America’s Ocean Wilderness: A Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration (review)

Gary Kroll states his thesis directly: “the ocean in the twentieth-century American imagination took on many of the characteristics that were typically associated with frontier territories: a trove of inexhaustible resources, an area to be conserved for industrial capitalism, a fragile ecosystem requiring stewardship and protection from ‘civilizing’ forces, a geography for sport, a space for recreation, and a seascape of inspiration” (p. 7).Whether or not America’s westward frontier ended at the Pacific’s shores, the frontier thesis has apparently unfurled sails and continued.

Kroll advances this observation through seven profiles of major personalities who helped place Earth’s oceans into American popular culture. They appear in chronological order, ending around 1970 with Earth Day and its immediate aftershocks. Roy Chapman Andrews, a professional explorer with the American Museum of Natural History, connects whaling with the tradition of frontier hunting and sport. Robert Cushman Murphy extends the terrestrial conservation concerns of George Perkins Marsh into oceanic islands. William Beebe, best known for his descents with a bathysphere, links the newly unveiled depths with a natural history tradition of the sublime. Rachel Carson reconstructs that literary tradition by bonding it with upgraded science and an ethical urgency into what Kroll terms “oceancentrism.” Eugenie Clark, the Shark Lady, establishes a valence with postwar feminism and helps domesticate this unruly frontier. And two adventurers, Thor Heyerdahl and Jacques Cousteau, successfully fuse rival technological perspectives with ocean exploration. Heyerdahl appeals to a kind of appropriate (if not outright primitive) technology, while Cousteau celebrates a kind of salvation by high-tech innovation. All are keen, initially, to promote their discoveries and experiences; all succeed in connecting through evolving media, from print to television, with American popular culture; and all end, in one way or another, with ironic worry about what humanity might fashion and wreck. In Kroll’s perspective, a frontier tradition puts them all into a common cultural aquarium.

What the book is really about is the ocean, American popular culture, and the search for similes, among which the ever-allusive frontier dominates. Yet, as Kroll notes, “the frontier is a mental conception of space that may bear little resemblance to the physical landscape” (p. 7), or, one might add, to the historical landscape of ocean exploration and exploitation. Whether or not the ocean has become a frontier is thus pretty much a matter of personal definition. Moreover, the episodes describe encounters more than explorations. What is unquestionably true is that the ocean has become a veritable tsunami of historical inquiry. It is a wave that America’s Ocean Wilderness easily earns the right to ride.

Each of the seven profiles throws up other similes and analogies. Some work, some do not. Beebe and the pastoral sublime don’t. Cousteau and redemption by technology do, more or less. The search for similes may in fact be the book’s defining theme: newness becomes accessible only by a leap from the familiar, and such leaps happen by likening the unknown to the known. Kroll’s Magnificent Seven commonly resorted to analogies, for what they sensed about the sea and what they wanted to say far exceeded the data available and the capacity of existing genres, and they had to explain by allusion and literary invention. They appealed to the past to explain the present.

Yet even as these seven struggled to modernize expression in the postwar era, the deep oceans were becoming the scene for a bold new age of geographical discovery and for radical theories about Earth as a planet. That was the twentieth century’s exploration, and it hardly enters into this story, save as a kind of postscript on the cold war. The book ends just as the torrent of data is overrunning old venues and similes like a turbidity current, as new facts overwhelm old fancies.

In the end, the book appears rather like one of the exhibition halls at the American Museum...