The Bound[less] Sea: Wilderness and the United States Exploring Expedition in the Fiji Islands

Abstract

The United States Exploring Expedition, which circumnavigated the world and surveyed the South Sea from 1838 to 1842, marked an important moment in Americans' changing perceptions of the Pacific Ocean from wilderness toward an ordered, knowable commercial space safe for the nation's maritime commerce. Nautical charts and the cartographic process were central to this transformation. Steeped in progressive notions of science and the supposed precision of cartographic method, the expedition's surveys charted waters that had once been little more than blank spaces in the maritime imagination. I argue that wilderness was an idea that transcended the North American forest, and one that stimulated a muscular naval science in the voyage of the Exploring Expedition. This article uses the expedition's survey of the Fiji Islands from May to August 1840 as a lens to examine the convergence of wilderness and naval science in the marine environment and in a larger maritime world undergoing political, commercial, environmental, and cultural changes. In the maritime imagination, the Fijis were a notorious wilderness of uncharted reefs and cannibals, but they were also waters that the United States sought to claim. The nautical charts produced by the expedition were at once powerful and flawed testaments to American commercial intentions and to the assumption that the United States could control the marine environment.