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5 Rozwadowski, Helen, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 39Google Scholar, For one of the earliest enunciations of this narrative in the history of oceanography see Maury, Matthew Fontaine, Abstract Log, for the Use of American Navigators, Washington, DC: C. Alexander, 1848Google Scholar. US histories of whaling have fed into this narrative from the very beginning; cf. Starbuck, Alexander, History of the Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876, Waltham, MA, Published by the Author, 1878Google Scholar. Later examples are Ashley, Clifford, The Yankee Whaler, Boston: Houghton, 1926Google Scholar; Dolin, Eric Jay, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, New York: W.W. Norton, 2007Google Scholar; Gibson, Arrell Morgan, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993Google Scholar; Heffer, Jean, The United States and the Pacific: History of a Frontier, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002Google Scholar.

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15 Franklin, ‘A Letter from Dr. Benjamin Franklin, to Mr. Alphonsus Le Roy’, op. cit. (13), p. 315.

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18 Burke, op. cit. (17), pp. 211–212.

19 Burke, op. cit. (17), p. 21.

20 The New and Complete American Encyclopaedia, op. cit. (3), p. 609. Unusual today, ‘it has of before the thing’ was the common phrase in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dictionaries to denote the preposition following adjectives that govern objective genitives, e.g. ‘if there be no object of his intellect, he is intelligent of nothing, or not intelligent’. William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated, London: [s.n.] 1722, p. 29.

21 Stackpole, op. cit. (4), p. 145. For more on nineteenth-century whaling in the Pacific see Gibson, op. cit. (5), pp. 131–155; and Mawer, Granville Allen, Ahab's Trade: The Saga of South Seas Whaling, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999Google Scholar; for Pacific exploration see Burnett, ‘Hydrographic discipline’, op. cit. (8); Dodge, Ernest, Beyond the Capes: Pacific Exploration from Captain Cook to the Challenger, London: Victor Gollancz, 1971Google Scholar; Ehrenberg, Ralph, Wolter, John and Burroughs, Charles: ‘Surveying and charting the Pacific basin’, in Margolis, Carolyn and Viola, Herman (eds.), Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985, pp. 164–187Google Scholar; and Igler, David, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013Google Scholar.

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23 Stackpole, op. cit. (4), Part II and Chapter 5.

24 Stackpole, op. cit. (4), p. 354; cf. the literature cited above in note 5; for a critical engagement see Eperjesi, John, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture, Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2005Google Scholar; for histories dealing with the maritime frontier see Gillis, John, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013, pp. 68–98Google Scholar; LeMenager, Stephanie, Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, pp. 109–135Google Scholar; Matsuda, Matt, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perry, John Curtis: Facing West: Americans and the Opening of the Pacific, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994, pp. 66–70Google Scholar; Rouleau, Brian: With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014, pp. 74–101Google Scholar. With regard to the history of science see Adler, Anthony, ‘The capture and curation of the cannibal “Vendovi”: reality and representation of a Pacific frontier’, Journal of Pacific History (2014) 49, pp. 255–282CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, op. cit. (6).

25 Turner, Frederick Jackson, ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’, in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893, Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1894, pp. 199–227, 199Google Scholar.

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28 H.R. Doc. No. 88, 20th Cong., 1st Sess. (1828); Reynolds, Jeremiah N., Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas: Delivered in the Hall of Representatives on the Evening of April 3, 1836, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836Google Scholar; Reynolds, , Pacific and Indian Oceans: Or, the South Sea Surverying and Exploring Expedition: Its Inception, Progress, and Objects, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841Google Scholar; Stanton, op. cit. (27), p. 16.

29 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), pp. 44–46.

30 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 46.

31 Nantucket Inquirer, 28 March 1825, p. 3.

32 Sorrenson, Richard, ‘The ship as a scientific instrument in the eighteenth century’, Osiris (1996) 11, pp. 221–236, 228CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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34 Thomas Knowles & Company to Capt. Orrick Smalley, 1 June 1852, New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library and Archives, Knowles Family Business Records, Mss 55, S-g 2, Sr. H, S-s 1, vol. 1, agent/owner account book, 1852.

35 Insurance policy of the Isabella (New Bedford), 1853, New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library and Archives, Knowles Family Business Records, Mss 55, S-g 2, Sr. H, S-s 1, Folder 6; cf. Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 35; Vaucher, J., A Guide to Marine Insurances; Containing the Policies of the Principal Commercial Towns in the World, London: A.H. Bailly and Company, 1834, esp. pp. 44–48Google Scholar; Davis, Lance, Gallman, Robert and Gleiter, Karin, In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816–1906, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 397CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 Nantucket Inquirer, 23 June 1821, p. 1. For more on news and the public in the United States see Blondheim, Menahem, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994Google Scholar; John, Richard, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995Google Scholar; and Slauter, Will, ‘Forward-looking statements: news and speculation in the age of the American Revolution’, Journal of Modern History (2009) 81, pp. 759–792CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the founding of newspapers in whaling towns see Ellis, Leonard Bolles, History of New Bedford and Its Vicinity, 1602–1892, Syracuse: Mason, 1892, pp. 522–532Google Scholar; and Harry B. Turner's chapter on ‘The newspapers of Nantucket’, in Douglas-Lithgow, Robert Alexander, Nantucket: A History, New York: Putnam's, 1914, pp. 329–339Google Scholar.

