Characterizing himself as "a child of misfortune" drawn by ambition and curiosity to far-flung voyages and enterprises, Amasa Delano would have agreed ruefully with a reviewer's description of him in The North-American Review and Miscellaneous Journal for July 1817 as a "tempest-beaten mariner, who had made three or four voyages round the world, of three or four years each, with only the success of getting home again." A shipbuilder, ship's officer, captain, and owner of several vessels, Delano participated in voyages of commerce and discovery to China, India, the Pacific islands, and South America from 1789 to 1807 and wrote about them in A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific and Oriental Islands (1817). The work is an account of his attempts to navigate the rapidly shifting currents of cultural...