Nature's Expressions: Thinking Race on the US South Seas Exploring Expedition (1838-1842)

Abstract

Dr. Charles Pickering (1805-1878) departed the Americas in 1838 a naturalist but returned a race scientist. His years abroad on the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) were transformative: his voyage through Oceania was characterised by a rapid but ultimately uneven shift in his thinking about the nature of human difference and humanity's relationship to the environment. His primary contribution to the Expedition's lengthy list of publications, titled The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution, was described by one contemporary as "unstratified as a dumpling and heterogeneous as a low-priced sausage" and the incoherence of this work has vexed readers since. After his return from the Pacific, in the face of mixed responses, he became a fixture on the stage of mid-nineteenth century Atlantic science, influencing thinkers like Charles Darwin and facilitating the growth of scientific societies and disciplines in the United States. Despite this, his life and work has largely been passed over in favour of studies of his more assertive and less inconsistent colleagues. This study illustrates the ways that Pickering's travels and interactions aboard the Expedition led to his ultimately incoherent inventions of race, showing the contradictory ways that race thinking propelled and subverted his sometimes-brilliant scientific work. This is a history of thinking, rather than thought - a survey of Pickering's situated, transitory and contingent moments of clarity - and it shows both the utility and complications of race science for one of those who worked to bring it to the public. In recent years the US Exploring Expedition has been the topic of a growing body of research, and this thesis adds a novel perspective to those histories while also contributing to broader studies of antebellum science, histories of race, and its encounters with self, objects, and others in the Pacific.