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. Now we are beginning to view such narratives as signs of an age engaged not merely in geographical discovery but also in the

THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXIV, No. 1 (January 1990) 98 ESSAY REVIEW January formative stages of modern science.1 Before now, Charles Darwin's voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle commanded the most attention. Now, grand global ventures like the Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 are coming into focus. This particular expedition, for example, offered inductive field research that provided the first support for Darwin's theory of evolution. In addition, the work of the American geologist, James Dwight Dana, confirmed Darwin's theory on the formation of coral atolls. In charting the sequence of the emergence of the volcanic islands of the vast Pacific, Dana laid the groundwork for the modern theory of plate tectonics. The Great United States Exploring Expedition also proved that the white and frozen Antarctic was the southern continent that had been the object of European searches for nearly two centuries. • Clearly, scholars should pay more serious attention to exploring expedi- tions as part of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural process even more powerful than the phenomenon of rising nationalism. The relationship of exploration to imperialism has long been evident, especially as it so dramatically appeared on the continent of Africa and the sub-continent of India. What has not been sufficiently recognized, perhaps because of the emphasis on political history, are the ways in which exploration signaled, during these centuries, the emergence of an inductive culture of science that spread over the globe and, in so doing, defined reality and—to a virtually unrecognized extent—"normalcy." That is, because science became synonymous with "civilization" and "progress," Europeans and Euro-Amer- icans unselfconsciously defined their ways of life superior to all others which were considered "savage" and "backward." And as Christianity became scientized, it re-enforced the hegemony of the culture of science which we are just now seeing at a crisis point in the long tide of history. For historians, what this means is that we must go back over exploring accounts and read them not as mere adventure stories, no matter how good they are in that respect, but rather as critically important evidence of the "emergence of modern science." Because of the development of the inductive and hy- pothesis-oriented scientific method during this period, science and scientific expeditions became qualitatively different from those of the age of Colum- bus. In the first of the three works at hand, Edwin James's account of Major Stephen H. Long's expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains in 1819 and 1820, Maxine Benson, biographer of Edwin James, presents

1 Robert V. Bruce, in The Launching of Modern American Sciencey 1846-1876 (New York, 1987), 201-14, gives only a cursory treatment of the relationship of exploration to the emergence of modern science in America. 1990 ESSAY REVIEW 99 readers with an edited, abridged edition of James's western classic. The historian of the fur trade, General Hiram M. Chittenden, called Long's trek across the Great Plains and south along the front range of the Rockies "an expedition smothered in elaboration of method." He refused to note its importance. Benson in part remedies this deficiency by noting that Long's scientifically derived map was of signal importance, that his expedition, even more than that of Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, stamped the Great Plains as a "Great American Desert," and that the expedition's artists, Samuel Seymour and Titian R. Peale, provided the world with the first views of what became the American West. Unfortunately, in this beautifully illustrated edition (featuring Titian Peak's delicate watercolors and Seymour's first view of the Rockies, alas presented backwards) Benson did not pursue far enough the theme of science and what art can tell science. Like an earlier, handsomely packaged limited reprint edition of the same journey edited by Howard R. Lamar of Yale, Benson focused on the narrative and left out the scientific appendixes. Moreover, like Lamar and anthropologist John Ewers, Benson found the illustrations by Seymour and Peale chiefly important as documentation of ethnology and natural history. It never occurred to her that none of the pictures portrayed a desert environment and that Peak's drawings of animals suggested that the Great Plains represented in fact a rich biota. Indeed, the much maligned Journal of Sergeant Patrick Gass (1811), chronicling the Lewis and Clark expedition, came closer to the truth concerning the abun- dance of flocks and herds and fish out on the Great Plains than did James's account if it is not read shrewdly. Historians have been so grateful for James's and Long's conceptualization of "The Great American Desert" and its linkage to the 1930s Dust Bowl that they have not really penetrated the between-the-lines meaning of the complete James report. If Seymour's Distant View oj the Rocky Mountains with its carpet of pool-table green and its distant herds of buffalo, as well as the suggestive marine fossils in the foreground, did not subtly suggest something more than a desert environ- ment, then surely his watercolor, James Peak in the Rain, recently discovered by Patricia Trenton, certainly gives the lie to the desert theory. But then scholars since Walter P. Webb2 have, in view of the 1930s Dust Bowl, consistently misread not only Long's map and James's narrative but also Major John Wesley Powell's classic Report Upon the Arid Regions oj the United States (1878) in not distinguishing between the country west of the 98th meridian and that east of it, which is also part of the Great Plains.

