"A Home Which Is Still Not a Home": Finding a Place for Ranald MacDonald

1847, a twenty-four-year-old half-Chinook Indian, half-Scot named Ranald MacDonald signed onto the crew of the Plymouth, a whaling ship out of New York. He was about to act on a plan that had been forming in his mind since he left his apprenticeship at a bank in Toronto three years prior. His plan was this: when the ship was full and ready to return home, the captain would give MacDonald a small boat and strand him off the coast of a land that was then strictly closed to most of the outside world. The captain reluctantly agreed to this strange scheme, and the plan was carried out. MacDonald landed alone on an island off was turned over immediately to the Japanese government, and finally imprisoned in Nagasaki. Despite his confinement, MacDonald was well treated; his captors set him to do what he found enjoyable: the work of teaching English to Japanese interpreters, several whom would go on in a few years to interpret the negotiations between Commodore Matthew C. Perry and the Japanese emperor for the of Japan. After nine months, MacDonald was rescued by a US naval ship that had come to retrieve another stranded group of American shipwrecked sailors. Instead of returning to America, however, MacDonald set out for China, to Australia, and then Scotland, before finally returning in 1853 to live out the rest of his years in British Columbia and Washington state. This article is about a number of subsequent attempts to tell--and publish--this story of trans-Pacific contact, and the racial, colonial, and national frameworks that have shaped the story's meaning and enabled or impeded its telling. Despite the efforts of MacDonald and his friends, only a few chapters of his account of this experience appeared in print during his lifetime, in a local newspaper in Kettle Falls, Washington. 1923, almost thirty years after MacDonald's death, his narrative was finally published in its entirety by the Eastern Washington State Historical Society in a limited edition of one thousand copies; quickly went out of print until its recent reissue by the Oregon Historical Society in 1990. My interest is not with MacDonald's impressions of Japan or its people, but rather with a revision process that altered and re-altered the first few chapters of the book. These opening chapters explain who MacDonald is, why he made the odd decision to maroon himself alone off the coast of and what the significance of his actions is for his readers. The fact that he radically revised these chapters--changing not only the context in which we should interpret his actions, but who he in fact represented himself as--indicates that conventional boundaries of race and nation were insufficient to define this man's identity and place. MacDonald begins the final 1894 version of his story, titled A Japan of Adventure, with a statement that would seem to clear up any confusion about his citizenship: Native and denizen almost throughout all my life, of the Columbia Valley of the Pacific Slope of America, I claim to be, in the broadest sense, a true American. True was the British Flag that covered my cradle, but that makes no difference. The Oregon treaty of 1845 made me a citizen of the United States of America 73-74). The movement of the border to the 49th parallel when he was a young man seems to have clearly reassigned his national identification from British Canadian to true American. Yet in 1888, an earlier, unpublished version of MacDonald's narrative was titled A Canadian in Japan, and an 1891 draft opens by stating merely that it was the British flag that covered my cradle (Japan Story t.s.). The movement of the border made MacDonald both Canadian and American, but his Chinook lineage made him uncomfortable on either side of the border. As MacDonald wrote in his second chapter of the 1894 version, In truth I am and have ever felt myself to be a man of two flags; proper, in a way to both. …

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