Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Wilkes also met several British naval officers who had led exploring voyages similar to what the United States was contemplating. Robert Fitzroy had recently returned from an expedition to the Pacific that had included a vessel named the Beagle and a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Arctic explorer James Ross, just thirty-five years old, was already known as the discoverer of the earth’s magnetic North Pole. In 1831, he had located the place at the edge of the Boothia Peninsula in northern Canada where his dipping needle, a sensitive instrument used to measure the vertical angle of the earth’s magnetic field, pointed straight down, and he had planted his country’s flag at the magnetic North Pole. Although no one had yet managed to reach the geographical pole, approximately one thousand miles farther north, interest was mounting to find the earth’s second magnetic pole, and many felt that Ross was the natural choice to lead a British expedition south.

  For an aspiring American scientist and explorer, it was a heady four months among the world’s scientific elite. “I feel myself more at ease with these giants,” Wilkes wrote Jane. He was also convinced he had put together an impeccable collection of scientific instruments. But when he returned to the United States in January, he received little of the praise he had anticipated.

  By the winter of 1837, more than a dozen scientists had been chosen for the Expedition. Instead of showering Wilkes with compliments, they were quick to point out that he had neglected to purchase a single microscope, as well as many other instruments required in fields outside the area of his own expertise. After being lionized by the intelligentsia of Europe, it was more than the fiercely proud and sensitive lieutenant could tolerate. When Dickerson finally offered him a position as the Expedition’s astronomer, it was under the condition that he report to a civilian scientist who had been a particularly vocal critic of his efforts in Europe. He had been dreaming about sailing on a voyage of discovery for decades, but Wilkes decided he wanted no part of the Expedition as it was presently organized. If he could not go on his own terms, he would not go at all.

  The spring of 1837 was not good to the Exploring Expedition. In June, Jeremiah Reynolds decided to make public his grievances against the secretary of the navy. In a series of scathing letters published in The New York Times, he excoriated Dickerson, eventually forcing the secretary to respond with two letters of his own. This war of words did neither man credit, serving only to further tarnish the image of what one wag renamed “the Deplorable Expedition.” In the meantime, the Expedition was denied the services of one of the most talented writers in the country when political infighting made it impossible for the friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne to secure him a position as the voyage’s historiographer.

  In May, the Panic of 1837 struck the nation’s economy. For the last six years, state governments had been piling up huge debts to finance the construction of canals and railroads. Land speculation was rife all over the nation, and imports were outpacing exports. Much of America’s economic expansion had been made possible by English capital, and when a financial crisis rocked Europe, many British creditors called in their loans. On May 10, banks in New York suspended the payment of coined money. Soon banks across the country were closing their doors. Just a few months into the presidency of Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, the American economy was in chaos. In this climate of frightening loss and uncertainty, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, a tenuous enterprise in the best of economic times, struggled to become a reality.

  Wilkes decided it was time to embark on a new endeavor. That spring he proposed that the Depot of Charts and Instruments sponsor a survey of Georges Bank, a 10,000-square-mile section of tumultuous shoal water approximately a hundred miles off Cape Cod. A prime fishing ground, the Banks were notoriously dangerous. To provide an accurate chart of this serpentine-shaped shoal would be an immense service to mariners throughout the region. For a thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant who had not commanded a ship in fourteen years, it was a challenging test. It also happened to be an assignment that would demonstrate whether he had the ability to coordinate a survey of the kind that would make up the primary mission of the Exploring Expedition, and on June 14, Dickerson granted his request.

  Saying good-bye to Jane and the children, Wilkes traveled to the navy yard in Norfolk, where the eighty-eight-foot brig Porpoise awaited him. He planned to employ what was, for the American navy, a new and revolutionary system of surveying known as the quincunx method. Dickerson had given him permission to borrow some of the instruments he had purchased in Europe. Using two schooners and a fleet of whaleboats, along with specially designed buoys equipped with flags, he and his officers would create a series of interlocking triangles with sides of between a half-mile and three miles in length. Their positions would be established by chronometer and later confirmed by the celestial observations of Professor William Bond at Harvard. The small open boats would be used to measure soundings on shoals that, in some cases, were only a few feet below the water’s surface.

  It took longer than he had expected, but Wilkes was able to complete the survey in two months. Sometimes deploying all eleven whaleboats at one time, he insisted that his officers and men meticulously survey even the roughest portions of the bank. No one would improve on Wilkes’s work at Georges Bank until well into the twentieth century.

