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reliable charts grew stronger, communities up and down the Atlantic seaboard began to insist that it was time for the U.S. government to catch up to the achievements of its mariners. In 1828 the citizens of Nantucket drafted a memorial to the U.S. Congress: “Your petitioners consider it a matter of earnest importance that those seas should be explored; that they should be surveyed in an accurate and authentic manner, and the position of new islands, and reefs, and shoals, definitely ascertained.”
    In the tradition of Cook, it was time America launched an exploring expedition of its own.

CHAPTER 2
    The Deplorable Expedition
    WITH THE THREE VOYAGES of James Cook, Great Britain had set the pattern for future global exploration: two sturdy and seaworthy ships led by a captain with extensive surveying experience. By 1804, the exploratory efforts of the world’s leading maritime power were coordinated by one man—John Barrow, the second secretary of the Admiralty. Safely ensconced in his office at Whitehall, where he remained insulated from the disruptions of political change, Barrow was free to send out a seemingly continuous stream of wondrously equipped expeditions. Barrow would remain at the Admiralty for the next forty-four years, and over that span of time he would dispatch voyages to just about every corner of the world in a deliberate campaign to extend the bounds of British scientific knowledge and influence.
    The United States, on the other hand, was starting from scratch. Government-sponsored exploration in America began with Lewis and Clark in 1803. Although the expedition succeeded in alerting the American people to the promise of the West, no provision was made to do anything with its results. The journals would remain unpublished for more than a decade; the botanical collection eventually ended up in England, while other specimens and artifacts were scattered among scientific societies throughout America. From an institutional and policy point of view, it was as if the expedition had never happened.
    In the years after the War of 1812, there were too many distractions to allow a young, raw-boned nation like the United States to focus on a project as esoteric as a voyage of discovery in the name of science. There were roads, canals, and railroads to be built, while the obvious sponsor of an expedition—the U.S. Navy—was as conservative an institution as the country possessed. Not founded until 1794, the young navy was reluctant to implement any kind of reform—whether it involved corporal punishment, education, or technology. Even though the United States owed its very existence to the discoveries of Columbus and others, its navy would show a curious and at times infuriating scorn for the concept of exploration.
    In 1825 it appeared as if the newly elected president, John Quincy Adams, might goad the nation to action. In his inaugural address he proposed that the United States embark on an innovative program to further the cause of education and science. In addition to a national university and an observatory (which he poetically referred to as a “light-house in the sky”), he advocated a voyage of discovery to explore the Pacific Northwest. Congress, unfortunately, refused to fund any of Adams’s proposals. If America was ever to follow in the wake of Cook, the impetus would have to come from somewhere beyond the nation’s capital.
     
    In 1818, John Cleves Symmes was a thirty-eight-year-old retired army captain living with his wife and ten children in the frontier town of St. Louis. He was a trading agent with the Fox Indians, but his mind was not on his work. Instead, his dreamy blue eyes were often lost in abstraction as he pondered his own theory of the world, a theory that put him at odds with such scientific luminaries as Sir Isaac Newton. But what the largely self-educated Symmes lacked in intellectual credentials, he more than made up for in audacity and pluck.
    Symmes had read somewhere that