Back to the Classics #2

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

19^th Century Classic. I think sometimes it’s good to read memoirs and stories by people are not writers. Think Fields of Fire by James Webb, a fictionalized memoir of his tour of duty in Vietnam in the Marine infantry.

The Private Journal of William Reynolds: United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

I’ve been reading first-person narratives of sea voyages from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1840) when I was a kid to The Sea and the Jungle by H. M. Tomlinson (1912) as an adult. I would recommend this book as a military service memoir and a study in the extension of power by technologically advanced foreigners over people who are basically minding their own business in places where they were born.

Reynolds was in his early twenties when the US Navy assigned him to the group of ships on the United States Exploring Expedition. Their mission was to circumnavigate the world and survey the South Sea from 1838 to 1842. The basic goal was to understand the Pacific Ocean for sake of safe passage of ships and the nation's maritime commerce. Highly educated for the time (Reynolds was from Pennsylvania), our author used the cartographic process to create nautical charts.

Being very young, he writes enthusiastically which gives his writing presence.

That great Ocean, whose bounds are not known, the Icy barriers of which have never been passed, lay beneath us stretching away in the distance until it met the Sky, for once undisturbed, almost unruffled by the light breeze that kissed its Surface--But there was no sail to be seen on the watery waste, the vast expanse of sea upheld no moving or living thing--though, starting from our feet, there was the bold & terrible promontory, Cape Horn, thrusting its rugged form far into the Ocean, the last, lingering point of the great Western World.

Immediacy, no literary pretensions, as in Pacific War Diary, 1942-1945: The Secret Diary of an American Sailor by James J Fahey.

As is the sailor’s habit, Reynolds complains about his captain and his toadies. He writes about exciting storms and terrible beachings. It’s fun and instructive until our sailors kill about 100 Fijians in retaliation of two US sailors being robbed and killed. Though early in the memoirs Reynolds is of two minds about the influence of western culture on the locals, of the reprisal he writes, “It was bloody work, but all the lives in Fegee would not pay for the two we lost.”