In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER I Sf Exploration and New Territories, 1780-1850s ~ Throughout the era of exploration, discovery, and colonization ofthe New World, expeditions searched for water or land routes to Asian wealth. The quest had always had plural objectives: China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands. The chief problems in the Pacific region related to the geographical vastness; the inadequate navigational charts; the complexity ofdealing with numerous, distinct indigenous populations ; and the tense relations among adventurers, settlers, merchants, sailors, and missionaries from various imperial states. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, various sea and land explorers-for example, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Jean Fran~ois de la Perouse, James Cook, C.A. Vincendon-Dumoulins, Charles Wilkes, John Ledyard, John Jacob Astor, Meriwether Lewis, and George Rodgers Clark-and a multitude of whalers and sealers supplied information and generated curiosity about access to the Pacific and about the Pacific basin.I John Ledyard, who sailed in the 1770s with James Cook, the great British Pacific explorer, had noticed how eagerly the Chinese traded for furs. In the 1780s, he planned to return to China for a fur-trading venture, but in Paris, U.S. minister Thomas Jefferson enlisted him to cross Russia, sail the northern Pacific to Nootka Sound, and finally cross the U.S. continent from west to east. The scheme collapsed when Ledyard was arrested in Siberia and sent back to Europe.2 But increasing numbers of dreamers, adventurers, and entrepreneurs hoped to link the New World to Asia. Increasingly after the sixteenth century, explorers sought a canal route or a waterway that would cut the continent in two (such as Mexico's Tehuantepec Isthmus, Nicaragua's San Juan River, or Colombia's Atrato River). Proposals 10 Uncle Sam's War of 1898 for transisthmian roads and, even more enthusiastically, railroads attracted investors and engineers in the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century , as historian Charles Vevier so aptly describes, U.S. geopoliticians had incorporated part of North America, the Caribbean basin, northern South America, and the isthmus into projects that aimed to open up the Pacific basin. Such ideas persisted until the Panama Canal was completed in the early twentieth century.3 Land expansion served an agrarian folk in the first instance, but successful farmers on rich lands needed markets to absorb their large harvests and to acquire the production of others to enhance rural life. Initially, the source of imported goods and the market for surplus production were across the water in Great Britain. Later, the routes from the east coast area to Asia went on water, over land, or via some combination of the two. Historian Foster Rhea Dulles observed that the "ambition to win the mastery of the Pacific and control its rich commerce runs persistently through the entire history ofthe United States ... first awakened by the old China traders."4 The importance of water in early North American history has been obscured . Since the 1890s, Frederick Jackson Turner and other historians have emphasized the westward movement and diverted attention to land in the first three centuries of European settlement in North America. Water was not just an essential dietary component; it offered transportation, nourishment, and recreation. Many colonists lived from shipbuilding, fishing, and maritime activity. Novelist Herman Melville captured the power ofthe Pacific Ocean's image in the mid-nineteenth century: "This serene Pacific ... rolls the mid-most waters ofthe world, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles ofthe new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts ofAsiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay of it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth." His imagery reflected the aspirations ofColumbus and the inspiration of the geopoliticians of the nineteenth century.s The Hawaiian islands, the inhabited island group closest to the west coast of North America, were an early objective in the Pacific for U.S. expansionists . Explorers and seafarers knew this island group well since Cook visited them in 1778. The discovery of Japanese sperm whale fields in the 1810s boosted Hawaii's utility, and Hawaii became the principal base for whaling in [3.16.81.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 02:52...

Share