WHO WERE THE FIRST AMERICANS IN VIETNAM?
Every day was a new experience. It was exciting to me to live in Vietnam and have my husband and my children right with me. There were very few American military in Vietnam who had their family with them. As a result, I felt a little bit like a pioneer. By studying a bit of history, however, I learned that there were other Americans who made trips to Vietnam a couple of hundred years before I ever got there. The first American to venture to Vietnam, or at least the first one I could find anything about, was John White of Marblehead, Massachusetts. He arrived in Vietnam in 1819 on a ship named The Franklin. White had hoped to set up trade deals with the Vietnamese but was delayed by what he called “the countless idiosyncrasies of the Vietnamese.” He was repulsed by the people’s habits, which he considered to be barbarian. Despite his lack of understanding of the Vietnamese, he did leave a legacy, a book entitled, History of a Voyage to the China Sea. THE FIRST AMERICAN DIPLOMAT IN VIETN
