The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush

by David Igler

The Pacific of the early eighteenth century was not a single ocean but a vast and varied waterscape, a place of baffling complexity, with 25,000 islands and seemingly endless continental shorelines. But with the voyages of Captain James Cook, global attention turned to the Pacific, and European and American dreams of scientific exploration, trade, and empire grew dramatically. By the time of the California gold rush, the Pacific's many shores were fully integrated into world markets-and world consciousness.

The Great Ocean draws on hundreds of documented voyages--some painstakingly recorded by participants, some only known by archeological remains or indigenous memory--as a window into the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following Cook's exploits, focusing in particular on the eastern Pacific in the decades between the 1770s and the 1840s. Beginning with the expansion of trade as seen via the travels of William Shaler, captain of the American Brig Lelia Byrd, historian David Igler uncovers a world where voyagers, traders, hunters, and native peoples met one another in episodes often marked by violence and tragedy. Igler describes how indigenous communities struggled against introduced diseases that cut through the heart of their communities; how the ordeal of Russian Timofei Tarakanov typified the common practice of taking hostages and prisoners; how Mary Brewster witnessed first-hand the bloody "great hunt" that decimated otters, seals, and whales; how Adelbert von Chamisso scoured the region, carefully compiling his notes on natural history; and how James Dwight Dana rivaled Charles Darwin in his pursuit of knowledge on a global scale.

These stories--and the historical themes that tie them together--offer a fresh perspective on the oceanic worlds of the eastern Pacific. Ambitious and broadly conceived, The Great Ocean is the first book to weave together American, oceanic, and world history in a path-breaking portrait of the Pacific world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Read For School, Environment, 19th Century, 18th Century

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Brian Griffith]

This is a dense little book of history, built on a rather massive study of shipping activities in the Pacific over a 75-year period (the 1770s to 1840s). From among thousands of voyages, Igler focuses on a handful in which the human drama can be documented. The little known characters he selects include China traders, seal and whale hunters, naturalists, and some native people of the islands or coastlines. And for the most part the accounts of these eyewitnesses are simply horrific. There's the enormous hardships at sea, the acknowledged guilt in bringing deadly epidemics to native populations, the regularity of rape, violence and hostage taking as part of the trading process, and the mind-boggling slaughter of sea mammals. Then, through it all come a host of naturalists, industriously and even rapturously documenting the wonders of nature across the greatest ocean, though even these voyageurs also tend to serve the interests of growing empires.

[Samuel]

The concept was more captivating than the narrative, but still, this is pretty impressive stuff. Rather than create another terrestrial history confined by national and political borders, David Igler has allowed himself to imagine "the ways that oceanic space connects people and polities, rather than separating them" (8). The Great Ocean focuses on the fact that the Pacific Ocean was a fluid--oh yes I went there--transportation network beginning in the late 18th and early 19th century. This perspective helps us understand Hawaii--often viewed as a tiny, inconsequential volcanic archipelago--as the major hub and center of the Pacific world it was and to a lesser extent still is. Beginning with Captain Cook's voyages in the 1770s through the Gold Rush of 1949, Igler demonstrates how the "convergence of British, Spanish, Russian, French, and US commercial ventures along the American coastline" (east Pacific) linked it to the Pacific and west Pacific coast beyond. This activation and increase in maritime commerce allowed for the east Pacific to effectually become the American West we know it as today (before 1848, "the American West" had been Missouri and other parts of what is now called the Middle West.

Again he justifies his methodology by stating that "an oceanic rather than terrestrial approach, a peopled rather than a vacant waterscape, a place of movement and transits, and a methodology that searches for the vital interplay between global, oceanic, and local scales of history" will be more beneficial than individual regional histories (11). The global forces of international trade, disease transmission, resource demands, and scientific inquiry are all given rather intriguing treatments here. If you have an interest in the Pacific Ocean (or nineteenth century maritime history), then this is a must read.

[John]

I have had this out from the library for almost a year, because we were supposed to read it for this Atlantic History reading group (in a “what about Pacific History” kind of exercise), and then that got canceled but I kept trying to come up with a good excuse to read this because it looked good. So I finally just sat down and got to it, and I’m so glad I did. This doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for any of my fields (Early American History, Global History, Colonial Latin America) but it actually plays off lots of books I’ve been reading in really interesting ways.
Of course, it is kind of crazy to even think of doing a “Pacific History” because it is just so huge. But Igler does a great job here exploring different aspects of Pacific interactions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and showing how the Pacific sphere helps us understand U.S. history better, and Latin American history better. Most interesting to me was his characterization of the California coast as an “American commercial hive” by the 1810s and 1820s, which is so early. When “manifest destiny” reached the Pacific in the 1840s, we were already there. And then he gets into how Latin American revolutions helped grow the US trading hive, and how the hive helped encourage the revolutions too. And there is a fascinating bit about how naturalists used to see the Pacific as its own sphere, until manifest destiny really took over in the US in the mid-19th century, at which point the eastern Pacific was transformed into the western part of the American Empire of Destiny. I can definitely see myself using this book to help craft a class on globalizing American history. (Because I’ve been using this book to craft a class on globalizing American history. In my head.)

[Josh Reid]

Enjoyed this -- some fascinating historical actors David brings to our attention. Solid introduction to the growing Pacific world field.

[Al Anoud]

I may or may have not skipped a chapter. Beside that, this book was full of interesting information about the gears that characterized the Pacific Ocean which I found fascinating.