Introduction
Beginning with its independence, the United States expanded its territories by imposing settler colonialism on Native Americans, in Mexico, and later in Cuba and Central America. Among the forms of empire, settler colonialism was unique because its goal was not to obtain commodities or labour from a foreign people but to claim land for expatriates to populate. The process involved removing native peoples from the land with the justification that the settlers could use it more productively.Footnote 1 Booster literature, usually in book or pamphlet form, informed people of emigration destinations and attracted more settlers to frontiers such as Kentucky and Tennessee. The desire for freehold farms was one of the main motivations for working emigrants who, in James Belich's words, could ‘hardly wait to hew their yeoman-hold from the wilderness’.Footnote 2 However, simultaneously, although frontier settlerism emphasized self-sufficiency and the sanctity of the freehold, settlers were more concerned about independence from masters, rather than from markets. Because they were never entirely removed from the national and regional markets for their necessities, settlers integrated their lands within the American nation and established states within the Union.Footnote 3
The American expansion into frontier lands was fuelled by Manifest Destiny, a predominantly martial discourse that was nurtured by scientific race theory and increasing acceptance that the imaginary race of American Anglo-Saxons was destined to dominate ‘lesser’ races. By defeating the ‘savage’ Native Americans in military confrontations, American frontiersmen celebrated their masculinity and fashioned themselves as the legitimate possessors of American land.Footnote 4 After the Civil War (1861–1865), America's essentially agrarian society became an industrialized urban economy that saw increasing labour unrest and civil rights movements for gender and racial equality. Rural migrants and working men launched strikes to challenge middle-class men's urban leadership.Footnote 5 Women advocated for their rights to a college education and to professions that were once exclusively male.Footnote 6 These challenges affected men's sense of authority. As Gail Bederman suggests, from 1880 to 1910, middle-class men reshaped manhood by incorporating working-class culture into their social lives and replacing the Victorian ideals of self-restrained manliness, which were focused on economic, industrial, and spiritual progress, with a rough code of manhood that had earlier been derided as backward and coarse.Footnote 7 White, middle-class, urban men discovered new meaning in America's virgin soil and unexplored frontiers, and this came to symbolize their endless potential to become the civilized race, that is, superior to the other aspirants to this status. They considered themselves the descendants of those frontiersmen who had not succumbed to the wilderness and had triumphed over savage men and wild beasts to expand America. Self-styled as ‘American Natives’, they regarded themselves as enlightened heirs to the Native Americans who, unlike them, had never advanced beyond the instinctual need to hunt for subsistence. In contrast, they had moved to the level of developing scientific knowledge and cataloguing, comprehending, and worshipping the natural productions of America's frontiers. Manifest Destiny thus went hand in hand with the cult of ‘the wilderness’ which celebrated settler colonialism and the male hunter as an accomplished product of American civilization.Footnote 8
Drawing on archival sources at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and from family letters, missionary papers, and unpublished memoirs at the Yale Divinity Library, this article introduces the unusual expansion of America's religious and scientific empire into Fujian, China, in the early twentieth century. It also introduces the missionary Harry R. Caldwell (1876–1970), who was famous not for his proselytizing efforts but instead for his animal hunts and specimen collections.Footnote 9 Caldwell was able to unite his missionary and hunter roles in the physical and spiritual frontiers of Fujian through his ability to protect villages from tigers and his pursuit of a mythical animal known as the ‘Blue Tiger’, which had never been captured, either physically or on film. This article argues that Caldwell's experience as both a missionary and a hunter in Fujian was an extension into China's frontier of his American masculinity. Fujian is China's southeasternmost province and it was less developed than its neighbours, such as Guangdong and Zhejiang. In the 1910s and 1920s, increased interest in China's natural history, spurred partly by Caldwell's publicity of the Blue Tiger but also largely driven by AMNH expeditions to Asia, influenced how the Chinese in Fujian conceptualized their relationship with nature.Footnote 10 Caldwell's specimen collecting contributed to America's collecting imperialism because it involved ‘the removal of objects connected with the ecology and ethnology of alien nations for the enrichment of one's own museums and private collections’.Footnote 11 Collecting was linked to wider expressions of America's scientific imperialism or ‘the ideology and practice of collecting information and producing knowledge—knowledge that claimed to be factual, objective, scientific, and definitive’.Footnote 12
This article comprises four sections. The first contextualizes America's notion of masculinity in its frontier tradition and its imaginings of wilderness, and it explains the AMNH's role in preserving works of nature and exhibiting the fruits of civilized labour. The next section describes Caldwell's upbringing and how it relates to his activities in Fujian. The third section discusses the sensation of the Blue Tiger, which attracted Western hunters to Fujian and created a new economy of natural expeditions for the Chinese people. The last section compares Caldwell with his contemporary Arthur de Carle Sowerby (1885–1954), noting their different colonial approaches to hunting and masculinity as part of national identities.
