Making War upon the Chart

This chapter examines the place of charts and hydrographic surveying in the consolidation of a formal American empire after 1898 and the central place of environmental knowledge in the broader strategic debates concerning American empire in the post war period, 1899-1903. It follows the work of surveying vessels off Cuba and the Philippines, the emerging role of the Hydrographic Office and its leaders, and the strategic debates among officer-students at the United States Naval War College and the Navy’s top leadership in the General Board of the Navy in recognizing and debating the importance of the marine environment generally and the specific strategic features of various harbors and coastlines from the Caribbean to the Western Pacific. The chapter argues that charts, hydrographic surveying, and a larger cartographic discourse were central to the geography of American empire, particularly in projecting American sea power into the Western Pacific and the Caribbean.

The Common Highway

This chapter examines the hydrographic work of the U.S. Naval Observatory and Hydrographical Office under the leadership of Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, 1842-1861, a tenure in which Maury brought the Navy to the forefront of antebellum American applied and theoretical science and embarked upon revolutionary new cartographic conventions in his Wind and Current Charts series. Maury pushed and considerably expanded the boundaries of the hydrographic chart to include wind speed, ocean temperature, ship tracks, and whales, among other things, creating a partnership with American and foreign mariners to collect and systematize data about the marine environment thereby significantly shortening the length of voyages under sail, and breaking down the rule-of-thumb navigational methods deeply-rooted in maritime culture. With Maury’s publication of The Physical Geography of the Sea in 1855, he became the intellectual and political rival and sometime enemy of key leaders in the American civilian scientific community. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that at a time when the U.S. Navy, the American maritime community, and civilian science were diverging, Maury was just the sort of figure who could bridge increasingly widening intellectual, cultural, and institutional gaps between them.

Wilderness of Waters

This chapter examines the origins of navigational science in the American maritime culture of the early nineteenth century, in marine societies, and in the U.S. Navy, linking the institutionalization of naval science to the broader expansion of American maritime commerce and the evolving role of science in the federal government more broadly. The chapter argues that naval scientists, surveyors, and cartographers saw their work as bringing empirical rationality to a watery wilderness, imposing cartographic order over nature and an appropriation of space in the interests of American maritime commerce. In the process, they aimed to replace folkloric and experiential navigational understandings deeply held by the American seafaring community with a growing embrace of science institutionalized in the federal government and in the American navy specifically.

Introduction

The introduction established the main argument of the book, which is that the U.S. Navy’s charts and its chart-making throughout the nineteenth century were integral to the expansion of American oceanic empire even as such effort exposed the limits of science practice, seafaring, and war-making in a dynamic, dangerous marine environment. The Navy and the broader American maritime world’s encounter with the ocean, mediated through science, was integral to the way mariners, navigators, and naval officers thought of an emerging maritime empire first in commercial terms and, by the late nineteenth century, in new geo-strategic terms. The introduction also places the larger work within the historiographies of military, maritime, and naval history as well as environmental history and the history of science and cartography, seeking to establish historiographical and methodological bridges among these sub-fields.

Epilogue

The epilogue tracks the evolution of naval science and its relationship to the broader scientific world into the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries with attention to the growing strategic role of cartography, oceanography, and marine science within the Cold War national security state, the emergence of submarine warfare, and the militarization of science in weaponizing nature itself. The epilogue argues that while science became even more central to strategic discourse and naval warfare more generally, it continued to have a fraught place within the Navy’s ranks and its significance was not continuously appreciated among naval leaders even as the U.S. Marine Corps in the interwar period placed strategic knowledge of the natural world at the foundation of its emerging amphibious assault doctrine. Finally, the epilogue makes some general claims about the significance of the marine environment to naval affairs in the present day by linking the Navy’s strategic visions to a marine environment made more violent and dynamic by the influence of climate change as well as the renewed importance of hydrographers historic methods and data as baselines from which to understand the degree of change in the world’s oceans.

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.

Conquering Old Ocean

This chapter examines U.S. Navy’s hydrographic efforts after the American Civil War, in the period from 1865-1890, an era in which earlier commercial imperatives began to significantly breakdown with the near demise of the American merchant marine and amid slowly-growing geo-strategic imperatives related to the growth of American imperial aspirations, particularly in the Pacific Ocean. The chapter traces a multiplicity of hydrographic efforts from the North Pacific, to the Central American isthmus, the Arctic and the deep sea, arguing that this era was actually one of vigour for American naval science even as the American navy more generally shrank considerably from wartime peaks and lost ground in terms of technological innovation. The Navy’s hydrographic efforts show both a continued commercial imperative and now, emergent strategic interests that would fully emerge in 1898 during the Spanish-American War and with the acquisition of a territorial empire. Finally, despite a growing faith in technology and machines to both usher new dimensions of hydrographic surveys and to change the natural world, these American efforts remained limited, often undermined by the magnitude and dangers of scientific work in a difficult environment.

’Twixt the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

This chapter examines the full emergence of hydrographic surveying, charts, and knowledge of the marine environment as a strategic imperative that underpinned American empire broadly and naval operations specifically during the Spanish-American-Philippine War, 1898-1902. The emergence of a modern steam-powered, steel-hulled fleet complemented new ideas about the United States’ role in the world and the size of its navy in the writings of the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. During the War with Spain, a close look at the operations of the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Cuba highlights the significance of the marine environment amid a poorly-charted, circuitous and dangerous coastal waters and the necessity of accurate knowledge of these waters for tactical, operational, and strategic reasons. The Navy found itself similarly ill-prepared in the Philippines. This chapter argues that the practice of naval operations and warfare during this war showed the marine environment to be a dangerous natural enemy, every bit as if not more fearsome than the largely inept Spanish enemy. The Americans won the war rather easily and with great consequence for America’s imperial ascendancy, but the conflict had also made clear that American sea power did not rest far from knowledge of the sea itself.