Photo Essay: An East Asian Circulation: Asa Mattice on the USS Juniata, 1883–1885

On Tuesday, May 12, 1885, 210 men from the U.S. navy warships Juniata and Monocacy marched up Shanghai’s Nanjing Road, from the riverside Bund to the Shanghai racecourse, led by a sixteen-man band. There, on the recreation ground inside the track, they exercised and paraded for two hours, putting their field gun teams through their maneuvers, and in the afternoon the band played for the spectators. The weather was fine that day. Toward the end of the proceedings, before the men were paraded back through the streets of the foreign-run International Settlement to embark for the ships moored in the Huangpu River, the North China Herald (May 15, 1885, p. 552) recorded that “past Assistant Engineer Mattice of the Juniata took a photographic view of the battalion by the dry plate process.”