Natural history and collecting in China
In pre-independence America, white hunters were already engaging in regular autumn and winter hunts in the areas that are now Kentucky and Tennessee, thereby challenging Native Americans’ monopoly on furs and skins. In the 1770s, pioneering trans-Appalachian settlement began.Footnote 13 Armed with guns, the hunter was the pioneer par excellence of the untamed frontier and was instrumental in civilizing the wilderness. He cleared the wild country of dangerous animals, nourished his household with extra meat, and protected the settlements from hostile Native Americans. This ideal white American man was brave, industrious, and resourceful.Footnote 14 Having the knowledge of hunting handed down from father to son thus identified one not only as an American but also as a man.Footnote 15 Armed men cleared the land of animals and groups hostile to agriculture, thus contributing to the growth of the population of the American West from one million people in 1815 to more than 15 million by 1860.Footnote 16
After the Civil War (1861–1865), the American empire entered its Gilded Age (1870–1890), characterized by the rise of metropolitan centres, mining towns, and railway industries. Hitherto remote and uncultivated lands became not only settled but also urban. For sentimental Americans who accepted environmental explanations for the rise of their nation and who saw an allegedly almost empty environment as key to the rapid expansion of the American West, this development was alarming.Footnote 17 Gilded Age men ‘felt anonymised by industrialization, betrayed by corrupt government, preyed on by big businesses, disheartened by severe economic depressions, or challenged by an emerging women's movement’.Footnote 18 In 1890, the Census Bureau announced that there were no remaining vast tracts of empty land available for settlement. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861–1932) frontier thesis appeared in which he argued that the availability of free land promoted the growth of democracy because pioneers established anti-authoritarian structures for self-rule.Footnote 19 For Turner, a continuing frontier, rather than its British inheritance, contributed to America's growth. For Americans, the West held exceptional promise for social mobility and the acquisition of labour because every settler was the owner of his own labour and land, free from the aristocratic rule and economic inequalities of Europe. This ideology of free labour, supplemented by Protestant ethics and moral qualities, such as diligence, frugality, and honesty, would ensure success in one's calling and came to constitute America's national character of equality and individuality.Footnote 20 As Belich suggests, Turner's argument implied that the frontier ‘Americanised all whites’ and was ‘a declaration of cultural independence from Britain’.Footnote 21
Americans’ sense of loss of the frontier led to anxiety regarding the best way to preserve or recover the rugged qualities of men.Footnote 22 Raewyn Connell has coined the term ‘frontier masculinity’ to describe a form of masculinity built on the myths of the frontier. As an ideal, frontier masculinity was based on the active subordination of nature, autonomous individualism, courage, romanticized understandings of wilderness, rugged self-sufficiency, and masculine bodily strength. American men imagined the frontier as a place to which they could escape from stifling civilization and feminine domestication, and where they could return to an authentic masculinity tested and honed by strenuous and virtuous labour. Men who defied death to overcome dangerous aspects of rurality and wilderness had long been hailed as heroes.Footnote 23 When Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) was president of the United States (1858–1919), he popularized hunting as a sport fit for men and fused it with the concept of empire by emphasizing the travails of the white settler living under the threat of the wild.Footnote 24 Fearing the loss of individual vitality and seeking to recover the qualities with which American men had attained their exceptionalism, he transformed himself from a New York aristocrat into a frontiersman by purchasing a ranch and hunting ‘elsewhere’ in South Dakota.Footnote 25 For Roosevelt, the modern American was in danger of becoming an ‘overcivilized’ man who had lost the fighting, masterful virtues of a life of strenuous endeavour.Footnote 26 By the 1900s, frontier anxiety about overcivilized men had manifested in the social customs or ‘vacation complex’ of urbanites, which included bird watching, fishing, and hunting for sport. American men who were cut off from nature wanted to head outdoors and experience nature in ways that suited their middle-class aspirations of self-improvement.Footnote 27
In fact, as early as the 1870s, some Americans felt the need to exhibit, preserve, and study the fauna, flora, and natural history of their nation. Explorers and scientists conducted surveys and returned with thousands of artefacts and specimens. In 1869, the AMNH was founded in New York, which had become a major financial centre and urban settlement, to house these collections. The chief founder of the AMNH was Albert S. Bickmore (1839–1914), who persuaded New York's businessmen to fund the museum and shape it into an institution that was dedicated to popular education in the natural sciences.Footnote 28 The AMNH became a symbol of the New York economic elites’ pride in scientific accomplishments, global domination, and biological hierarchy. It was a museum that ‘celebrated the domination of the natural world and non-Western peoples by the Western bourgeoisie’.Footnote 29 From the 1870s until approximately the Great Depression, the AMNH raced to preserve the disappearing wildlife of northwestern North America, and it competed with British, Canadian, French, German, and Russian museums for zoological specimens. The artefacts of the Native Americans displaced by white settlement were also collected.Footnote 30 In 1890, the AMNH trustees, who were ‘the tribal elders of New York society’, recruited biologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) to head their new mammalian palaeontology department.Footnote 31 Osborn's work in mounting mammals for exhibition propelled him to the position of president of the AMNH's Board of Trustees in 1908. Under Osborn, the AMNH developed the habitat concept and displayed animal specimens against painted backdrops that represented their home landscapes.Footnote 32 Osborn also understood the visual power of photography and taxidermy. Starting with Africa, he funded explorations by Carl E. Akeley (1864–1926), the inventor of the Akeley motion picture camera and new taxidermy methods, to create naturalistic models wrapped in animal skins. Osborn was eager to make his mark with discoveries of scientific laws and innovation in museum exhibitions, and Akeley's taxidermy was just such an innovation.Footnote 33 By the 1900s, the AMNH had perfected the craft of mounting explanatory and lifelike displays which incorporated model habitats, charts, diagrams, and photographs for the benefit of non-specialist visitors. The habitat dioramas, which were designed to offer illusions of nature and the wilderness, impelled the AMNH to undertake more expeditions to collect specimens and animal skins.Footnote 34 Because of the dioramas, the AMNH became the standard to which natural history museums all over the world were expected to aspire.Footnote 35 Animal skins, usually the spoils of game hunts, became sought-after commodities by both private collectors and public museums, and were perceived as trophies that ‘represented the strong human drive to mark moments of significant achievement in material form’.Footnote 36
In defining China for American museums, material culture, rather than animal specimens, was more significant. Colonial Americans began to trade in—and use—Chinese commodities, such as lacquer, porcelain, and tea. Their familiarity with the latest metropolitan passion for chinoiserie led collectors and sellers to acquaint Americans with Chinese artefacts prior to America's independence. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed even more Chinese commodities; later in the century, they founded art museums and exhibited Chinese artwork sold by collectors who lived in China.Footnote 37 An example of an American museum collector was Albert Shelton (1875–1922), the David Livingstone of the United States. A Protestant missionary, Shelton was born in Indiana and raised among the farms and plains of Kansas, where ‘religion buttressed his martial zeal’ and he dreamed of advancing the mission frontier to Tibet. As a medical missionary, he treated patients in remote mountains and was well respected by the Tibetans. To finance the work of his mission hospital, he purchased objects of religious art from cash-strapped lamas and sold them to New Jersey's Newark Museum.Footnote 38 For Shelton, ethnological collecting not only provided funds but also enhanced his understanding of the Tibetans whom he was attempting to convert.Footnote 39 Caldwell also possessed the collector's instinct common among missionaries in China, but his collaboration with the AMNH was founded exclusively on animal specimens, rather than cultural artefacts. Another intriguing aspect of Caldwell's collecting was that he regarded the spoils of his hunts not as trophies but as specimens, a terminological aspect that differentiated him from other hunters.
The AMNH's curiosity, specifically Osborn's, regarding Chinese wildlife was not piqued until Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960) proposed proving Osborn's theory that the origins of humanity were to be found in Central Asia. Andrews was a fellow collector in China and a contemporary of Caldwell's who commented that he ‘[held] a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other’.Footnote 40 In the 1910s and 1920s Andrews led the Central Asiatic Expeditions to China and Mongolia where he hired local camp technicians, cooks, interpreters, and teamsters as he collected animal specimens and fossils of ancient men, extinct apes, and other forms of mammalian life for the AMNH's exhibition halls. Caldwell was engaged in one of these expeditions.Footnote 41 Andrews helped furnish the giant panda group and the Siberian tiger group for the AMNH's Hall of North Asiatic Mammals.Footnote 42
As for Caldwell, his partnership with the AMNH contributed to changing Americans’ conception of game hunting in China. To American expatriates, South China, where Fujian is situated, was a highly urbanized area of treaty ports that seemed to lack biodiversity. Thomas R. Jernigan (1847–1920), an American diplomat in Shanghai, wrote that ‘if the shooter is fond of hunting big game, he can enjoy the sport in China but not in the sense it can be enjoyed in Africa or India’.Footnote 43 For Andrews, the wilder Gobi Desert and southwestern Chinese provinces, such as Sichuan and Yunnan, held a greater promise of exotic fauna and mammalian fossils than the rest of China.Footnote 44 Prior to Caldwell's arrival, Fujian lay beyond the consideration of collectors, curators, and hunters.
