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Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

19th-Century US Pacific

Beginning in the late 18th century, freed from the British Empire and with some global catching up to undertake, U.S. Americans flooded into the Pacific Basin in search of whales, raw materials, trade commodities, territory, and converts. According to historian Matt Matsuda, no other period in Pacific history witnessed such an onslaught of newcomers aggressively navigating its every cove, island, and shoreline, north, south, east and west. These essays take us into the 19th-century Pacific, a realm that came to be dominated by the United States by the dawn of the next century.

Extremely popular in the United States, this 1806 French panoramic wallpaper, "Les sauvages de la mer pacifique," depicts an abundant and welcoming world beyond the West Coast of America.

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Twenty panels of Pacific island life, produced by Joseph Dufour et Cie, France, painted by Jean-Gabriel Chavret based on his experiences in the West Indies. Chavret had never visited the Pacific, so his scenes are based primarily on descriptions of Pacific voyages by Captain Cook and Comte de Laperouse as well as Rousseau's philosophical "nobel savage." National Gallery of Australia and the Gallery of New South Wales have a complete set of all twenty panels.

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Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique Twenty panels of Pacific island life, produced by Joseph Dufour et Cie, France, painted by Jean-Gabriel Chavret based on his experiences in the West Indies. Chavret had never visited the Pacific, so his scenes are based primarily on descriptions of Pacific voyages by Captain Cook and Comte de Laperouse as well as Rousseau's philosophical "nobel savage." National Gallery of Australia and the Gallery of New South Wales have a complete set of all twenty panels.