Publishers pay great attention to fashioning the outside of a book, and final decisions about the title and appearance are often the responsibility neither of the editor nor of the author, but of the marketing department. According to its dust jacket, Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped the World contains ‘a thrilling tale of adventure, political history, and scientific discovery’. Expressed more prosaically, this book describes in considerable detail the expedition despatched to Peru for measuring a degree of latitude on the equator. Its aim was to help determine whether Isaac Newton had been right in suggesting that the Earth is slightly flattened at the poles rather than at the equator, as maintained by the supporters of René Descartes. The subtitle is also attention-grabbing and misleading. In claiming that this geodetic mission reshaped the world, the author – the American popular science writer Larrie D. Ferreiro – has reshaped history.

Although he does not reflect on his own contribution to fashioning the past, Ferreiro is continuing a process of reinterpretation that originated in the mid-eighteenth century and whose outline can be deduced from the material in his own book. The honour of squashing the globe is usually accorded to Pierre Maupertuis, who departed for Lapland after the equatorial explorers set off across the Atlantic, but returned several years sooner to portray himself triumphantly as an Arctic adventurer whose results conclusively vindicated Newton. It is now clear that he too was engaged in a considerable amount of reshaping, since his data were by no means as clear-cut as he insisted. Even so, by the time his chief competitor, Pierre Bouguer, eventually struggled back from South America to Paris in 1744, Maupertuis had successfully established himself as France's geographical hero, although experts at the Royal Academy were already aware that his measurements differed from those predicted by theoretical calculations. Earning only a brief period of public acclaim, Bouguer rose to prominence at the Academy but was soon eclipsed by his fellow-traveller but rival, Charles-Marie de La Condamine, who had astutely made a courageous detour down the Amazon. Once safely home, he converted his experiences into a best-selling account that sparked a Europe-wide fad for Peru and the Incas.

Readers like learning about firsts in history, and Ferreiro creates yet another twist in the shape of the past by advertising that his is the first full account of ‘the world's first international scientific expedition’ (p. xvi). Previous contenders for this accolade include the observers sent out during the two transits of Venus, Alexander von Humboldt's travels in South America, and the magnetic crusades of the nineteenth century. Definitions are clearly significant when making this type of judgement: it seems that this particular expedition was unprecedented in involving administrative cooperation as well as participation on the part of two countries (France and Spain). Ferreiro implies that it not only directly inaugurated a host of other geodetic projects, but also led to independence movements in South America. However, he does little to establish causal relationships between events that succeeded one another chronologically.

Like his Enlightenment predecessors, Ferreiro is keen to capitalize on the romantic potential of hazardous voyages overseas. The substantial footnotes make it clear that Ferreiro has embarked on his own journey through numerous archives, and he has retrieved a great deal of fascinating material. Unfortunately, he lacks La Condamine's ‘storyteller's gift for the ripping yarn and the novelist's eye for the telling detail’ (p. 254), and seems undecided whether he is catering for a popular or an academic audience. Although he gives very elementary accounts of the science involved, he includes so many travelogue factoids that the suspense is submerged; he also tends to alternate between clichéd colloquialisms and stodgy expressions such as ‘Colbert erected science as an institutional arm of the French state’ (p. 5).

Since I have criticized Ferreiro for failing to contemplate his participatory role in the historiography of exploration, I feel I should consider my own. I am judging an American book from a British perspective, and reactions on the other side of the Atlantic may well be different. After all, when Humboldt's dramatic travel narratives first appeared, they enjoyed enormous success in France and Britain, but in Germany were relegated to the shelves of adventure stories for children.