ESSAY REVIEW Chronicling the Second Great Age of Discovery
ESSAY REVIEW Chronicling the Second Great Age of Discovery From Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains: Major Stephen Long's Expedition, 1819-1820. Edited by MAXINE BENSON. (Golden: Fulcrum, Inc., 1988. xxvii, 41 Op. Illustrations, color plates, maps, bibliography, index. $20.00.) Voyage to the Southern Ocean: The Letters oj Lieutenant William Reynolds jrom the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. Edited by ANNE HOFFMAN CLEAVER and E. JEFFREY STANN. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988. xxxix, 325p. Illustrations, maps, appendixes, bibliography, index. $24.95.) The Nagle Journal: A Diary oj the Life oj Jacob Nagle, Sailor, From the Year 1775 to 1841. Edited by JOHN C. DANN. (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. xxx, 402p. Maps, illustrations, color plates, appen- dixes, glossary, index. $27.50.) These three books chronicle the adventures of men who ventured into the unknown in what is now becoming recognized as a unique second "Great Age of Discovery." Two of the accounts concern the stories of men sent out on U.S. Government exploring expeditions. A third, the journals of Jacob Nagle, chronicle the remarkable global peregrinations of an American sailor impressed into the British navy at the time of the American Revolution. His adventures in some ways call up memories of Sinbad, the Sailor, though his travels are demonstrably real. For a long time the important literature of exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was compartmentalized into "land" and "sea" categories; scholars made few attempts either to link these exploration narratives to any single cultural process or to see them as more than mere adventure stories.
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