Apr 27, 2017 - Sale 2444

Sale 2444 - Lot 88

Price Realized: $ 938
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(CHINA.) Schuyler, Walter Scribner. Diary and lecture notes from his 1904 work as a military attaché in Manchuria. Various sizes, in one box; condition generally strong. Vp, 1904-05
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Additional Details

Lieutenant Colonel Walter Scribner Schuyler (1850-1932) was an American veteran of the Indian wars and the Spanish-American War. He accompanied the Russian army as a military observer in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War. His 141-page diary covers the first part of his mission, from 25 April to 17 May 1904. Most of it is a detailed travel narrative as he moves northward from Hong Kong to Shanghai (where he met Admiral Yates Stirling on 2 May) to Beijing, where he had an audience with the Empress Dowager Cixi (9 May, pages 90-94). He offers detailed and sympathetic descriptions of China, including a discussion of the small Jewish community on page 47, but his loyalties in the Russian-Japanese conflict could not be clearer or more racially motivated: "A yellow race whipping a white one would be an unpleasant spectacle" (28 April, page 25). He reaches Mukden (now Shenyang) near the front on 15 May, and meets with Admiral Yevgeni Ivanovich Alekseyev, commander of the Russian forces, the following day (page 129). While meeting with another Russian general who spoke a bit of English, "he asked me what I was going to do without the languages, and I had only to shrug my shoulders, for that is just what is bothering me" (page 124). The diary concludes at the major Russian camp at Liaoyang.
Also included is Schuyler's 40-page typed address to the National Geographic Society titled "Manchuria," delivered on 8 March 1905. The manuscript has Schuyler's corrections and annotations, and discusses his travels rather than any confidential military aspects of his journey. It is accompanied by Schuyler's correspondence with Col. Carl Reichmann regarding the publication of the address, and a faded photograph which apparently depicts a scene from the expedition.
Schuyler later reached the rank of general, and became the first commander of the army's Pacific Command in 1909. See also his much earlier letters from the Indian Wars (lot 11), as well as the papers of his father and sister (lots 260 and 261). with--a packet of congratulation letters and cards received upon his second marriage in 1921, many from notable military leaders 16 loose leaves from his diary as commander of Fort Huachuca, AZ, September-October 1908 and a few other related papers.