After departing from Hampton Roads, Virginia, and navigating the Cape of Good Hope, the expedition traveled throughout the Pacific Ocean accumulating hydrographic information from the South China Sea to the Bering Strait in the Arctic and Alaska.

Subsequently, Fenimore Cooper performed supply operations based out of San Francisco, California, before once again returning to her Pacific Ocean survey work, which continued until she was destroyed in a typhoon off Yokohama, Japan.

Fenimore Cooper and two other ships charted archipelagos and passages between Batavia and Singapore and from Java northward to the South China Sea until June 1854, when she rejoined the flagship at Hong Kong.

Vincennes penetrated the Arctic, while Fenimore Cooper searched the Aleutians unsuccessfully for information concerning the fate of the men of the whaler Monongahela, missing since 1853.

Returning to the United States, Fenimore Cooper called at Sitka, Alaska, then Russian territory, in what her commanding officer believed to be the first visit ever paid by an American naval ship to that port.