America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his bestselling In the Heart of the Sea Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen—the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, six magnificent sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and ended up naming the newly discovered continent of Antarctica, collecting what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution.
Chapter 1. The Great South Sea
Chapter 2. The Deplorable Expedition
Chapter 3. Most Glorious Hopes
Chapter 6. Commodore of the Pacific
Chapter 10. Massacre at Malolo
Chapter 12. The Wreck of the Peacock
Chapter 15. This Thing Called Science