! See Walter P. Webb's classic, The Great Plains (Boston, 1931). 100 ESSAY REVIEW January

As the maps in Donald Worsteds The Dust Bowl3 indicate, the major dust- blown area lay mostly in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. Even the writer, Frank Baum, in his Oz stories, and John Steuart Curry, in his paintings, recognized the existence of rain storms and even tornadoes out in the Great Plains. Needless to say, the whole import of James's narrative and Long's map need to be more closely scrutinized than they have been previously. Unfortunately, in the Benson edition, the crucial area of Long's map is obscured, ironically enough, by the book's gutters. Before leaving this overview of James's Report and Long's expedition, it needs to be said that Benson at least made an effort to identify the scientists and artists on the expedition. But in leaving out the scientific appendixes, she overlooked the most revolutionary conclusion stemming from the ex- pedition. The geological report posited the Rocky Mountains as a great uplift fault that eons ago rose up out of an ancient lake bed that formed the Great Plains. This conclusion, skipped by more than one generation, completely undermined the biblical story of creation, and Anglican Bishop Usher's carefully calculated 4004-year-long history of the earth. This was truly subversive and indicative of the way the culture of science was subtly infiltrating the culture of Christianity.4 In any case, the U.S. Government refused to print James's Report and published only Long's map with "Great Desert" printed across the Great Plains. James's Report, with appendixes, but without all of Seymour's 150 landscapes and Peale's great number of watercolors, had to be privately printed. It remains a rare book, even with Lamar's limited edition, which is why we must be grateful for Benson's modestly priced edition complete with some of Peale's interesting pictures in accurate colors. The Reynolds volume, edited by Anne Hoffman Cleaver and E. Jeffrey Stann as Voyage to the Southern Ocean, is a welcome addition to the growing literature of "The Great United States Exploring Expedition" of 1838- 1842, sometimes known as the "Wilkes Expedition," with reference to the expedition's malevolent commander.5 This new book presents, for the first

3 Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl (New York, 1979). 4 See Herbert Hovencamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800-1860 (Philadelphia, 1978). 5 At least four authoritative books deal extensively with the Great United States Exploring Expedition. Of these, the classic work is William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition oj 1838-1942 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975). Herman Viola and Caroline Margolis, eds., Magnificent Voyagers: The United States Exploring Expedition 1838-1842 (Wash- ington, 1985), supplies the most pictorial material. See also David B. Tyler, The Wilkes Expedition, 1838-1841 (Philadelphia, 1968); William H. Goetzmann, New Lands, New 1990 ESSAY REVIEW 101 time, the letters of Lieutenant William Reynolds, one of the first on the expedition to sight Antarctica's mountains on January 16, 1840. In this edition, the editors also have interspersed parts of Reynolds's "secret jour- nal"—the most biting and candidly detailed account of the expedition. It is to be hoped that the editors' next venture will be to publish Reynolds's "secret journal," which is far more complete and interesting than the letters which Reynolds believed might be intercepted and read by his commander, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. Still, Reynolds's letters are interesting. Like most officers on the expe- dition, he begins by praising the erudite Wilkes. By December 1839, along with all but three of his officer comrades, he had come to hate Wilkes, the American Captain Bligh. But other aspects of Reynolds's collection of letters are even more in- teresting. He writes of South Sea cannibals who came aboard ship munching on a roasted human head. In the same spirit, he casually accepts genocide as the solution to cannibalism. He vividly chronicles battles with the natives and the perils of surveying, in a longboat, islands surrounded by dangerous reefs and "thousands" of pursuing sharks. He tells of the sighting of Antarctica, but says he forgot to note it in his Journal on January 16, commenting that his comrade, Lieutenant Henry Eld, had done so (he didn't know that Lieutenant G.F. Emmons also had noted land to the south). This is important because Captain William Hudson, commanding the U.S.S. Peacock, paid their observation little heed, and Lieutenant Wilkes later "doctored" the logbooks, bringing the all-important discovery of the Antarctic continent by Americans into question—by the British Captain James Clark Ross and the French Captain Dumont D'Urville, whose men landed on the continent on January 19, 1840, three days later. The real proof of the Wilkes expedition's discovery of Antarctica as a continent lay not in Wilkes's doctored logbook, but in the journals of his subordinates.6

Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery (New York, 1986), 265-97. Daniel C. Haskell, The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, and its Publications, 1844-1874 (reprint ed., New York, 1968), is the authoritative bibliography of the extensive publications resulting from the expedition. Perhaps the place to start is Charles Wilkes, Narrative oj the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 . . . In Five Volumes and Atlas (Philadelphia, 1844). 6 In footnote 3, page 128, of Voyage to the Southern Ocean, Cleaver and Stann explain that Reynolds notes land in Antarctica on January 16, 1840, in his "secret journal," but may have added that sentence later, just as a page was inserted into his Public Journal between pages 120 and 121. On p. 130, footnote 3, of Voyage to the Southern Ocean, the editors add that Eld had not neglected to enter the sighting in his Journal. 102 ESSAY REVIEW January