The troubleshooter
Caldwell was born in Athens, Tennessee. His father, a Methodist circuit rider, missionary to the Native Americans, and wandering minister who was ‘deeply concerned about the temptations of city life’, taught him how to hunt in the forests and mountains of eastern Tennessee where the Caldwells, who came from upstate New York and Canada, had settled after a brief sojourn in Ohio.Footnote 45 In Caldwell's words, the hills were ‘a laboratory for the study of nature's wonders’.Footnote 46 In the nineteenth century, missionaries were also sending farmers and other pioneers to settle and transform foreign spaces, but they were not interested in removing the native people who had initially brought them to the new land. Instead, the missionaries were invested in transforming the native people into civilized Christians, and they sought to demonstrate their own desirable personal qualities and showcase the technology of American agriculture and mechanics in everyday interactions with native people.Footnote 47 In this regard, the Methodists were also a prominent social force in the old American West. On the frontier of the early republic, as Sam Haselby suggests, ‘no one provided more pastoral care and social regulation than the Methodists’.Footnote 48
Caldwell's great-great-grandmother was a full-blooded Mohawk and one of his forefathers was the first white child born in western Quebec. From an early age, Caldwell and his brothers had been encouraged by their father to spend all of their leisure time in the woods. Caldwell himself studied the animals and plants of Tennessee under a Cherokee teacher, and after he defended his brother in ‘a clash with the bees’, Caldwell was declared ‘a real boy’.Footnote 49 Because of their upbringing, the Caldwell brothers became skilled fishermen, expert hunters, and students of the birds and the animals that roamed the Tennessee hills. Caldwell's son John attributed these interests to the Mohawk blood that ran in their veins. The Caldwell brothers also became excellent baseball players who were highly sought-after by major league scouts. Their manly frontier lifestyle included gold prospecting in the mountains of the Cherokee National Forest, which helped to pay for their college educations at Grant University, where their father was vice-chancellor. In college, Caldwell joined the Student Volunteer Movement, founded in 1888, the purpose of which was to evangelize the world within a generation, and he signed a pledge to devote his life to the service of the church.Footnote 50
After graduation, Caldwell sold insurance and eventually worked for a Wall Street firm in New York. As he prospered financially, the pledge that he had signed in college weighed heavily on his mind. Over time, he recalled the words ‘except the Lord build the house they labor in vain who do build it’. He had also not forgotten the Tellico Plains region where he had fished for beautiful brook trout or the Coker Creek area and hill country where he had hunted wild turkeys and panned for gold. Within a year, Caldwell felt a calling to be in the service of God and not in the service of himself, so he resigned and returned to Tennessee to study theology. In his own words, he had won ‘a tremendous victory over personal business aspirations’.Footnote 51 In addition to a religious calling, the concept of manhood also played an important role in Caldwell's decision. Rural areas and the wilderness were sites where men could be real, masculine men, in contrast to those in cities, who were overly civilized, affected, and effeminate. In the wilderness, hunters experienced masculine freedoms unavailable in stifling, feminized, and domesticated cities.Footnote 52 Caldwell rejected the self-restrained masculinity that focused on commercial and personal growth for a more rugged manliness characterized by a strenuous life of itinerant labour and public action.Footnote 53 As he told his son John later in his life, ‘the only way to be happy was to accept responsibility, not to avoid it’.Footnote 54 In 1900, the great anti-Christian movement in China known as the Boxer Rebellion erupted. Caldwell was in theological school in Chattanooga when the Board of Missions issued a call for volunteers to help restore the glory of their religion. One of Caldwell's brothers had been performing missionary work in China and Caldwell feared for his safety.Footnote 55 Thus, although China appealed to Caldwell no more than Africa or India, he answered the call and went to China in 1900.Footnote 56 He was assigned to the Yenping Methodist Episcopal Church, where Methodist activists presented Christianity as a progressive force that could resolve both everyday and national issues. By launching social projects in Fujian in response to ‘China's challenge’, specifically the mass suffering caused by lawlessness, warlordism, and regime change, Methodist missionaries ushered in the peak of Protestant influence in the Fuzhou area and an expansion of the facilities of, and membership in, local Methodist churches.Footnote 57
Upon his arrival in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian, Caldwell began to study Buddhism and Taoism, the major religions of southeastern China, and he also learned the local dialect. He wanted to apply ‘the transforming power of the Christian message upon pernicious social evils which had been practised through countless ages with the sanction of all pagan religions’ and to contribute to Christianity's programme of social reform and enrichment in Fujian.Footnote 58 Caldwell argued that ‘… Buddhism and Taoism had long opportunity to show concern and compassion toward suffering humanity on the bridges and streets where suffering humanity congregated and in the villages scattered over the plains, but they were never interested in the well-being of the masses’. Caldwell asserted that, in contrast, Christianity would make a difference because it would ‘vindicate the missionary enterprise throughout the world’.Footnote 59
Caldwell married his fiancée, whom he had met in Chattanooga, when she joined him in Fujian in 1901. However, a health scare soon thereafter forced him to leave China temporarily and recuperate in America. To aid his recovery, upon his return to Fujian, Caldwell began to hunt again and shoot birds around the mission compound. He also collected and studied bird eggs around Fuzhou while maintaining that these ‘pleasures and hobbies of his childhood’ did not interfere in ‘the establishment of the kingdom of God in this part of the world’.Footnote 60 At this time, he did not yet know that his gun, which he used for afternoon sport, would become ‘a passport to mountain villages that had denied entrance to missionaries for fifty years’.Footnote 61 As he recalled,
For years, I had longed to preach the Gospel in a certain strategically important community. I saw that I had to crack the shell of that particular community or abandon the evangelization of an area of more than one hundred towns and villages with half a million inhabitants. Attempts to enter this region were blocked just when it seemed that success was at hand. There was bitter prejudice against the foreigner and all his works. Consequently, the doors of the community had been sealed for so long that the exclusion of foreigners had become a matter of pride among the elder clansmen. This condition might have remained unchanged until this day had a man-eating tiger not appeared upon the scene.Footnote 62
The Yenping Methodist Episcopal Church had begun operating in China in 1847 but had met with little success in the remote areas of Fujian. Its failure to convert the Chinese people in these regions was largely cultural. To be sure, American Methodists had built hospitals and schools to introduce civilization, but the Chinese were not fully convinced of the backwardness of their own methods nor of the superiority of American innovations.Footnote 63 Complicating this issue, uneducated Chinese people either could not read or had little access to the Christian periodicals that were aimed at spreading the faith,Footnote 64 and the Chinese people in rural Fujian did not yet perceive technology as important. Caldwell's hunting skills became the Methodist key to the doors of Chinese villagers, who had long suffered attacks by tigers.
