Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery

"This is the story of a group of American sailors who explored the Pacific in the years before the US Civil War. Before Philbrick’s book, this part of our naval history had largely been forgotten. I chose this book because we tend to think of the US Navy as a fighting force, but the Navy has made major contributions to science, particularly in the 19th century. For example, the person who is often cited as the founder of modern oceanography, Matthew Maury, was a US Naval Officer as well as a scientist. Sea of Glory reminds us of this chapter of the Navy’s history, which has long been overlooked. The subject of Philbrick’s book, the United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Navy officer Charles Wilkes, made major contributions to American science, spending years charting the West Coast and 800 islands in the Pacific. They also explored Antarctica, a giant piece of which is still called Wilkes Land . The collections of plant and animal specimens the Wilkes Expedition brought back were the foundation of the collections of the Smithsonian Museum and the National Botanical Garden. It’s a fascinating story that reminds us that the Navy has done more than fight during its history. Much of our involvement with Latin America has been driven by the fact that we possess two coasts but only one navy. We desperately wanted a fast way to shift fleets from the Atlantic to the Pacific without going the long way, around Cape Horn. So we intervened in Central America, helped create the nation of Panama, and built the canal, which still provides the only way to move US Naval forces quickly from the East Coast to the West Coast. Our subsequent history of intervention in Latin America was driven by our desire to protect the canal. You can’t really understand the United States and our fraught and complex relationships with Central America, Cuba or Puerto Rico without understanding US Naval history."