Alex's Reviews > Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

It is difficult to believe this expedition actually occurred. For two reasons. One is its utterly immense scope. From 1838-1842, a small navy squadron sailed from Norfolk to Madeira to Rio to Cape Horn to the Antarctic Peninsula to Valparaiso to French Polynesia to Fiji to Sydney to Antarctica to New Zealand to Hawaii to the Puget Sound to the Columbia River to San Francisco bay to Hawaii to Manilla to Cape Horn to St. Helena and then to New York. To quote the preface: “The Expedition logged 87,000 miles, surveyed 280 Pacific islands, and created 180 charts-some of which were still being used as late as World War II. The Expedition also mapped 800 miles of coastline in the Pacific Northwest and 1,500 miles of the icebound Antarctic coast. Just as important would be its contribution to the rise of science in America. The thousands of specimens and artifacts amassed by the Expedition's scientists would become the foundation of the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.”

The second reason is hardly anybody living in the 21st century has ever heard of it. If the book has a primary theme it is exploring why this is so. The reason is that the men of the expedition, both its leader (Lt. Charles Wilkes, who insisted being called commodore during the expedition even though he wasn't even a captain) and the subordinate officers, were so obsessed with glory and rank and prestige that the expedition’s fallout (there were innumerable courts martial when the expedition ended) overshadowed what the men had accomplished.

I suspect another reason is that the USA changed a lot at the exact same time the expedition occurred. In the late 1830s, the frontier really was the sea. But by the 1840s, when the first wagon trains headed out and Fremont started his own series of expeditions and the USA settled its boundary dispute with Britain, annexed Texas, and entered into the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the frontier had became the west.

I rate this book highly even though I have no doubt that out there somewhere, probably unwritten, is a much better (and bigger) book. As impressive as his scholarship and writing was, Philbrick did not spend as much time as I expected on the actual work of the expedition. But I think whole books could be written about several episodes in the expedition.