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, appendixes, 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 expeditions 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 environment, 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 expedition. 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).

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