38 New-Bedford Mercury, 7 August 1807, p. 1.

39 New-Bedford Mercury, 3 March 1820, p. 3.

40 Rouleau, op. cit. (24), pp. 16–42, has pointed to the connection of maritime and mass media expansion.

41 Rouleau, op. cit. (24), pp. 28–29; Schwarzlose, Richard, ‘Harbor News Association: the formal origin of the AP’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (1968) 45, pp. 253–260Google Scholar.

42 Philippe Despoix, Le monde mesuré: Dispositifs de l'exploration à l’âge des lumières, Geneva: Droz, 2002, pp. 86–89, 100–105. Herman Melville's narrator and (intelligent) whaler Ishmael in Moby-Dick claims that the ‘adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's common log’. As far as the history of whaling intelligence is concerned, it was sufficient that they recorded certain geographical findings and reported them to the newspapers in their home ports. Melville, op. cit. (1), p. 110.

43 Cook, James: A Voyage Towards the South Pole, and Round the World. Performed in His Majesty's Ships the Resolution and Adventure, in the Years 1772, 1773, 1774, and 1775, 4th edn, vol. 1, London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell, 1784, p. ixGoogle Scholar. On publishing and exploration see also Craciun, Adriana, Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Quoted in Rouleau, op. cit. (24), p. 29.

45 Quoted in Rouleau, op. cit. (24), p. 29.

46 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 31. On Reynolds's interviews see also Burnett, ‘Hydrographic discipline’, op. cit. (8); Sachs, op. cit. (27), p. 128–131; and Stanton, op. cit. (27), pp. 17–19.

47 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 1.

48 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 2.

49 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 32.

50 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 2.

51 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 2.

52 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 3.

53 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 3.

54 Gitelman, Lisa, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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56 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), pp. 6, 7.

57 See especially Daston, Lorraine, ‘Baconian facts, academic civility, and the prehistory of objectivity’, in Megill, Allan (ed.), Rethinking Objectivity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 37–63Google Scholar; Daston, : ‘Strange facts, plain facts, and the texture of scientific experience’, in Marchand, Suzanne and Lunbeck, Elizabeth (eds.), Proof and Persuasion: Essays on Authority, Objectivity and Evidence, Brepols: Turnhout, 1996, pp. 42–59Google Scholar; Daston, , ‘Why are facts short?’, in Daston, Lorraine, Müller-Wille, Staffan and Sibum, H. Otto (eds.), A History of Facts, Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2001, pp. 5–21Google ScholarPubMed. For a history of facts in relation to commerce see Cook, Harold, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shapiro, Barbara, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000Google Scholar.

58 Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979Google Scholar. For the mediality of facts see Daston, ‘Why are facts short?’, op. cit. (57). For a nineteenth-century insistence that facts be presented in tables see Headrick, Daniel, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 75Google Scholar.

59 Daston, ‘Why are facts short?’, op. cit. (57), p. 13.

60 Daston, ‘Why are facts short?’, op. cit. (57), p. 7.

61 Heesen, Anke te, ‘Faktenmontagen’, in Wegmann, Nikolaus and Rathmann, Thomas (eds.), ‘Quelle’: Zwischen Ursprung und Konstrukt. Ein Leitbegriff in der Diskussion, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2004, pp. 66–88, 80Google Scholar.

62 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 9.

63 Robert Hooke asked travellers to ‘mark[-] withal, the Latitude and Longitude of the place, wherever such Observation is made, as exactly as may be, and [to] set[-] down the Method, by which they made them’, in one of the first issues of the Philosophical Transactions. ‘Directions for Sea-Men, Bound for Far Voyages’, Philosophical Transactions (1666) 1, pp. 140–143, 140Google Scholar. See, for the history of the logbook, Schotte, Margaret, ‘Regimented lessons: the evolution of the nautical logbook in France’, Annuaire de droit maritime et océanique (2013) 31, pp. 91–115Google Scholar; Schotte, , ‘Expert records: nautical logbooks from Columbus to Cook’, Information & Culture (2013) 48, pp. 281–322Google Scholar; and Jonkers, A.R.T., ‘Logs and ship's journals’, in Hattendorf, John B. (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 394–401Google Scholar. For nineteenth-century practices of log-keeping see Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle, ‘A portable world: the notebooks of European travellers (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries)’, Intellectual History Review (2010) 20, pp. 377–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilje, Paul, To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 56–105Google Scholar; Naylor, Simon: ‘Log books and the law of storms: maritime meteorology and the British Admiralty in the nineteenth century’, Isis (2015) 106, pp. 771–797CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Sankey, Barbara, ‘Writing the voyage of scientific exploration: the logbooks, journals and notes of the Baudin expedition (1800–1804)’, Intellectual History Review (2010) 20, pp. 401–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Billig, Volkmar, Inseln: Geschichte einer Faszination, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2010, p. 20Google Scholar; see also Siegert, Bernhard, ‘(Not) in place: the grid, or, cultural techniques of ruling spaces’, in Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, pp. 97–120Google Scholar.

