Salem — Witch Trials & Maritime City
Peabody Essex Museum and East India Marine Hall
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
The Peabody Essex Museum grows from institutions created by Salem’s maritime elite, including the East India Marine Society founded in 1799. Its members were captains and supercargoes who had sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn.
Their collections reflected Salem’s global reach. Ships traded in ports across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, bringing home goods, artworks, specimens and ideas.
The phrase “East India trade” can sound adventurous and cosmopolitan, and it was. It also operated inside global systems of empire, unequal exchange and slavery. Salem merchants traded in goods produced by enslaved labor and participated in Atlantic networks in which human bondage generated profit.
That does not mean every Salem voyage was a slave voyage. Precision matters. The stronger claim is structural: northern maritime wealth and southern or Caribbean slavery were economically connected.
Museums themselves have changed how they explain collections acquired in eras of colonial expansion. Objects once displayed mainly as curiosities now raise questions about provenance, cultural authority and who gets to interpret whom.
This stop moves Salem decisively beyond 1692. The city’s next great historical chapter was outward-looking, commercial and global — and it carried moral contradictions of its own.