Michael Reidy

Like other aspiring geologists in the 1830s, Darwin focused heavily on the rising and falling of the earth's crust. I use his time in the Andes to underscore the importance he placed on larger questions of vertical movement, which mountains helped to solidify in his mind. His most impressive ramblings occurred in 1835 on two high passes in the Andes. Prior to his upland journey, he was well prepared to see the gradual movement of the earth's crust, but his time in the mountains honed his vertical vision. His actual travels up and over enabled him to think more clearly about rise and fall, and how corresponding geographies could link the past to the present. Mountains were instructive backdrops to his theorizing, partly because he traveled through them, but also because his time there, linked with other geographies, became a means to foster his thinking both spatially and temporally. He did not think about mountains, but with them and through them. He is a good example of the broader vertical consciousness that directed many sciences at this time.

Historians of science have richly documented the interconnections between science and empire in the nineteenth century. These studies primarily begin with Britain, Europe, or the United States at the center and have focused almost entirely on lands far off in the periphery—India or Australia, for instance. The spaces in between have received scant attention. Because use of the ocean in this period was infused with the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, the ocean was constructed as a space amenable to control by any nation that could master its surface and use its resources effectively. Oceans transformed in the mid-nineteenth century from highway to destination, becoming—among other things—the focus of sustained scientific interest for the first time in history. Use of the sea rested on reliable knowledge of the ocean. Particularly significant were the graphical representations of knowledge that could be passed from scientists to publishers to captains or other agents of empire. This process also motivated early government patronage of science and crystallized scientists’ rising authority in society. The advance of science, the creation of empire, and the construction of the ocean were mutually sustaining