Custom House Talk Discusses New London Merchant, Consul

New London associates itself closely with its past as the “whaling city” of New England, and about 100 sea captains have found their final resting place in the . As far as author Stephen Grant can tell, however, he is the first to write a biography on one of them.

Grant gave spoke at the on Tuesday on the subject of his book Peter Strickland: New London Shipmaster, Boston Merchant, First Consul to Senegal. Strickland, who lived from 1837 to 1921, was born in Montville. He left school at the age of 15 and started as a cabin boy aboard a ship. By age 24, he was a captain.

His first voyage to West Africa was in 1864. He brought tobacco and pitch pine to the continent, and brought back gum Arabic, gum copal, peanut and palm oil, and animal hides, including cowhides used to make shoes for Union soldiers. He moved his family from New London to Dorchester, Mass. after finding business more brisk in the Boston area. He began living in Africa in 1877; his wife accompanied him for about a year before deciding to stay in the United States.

“He wrote that he made 100 voyages to Africa, and he became the American most familiar with western Africa,” said Grant.

Six years after he began living in Africa, the State Department tapped Strickland to become the U.S. Consul to Senegal. The choice was largely a result of his successful business dealings, which he was able to continue while holding the government post. Strickland spent 23 years in the post before retiring in 1905. 

“Even though he was a consul for the last several years of his life, he was never given a salary,” said Grant.

Grant said he first became interested in Strickland when he discovered an envelope, for a letter sent to Strickland in Africa from Boston, on eBay. He found a third of the material for the book in the archives at the Mystic Seaport library, and other papers in a Delaware archive and the National Archives. Grant also traveled to Senegal, where he found a handwritten letter by Strickland regarding the wreck of a ship off Cape Verde.