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The Beginnings of Topo-hydrographic Activities of the United States Navy Department in Exploration of the Arctic prior to 1870 as reflected in the Official Records in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2011

Herman R. Friis
Herman R. Friis
Affiliation:
Chief Director, Centre for Polar Archives, The National Archives, Washington, D.C., USA.
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Extract

During the second half of the nineteenth century the United States of America embarked on a broad programme of scientific geographical exploration of the Arctic (Dodge 1961; Friis 1967). In the present century this programme has continued in cooperation with other nations, developing into a wide variety of co-ordinated scientific activities of considerable benefit to mankind and represents remarkable advances in hydrographic and oceanographic research. The very large role of the United States Navy in the history of these accomplishments is reflected in the seemingly limitless resource of extant records of the scientific work of its innumerable expeditions. It is perhaps timely that we review in brief the humble beginning and the motivations that combined to generate an interest by the Federal Government and the people in the exploration of the Arctic by the Navy Department.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Section B: Biological Sciences , Volume 73: Challenger Expedition Centenary Proceedings 2 , 1972 , pp. 35 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1972

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Footnotes

*

This paper is based to a large extent on the considerable little-used volume of official records in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The major bodies of records of an agency of the United States Government are identified by ‘Record Group’ or ‘RG’. The Record Groups listed as follows are subdivided by office of their origin and within this by specific kinds of records, as for example, correspondence, abstract logs, boat sheets, deck logs, memorials, cartographic, hydrographic, nautical chart, survey field notes, reports, journals, diaries, and similar series of records. There are a variety of finding aids such as descriptive lists, registers and inventories that serve as aids to identification of specific items.

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