Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century America

CHAPTER 2: Tarrying with the National: Fantasizing the Subject of State

· 57 ·· CHAPTER 2 · Tarrying with the National: Fantasizing the Subject of State Fantasy has been where statehood takes hold and binds its subjects, and then, unequal to its own injunctions, lets slip just a little. —Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy These waves, to me, are what the land is to you; I was born on them, and I have always meant that they should be my grave. —James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot If the sailor is a specter-like catalyst for antebellum maritime fantasies, then for many of this era’s related narratives, the nation might be viewed as a common symbolic denouement. Indeed, maritime endeavors were paramount to the young country’s economic, military, and spatial development, playing a salient role in both how and why its mainland domains rapidly expanded via the Louisiana Purchase and the subsequent appropriation of Mexican territories. This process of expansion included , by the time of the Civil War, the construction of a navy that could have menaced the dominating fleets possessed by England and France during the Napoleonic era. Though North American merchants had created piecemeal a veritable flotilla of private men-of-war as early as the 1740s, the rapid creation of an official naval force was quite a feat if one considers that it did not begin until 1794 and then only with the construction of a meager six frigates.1 Economic and scientific expansion into Pacific, Asian, and Arctic maritime regions during the early nineteenth century, therefore, was directly tied to state military power. In fact, American merchants’ initial push into the Pacific during the late eighteenth century stemmed from a dire need for open markets when the British banned American ships from its colonial 58 TARRYING WITH THE NATIONAL ports after the close of the Revolutionary War. In the antebellum era, such direct connections between merchant and national maritime registers are apparent in the military instructions to Charles Wilkes’s 1838 United States Exploring Expedition, as mentioned in the Introduction, where the secretary of the navy writes that Congress had voted to finance the mission in order “to extend the empire of commerce.”2 Antebellum-era citizens eagerly read of Wilkes’s experiences and were also familiar with Benjamin Morrell ’s account of South Pacific and Arctic exploits (1822–31) as well as Captain David Porter’s narrative of Pacific activity (1812–14). The mainland public, in other words, was quite conscious of the concerted and ongoing national effort to both physically and empirically extend the nation’s command over foreign and largely unknown maritime regions. It is thus easy to see why many antebellum maritime narratives take up the subject of the nation—especially in the years following the politically divisive War of 1812, when surprising naval victories offered fodder for nationalistic fantasies. Even maritime texts that do not ostensibly treat national or naval issues negotiate such topics through their contexts’ broader implications. Examples of this abound in early-American maritime texts. Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill (1797), for instance, ends a rather stock captivity narrative of abduction, internment, and escape from a Barbary “pirate” state with a charged call for military and naval power, asserting that the events in the tale evince the “necessity of uniting our federal strength to enforce a due respect among other nations.”3 Such sentiment is also voiced in Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex (1821). Chase opens the harrowing tale of a spermwhale attack by discussing British competition in the developing Pacific whale fishery, and explicitly states that “recent events have shown that we require a competent naval force in the Pacific, for the protection of this important and lucrative . . . commerce.”4 These repeated calls for the use of concerted national force—obviously heeded by the time of Wilkes’s expedition—depart distinctlyfrompoliticalviewsdominantduringtheFederalist era, which, though favoring the construction of a navy, opted for political neutrality within international and foreign waters so as to allow American merchant shipping to profit from Europe’s splintered allegiances.5 Timely national issues within antebellum maritime narratives, however , extend far beyond concerns of military naval power proper. In Melville ’s early adventure narratives Typee and Omoo, for example, he repeat- TARRYING WITH THE NATIONAL 59 edly delves into the nuances and complexities of national colonial projects and missionary endeavors in Polynesia. As Bruce...