Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/154

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Travellers and Explorers, 1846-1900

(1845), but the scientific data have not been issued, although many of the projected volumes are printed.[1] There is extant the manuscript journal of Captain Hudson, who commanded one of the ships; and Lieutenant (later Admiral) Colvocoresses attached to this command published Four Years in the Government Exploring Expedition commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes, etc. (1852). They saw Antarctic land frequently, and he says that on one day they saw "distinctly from sixty to seventy miles of coast, and a mountain in the interior which we estimated to be 2500 feet high." There are in this volume certain ethnological notes on the South Sea Islanders that are important.

Wilkes also published separately a volume, Western America Including California and Oregon (1849). Data on the same region are contained in the fourth and fifth of the five narrative volumes.

A prominent American sailor on the seas in the early fifties and onward was Captain S. Samuels. He began his career as cabin-boy at the age of eleven in 1836, and in ten years was a captain. He commanded the famous Dreadnaught, the swiftest ship of her time. He tells a thrilling story, for which Bishop Potter wrote the introduction, in From the Forecastle to the Cabin (1887).

South America was not forgotten by our American travellers and explorers, and a naval expedition in 1851-53 carried on an Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (1854) under William L. Herndon and Lardner Gibbon, while, earlier than this, John Lloyd Stephens was investigating the intermediate part of the Western Hemisphere, publishing his admirable results in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843). E. G. Squier's operations came out in Nicaragua (1856) and The States of Central America (1858). Far away in Turkey the Rev. Doctor William Goodell was having the experiences which he recounts in Forty Years in the Turkish Empire (1876), edited by his son-in-law, E. D. G. Prime. Dr. Goodell belonged to a class of workers, the religious missionaries, who travelled far and wide seeking out all manner of places. They also became active in the Far West at an early date. Samuel Parker for

  1. For contents of these volumes see MS. catalogue in the Library of Congress.