Empire of Commerce and Science

This chapter examines the voyage of the United States Exploration Expedition, 1838-1842, focusing specifically on its hydrographic survey of the Fiji Islands in the summer of 1840. The coral reef-infested waters of the Fijis were among the most notorious in the Euro-American maritime world. They had long been ill-charted, and the Fijians themselves were widely rumored to be cannibals. This chapter argues that the American expedition sought to impose order on this dangerous marine environment through its hydrographic surveying, a fidelity to the precision of their methods, and, if necessary, by using the military power of this scientific expedition. Throughout the survey, the Americans’ faith in the precision of their work and the charts that derived from them was continually undermined by the agency of the marine environment and by the Fijian people themselves. Even as the American sought to open this ocean wilderness to expanding American trade in the islands by bringing order not just to the surrounding waters but to the cultural practice of Fijian cannibalism in a wide-ranging survey, they nevertheless had to resort to both science and violence when two American officers were attacked and killed.