Tigers had plagued the sparsely populated regions of Fujian since the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), the expansion of cities, such as Fuzhou and Xiamen (Amoy), and the subsequent deforestation intensified the tiger menace. Local gazetteers recorded instances of ‘bestial disasters’ (shouzai),Footnote 65 most of which were tiger attacks on humans and livestock. Local officials made offerings to the deities and prayed that the tigers would spare the rural people, but the proliferation of bandits, pirates, and rebels further hindered officials’ efforts to remove the tigers.Footnote 66 Urban growth required the cultivation of farming plots at the expense of natural vegetation, and demands for land to accommodate animal husbandry and commercial crops further diminished the habitat of tigers; thus, they appeared in human settlements and inflicted damage, injury, and death.Footnote 67 Despite the modernization of the late Qing armies, local magistrates and troops were equipped with little firepower to kill tigers, and rural inhabitants had only knives, spears, and sticks to defend themselves against tiger attacks.Footnote 68 The fall of the Qing Dynasty resulted in the breakdown of political order in Fujian, and the countryside was soon overrun by bandits and warlords.Footnote 69
These negative circumstances presented opportunities for Caldwell and the Methodists. The collapse of the Qing Dynasty signalled the end of the cultural hegemony of the literati and of the ideological dominance of Confucianism. The role of the former in the life of the Chinese people seemed destined to be replaced by Christianity. The founding of the Chinese republic, which was modelled on Western constitutional ideas, boosted missionary confidence regarding Chinese receptivity to Christianity. By 1914, American missionaries formed the largest evangelical force in China, comprising approximately half of the entire Protestant missionary body of 5,400 present in the nation. By 1915, nearly 10,000 American missionaries operated abroad, with almost 2,500 in China. In 1925 and 1926, Americans accounted for 5,000 of the 8,300 Protestant missionaries in China.Footnote 70 As the American empire expanded across the Pacific Ocean and into Asia following the Spanish-American War (1898), its missionaries believed that the new commercial and political links should serve religious goals. The missionaries had a vision of Christian imperialism and expected that the American empire would be a moral one that would help to spread ‘civilization’, along with Christianity.Footnote 71 For Caldwell, the lingering issue of man-eating tigers offered him an opportunity to hunt them to ‘advance the knowledge of the Christian God in the heart of Asia’.Footnote 72
Caldwell's tiger hunting began in 1910, when he shot a tiger that had taken the life of a 16-year-old boy. According to Caldwell, ‘the killing of that beast turned almost an entire village to Christ’.Footnote 73 Chinese villagers, who were once bitterly prejudiced against foreign missionaries, flooded to his door. They wanted to hear the story of the shot, see his rifle, and ask him to shoot the tigers in their communities. A local magistrate told Caldwell that ‘When you have lived long in this land you will know that many of us are like children in some ways.’Footnote 74 The Chinese villagers appreciated the use of modern technology to combat tigers, and they viewed Caldwell as a fatherly figure who avenged a boy's death and defended them against wild beasts. Even Buddhist monks invited Caldwell to their temples, where he would set a camp nearby and help rid the area of tigers.Footnote 75
Caldwell also took the opportunity to impress the Chinese people with the technology used in American agriculture and mechanics. However, he failed to completely suppress his feelings and attitude of superiority when discussing American goods, and he turned these discussions into lessons on social Darwinism. He first convinced the educated elite of the village communities of the ‘excellent qualities’ of his 22-calibre, high-powered Savage rifle by explaining its mechanism—upon hearing of his hunting interests, the Savage Arms Corporation had asked Caldwell to try the gun in China.Footnote 76 The villagers’ ‘ancient muzzle loaders’ and ‘battered muskets’ paled in comparison to the Savage rifle.Footnote 77 Moreover, at harvest time, Caldwell demonstrated the use of the American reaper, which performed the work of many ‘Chinese harvest hands’ and proved to be superior to the sickle. He declared, ‘Friends, you agree with me that this gun is better than yours and that the American farm implement is better than those with which you cultivate your fields and harvest your grain, and when you have listened to what I have to say about the Christian doctrine, you will see that it too is better than the religions of your fathers.’Footnote 78 To further persuade people, he introduced Italian queen bees from America and conducted breeding experiments that resulted in a new strain of bees that produced more honey than Chinese bees. He also imported Rhode Island Red chickens to increase local egg production. John Caldwell recalled ‘the scores of people who beat a path to our door asking for the seed of the new cabbage Father had imported’.Footnote 79
After Caldwell's gun gained him entry to preach the first sermons in the villages, Chinese villagers began to renounce their traditional beliefs and abandon their temples, which were the perceived sources of the spiritual powers of wild animals.Footnote 80 Prior to Caldwell's arrival, the fear of man-eating tigers built communities by forging a sense of solidarity among the villagers who had sought safety in numbers and taken refuge behind authority figures.Footnote 81 With this fear partially eliminated, Caldwell was able to form new relationships with the villagers, who regarded him as a hero and relied on him for protection. Caldwell thus ultimately desacralized the tiger. In Chinese mythology, tigers possessed the power of divination and could draw patterns on the ground to identify the whereabouts of their prey.Footnote 82 Caldwell made pacts with his Chinese companions and said that if he could hunt down the wild animals in their villages, ‘they were to abandon forever their belief in the so-called “fox devil” and were never again to consult the temples and shrines [to] ascertain the will of the gods regarding the hunt’.Footnote 83 His hunting trophies were more than sufficient to seal a covenant with the hunters. No one offered a word in defence of the long-cherished beliefs regarding the disappearing devil cats. Caldwell also dispelled the myth of mystery cats or spirit cats, which included the civets, foxes, and wild dogs that preyed on pigs and poultry.Footnote 84 He noted that, once again, the gun engendered confidence and delivered a message far more effectively than any amount of preaching could accomplish.Footnote 85 His hunts ultimately eliminated the villagers’ fear of tigers and emboldened them to kill the once divine, invincible cats.Footnote 86 Accordingly, Caldwell changed the way in which the Chinese conceptualized their relationships with tigers and nature.
