Summary of Nathaniel Philbrick's Sea of Glory

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 The South Sea, or the Pacific Ocean, was named after Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who first crossed it in 1513. It was James Cook who first crossed the Pacific, discovering islands at almost every turn.

#2 The city’s wealthiest merchant, John Jacob Astor, had made his fortune with these ships. American China traders, many of them from Boston and Salem, set out around Cape Horn in search of otter skins. They anchored somewhere in the vicinity of Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound.

#3 The War of 1812 was a extremely exciting time for Charles Wilkes. It was difficult to appreciate the level of patriotism felt by those of Wilkes’s generation, many of whom were fathers or grandfathers who had fought in the Revolution.

#4 Wilkes was a young man who was receiving little help from his father, who wanted him to become a businessman like himself. Wilkes was enrolled as a day student at a preparatory school for Columbia College, and he was showing remarkable promise in mathematics and languages. But he was always fascinated by the sea, and he wanted to become a captain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669372257

IRB Media

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Insights on Nathaniel Philbrick's Sea of Glory

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The South Sea, or the Pacific Ocean, was named after Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who first crossed it in 1513. It was James Cook who first crossed the Pacific, discovering islands at almost every turn.

#2

The city’s wealthiest merchant, John Jacob Astor, had made his fortune with these ships. American China traders, many of them from Boston and Salem, set out around Cape Horn in search of otter skins. They anchored somewhere in the vicinity of Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound.

#3

The War of 1812 was a extremely exciting time for Charles Wilkes. It was difficult to appreciate the level of patriotism felt by those of Wilkes’s generation, many of whom were fathers or grandfathers who had fought in the Revolution.

#4

Wilkes was a young man who was receiving little help from his father, who wanted him to become a businessman like himself. Wilkes was enrolled as a day student at a preparatory school for Columbia College, and he was showing remarkable promise in mathematics and languages. But he was always fascinated by the sea, and he wanted to become a captain.

#5

Wilkes was eventually promoted to midshipman and sent on a cruise of the Mediterranean with the USS Guerriere. While he did not enjoy the debauchery and drunkenness of his fellow officers, he did not have any enemies or any that he was not in the best of terms with.

#6

Wilkes was assigned to the Franklin for a cruise to the Pacific in 1821. He was about to encounter the ocean he had been dreaming about since he was a young boy.

#7

The Pacific Ocean was a huge ocean that was not yet adequately surveyed and charted. There were hundreds of little-known islands surrounded by reefs of razor-sharp coral. In the absence of a published chart, a captain might rely on a handwritten map given him by a mariner who had recorded his not always trustworthy impressions.

#8

The sea otter population in the Northwest dropped catastrophically due to overhunting, and New England merchants were forced to look elsewhere for trade goods. In the Hawaiian Islands, they found sandalwood, which was prized by the Chinese for making incense and ornamental boxes.

#9

In the 19th century, it was believed that what we now call the Antarctic Peninsula was a group of islands. But two American sealers, John Davis and Christopher Burdick, thought differently, and recorded their suspicions in their logbooks in 1821.

#10

By the mid-1820s, the South Shetlands had been stripped of seals, and commercial interest in the region waned. The question of whether a continent or a group of islands existed to the south would be unresolved for decades to come.

#11

The United States was beginning to expand, and in 1825, President John Quincy Adams proposed a voyage of discovery to explore the Pacific Northwest. Congress refused to fund any of his proposals.

#12

Symmes’s theory of the Holes in the Poles began to gain popularity in the mid- eighteenth century. He traveled by horse and wagon across the states of Kentucky and Ohio to