Perhaps the high point of Reynolds's letters is his account of the near disaster faced by Captain Hudson and his men aboard the Peacock as the ship became ice-bound beneath the menacing ice wall of Antarctica towering over the ship, which was rudderless. The ship and all the crew seemed doomed to destruction by the falling ice wall and the grinding ice packs. Only good luck and the professionalism of Captain Hudson and his men saved the ship from disaster. Interestingly enough, Reynolds did not report the expedition's earlier pass at the frozen continent in the summer of 1839, in which the Peacock surpassed Captain Cook's farthest southern latitude, and Wilkes's ships just missed sighting the Palmer Peninsula, though Rey- nolds does report the probable loss of the schooner Seagull with all hands off Cape Horn. This review essay, however, is not the place to recount Reynolds's ad- ventures. The letters represent new accounts of these adventures and his personal observation of Wilkes and his fellow officers, as well as his eth- nocentric view of the South Seas "savages." In his "secret journal" Reynolds is much more critical of the bigoted American missionaries than he is of the cannibal kings.7 This was an attitude shared, of course, by the whaleship novelist Herman Melville.8 Finally, one more of Reynolds's observations must be noted, because it reveals one aspect of the "Manifest Destiny" enthusiasm sweeping across America at the time. In October 1840, at the mouth of the Columbia River, Reynolds clearly expresses the realistic fear that Britain, not the United States, will occupy the Far Northwest. "If they are allowed to put one foot in," he wrote, "they will soon follow with the other. Whoever fortifies the mouth of the River will have the Command of the whole Coast and all of our territory."9 Reynolds's letters tell us much about the inner workings of the Great United States Exploring Expedition, but little about the culture of science. Rather, his larger interest seems to have been the international competition for Antarctica, the South Sea islands, and, most of all, the strategic northwest coast of America. This book is a handsome edition, including a reproduction of Dr. Charles F.B. Guillou's drawing of the Peacock on the verge of destruction beneath the ice wall of Antarctica—a picture now in the possession of Anne Hoffman

7 Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men, 278-79. Reynolds, in his "secret journal," notes that the Reverend John Williams treated the natives with "nothing but a gross absurd tissue of nonsense, ignorance and fanaticism." Reynolds later learned that Williams had been killed and eaten by the cannibals of the New Hebrides. 8 See the opening passages of Herman Melville, Typee, or a Peek at Polynesian Life (New York, 1846). 9 Cleaver and Stann, eds., Voyage to the Southern Ocean, 221. 1990 ESSAY REVIEW 103

Cleaver. Let us hope an edition of Reynolds's secret journal is the next volume forthcoming from these editors and the Naval Institute Press. Jacob Nagle's Journal recounts the simply incredible life of an ordinary man of the sea. Captured by the British during the American Revolution, he managed to serve on both sides of that conflict and still claim an American veteran's pension long after the war. Nagle's story from his birth at the Berks County, Pennsylvania, jail, managed by his father, and his service at the Battle of Brandywine (where he met George Washington), to his return to America after many years at sea (once serving with Horatio Nelson), is one of the greatest picaresque sea stories of all time. No review can do justice to the over sixty years of his adventurous life aboard ships that sailed all over the oceans of the world. To single out perhaps the most historically important of these voyages is to point to his service on the first ship of Governor Arthur Phillips's flotilla taking convict settlers to New Holland (Australia) in 1787. Nagle's de- scription of the voyage, his Australian coastal service in the captain's and then the governor's launch, his observations of Botany Bay and what became Sydney Harbour—all are important pioneer eyewitness views. Especially noteworthy are his casual comments about the doomed aborigines and the convict settlers. With regard to the latter, he is frank about the extent of male-female cohabitation (probably desirable from an imperialist-settlement point of view), and he just as casually recounts the hanging of convict Ann Davis for theft. He remembered that "she was so much intocsicated [sic] in liquor that she could not stand without holding her up. It was dreadful to see hur [sic] going to aternity [sic] out of this world in such a senseless, shocking manner."10 On the other hand, he also recounts the story of the black prisoner who, when about to be hanged, "laughed and seemed to rejoice, saying he would go to his own country and see his friends." Nagle adds, "The Governor could not think of hanging such an ingnorand [sic] creature and pardoned him."11 Clearly, for this sturdy man of the sea, who lived to be eighty before he died peacefully at Canton, Ohio, science, and even orthodox spelling, had not yet replaced a primitive Christianity. This is an important book—too important to be digested in a review. It is infused with the flavor of the sea as experienced by a very intelligent sailor over a long time and through many and various situations, some of which, like the Australian voyages and several British naval battles, are of real historical importance. This is also a heavily edited book with long connecting passages written by the editor, John C. Dann, for whom this is

' Quoted from Dann, ed., The Nagle Journal, 110. Ibid., 111. 104 ESSAY REVIEW January

the culmination of five years' work. One of the additional delights of the book is the inclusion of numerous pictures from the period and events closely related to Nagle's experiences. If social history reigns supreme today, this must be one of its naval classics. In summing up the significance of these three very different books, one can say that they all share the spirit of exploration. Even Nagle, the common seaman, continually looks forward to seeing new places like Australia and India and South America and China. He, like the other explorers, represents the emergence of global man borne over the land and the seas by a new science and a new technology. Islands, continents, vast plains, the Rocky Mountains, cannibals, convicts, Indians—all represented, in Emerson's words, "new lands [and] new men" (I would add, women) that began to fill the ever broadening horizons of the Second Great Age of Discovery.

University of Texas, Austin WILLIAM H. GOETZMANN