When Charles Pickering arrived in Port Jackson in late 1839 he eagerly anticipated ‘the pleasures of intellectual communication … long foregone.’ In the preceding months the United States Exploring Expedition, of which Pickering was a part, had crossed the Pacific, stopping in the Tuamotu Archipelago, Tahiti and Tonga before arriving in New South Wales. This paper explores the nature of this ‘intellectual communication’; examining Pickering’s thinking, as much as his thought, over a few months as 1839 turned over to 1840. I ask how much Pickering’s race science owed to his time in Australia, what cognitive resources the colony offered him for ordering the turbulence and violence of the Expedition. In turn I argue for the usefulness of this scale of history, informed by the idea of ‘cognitive ecology’, in thinking the thinking of race.