Land and Sea: the significance of named places in digitally mapping historic ocean voyages

Brennan, Claire

Abstract

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a burst of interest by European powers in the scientific exploration of the Pacific. Well-equipped expeditions were sent to the far side of the world, although the technology of the time limited navigators’ ability to record their routes accurately. The journals and other publications produced by European expeditions to the Pacific are storehouses of observations of places and people, and the self-consciously scientific expeditions of this period provide particularly rich descriptions of the physical world they had set out to document. In addition, scientific expeditions brought back to Europe a vast array of physical specimens used to define species, as well as descriptions and drawings of people, landscapes, cultural objects, plants, and animals. However, the value of these records is diminished through uncertainty about where specimens were collected, and about the locations in which observations were made. The Coral Discovery project seeks to map scientific voyages to the Pacific completed by 1834 in order to clarify issues of coral taxonomy. Land provides the project with a way to map these voyages and trace the provenance of their specimens. Places named within navigators’ journals provide a more accurate way of mapping the locations visited by vessels than the multitude of calculated coordinates laboriously produced during the voyages.

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M/C Journal

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1441-2616

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Queensland University of Technology

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