65 Daston, ‘Why are facts short?’, op. cit. (57), p. 16.

66 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 3.

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69 Shapiro, op. cit. (57), p. 75; Sorrenson, op. cit. (32), p. 222.

70 Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that being part of the gentry was a requirement for fact production. Shapiro, op. cit. (57), pp. 75–76, however, convincingly shows that while ‘gentlemanly status may have a role for those engaged in creating experimental “facts”, the community could not be so small for the “facts” of natural history gathered from distant climes’.

71 ‘Of the New American Whale-Fishing About the Bermudas’, Philosophical Transactions (1665) 1, pp. 11–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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74 Beginning in 1848, Matthew Fontaine Maury, superintendent of the US Naval Observatory, collected hydrographical information by asking captains to fill in standardized forms, so-called abstract logs, in exchange for nautical charts drawn on the basis on these very abstract logs. See, most recently, Achbari, Azadeh, ‘Building networks for science: conflict and cooperation in nineteenth-century global marine studies’, Isis (2015) 106, pp. 257–82CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hardy, Penelope K., ‘Every ship a floating observatory: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the acquisition of knowledge at sea’, in Rozwadowski, Helen and Anderson, Katharine (eds.), Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea, 1800–1970, Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2016, pp. 17–48Google Scholar; and Smith, op. cit. (6), pp. 74–106.

75 John Downes, quoted in Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 239.

76 It is worth noting that Reynolds did not ask whalers to report their most profitable whaling grounds (which is precisely what Matthew Fontaine Maury would later, successfully, ask them to do). For the ideal of a disinterested gentlemanly science see Secord, op. cit. (67). Rieppel, Lukas, ‘Albert Koch's hydroarchos craze: credibility, identity, and authenticity in nineteenth-century natural history’, in Lightman, Bernard and Berkowitz, Carin (eds.), Science Museums in Transition: Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017, pp. 139–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar, gives another example of how profit-oriented agents were included into the scientific community. On practical versus theoretical knowledge in whaling-related fields see Achbari, op. cit. (74).

77 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 117. This point has been made most emphatically by D. Graham Burnett, who also quotes Rodman's letter to Reynolds; see Burnett, ‘Hydrographic discipline’, op. cit. (8), p. 200.

78 Reynolds, Address, op. cit. (28), p. 117.

79 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 3.

80 H.R. Doc. No. 105, op. cit. (36), p. 3.

81 H.R. Doc. No. 2, 29th Cong., 1st Sess., 1845, p. 689.

82 Whalemen's Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript, 17 March 1843, p. 8.

83 Wolf, Burkhardt, ‘Das gefährliche regieren: Die neuzeitliche Universalisierung von Risiko und Versicherung’, Archiv für Mediengeschichte (2009) 9, pp. 23–33Google Scholar; Michel Foucault: Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 55–87.

84 Hohman, Elmo Paul, ‘Wages, risk, and profits in the whaling industry’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (1926) 40, pp. 644–674, 659CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Gallman and Gleiter, op. cit. (35), pp. 381–422.

85 Slauter, op. cit. (37), p. 768, makes a similar case for merchants and insurers in the age of the American Revolution who followed the movement of armies and navies, drawing on letters, newspapers and ships’ captains’ reports. For a social history of whaling towns see Norling, Lisa, ‘Contrary dependencies: whaling agents and whalemen's families, 1830–1870’, Log of Mystic Seaport (1990) 42, pp. 3–12Google Scholar; Norling, , Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870, Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2000, pp. 165–213Google Scholar. Whalers were not, of course, all men, although women aboard whaling ships were the exception. Some captains were accompanied by their wives and daughters, and very few cases have left traces in the archives in which women went a-whaling disguised as men. Brewster, Mary, ‘She Was a Sister Sailor’: The Whaling Journals of Mary Brewster, 1845–1851, Mystic: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1992Google Scholar; Creighton, Margaret and Norling, Lisa (eds.), Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996Google Scholar.

86 Melville, op. cit. (1), p. 239; see also Krajewski, Markus, ‘Kapitel 53: The Gam. über oralen Verkehr auf See’, Neue Rundschau (2014) 125(3), pp. 175–185Google Scholar.

87 Cheever, Henry, The Whale and His Captors; or, The Whaleman's Adventures, and the Whale's Biography, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850, p. 206Google Scholar.

88 On the US Exploring Expedition see Burnett, ‘Hydrographic discipline’, op. cit. (8); Joyce, Barry Alan, The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Expedition, 1838–1842, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001Google Scholar; Smith, op. cit. (6); Stanton, op. cit. (27); Margolis and Viola, op. cit. (21).

89 Wilkes, Charles, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition: During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, vol. 1, London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845, p. xxvGoogle Scholar.

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91 Wilkes, op. cit. (89), p. xviii.

92 Pratt, op. cit. (12), p. 27.