238 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



the Pacific in the summer of 1839. The main work of the expedi- 

 tion the exploration and charting of the Polynesian archipela- 

 goes was now to begin. They reached first the Paumotu or Low 

 Archipelago, where Dana had his first introduction to the problems 

 of the coral islands. Next, Tahiti was visited, where Dana and 

 others ascended Mount Aorai, and made important geological 

 observations. After a visit to the Samoan Islands, the expedition 

 proceeded to Sydney, Australia, where they arrived about the 

 first of December. From this point Wilkes sailed southward with 

 the Vincennes, the Peacock, and the Porpoise, and on January 16, 

 1840, discovered the Antarctic Continent the most important 

 geographical result achieved by the expedition. When the navi- 

 gators started on the Antarctic cruise, the naturalists were left at 

 Sydney. After some weeks spent in the study of the geology and 

 natural history of Australia, they proceeded to New Zealand, where 

 the expedition reassembled in the spring of 1840. The Tonga 

 and Fiji groups of islands were then explored. The murder of two 

 of the officers of the expedition by the then savage Fijians was one 

 of the tragedies of the voyage. In the early autumn of that year the 

 explorers reached the Hawaiian Islands, where already the labors 

 of American missionaries had been crowned by the development 

 of a Christian civilization. The magnificent volcanoes of these 

 islands afforded Dana the material for most important and fruitful 

 study. In December, the Peacock, to which Dana was again 

 attached, left Oahu on a long cruise in the Pacific, in which nu- 

 merous groups of islands were visited. The ship narrowly escaped 

 wreck by grounding on a reef among the Kingsmill Islands, whose 

 cannibal inhabitants would have been far from hospitable to 

 shipwrecked mariners. The cruise actually ended in the wreck 

 and total destruction of the ship on the bar of the Columbia 

 River, July 18, 1841. The lives of all on board were saved, but 

 an important part of the scientific collections of the expedition 

 was lost. A party of which Dana was a member then proceeded 

 up the Willamette River and down the Sacramento to San Fran- 

 cisco, then a village of a few shanties. In October of that year the 

 surviving vessels of the expedition assembled at San Francisco; 



