The Ex. Ex. Gets a Dog
There’s the xx but there’s also the Ex. Ex. This week on Not What You Think we’re talking all about the second one.
The United States Exploring Expedition: a.k.a. the Ex. Ex. The same expedition described by this week’s guest, Will Scates Frances, with the line “my thesis topic is pretty obscure, you probably haven’t heard about it.”
It’s a kind of an amazing accident of history that this expedition isn’t better known. And this isn’t new: it got overlooked from the moment it returned. It didn’t help that it was run by Charle Wilkes: a strict, self important captain who was extra talented at upsetting his own crew.
It’s a story about the gathering of knowledge, tall ships and violence. But it’s also a story with a dog. Although, on air, we never quite get up to him.
That dog comes in when this fleet of ships get to Sydney. According to Wilkes, who was writing years later, his ships just popped up in Sydney harbour overnight and freaked everyone out. The city is said to have gotten so seriously upset over this that they fortified a small island in the middle of the harbour, Fort Denison.
You can have lunch there, now.
How did the startled city punish the Expedition? The governor gave them a dog. As you do. And the dog was called Sydney, because, of course it was. Sydney (the city) was the Expedition’s launching off point for exploring the South Pole. So Sydney (the dog) followed to Antarctica, to Hawaii and beyond.
The Ex. Ex. got around. It travelled to Chile, San Francisco (then, still a Mexican port), Brazil, Hawaii, New Zealand, all over the Pacific, to islands like Fiji or the Tuamotu Archipelago, and Antarctica.
Antarctica was hard:
Surviving Antarctica was probably the most explorer-y thing this expedition did. The rest of its story is about race, low-to-average workplace safety, strange, strange Antarctic science, having high ideals, and then violently breaking with those ideals.
There’s so much in the Expedition that, in 20 minutes of radio, we didn’t actually have time to get up to Sydney the dog.
Here’s a picture of him at work, though.
Click through to our show page to hear about all that other stuff.
If you do just really need to know about Sydney the dog, the Smithsonian museum has you covered. The Ex. Ex. helped found that museum, too.
It’s worth knowing about.
Not What You Think is broadcast 10:30am Saturdays in September and October, on Sydney’s FBi Radio. Listen live on 94.5 FM or the website, or subscribe to the podcast via our show page.
