Abstract
For much of the nineteenth century, national competition defined attempts to investigate the poles. International scientific cooperation depended on a variety of particular social and political factors. Such mutual collaboration could best occur during periods of relative diplomatic tranquility. Just as the decades between the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the outbreak of the Crimean War (1854) had provided such a space for scientific teamwork, so the political situation after the Congress of Berlin (1878) opened the possibility of another era of international scientific partnership. Indeed, rather than being novel, the efforts leading up to the coordinated study of the Arctic during the first International Polar Year (IPY) (1882–83) represented the return to a model of international action first seen earlier in the century. These synchronized attempts to solve the mysteries of the Arctic momentarily blunted nationalistic bravado in favor of a cosmopolitan study of geoscience but also gave domestic politics a more significant role in shaping those scientific ventures. Such cooperative scientific pursuits seemed well suited to the peacetime situations of the nineteenth century and serve as a model of analysis for history. By comparing parallel efforts by Great Britain and the United States to launch an Antarctic expedition in the early nineteenth century, it is possible to see the effect that domestic partisan realities could have on the supposedly impartial study of science in this period.
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Notes
See Bruce Hunt, “Doing Science in a Global Empire: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in Victorian Britain,” in Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 312–333.
John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 34–47.
Robert Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science: 1846–1876 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987), 130–134.
Quoted in Jeremiah Reynolds, The South Sea Surveying and Exploring Expedition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841), 186.
Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 340.
Henry to Bache, August 9, 1838. Marc Rothenberg, Paul Thompson, Kathleen Doman, John Rumm, and Deborah Jeffries, eds., The Papers of Joseph Henry (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 4:103. Hereafter cited as JHP.
Although concentrated in New England, American scientists were spread out over the whole nation. In 1846 there were no fewer than 32 different scientific societies in the United States. Robert Bruce, “A Statistical Profile of American Scientists, 18461876,” in George Daniels ed., Nineteenth-Century American Science: A Reappraisal (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1972): 63–94.
James Gabriel O’Hara, “Gauss and the Royal Society: The Reception of His Ideas on Magnetism in Britain (1832–1842)” Notes & Records of the Royal Society of London 38, no.1 (August 1983): 28.
The earliest occurrences of the term “Magnetic Crusade” in the nineteenth century appear to be from America in the 1840s. Farrar and Lovering refer to “the present magnetic crusade” in their 1842 textbook on electromagnetism, while Robert Patterson used the term in his 1843 address to the American Philosophical Society. John Farrar and Joseph Lovering, Electricity, Magnetism and Electrodynamics (Boston: Crocker & Ruggles, 1842), 243; “Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary, May 25, 1843,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 3, no. 27 (May 25–30, 1843): 34. I am grateful to Marc Rothenberg for his assistance in finding these citations.
John Cawood, “Terrestrial Magnetism and the Development of International Collaboration in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Annals of Science 34 (1977): 585.
Herschel, “Terrestrial Magnetism,” Quarterly Review 66 (1840): 294.
William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (London: Parker & Son, 1857), 55.
The idea of an open polar sea had existed at least since the fourteenth century. Kirsten Seaver, The Frozen Echo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 262. Both Howgate and Hayes continued to believe in the existence of such a sea that could be traversed with little difficulty.
Henry Howgate, “Arctic Meeting at Chickering Hall,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 10 (1878): 280, 293.
William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 17–27. “Whig” here refers collectively to the various anti-Jacksonian parties of the period.
Goetzmann suggests that “Jackson’s forces pushed the exploring expedition bill through Congress,” an assertion that is difficult to sustain given the relative lack of support from Democrats (only 48 percent in favor) when compared to the anti-Jacksonian Whigs. William Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men (New York: Viking, 1986), 271.
Jackson to Dickerson, July 9, 1836. Nathan Reingold, ed., Science in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1964), 110.
Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory (New York: Viking, 2003), 35.
Quoted in C. Ian Jackson, “Exploration as Science: Charles Wilkes and the U. S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–42,” American Scientist 73 (1985): 455.
Quoted in William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 68.
Peale felt that the collected items were only “of value to ‘closet-naturalists,’ stay-at-home philosophers, and others who could profit by Congressional appropriations of money, liberally made for the care of the articles.” Titian Ramsey Peale, “The South Sea Surveying and Exploring Expedition,” American Historical Record 3, no. 30 (June 1874): 249. In 1846 Henry had questioned the need to spend thousands of dollars displaying the expedition’s specimens, commenting “a collection of curiosities at Washington is a very indirect means of increasing or diffusing knowledge.” Henry to Hawley, December 28, 1846 (JHP 4, 612).
James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 56–66.
The stone observatory buildings of Rossbank still stand on the grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens and Government House in Hobart, now restored and used as residences. Ann Savours and Anita McConnell, “The History of the Rossbank Observatory, Tasmania,” Annals of Science 39, no. 6 (November 1982): 541–543, 546.
Julius Payer, “The Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition of 1872–4,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 45 (1875): 1–19.
William Barr, “Geographical Aspects of the First International Polar Year,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, no. 4 (December 1983): 465, 473.
Karl Weyprecht, “Scientific Work of the Second Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition, 1872–4,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 45 (1875): 19–33.
Nancy Fogelson, Arctic Exploration and International Relations (Fairbanks, University of Alaska Press, 1992), 10–11.
W. Elmer Ekblaw, “The Arctic Voyages and the Discoveries of Dehaven, Kane and Hall,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 82, no. 5 (June 1940): 879.
James Rodger Fleming and Cara Seitchek, “Advancing Polar Research and Communicating Its Wonders: Quests, Questions, and Capabilities of Weather and Climate Studies in International Polar Years,” in I. Krupnik, M.A. Lang, and S.E. Miller, eds., Smithsonian at the Poles: Contributions to International Polar Year Science (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2009), 1–12.
Congressional Globe, 41st Congress, 2nd session, 1773, 2211, 2807, 3144. For the Polaris expedition, see Richard Parry, Trial by Ice (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001).
Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 2nd session, 2931. Following the condemnation of the Gulnare, the 46th Congress again voted to support the expedition the following year. Alden Todd, Abandoned (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press 2001), 16.
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© 2010 Roger D. Launius, James Rodger Fleming, and David H. DeVorkin
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Carter, C. (2010). Going Global in Polar Exploration: Nineteenth-century American and British Nationalism and Peacetime Science. In: Launius, R.D., Fleming, J.R., DeVorkin, D.H. (eds) Globalizing Polar Science. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114654_6
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