East India Marine Society
[5]: 49 The East India Marine Hall and its collections were combined with those of the Essex Institute in the fields of natural history and ethnology, and reimagined as the Peabody Academy of Science.
Firstly, the society's members were obligated to donate "curiosities" from their travels; not only did the museum help make Salem a vital location for learning about European and Asian visual and intellectual culture, it signaled America's success and prosperity in global trade.
[3]: 199 The collection was started by donations from Captain Jonathan Carnes; items as diverse as an elephant's tooth and a pipe from Sumatra set the standard for the museum's acquisitions.
[7]: 69 Because of the society's requirement for its members to donate a diverse range of objects from their travels, the collections were specifically related to their business endeavors, which explains the predominance of Pacific artifacts on display.
[13][14] Donors of objects included members, New England locals such as William Bentley, non-member seafarers such as John Derby, and others such as merchant Nusserwanjee Maneckjee of Bombay.
Because there was no strong financial reason to expend concerted effort on collecting Native objects, scholars have reported that the museum's representation of Eastern tribes was small and used to compare them to ancient civilizations: items such as arrowheads that had come up during excavations in New England were displayed with classical artifacts.
[9]: 46 Not much is known about the specific groupings of the collection prior to the 1830s; near the end of the decade, however, records state that items were displayed based on their general function, such as weaponry or musical instruments.
[9]: 45 Prominent visitors to the society's museum included William Bentley,[19] James Silk Buckingham,[1] Nathaniel Hawthorne,[20] Joseph Smith,[21] Andrew Jackson, Anne Newport Royall,[17] and Martin Van Buren.
"[22] These impressions taught the younger generations of Salem knowledge of the global marketplace that was valued highly in the early 19th century: the possibilities for trade relations were enhanced by their prolonged exposure to foreign nations.
[3]: 197 In addition, an entrance fee was briefly charged as an attempt to "remedy [the] evil" of their popularity; the more than 2,000 annual visitors, coupled with the society's responsibility to care for its members' families experiencing financial hardship, had become too difficult to maintain.