Two factors contributed to Caldwell's success in hunting and proselytizing in Fujian. First, similarly to the American and British naturalists of the past, Caldwell had indigenous collaborators who served as his assistants and collectors.Footnote 87 His hunting entourage consisted of many, initially sceptical, Chinese hunters and woodsmen who admired his shooting prowess. Caldwell wrote that it had been difficult to find a real naturalist in China, except among people who were well trained through their associations with foreigners undertaking fieldwork.Footnote 88 Among his most able and trusted Chinese companions was Da Da, who worked as a cook and hunter in the Caldwell household for 18 years. Da Da had converted to Christianity, acquired hunting skills from Caldwell, and became a famous tiger hunter in his own right. He hunted for profit and each tiger he killed was worth a fortune.Footnote 89 In a paternalistic manner, Caldwell was particularly proud of having taught Da Da how to hunt. He declared that Da Da was ‘the finest big game hunter to be found among the natives in South China’.Footnote 90 Caldwell noted that the blood, bones, and flesh of tigers had medicinal properties for the Chinese people and fetched high prices, thereby adding to Chinese enthusiasm for tiger hunts.Footnote 91 Whether Da Da forged his own Western contacts is unknown, but by teaching and hiring him and other Chinese assistants, Caldwell introduced a new economy of natural expeditions to the Fujian villagers, who desacralized the tiger, became hunters and sellers of tiger parts, and benefited financially from their activities.
The second reason for Caldwell's success as a missionary was his role in brokering peace between the bandits of Fujian and the Chinese government. Although the American consul in Fuzhou had warned him against interfering in China's internal affairs, Caldwell argued that his involvement was an extension of God's work. He befriended bandits and observed that many who had turned to banditry were part-time opportunists committing crimes out of desperation to keep their families alive.Footnote 92 The bandits, for their part, admired Caldwell for his deeds, which became ‘the talk of the land’. The respect he had gained for hunting tigers resulted in his appointment as the Bandit Pacification Commissioner of Fukien by local officials. Accordingly, he was charged with negotiating with the bandits to end the war and bloodshed. Caldwell wrote, ‘The bandits crowded around me like enthusiastic schoolboys, thanking me for the great service I had rendered them, each eager to know when he could safely return to his home.’Footnote 93
Caldwell was also involved in negotiating with the pirates who operated off the coast of Fujian, and he handled kidnappings and other extra-legal affairs ‘where a solution without loss of face was needed’.Footnote 94 He was an autonomous mediator and enjoyed authority bestowed by all parties to achieve settlements. Chinese villagers who were reduced to abject poverty due to banditry and extortion by soldiers also benefited from peaceful settlements.Footnote 95 However, Caldwell was anxious to ensure that his activities were not curtailed by the leaders of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who felt that he was distracted by his external commitments from performing his real missionary work. However, by the 1920s, more Protestant missionaries had moved beyond preaching traditional Christian doctrines and were preoccupied with non-evangelical work, much like Caldwell.Footnote 96
By allowing neither the bandit chiefs nor the Chinese government to defray his living and travel expenses, Caldwell preserved his integrity and earned everyone's respect.Footnote 97 His success in tiger hunting raised his public profile, enabling him to hunt tigers in the lawless regions where banditry was rife, to earn the goodwill of the people who were resistant to a foreign presence, and to evangelize with official blessings. He
resolved never to refuse to render whatever service possible in the capacity of a middle-man, remembering the emphasis Christ placed upon the peacemaker. I am sure that in none of my activities were there any times when I prayed more earnestly for divine guidance, and for both wisdom and courage to conduct myself in such a way as never to compromise either the good name of my country or my Christ, as when I was playing the part of troubleshooter when the stakes were high.Footnote 98
China's invisible Blue Tiger
The Chinese villagers in Fujian had long claimed the existence of a tiger known as the ‘Black Devil’ or ‘Bluebeard’, which Caldwell called the ‘Blue Tiger’.Footnote 99 He first heard of this breed of tiger in the spring of 1910. To hunt it, he considered using well-trained American bear hounds, rather than the local Chinese dogs that ‘cowed at the very scent of a tiger’. He finally decided against this plan, however, as he felt that he would rather have these dogs chase mountain lions than lose them to a tiger.Footnote 100 To treat dogs well, rather than as prey, testifies to a hunter's humanitarian sympathies.Footnote 101 Caldwell claimed to have seen the Blue Tiger face to face: ‘The markings of the animal were marvellously beautiful. The ground color seemed to be a deep shade of maltese, changing into almost deep blue on the under parts. The stripes were well defined, and so far as I was able to make out, similar to those on a regular tiger.’Footnote 102 In the 1910s and 1920s, the Blue Tiger was occasionally sighted. Villagers who had seen it claimed that it was black with Maltese markings. Caldwell believed that they were describing it backwards and thus regarded it as black instead of blue.Footnote 103 He wanted to save the villagers who were threatened by the Blue Tiger, as it was ‘no longer a myth’.Footnote 104
The North China Herald carried regular reports of American hunter-naturalists who travelled to join Caldwell on his hunt for the Blue Tiger. In the ranks of these hunter-naturalists was Edmund Heller (1875–1939), who had followed Theodore Roosevelt to South Africa for big game hunting and had explored Peru's fauna and flora for Yale University. In 1916, Heller brought the Akeley camera, which he had used to record the wildlife in South Africa, to Fujian to capture the Blue Tiger on film.Footnote 105 Additionally, in 1916, Roy Chapman Andrews, who was en route to Yunnan for the First Asiatic Zoological Expedition, stopped in Fujian in the hopes of obtaining a specimen of the Blue Tiger.Footnote 106 Heller joined Andrews and Caldwell who intended to use large traps to catch the Blue Tiger.Footnote 107 Despite being fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the Blue Tiger (also known as the Great Invisible, for its ‘[being] everywhere and nowhere, here today and gone tomorrow’),Footnote 108 they were unsuccessful. They ‘had the worst luck with the tiger’, Andrews wrote, which would not take the bait and fall into their trap.Footnote 109
At a time when the American government was not yet the main engine of scientific research, Osborn and Andrews solicited funds from museum trustees and private donors. Money poured in from people who wanted to prove Osborn's theory that the origins of humanity were to be found in Central Asia and find ‘the missing link between monkeys and humans’. His fundraising activities were not without controversy. For example, the successful auctioning of a dinosaur egg from the Gobi Desert led the Americans, Chinese, and Mongolians to suspect that the AMNH's expeditions were for-profit ventures. However, Osborn managed to retain the support of New York tycoons, which allowed the AMNH to remain financially solvent throughout the 1920s and to sustain Andrews’ costly expeditions.Footnote 110
