He served first in the United States Navy and commanded an expedition which made the first detailed hydrological studies of the Río de la Plata basin in South America.

During the administration of John Quincy Adams, he received an appointment to West Point but upon arrival at the academy, he became homesick and returned home almost immediately.

[2][3] After serving on the Erie, Page carried out a hydrographic survey of the New York coastline and from 1842 to 1844, he cruised with the battleship Columbus to the Mediterranean and Brazil.

After returning to the United States, the Navy agreed with Page and organized a surveying expedition under Commander Cadwalader Ringgold.

[5] The La Plata had recently been opened to commerce after the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas had been forced from office.

In addition to charting the waterways of the Río de la Plata basin, Page was instructed to explore the surrounding countryside and collect natural history specimens for the naturalist Spencer Fullerton Baird at the Smithsonian.

[6] Page commanded the USS Water Witch, a wooden-hulled, sidewheel gunboat which sailed from Norfolk in February 1853, and reached Buenos Aires, at the mouth of the La Plata, in late May 1853.

In all, the expedition accomplished the first detailed hydrological studies of the main rivers that drain the Rio de la Plata basin.

A commercial dispute between the Paraguayan president, Francisco Solano López and an American trading company eventually led to the exclusion of the expedition from Paraguay.

At the beginning of the war, he commanded artillery defenses at Gloucester Point, York River, and other coastal batteries along Virginia.

Instead, he spent a year in Florence and then travelled to Copenhagen where he took command of the ironclad CSS Stonewall, a ship originally built by France for the Confederacy and then sold to Denmark.

[7] After the war, Page moved to Argentina and worked as a rancher in the Entre Ríos Province in collaboration with the Argentine president, Justo Urquiza.