Writing the Journey: June 1999 | Department of English

Iron Expeditions, Decadent Emperors, and the Search for Sodom

Bruce A. Harvey
English Department
Florida International University
Email: harveyb@fiu.edu

A Virginian, born in 1801, Lieutenant William F. Lynch was a pious and well-respected U.S. naval officer who fought in the Mexican-American War. After the Mexican surrender of Vera Cruz in 1847, and now in search of new fields of naval heroics, he gained permission from the head of the U.S. Navy to map the Jordan river and explore the Dead Sea. The exploratory party, a group of five officers and nine seamen, made its way down the Jordan in iron and copper boats and then, upon arrival at the Dead Sea, spent a grueling two months surveying its desolate waters and shoreline. Lynch returned to Washington in early 1849, and in the same year published Narrative of the United States' Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea. The expedition, which involved sketching topographical charts, calculating barometric changes, and so on, was of some scientific value. Previously, both the Jordan and the Dead Sea had been unmapped, and for centuries the latter had posed something of an enigma. Accounting for its high salt content and its eerily sterile terrain had vexed amateur and professional geologists. Yet neither science nor diplomacy can quite satisfactorily account for Lynch's motives. The venture lacked any real political agenda, other than establishing friendly relations with the Ottoman Sultan (in the 1860s, somewhat lamely, Lynch promoted the notion that gold might be found in Palestine and that the entire region was ripe for U.S. commerce). The scientific data garnered, moreover, yielded little practical knowledge. The main discovery, that the Dead Sea was as many had suspected indeed below sea level, and thus antipodally related to the heavens, was more theologically than scientifically interesting. The public, however, found the spectacle of the representatives of "this great Republican country" (as one of Lynch's officers put it in his own narrative) traversing sacred territory altogether compelling. The New Israel, through its ingenuity, had mapped a venerable portion of the antique world, uniting -- however nebulously -- modern science and religion. By the time Lynch submitted the more complete "Official Report" of the expedition to Congress in 1852, the popular version had already run through seven American and two English editions.

My talk will suggest that Lynch's narrative navigates, through its mediating Holy Land scenes, some of the troubled faultlines of the antebellum Protestant psyche. In particular, I argue that his volume's representational strategies tensely reflect the eighteenth-nineteenth century shift in what I call scriptural mimesis: the shift from a focus, often taking the form of the jeremiad, on the Father's wrath, the signs of which typically could be representationally depicted; to one on the more sentimentalized, however elusive, representations of the Son's heartknowledge. The Holy Land provided compelling and ample testimony of Old Testament ire. To wish to locate the body of Christ, though, was tantamount to idolatry: the "Almighty," Lynch writes, "left us in ignorance of the exact position of places infinitely . . . sacred," that is, the site of Christ's burial. The Dead Sea's signal virtue to nineteenth-century readers of Holy Land travel volumes, I hazard to guess, resided in its odd blend of representational or theological dynamics. Hidden depravities (the sunken Cities on the Plain) could be summoned to mind, yet to describe its lifeless surface and environs was, in effect, to represent nothing at all. To depict the Dead Sea was simultaneously to skirt the impiety of corporealizing spiritual matters, to invoke implicitly (but superficially) the traditional genre of the jeremiad, and yet also to remind Americans how their nation had transcended such colossal communal slips into sin. My talk will concentrate on Lynch, but I will also allude to a number of other writers (such as Herman Melville) whose texts likewise reflect the conflictual psycho-theological terrain of the antebellum imaginary of the Holy Land.

Bruce A. Harvey
Florida International University
North Miami Campus
3000 Northeast 145th Street
North Miami, FL 33181
Office #: (305) 9195254
Email: harveyb@fiu.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999