the Sally and Ken Owens Award of the Western History Association and the John Lyman Book Award for U.S. Maritime History of the North American Society for Oceanic History, and Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920.
Igler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, All Species of Knowledge: A Voyage of Discovery, Failure, and Natural History in the Pacific Ocean, and shared the following:
The Page 99 Test works exceedingly well for my new book All Species of Knowledge. The page examines a lithograph by the voyage artist Ludwig Choris and also the way the expedition’s personnel served a strong critique of the Russian imperial project in the North Pacific. The Rurik expedition sought to find a Northwest Passage in the years 1815-1818, but it failed in this mission in the same manner as every previous attempt to locate a passage. The voyage naturalists and the artist turned failure into great success with their own production of natural history and visual ethnography once they returned to Europe. Much of the scientific knowledge they gather derived from their interactions and communications with Indigenous people.Learn more about All Species of Knowledge at the Oxford University Press website.
The artist Choris was central to this success, and his volume of lithographs Voyage Pittoresque (1822) created an entirely new genre of visual expeditionary accounts. Page 99 delves into one of these lithographs: an image of a richly decorated visor used by an Aleut sea otter hunter. These decorations show how Aleut hunters encircled their prey on the water, and used spears to attack an individual otter. Surrounding this image of the hunt are depictions of whales and other sea life. Therefore, the Aleut visor itself tells a story of the hunt, and Choris’s lithograph translates this story for his European audience.
Page 99 connects this ethnographic interpretation of the visor to a larger goal of the Rurik’s naturalists. They sought to acquire knowledge from Indigenous groups because they found this knowledge valuable. At the same time, they were largely repulsed by the Russian colonial project in the North Pacific, which had severely destabilized Aleut and other Indigenous communities in the previous decades. Their private diaries and published accounts document their critique of the Russians, despite the fact they sailed on a Russian ship. Page 99 oddly, even eerily, reflects the book in that it showcases the most important archival material (a telling lithograph by the artist) and one of the key arguments regarding discovery, failure, and the ongoing work of colonialism in the Pacific world.
The Page 99 Test: The Great Ocean.
--Marshal Zeringue
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