Although Andrews was initially sceptical of identifying the Blue Tiger as a distinct species, he decided that it was a specimen that was well worth acquiring for the AMNH. Close-up observations of what Caldwell identified as the Blue Tiger led Andrews to conclude that it was a partially melanistic phase of the ordinary yellow tiger.Footnote 111 Osborn was also interested in the Blue Tiger and hoped that Andrews would secure a specimen for the AMNH.Footnote 112 Caldwell tried to convince them that Fujian offered one of richest possibilities in China for locating a Blue Tiger, and he was pleased to host Andrews and Heller. He hoped that the AMNH curators would remain engaged with Fujian, which was home to rare species of birds and mammals and thus offered ‘but few areas of greater wealth for the Zoologist’. For Caldwell, because no real scientific exploration of Fujian had been conducted, any museum that examined the area in a systematic manner would be greatly rewarded for its efforts. He submitted posters to the AMNH to generate American public interest in a collection of animal specimens from Fujian. Although Caldwell was approached by several American museums regarding his specimens, he remained loyal to the AMNH for its generous sponsorship and outreach programmes. He stated that he would be ‘pleased to give the American Museum first choice of anything I may take in the future’.Footnote 113
Caldwell's unwavering dedication to the AMNH was not entirely about nationalism. Other American organizations, such as the Smithsonian Institution, had approached him for his specimens. The AMNH, however, was the first museum to pay attention to Fujian's fauna and buy Caldwell's specimens, all before the 1920s sensation of the Blue Tiger. Upon Caldwell's arrival in Fujian, he was notified by the finance committee of the Methodist Episcopal Church that he would receive no money to perform the work to which he had been assigned as it was experiencing difficult times. The Student Volunteer Movement to which Caldwell had belonged had faded because of rising secularism in American higher education and funding had decreased over the years.Footnote 114 During Caldwell's ministry in Fujian, he often returned from annual conferences without any money to meet his financial obligations. In his autobiography, he explained that he had managed to build more than one hundred buildings for the church because God satisfied all his financial needs in wondrous ways, without mentioning where or from whom he had received the funds.Footnote 115 He further mentioned that he travelled on foot to ‘save enough money otherwise spent on chair hire to support several newly opened preaching places or schools’.Footnote 116 Letters in the AMNH archives reveal that Caldwell received handsome pay cheques for selling animal skins and skulls, including those of tigers, to the AMNH.Footnote 117 In 1917 alone, Caldwell contributed more than 8,000 insect specimens to the AMNH.Footnote 118 When he was obliged to invent a superior grade of smokeless powder and load his own shells to save money on shotgun ammunition,Footnote 119 the AMNH shipped firearms to him as part of the field equipment it supplied for its own expeditions.Footnote 120 Because of the support of the AMNH, Caldwell could pay Da Da, his native collector, as well as for his own medical treatments on his annual furloughs.Footnote 121 During his most difficult time, Caldwell's hobby, funded by the AMNH, was the only source of income for his missionary work. The appreciation was mutual because the AMNH enrolled him as a lifetime member in 1917.Footnote 122 For Caldwell, the AMNH's support was crucial because it supplied the funds, gun barrels, and loaded cartridges that the Methodist Episcopal Church would not provide; his brother, who lived in New York, paid some of his expenses.Footnote 123 Of the Caldwell brothers, Harry was the only one who lived the life of a hunter.
Caldwell also believed that the AMNH, as the wealthiest and most famous natural history museum of its time, was in the best position to launch specific expeditions to southern China, not only to search for the origins of humankind but also to catch and confirm the existence of animals such as the Blue Tiger.Footnote 124 Caldwell helped to send supplies for Andrews’ expeditions to China and participated, at the AMNH's invitation, in the Second Asiatic Zoological Expedition.Footnote 125 The hunt for the Blue Tiger became the most widely advertised feature of Andrews' expedition in both America and China,Footnote 126 eventually yielding rare argali, rams, and wapiti. With these new specimens, the AMNH had approximately 4,000 mammals representing East Asia. Andrews was impressed with Caldwell and said that he ‘could not have had a more effective assistant or a more pleasant companion’.Footnote 127 He urged Caldwell to give up missionary work and become a permanent specimen collector for the AMNH, which could provide him with a salary greater than any missionary could ever hope to make.Footnote 128 After Andrews returned to New York, Caldwell reiterated his resolve to catch a fine male tiger to complete the AMNH's group of East Asian specimens and to secure ‘the finest tiger group ever taken from one locality to be found in any museum in the world’.Footnote 129
However, Caldwell had no desire to be remembered as a man who shot many tigers and other big game animals. Instead, he wrote, ‘My dedication to the work of building the Kingdom of God in a pagan land was without reservation’ and,
No suggestion that I abandon missionary work and accept some more remunerative assignment ever so much as loomed before me as a temptation. On one occasion when a very alluring offer to sign a long-term contract for directing the field research work of a great American scientific institution was laid before me for my signature, my reply was without hesitation and final, ‘I am now serving in China under a life contract,’ I replied; ‘I am not the least interested in any contract that may be offered me by man; I am serving under a life contract with God.’Footnote 130
The ‘great American scientific institution’ was almost certainly the AMNH, although for some reason, Caldwell refused to name it in his unpublished autobiography. Perhaps he had learned that many missionaries considered it near sacrilege to be seen walking trails carrying a rifle, but, he said, he ‘became immune to such criticism as I felt sure that the disposing of a troublesome tiger was a well worthwhile service in any community’.Footnote 131 The competing roles of hunter and missionary, and the physical and spiritual needs of Caldwell, suggest that, although the idea that the United States was exceptional in its moral approach to empire remained a prevailing paradigm, Manifest Destiny did not mean the same thing to all American men. Some people advocated a martial vision of aggressive expansionism, such as that of frontiersmen and hunters, and the acquisition of territory through force. Other people preferred the more restrained form of economic and religious expansion, such as that exemplified by merchants and missionaries.Footnote 132 As both a hunter who opened up the Chinese frontier to natural history and a missionary who delivered a sense of the superiority of American civilization and Christian manhood to the Chinese people, Caldwell embodied the two types of masculinity that helped to expand the American empire. He successfully negotiated these two masculinities by innovatively connecting hunting to his missionary work. Hunting, natural history, and specimen collection became the unlikely partners of the Methodist social programme.
