Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Paul Mapp, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Exploration forms a fundamental part of both the prehistory and history of North America. From the earliest arrival of Asians and Europeans in the Americas, unknown territories had to be investigated, mapped, and assimilated into existing conceptions of cosmography, humanity, and religion. Surveying the land and its resources was an imperative for aggressive and avaricious European colonists, and, in the long international struggle for dominance in the Americas, usable geographical information constituted a coveted resource. Witness the many British and French efforts to find a passage to the Pacific and the alarm these efforts aroused in the minds of rival Spanish officials. Native peoples' long familiarity with the terrain gave them a critical advantage over newcomers in these struggles to comprehend and control North America, and acquisition of this native information, or at least some usable approximation thereof, was bound up with the advance of European expansion.	1
In the history of the United States, exploration became assimilated into the mythology and memory of the West: Frederick Jackson Turner's evolving frontier is unimaginable without the explorer in his many forms. Historians of science are equally indebted to explorers, whose ventures into mysterious lands and waters opened new areas for European and American investigation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; from James Cook to John Wesley Powell, the allure of scientific discovery has actuated exploration of North America as fully as have politics and profit. The drama of such expeditions inspired such classic studies of Western discovery and settlement as Bernard De Voto's The Course of Empire (Boston, 1952) and William H. Goetzmann's Exploration and Empire (New York, 1966). As such authors were well aware, western myth and European science resist simple separation, and in the story of American exploration, as of American history more generally, cultural ideas and representations shaped both the conduct of exploration and the understandings it generated.	2
Accommodating a good portion of these numerous facets of American scientific exploration is the challenge faced by Surveying the Record, a collection of essays that features efforts to chart a new history of science and exploration in the American past. The sixteen papers' origins lie in a March 1997 conference on "North American Scientific Exploration to 1900" held in Philadelphia and sponsored by the American Philosophical Society, an organization whose interest in scientific exploration dates back to the role it played in providing scientific instruction to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark before their transcontinental expedition. The conference sought to examine "new historical approaches to scientific expeditions and surveys" (p. xi). Many of Surveying the Record's individual essays are excellent, but the book as a whole will be of limited use to early Americanists because most of its papers treat subjects from periods after the early nineteenth century and because the essays do not offer a sufficiently wide sampling of the various approaches scholars are currently using in the study of exploration.	. . .