The hydrographer's narrative: Writing global knowledge in the 1830s

Abstract

In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, the Admiralty Hydrographic Office revived and expanded the tradition of state sponsored scientific voyages. These voyages produced charts and technical sailing directions for navigators. They also generated general narratives for a wider audience. In such narratives, officers gave chronological accounts of their travels that folded in miscellaneous scientific content, from instrument tables to natural historical and ethnographical descriptions. These narratives are easy to dismiss as potboilers, clumsy accounts that simply exploited the market for travel writing. Focusing on the hydrographers and texts involved with a pair of famous voyages, the Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle (1839), I argue that the general narratives deserve closer attention. In an age better known for developing specialists and disciplines, the Admiralty voyage narratives followed a model of generalist knowledge. As distinctive literary products of hydrography, moreover, they reflected the values and training of a Royal Navy hydrographer. The texts are a neglected element of early Victorian print culture. Showing the imperial hydrographer at work in throughout the world's oceans, they are also part of the history of globalized knowledge. Through a consideration of these texts, we can see how hydrography treated accuracy, synthesis and crisis.