Sailors in the Holy Land: The 1848 American Expedition to the Dead Sea and the Search for Sodom and Gomorrah (review)

In the decades before the Civil War, U.S. Navy personnel explored widely scattered portions of the earth. The work of the first such expedition, the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838–42) has been the subject of books and a stunning Smithsonian Institution commemorative exhibition. Less well-known are the Dead Sea Expedition (1848), the U.S. Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere (1849–52), the Grinnell Expeditions to the Arctic (1850–51, 1853–55), the Herndon Expedition to determine the navigability of the Amazon River (1851), the Cyane Expedition across Panama (1854), and the North Pacific Surveying and Exploring Expedition (1855).

This book, both a biography of Lynch, the expedition's commander, and a narrative of the undertaking, demonstrates the multiple motives that underlay all the expeditions. The Navy ordered Lynch to measure the exact elevation of the Dead Sea and to collect mineral specimens in the region, but Lynch, a deeply religious man, was equally interested in searching for the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, to prove their existence and to validate the biblical account of their destruction.

After briefly sketching Lynch's early career, Jampoler describes in detail the equipment collected for the expedition, especially the specially constructed metal boats, the voyage from New York to Izmir, the overland journey from there to Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee, the descent of the Jordan River to the Dead Sea, the calculations and explorations conducted on and around that body of water, and the return overland to Beirut and then on to Hampton Roads. Jampoler augments his immersion in Lynch's official report, Hospital Steward Edward Montague's published memoir, and the accounts of contemporary European explorers Félicien de Saulcy and Thomas Molyneux, with pertinent archival and secondary sources.

The expedition fulfilled the goals of the Navy, both by scientifically measuring the level of the Dead Sea below that of the Mediterranean—though Lynch did overcalculate the length of the Jordan River by a quarter—and in gaining positive publicity for the Navy, which had stood in the shadow of the army during the just completed war with Mexico. Lynch was less successful in achieving his personal goal. He found no remains of Sodom and Gomorrah, though his discovery of a shallow basin at the southern end of the lake did convince him that the area had been the site of the two cities before a volcanic eruption resulted in the area sinking below the waters of the Dead Sea.

Jampoler deftly places the expedition in its contemporary context. It was ordered by the Secretary on the Navy, but not supported by congressional appropriations. Drawing on the experiences of other travelers to the region, e.g., Herman Melville and Mark Twain, he does a fine job of depicting the locations visited and the types of people encountered. Whether his descriptions of aspects of naval life and Victorian society that have at best a tenuous link to the expedition, e.g., flogging and Oscar Wilde's treatment as a homosexual, and of modern motion pictures, detract from his work will depend on the reader.

It is an interesting tale, well-told, one that rescues from obscurity an episode in American naval history too long neglected.