After years of lobbying for a national scientific and surveying voyage, Congress moved to authorize a U.S. Navy expedition to the Pacific and beyond. This decision created the framework for a government-backed program that would combine navigation, mapping, and natural history collecting on a global scale. It set the stage for what became the United States Exploring Expedition (the Wilkes Expedition).
A squadron of U.S. Navy vessels, led by Charles Wilkes, sailed from Norfolk to begin a four-year circumnavigation. Alongside naval officers and crew, the expedition carried a civilian scientific corps tasked with collecting and documenting plants, animals, rocks, and cultural objects. The departure marked the start of the expedition’s natural history program in the field.
From the early legs of the voyage onward, the expedition’s scientists and crew collected specimens at most ports of call and along surveyed coasts. The effort emphasized broad coverage—botany, zoology, geology, and marine life—so the United States could build reference collections comparable to European institutions. These collecting routines became the expedition’s defining scientific output.
The schooner Sea Gull, one of the expedition’s smaller support vessels, was lost at sea during the voyage. The loss reduced the squadron’s flexibility for scouting, supply, and short survey runs—tasks that also supported the movement and protection of collected specimens. It illustrates the operational risks of combining naval surveying with wide-ranging scientific work.
After work in the Pacific and Australia, the expedition departed Sydney for a major Antarctic push. The goal was to survey ice edges, chart coastlines where possible, and gather observations that could clarify whether Antarctica was a continent. This leg linked hydrographic surveying directly to new scientific and geographic claims.
During the Antarctic leg, expedition personnel reported seeing land and began charting long stretches of the East Antarctic coast. These observations fed into Wilkes’s argument that the southern landmass was a continent, not just scattered islands. The Antarctic work also shaped later place-names and claims associated with “Wilkes Land.”
By February 1840, the expedition had mapped a large extent of Antarctic coastline and then turned north. Even with limited landings, the combination of repeated sightings, bearings, and chart work was used as evidence for a continuous continental coast. This was one of the expedition’s most visible achievements beyond specimen collecting.
In Fiji, the expedition spent months conducting detailed surveys while continuing to collect plants, animals, and marine specimens. The scientific work was closely tied to chart-making—collecting often occurred alongside shoreline mapping and reef observations. This period became central to the expedition’s Pacific natural history record and its large chart output.
In 1841 the expedition reached the American Pacific Northwest to survey coastlines and key waterways. This work blended hydrography with natural history collecting, adding specimens and field observations from a region of growing U.S. interest. The surveys contributed to later published reports and maps that circulated well beyond scientific audiences.
The squadron returned to New York in June 1842 after circumnavigating the globe. The natural history program had accumulated extremely large collections—often described as weighing tens of tons—including tens of thousands of plant specimens and many zoological, geological, and ethnological items. Managing, cataloging, and publishing the results became a major national project in the years that followed.
After the voyage, the government cataloged and displayed many expedition objects in the Patent Office’s Great Hall during the 1840s. Public exhibition helped justify the expedition’s cost and made its scientific collections visible to a wider audience. It also highlighted the need for a permanent national institution to care for such materials.
Charles Wilkes’s multi-volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition was published and became the main public account of the voyage. While the Narrative focused on travel, geography, and encounters, it helped frame the scientific work as a national achievement and built interest in the expedition’s larger set of technical reports. It also provided a widely circulated storyline for the collections that scientists were still sorting and describing.
Beginning in the mid-1840s, the expedition’s specialized scientific volumes started to be issued, including works in areas like ethnography/philology and zoology. These publications converted field collecting into formal knowledge by describing species, comparing observations, and organizing evidence into reference works. The drawn-out publication schedule reflected both the scale of the collections and the limited scientific infrastructure available in the United States at the time.
In the late 1850s, Congress ordered the transfer of the government’s Exploring Expedition collections from the Patent Office to the Smithsonian Institution, along with funds for cases, moving, and ongoing care. This moved responsibility from an ad hoc display setting to a research institution that could organize, study, and preserve the materials. The transfer helped turn the expedition’s specimens into the core holdings of what became the U.S. National Museum collections.
United States Exploring Expedition (Wilkes Expedition) natural history program (1838–1842)