that the book's background was the Bay of Pigs!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491866504

Col. George W. Carrington

George Carrington came from a privileged background and a serious and good education. He likes to say that before Pearl Harbor's attack by the Japs, he was a NROTC candidate because he wanted to know how to navigate his own yacht before he had a yacht. He had a military career which included WW II. Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1 Europeans Realize That The Explorers Had Not Reached Asia

Chapter 2 19Th Century Protestant Missionaries Lead The Way

Chapter 3 Establishment Of The Russian Far East

Chapter 4 Opening The Amur River

Chapter 5 The Manchus Meet The Russians

Foreword

This assembly of chapters is a combination or distillation of semester essays for a degree of Master of Arts in History which I wrote in the 1960s at the American University, Washington, D.C. I am long in the tooth now, at 92, but I could not just throw away or abandon these pages.

They are spread out chronologically but they come together in my title, American Missionaries And Russian Explorers Close In On China. Of course there is much more to the story. I just had to thin them out, to wrestle them together, and to inform, teach, and entertain.

The story primarily centers on individuals, sailors, explorers, adventurers, and voyagers. But of course taking place in the background were the confrontations, events, discoveries, wars, treaties, and transgressions of the time,

And these Westerners of mine are primarily the American missionaries who crossed the world’s largest ocean westward. And they were the Russian trail blazers who crossed the biggest land mass eastward.

In the 1960s I was aide to the U.S. Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff. The Vietnam War was coming into full swing. I was a busy boy, sitting in the Chairman’s outer office, but I managed to type up these historical semester papers during some exciting days. After my retirement they were useful for credits for a DPhil (big brother to a PHD) at Oxford. That ended in a book, Foreigners in Formosa, which, when you think about it, constituted a story about still more Westerners getting into China.

Chapter 1

EUROPEANS REALIZE THAT THE EXPLORERS HAD NOT REACHED ASIA

It should be of interest to know when a well-educated man should have realized that explorers had not reached Asia. The question tempts one to try a clear-cut answer. However there is a probably a trap here. It has to be considered just who were well–educated, what peoples were to be counted European, the meaning of the word realize, and the concept of just what was Asia.

First there should be some sort of examination to the foregoing, Well-educated must mean men who were schooled enough so that they could peruse enough of the published works that generally were available in the 16th century. They themselves do not have to be considered scholars. The works they could find had to be more public knowledge than mere private correspondence or works that remained obscurely in private libraries of collections.

The early 16th century European explorer were primarily Spaniards, Portuguese, and English. Italians Germans, and Frenchmen were European, but they were not seafarers venturing into the oceans with the same vigor as those sailors from England and Iberia. Accordingly, their realizations that the explorers had not reached Asia might have dawned later, primarily because lack of propinquity or distribution of books, not because of any true intellectual inferiority.

Skipping consideration of the word realize for the time being, just what does not reached Asia signify? On the face of it, not reaching Asia would imply that the explorers had instead reached a clearly-defined new continent of America. However, there is another, third, in-between interpretation that has to be included. This is because the discoveries in the actual experiences of the explorers were neither America nor Asia. They were simply islands, large and small, but sometimes trending east-west, rather than north-south. They were lands existing at indeterminate distances from the known parts of Europe and suspected locations