Charles Pickering (1805-1878) left the East Coast of the United States in 1838 a naturalist. He returned in 1842 a race scientist. My thesis, and this seminar, explores his transformation in the context of the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition, which Pickering accompanied for its four-year voyage through Oceania. He brought eleven races to his homecoming, having fractured humanity from five, to eight, finally resting at eleven, as the squadron travelled from Sydney, to the Bay of Islands, Fiji and beyond, subsuming categories of civilised and savage as it went. What was it that thrust race to the forefront of Charles Pickering’s thinking? What were its dissonances, and how did the naturalist use the Expedition’s cognitive environment to manage them?

Answering these questions offers insight into the intersections of antebellum science and politics, race thinking and the Anthropocene, an Expedition that skates the edge of popular memory, and a man who became part of the backdrop of Atlantic science in the mid-nineteenth century.

William Scates Frances is a PhD candidate in the School of History at the ANU. Through the course of his thesis he has delivered presentations internationally at Göttingen and Harvard Universities, as well as conferences and workshops locally. His research on Charles Pickering and Horatio Hale is the basis for an upcoming exhibition case at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology -a part of ANU’s Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific laureate project- and his essay writing guide, Minimanual of the Essay Writer, is used in undergraduate courses at approximately 30 tertiary institutions in Australia and abroad.