Competing masculinities: Arthur de Carle Sowerby in Fujian
‘Tiger shooting has brought into my life and home many men with rifles,’ Caldwell wrote in his later years. He treasured the friendship of ‘a number of scientific men of prominence with whom otherwise I would probably never have become acquainted’.Footnote 133 Americans who had read about his tiger hunting and involvement in Andrews’ expeditions, including university students, diplomats in China, and professional hunters, joined him on his hunts in Fujian.Footnote 134
Throughout the 1920s, the Blue Tiger was highly sought after by zoologists because there was no specimen of its kind in any collection.Footnote 135 Although American curators and scholars approached Caldwell for all types of animal specimens, he continued to sell his best specimens to the AMNH and was proud of his loyalty to the museum, despite his financial difficulties. Most of the offers that Caldwell rejected were from Harvard anthropologist Frederick R. Wulsin (1891–1961), who collected mammal specimens for the National Geographic Society. Wulsin had visited Caldwell in Fujian and offered him very liberal prices for his specimens. When he once sold 251 bird skins to Wulsin, he explained to the AMNH that he needed the cash to keep his children in school in Shanghai. Because of his financial difficulties, which resulted from his earnings from specimen sales being too little to keep up with his living expenses and the costs of hunting supplies, Caldwell considered Andrews’ suggestion that he take 1923 off from missionary work and collect specimens full time in Fujian. Caldwell believed that there was a vacancy to fill because the AMNH had ‘yet to put a man in this province’, which he claimed was unfortunate because ‘it certainly is about the richest province in all of China [in terms of biodiversity]’. ‘Other museums are looking this way’, Caldwell warned, and the AMNH should concentrate ‘real efforts’ on Fujian.Footnote 136
However, it appeared to be impossible for foreign hunter-naturalists and specimen collectors to make progress in Fujian without Caldwell's network and support. A telling example was Floyd Tangier Smith (1882–1939), a renowned American panda hunter and leader of the China Society of Science and Arts, who did not contact Caldwell before his expedition to China. Backed by the Smithsonian Institution, Smith had a Russian cinematographer and two Chinese taxidermists with him to collect zoological specimens in Fujian. He wanted to establish a natural history museum in Shanghai, but his proposal never materialized. His team followed the route most favoured by the elusive Blue Tiger, and Smith boasted that if there were Blue Tigers anywhere near his line of march, Shanghai would have at least one specimen.Footnote 137 Smith's expedition ended in failure when he contracted malaria and his party was attacked by the same Chinese bandits who left Caldwell's men alone. Smith's expedition was forced to pay $200 before they were released and allowed to go free.Footnote 138
Among Caldwell's contemporaries and visitors, Arthur de Carle Sowerby (1885–1954), a British naturalist, provides an interesting example of a different kind of masculinity. During much of 1922, as Caldwell was recuperating from his stomach ailments during his annual furlough in Seattle, Sowerby stayed at Caldwell's house in Fujian and conducted extensive fieldwork in the province.Footnote 139
Back in the 1910s, Sowerby, as part of his studies of China's natural history, had followed Caldwell on his hunt for tigers. He witnessed how Caldwell, after fulfilling his pact with his Chinese assistants, converted them to Christianity. When Sowerby asked what would happen if he had failed to kill the tigers, Caldwell simply replied, ‘We mustn't.’Footnote 140 Sowerby had tried to recruit Caldwell for his own projects in other parts of China, but Caldwell had turned him down, and he failed to ‘get at least one specimen each’ of what Caldwell had collected.Footnote 141 Nonetheless, Caldwell accommodated Sowerby in his home and accompanied him on some expeditions in Fujian.
For Sowerby, the tiger—the most wary and cunning of all wild animals—was the most challenging to hunt. This task proved to be even more difficult in China. Having never learned to shoot well, Sowerby saw himself as more of a naturalist than a hunter, and in this regard, he admired Caldwell, who had mastered the Savage rifle. Sowerby also commented that, ‘In China, it is impossible to hunt the tiger with elephants, or by sitting in a tree and having the game driven towards one, as is done in India’Footnote 142 and he complained to Caldwell that he ‘[never had the chance to confront a] tiger close-up without the advantage of occupying a seat on the back of an elephant’.Footnote 143 Caldwell wrote that, in contrast, his ‘sole defence while nosing around in the lair of a tiger has been my 250–3000 Savage rifle’.Footnote 144 Without elephants, Caldwell was limited to setting up stationary platforms from which to spot and hunt tigers.Footnote 145
Caldwell had heard from a British photographer that in India, British men took photographs from a platform high in a tree or even from a comfortable seat in a strong box (houdah) on the back of a well-trained elephant. He, however, had to rely on eyewitnesses, such as Andrews and Heller, to support his claims about the existence of the Blue Tiger, as his photographs showed only the blurry shadows of the legendary animal.
Sowerby also disagreed with Caldwell about the colour of the Blue Tiger. According to him, Blue Tigers were blue only because it was impossible to assign any colour to them, ‘their peculiarity being that they are considerably darker than the common or garden tiger and they are somewhat rare’.Footnote 146 But they agreed on Fujian's potential, with Caldwell informing the AMNH about Sowerby's remark that Fujian was the richest faunal field to which he had ever been.
Between Sowerby's trips to Fujian, Caldwell kept himself abreast of his whereabouts and discoveries by reading natural history journals. He knew that Sowerby entertained the idea that the Blue Tiger might also exist elsewhere and hoped that this was not the case. As he confessed, ‘There is a great deal of selfishness about this, but I just cannot help it. If any museum gets that pelt, it is to be the American Museum of Natural History.’ Caldwell also hoped to have his name permanently attached to something for the sake of his children and to inspire other people to develop a strong interest in wildlife.Footnote 147
Cognisant of Sowerby's ambition, Caldwell promised Andrews and the AMNH that, upon his return to China, he would lead an expedition to explore Fujian more extensively than Sowerby or any other stranger ever could. Caldwell was concerned that, in his absence, Sowerby might photograph the Blue Tiger or even hunt it down before he could.Footnote 148 Fearing that Da Da and other native collectors would sell whatever they had collected to Sowerby, Caldwell had paid them in advance for the entire year of 1922.Footnote 149 Caldwell's fears proved to be unfounded—Da Da and other Chinese hunter-collectors were devoted to him and did not sell their specimens to Sowerby. As Caldwell noted, ‘Neither Sowerby nor any other man was well acquainted with the people, language, etc.’Footnote 150
When Sowerby requested help from Claude R. Kellogg (1886–1977), a Methodist professor at Fukien Christian University who was famed for his study of bees, Caldwell asked him not to assist Sowerby because they were ‘morally obliged’ to the AMNH for their equipment.Footnote 151 Caldwell also heard from Sowerby's Chinese hunting companions that ‘he [Sowerby] will never get a shot on account of his continual smoking and moving’ which, for Caldwell, meant that he was not a true hunter.Footnote 152 For Caldwell, a hunter who coveted a shot at China's tigers must be willing to endure hardship and forgo material comforts: ‘A hunter,’ he wrote, ‘should be actuated by more than a mere desire to secure a trophy, and should note down observations concerning the life history and movements of the animal.’Footnote 153 Caldwell declined to be interviewed or photographed by magazines or curious strangers, saying,
I am a missionary; my big game shooting has been purely on the side; if you desire an interview concerning my work as a missionary in China I will be very glad to help you in any way I can, but if you only want to interview me concerning a few tigers and other animals I have killed, I feel that I must say to you there will be neither interview nor photographs.Footnote 154
