The 2024 recipient of the ACUA & RECON Offshore DEI Student Travel Award is Dante Petersen Stanley. Dante Petersen Stanley was born in Japan, graduated with a B.A from the University of Miami, and currently an M.A. graduate student in the Maritime Program at East Carolina University. His focus is on East Asia, and specifically Western maritime interaction in the region. A familial biography directly connected to conquest, race, and trade in the Americas led to a focus on the webbed nature of identity and history, yet more importantly, the role of the currently unrecorded and forgotten narratives shaping the present.
Please join us in welcoming Dante for his presentation: Archaeological Analysis of Japanese Visual Knowledge of Western Vessels Before 1853
Dante Petersen Stanley is the 2024 ACUA & RECON Offshore Award Winner
Dante’s paper is an investigation into Japanese understanding of Western vessels from 1780 to 1853. From 1640 to 1853, Japan held an isolationist outlook on foreign diplomacy, slowly moving to a paradigm of limiting trade and external relations to a few locus points, with the Dutch existing as the sole accepted European presence. At the turn of the 19th century, this world order started to crumble, with a noted increase in American, British, and Russian vessels off the coast of Japan. This increase was in spurts, with four discrete periods, and the fourth leading to the “opening” of Japan in 1853-4 by Commodore Perry of the U.S. Navy. By fully elucidating Japanese knowledge of these vessels through contemporary prints, drawings, and imported line plans, a rounded conception of the vessel, the foreign people, Japanese construction elements, and Japanese attempts at building Western-style vessels emerge.