Publisher Description
“A treasure of a book.”—David McCullough The harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane’s Eye. A New York Times Notable Book America’s first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his bestselling In the Heart of the Sea Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen—the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, six magnificent sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and ended up naming the newly discovered continent of Antarctica, collecting what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution. Combining spellbinding human drama and meticulous research, Philbrick reconstructs the dark saga of the voyage to show why, instead of being celebrated and revered as that of Lewis and Clark, it has—until now—been relegated to a footnote in the national memory. Winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize
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“Very interesting book about an Expedition I had never heard about. It was an amazing 4 year expedition that charted much of the Pacific Ocean, Antarctica, and the Pacific Northwest. It still amazes me how these sailors navigated around the globe with basically just a compass and the stars to find their way. This book told the story of the expedition as far as all the adventure and the danger, but also concentrated on the relationships between the leader of the expedition, Charles Wilkes, and his fellow officers and crew. Wilkes was a very strange fellow, extremely driven, but also an incredible ego-maniac. He was so driven by his own desire for self-grandeur that he made some very poor decisions, and became pretty much hated by most everyone under his command. Very detailed, but also very interesting read.”
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Robert (4 out of 5 stars)