For Caldwell, it seems, a good hunter was also a good Christian—disciplined, moral, and principled—without the flippancy of Sowerby, the sins of non-Christians, and the vices of opium-smoking Chinese men. As a trustee of the Seattle Rod and Gun Club, the members of which, according to Caldwell, had the spirit and highest ideals of true sportsmen, Caldwell organized educational lectures for schoolchildren in Seattle during his furloughs. He hoped to educate the younger generation of sportsmen about the importance of both the propagation and the protection of wildlife, game, and game fish, as well as the protection of the national forests, parks, and natural resources. He hoped to develop sportsmen who would inherit the desirable qualities of a noble hunter.Footnote 155
This comparison of Caldwell and Sowerby indicates the growing professionalization of the naturalist that transpired with the rise of modern professional associations and salaried positions.Footnote 156 It also suggests different national approaches to hunting. A genteel, gentlemanly naturalist, Sowerby was wealthy and well educated. He was also a socialite and excellent fundraiser. In the 1920s, when American institutions were more willing than British institutions to fund scholarly fieldwork, Sowerby courted the Biological Society of Washington and the Smithsonian Institution of New York, which sponsored his expeditions to South China and Hainan Island. He also secured another patron, the American tycoon Robert Sterling Clarke (1877–1956), who was heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. With Clarke's funds, Sowerby could plan ‘big things for Fukien’ and hire cooks, scouts, and taxidermists, further demonstrating the racial inequalities between European hunters and their indigenous companions.Footnote 157 As part of a British identity, hunting was more of a colonial or upper-class (rather than middle-class) pursuit. British aristocrats and colonial administrators hunted for sport. To be sure, they were also interested in the science and natural history that came with hunting, and methods of scientifically managing species, such as maintaining closed and open seasons for shooting birds and game to ensure respite during breeding, were a code of class.Footnote 158 For the British, hunting was a privilege and display of an ‘aristocratic masculinity’ that reinforced class standing and elite superiority over social inferiors and colonial subjects. In America, by contrast, hunting was a tradition and life skill.Footnote 159 Both Caldwell and Sowerby paid assistants and had extractive, imperial relationships with the Chinese, and they both used hunting to build ‘social bridges’ with the Chinese through a shared enthusiasm for hunting.Footnote 160 However, Caldwell operated in a less hierarchical manner and treated Da Da like family; other Chinese assistants were his converts and volunteers, who hunted to supplement their meagre incomes from farming.Footnote 161 The experiences of Caldwell and Sowerby demonstrate that masculinities do not exist in isolation from other key facets of identity, such as class, nation, race, and religion.Footnote 162
Conclusion
Caldwell did not succeed in catching the Blue Tiger. By the late 1920s, the AMNH had collected sufficient specimens from East Asia and had become less interested in specimens from Fujian. Andrews, however, knew of museum curators and private collectors who remained interested in Caldwell's specimens and put him in contact with them.Footnote 163 Also around this time, armed conflicts among warlords and war with Japan plunged China deeper into anarchy, disrupting the infrastructure of specimen collecting and endangering the presence of the Methodist mission itself. Chinese communists had infiltrated the Fujian countryside, inspiring anti-foreign and anti-Christian movements.Footnote 164 ‘Banditry in the hills,’ Caldwell wrote, ‘was now taking a decided red tinge, and it was becoming unwise for me to venture far with either rifle or camera. There was evidence I was losing my good standing with the outlaw elements as they were, one by one, taken over by “reds”.’Footnote 165 Some Chinese intellectuals identified the Protestant missions with cultural imperialism and accused foreign missionaries of cooperating with foreign corporations and governments to force the Chinese to accept semi-colonial status and Western superiority.Footnote 166 Banditry, looting, and war increased so much that the American government recommended that its citizens leave China. Missionaries, unable to reverse the drift towards disorder, became dispirited. By the 1930s, the AMNH had terminated all its expeditions because of the chaos.Footnote 167 Caldwell turned his attention to butterflies and small mammalsFootnote 168 and, in conjunction with the Lester Institute in Shanghai, he discovered that the lung fluke, a parasite carried by freshwater shrimps and field-dyke crabs, was responsible for Chinese villagers spitting blood. This finding was his final contribution to ‘community uplifting’ before Japanese forces cut off the southern coastal provinces, including Fujian, from free China during the 1944 Ichigo campaign.Footnote 169 Caldwell and other missionaries were evacuated by American troops, and he never returned to China.Footnote 170
Back in Tennessee, Caldwell, now in his seventies, turned to quieter pursuits, such as trout fishing and wildflower gardening. Trillium, lady's slippers, hepatica, orange-fringed orchids, and birds’ feet filled his garden during this time.Footnote 171 Now a settled frontier, Tennessee was no longer the wooded wilderness in which Caldwell had found solace as an inquisitive child and teenager. ‘I abandoned my precious notebooks in which I had made notations about mission work, nature study, the flora and fauna, etc., through a period of years,’ Caldwell wrote.Footnote 172 For him, fieldwork and hunting had been ‘a worthwhile bit of “Missionary” work’,Footnote 173 and he had not separated the endeavours in mind or practice.
The frontier that was once Tennessee had nurtured his rugged masculinity and prompted him to forgo his work in cosmopolitan New York to pursue missionary work in China. The restrained masculinity of Methodist missionaries who were already in Fujian had failed to open Chinese villages to proselytization; in contrast, Caldwell managed to convert entire villages and reverse the tide. However, rugged and restrained masculinities are not mutually exclusive, and Caldwell embodied the qualities of both. These apparently oppositional masculinities gave rise to America's imperial impulse to expand into Fujian. Caldwell and the AMNH shaped Fujian into a primarily male space for Western naturalists and sport hunters.
The work of the AMNH, the Methodist missionaries, and Caldwell shared an emphasis on civilization. The AMNH wrote to the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Wellington Koo (1888–1985), asking him to facilitate its expeditions because the findings would be ‘a valuable contribution to science and will show to the world the interesting fauna of your country’.Footnote 174 The logic of paternal imperialism that underlay this request suggested that the ‘ignorant, unscientific’ Chinese could not fully exploit their resources, so it was incumbent on Americans to disseminate knowledge about China's natural history and become its custodian.Footnote 175 Years later, Caldwell's son John would write, ‘Until the missionaries came along, the natural history of China was completely unknown to the Western World. Little collecting and exploring had been done, and nothing had been written. The Chinese are an unscientific people and have seldom made the slightest attempt to discriminate between fact and fiction.’Footnote 176 John's comment regarding China's lack of science and the role of missionaries in cataloguing China's wildlife reveals how the latter—especially Caldwell, who was also a hunter and naturalist—were seen as contributing to the production of knowledge about China. This comment also indicates that these missionaries believed that they were accomplishing something important for the West—and that the West was needed to interpret China's nature because the Chinese could not do this for themselves. This belief might explain why, although Methodist missionaries in Fujian saw a distinction between their work and secular aims, they did not stop Caldwell from hunting. Although he might have deviated slightly from the Methodists’ social programme, he had united religious and scientific projects by deploying American technology to remove the threats to the livelihoods of Chinese villagers. He provided a model for how Americans could interact with the Chinese people in addressing their concerns by, for example, hunting man-eating tigers. Through his experiences (and similar to Jimmy L. Bryan Jr.’s conclusion regarding the legacy of white ‘adventurers’ in the American West), Caldwell had helped to ‘beguile a generation of Americans into believing in their own exceptionality and in their destiny to conquer’,Footnote 177 this time in Fujian. If the rugged qualities of men had created the American nation, then these same qualities could work as well for China.
