Undaunted: Five American Explorers, 1760-2007

The word “exploration” usually conjures images of bold adventurers who go where no one has gone before and discover what no one else has ever found. As historian Daniel Boorstin once noted, “Every discovery is also a biography.”

But exploration entails far more than tales of adventurers scaling new heights or enduring long, lonely journeys. Exploration alters existing knowledge about the peoples, places, or things being explored, and it simultaneously unsettles them. It results in verbal descriptions, visual images, and collections of objects that embody the cultural, social, and political premises that lie behind the new discoveries. Most important, exploration never ends, as peoples, places, and things—and our ideas and questions about them—are ever-changing. In short, everything is always in flux, always ready to be explored again.

In UNDAUNTED: Five American Explorers, 1760–2007, an exhibition at the APS Museum from 22 June 2007 through 28 December 2008, the tools of exploration will be turned on exploration itself. Visitors will discover five explorers who were or are all members of the Society, and all with a Philadelphia connection: David Rittenhouse, John James Audubon, Titian Ramsay Peale, Elisha Kent Kane, and Ruth Patrick. The displays, including scientific instruments, paintings and drawings, maps, charts, photographs, and ship models, will consider these adventurers’ place in the history of American science and culture, explore their practices in the field, and reveal the various ways they documented and mapped their findings.

Self-taught astronomer and instrument maker David Rittenhouse (1732–1796) explored the heavens and the earth. The instruments he built and his meticulous observations of celestial phenomena such as the 1769 transit of Venus played important roles in accurately mapping both the solar system and the territory of colonial Pennsylvania. Known as a skilled and honest surveyor as well as astronomer, he helped establish the boundaries of his home territory, including the famous Mason-Dixon Line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. His instruments and his observations helped transform the wilderness into settled farmland, and the irregular pattern of hills, forests, and streams into the geometric shapes traced on government maps.

John James Audubon (1785–1851) described himself as an “American Woodsman” with a passion for birds that “border[ed] on Phrenzy.” Beginning in the 1820s, when most of the continent was still unknown to Euro-Americans, he tramped thousands of miles to collect specimens, take notes, and make drawings. The Birds of America, the resulting double-elephant folio book, was a scientific, artistic, and publishing landmark that catapulted him to instant fame. The 435 exquisite hand-colored plates depict the birds life-size, often in their natural habitats, presenting a “map” of North American nature from the chilly shores of Newfoundland and Labrador to the swamps of Florida and the mountains of the far West. Audubon’s artistic talent was undeniable, but some doubted his scientific ability. At the time, naturalists who primarily worked in the field, as he did, had a lower status than the theoreticians who created grand schemes of classification. Thus he had to struggle for official recognition, even in the United States where the scientific establishment was still quite young.

When he sailed as a naturalist with the United States Exploring Expedition in 1838, Philadelphia artist, naturalist, and museum curator Titian Ramsay Peale (1799–1885) was known as a gifted collector of natural history specimens and a crack shot. The “US Ex Ex,” or “Wilkes Expedition,” as it was also known, was the first and largest sea-going exploring expedition launched by the young but rapidly expanding United States. Its round-the-world voyage lasted four years, and two of the squadron of six ships were lost. But the expedition made important discoveries in Antarctica and brought back nearly 40 tons of scientific specimens, which prompted the founding of America’s first national museum. Yet its discoveries in Antarctica were hotly contested, and the nation’s still-developing scientific institutions were overwhelmed by the amount of data collected. Personal and political conflicts stymied preparation of the expedition’s scientific publications, severely limiting their potential impact. The story of Peale and the US Ex Ex is one of grand ambition and heroic daring, but also of petty disputes and inadequate scientific resources.

Despite a weak heart, physician Elisha Kent Kane (1820–1857) survived two long, cold winters marooned in the ice of the upper Arctic, where he had ventured on a second voyage in search of earlier lost explorers and the mythical “Open Polar Sea.” Kane's undergraduate coursework in geology had trained him to observe and describe his surroundings. His accounts of glaciers and their movements would soon provide support for the Ice Age theory, a new and radical notion at the time. He also charted portions of the basin now bearing his name and learned essential survival skills from the Inuit. In the mid-19th century, when tales of travel to exotic lands were popular, the icy landscape, unfamiliar peoples, and strange animals of the Arctic had a strong grip on the public imagination. Kane’s triumphant return from his ordeal in 1855, after fending off starvation, disease, and mutinous crew members, caused an international sensation. Thousands of Americans mourned when he died prematurely in 1857 at age 37.

The final section of the show will demonstrate the importance of scientific exploration in the 20th century. It focuses on the accomplishments of Ruth Patrick (born 1907), a scientist-explorer who turns 100 this year. Beginning in the late 1940s, when science was closed to most women, Patrick traced thousands of miles of American rivers for her pioneering studies of freshwater ecology. In 1947, she founded the Limnology Department at The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Combining fieldwork with laboratory science, she proved that diatoms—small, single-celled algae with beautiful microscopic structures—are an essential part of the web connecting all organisms in river ecosystems. As one of the first researchers to use plant life and animal species to track and chart pollution in rivers and streams, Patrick has contributed greatly to our understanding of the environment.