East India Marine Society

The East India Marine Society was founded in 1799 in Salem, Massachusetts, by shipmasters and supercargoes who had sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. Members deposited navigational logs and the natural and ethnographic curiosities they collected on Asian and Pacific voyages, forming a cabinet of artifacts. That collection became the East India Marine Hall and grew into the Peabody Academy of Science, today the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, which holds one of the oldest continuously operating museum collections in the United States.