Early Geographers of the United States 399 



no particular attention was paid to the 

 subject; but that distinguished phys- 

 ical hydrographer, Commander Maury, 

 U. S. N., early saw the necessity which 

 might arise for this knowledge in deal- 

 ing with the question of encircling the 

 globe by wire, and he lent his command- 

 ing influence to the making of an ex- 

 amination of the bed of the ocean. 



Such research work as was required 

 could only be carried on under govern- 

 mental control and by the scientific sea- 

 men whom the government had in its 

 employ. Hence in the fall of 1851 the 

 U. S. brig Dolphin, under the command 

 of Lieutenant S. P. Lee, U. S. N., 

 was commissioned for a cruise which 

 had an important bearing upon the 

 commerce of the world. 



The charts of the North Atlantic 

 Ocean showed a mass of representations 

 of rocks and shoals which had accumu- 

 lated for many years, many of them of 

 doubtful character and position, and 

 yet no government seemed to feel the 

 responsibility for making an investi- 

 gation or expunging them from their 

 charts. The work of investigating 

 fifty-six of these doubtful dangers was 

 assigned to Lee in the Dolphin, and he 

 was at the same time to be employed 

 ' ' for testing new routes and perfecting 

 the discoveries made by Lieutenant 

 Maury in the course of his investiga- 

 tions of the winds and currents of the 

 ocean," as authorized by an act of 

 Congress dated March 3, 1849. The 

 Dolphin returned to the United States 

 in the summer of 1852, after an absence 

 of eight months, during which the navi- 

 gation of the Atlantic had been rendered 

 safer and important contributions had 

 been made toward the advance of knowl- 

 edge in physical geography, meteorol- 

 ogy, and other sciences. 



Beginning with this expedition, if I 

 were to complete the record and give 

 the names of all naval officers who have 

 taken a part in the study of oceanogra- 

 phy, it would be almost necessary to 



copy the U. S. Navy Register. But of 

 Lieutenant Brooke, who was the in- 

 ventor of a method for detaching heavy 

 weights which were dropped when the 

 sounding line touched bottom ; of Rear 

 Admiral Sigsbee, who invented the first 

 real sounding machine, and of Captain 

 J. E. Pillsbury, who first solved the prob- 

 lem of anchoring ships in hundreds of 

 fathoms of water and gave the first com- 

 prehensive study of deep ocean currents, 

 mention must be made, but no amount 

 of praise from me can add to their well- 

 deserved world-wide reputation. This 

 labor of investigating the bottom of the 

 ocean has been so utilitarian in purpose 

 that hardly a wire lies on the bed of the 

 Atlantic or of the Pacific Ocean that has 

 not been prearranged by the surveys of 

 United States naval officers ; and one of 

 the glories of the U. S. Coast and Geo- 

 detic Survey, in which service until 

 very recently naval officers have been 

 employed as hydrographers, is that it 

 has sounded minutely nearly 300,000 

 square miles of water and made deep- 

 sea soundings over little less than a 

 million square miles. 



THE UNITED STATES NORTH PACIFIC 

 EXPEDITION 



This expedition was authorized by an 

 act of Congress of August, 1852, which 

 appropriated a large sum of money for 

 use ' ' in prosecuting a survey and recon- 

 noissance for naval and commercial pur- 

 poses of such parts of Bering Strait, of 

 the North Pacific Ocean, and the China 

 Sea, as are frequented by American 

 whale-ships and trading vessels in their 

 routes between the United States and 

 China." 



The vessels of the expedition were 

 the U. S. ship \ r incennes, the steamer 

 John Hancock, and the brig Porpoise ; 

 also the steamship John P. Kennedy and 

 the tender Fenimorc Cooper. 



The command of the expedition was 

 first assigned to Commander Cadwalla- 

 der Ringgold, an officer who had distin- 