  In September, he and his officers returned to the Boston Navy Yard to finish the necessary calculations and to work on the chart. Word of Wilkes’s survey quickly reached the acknowledged master of American navigation, Nathaniel Bowditch. As a young sailor, Bowditch had taught himself enough mathematics and astronomy to uncover more than eight thousand errors in the leading navigational guide of his day. In 1802 he came out with his own guide, The New American Practical Navigator, immediately recognized as the most accurate and comprehensive text on celestial navigation ever published. At sixty-four, he was revered in maritime circles as the paramount navigator in the world.

  Wilkes was invited to Bowditch’s home in Boston, and once in the presence of his idol, the normally self-assured naval officer found himself “greatly abashed.” The two men went for a walk, and Bowditch questioned Wilkes about the survey. Placing his cane in the lieutenant’s hand, Bowditch asked Wilkes to draw a diagram in the dirt. “Oh, I see, I see,” he replied, nodding his head. “That will do.”

  Several days later, Bowditch and a friend appeared unannounced at the navy yard to inspect Wilkes’s chart. Wilkes would later remember what followed as “one of the most gratifying incidents of my life”: “The large and rough chart was spread out on the table with each and every station occupied. He took out from his vest pocket a hand full of small change, five & ten cent pieces, and put them on each station on the chart; these were numerous. Then he explained the whole process [to his friend]. . . . [A]fter fully examining all our work which was recorded in a large volume . . . , he passed a very complimentary speech as to the satisfaction he had derived from the whole.” Bowditch subsequently contacted several important government officials about Wilkes’s skill as a surveyor. “To him I think I owe, in part,” Wilkes later wrote, “my appointment to the Command of the Ex. Ex.”

  In the months after completing the survey of Georges Bank, some of Wilkes’s staunchest advocates proved to be the passed midshipmen who had served under him. Instead of ruling over his officers in a manner that inspired fear and trembling, Wilkes had acted as if he were one of them. He had accompanied them in the whaleboats and had taken the lead when confronting the worst portions of the Bank. A commander usually dined alone in his cabin; Wilkes chose to mess with his officers in the wardroom. This appears to have fostered a remarkable sense of loyalty and enthusiasm, and most of Wilkes’s passed midshipmen would follow him to his next assignment—a survey of the waters in the vicinity of Savannah, Georgia.

  There was one young sailor, however, who chose not to make the voyage south. Charles Erskine, sixteen, had served as Wilkes’s cabin boy. One of five children, whose father had abandoned the family whe
n he was still an infant, Charlie was strikingly handsome, with bright blue eyes and an infectious smile. Late in life, Wilkes would remember him as “one of the most beautiful boys I ever beheld. . . . [T]hough lowly bred, he had a certain refinement of manner and look that drew all hearts towards him.” Wilkes took such a keen interest in the boy that for a time aboard the Porpoise he became the father figure Charlie had never known.

  The falling out came in Boston, Charlie’s hometown. They were at the navy yard completing the chart of Georges Bank. Wilkes was anxiously awaiting orders from Washington, and Charlie was directed to make a quick trip to the post office on the other side of the Charles River. On his way back, Charlie decided to stop by his mother’s house for a surprise visit. “I shall never forget her fond embrace,” he later wrote, “and the ‘God bless you, my darling boy!’ when I left her.” While he waited to cross the river to the navy yard in Charlestown, his hat, along with the letters he had carefully placed inside it, was knocked into the water by a schooner passing through the drawbridge. By the time he’d recovered his hat, the letters were wet but still readable.

  When Charlie reached the Porpoise, Wilkes was waiting for him, with “a look as dark as a thunder-cloud.” Wilkes asked what had taken him so long. Charlie explained that his hat and the letters had been knocked into the river. Wilkes suspected that Charlie had taken the opportunity to enjoy himself in Boston and decided to teach the boy a lesson. Before Charlie knew what was happening, the boatswain’s mate had laid him across the breech of a cannon and begun whipping his backside with the colt—a three-foot length of half-inch rope. “[W]e were lying not more than a quarter of a mile in a straight line from where my mother lived,” he remembered, “and if she had been at an open window at the front of the house she could have heard my piercing cries.” Charlie would not be able to sit for three weeks. His white duck trousers had been cut through by the colt, and threads of cloth were stuck to his ripped and bleeding flesh. “When I shipped [on the Porpoise] I had made up my mind to try to be somebody and to get ahead in the world,” he wrote, “but now my hopes were blasted. My ambition was gone, yes, whipped out of me—and for nothing.”

  By the brutal standards of the U.S. Navy, there had been nothing unusual in Wilkes’s treatment of Charlie. Many a ship’s boy had been whipped for far less. But Wilkes had not consistently operated by the usual standards of the navy. As had been true with the passed midshipmen aboard the Porpoise, he had been more of a friend and mentor than a commander to Charlie. When all was going well, this approach made for what was known as a “happy ship.” But when a sailor needed to be disciplined, it could all fall apart. Since he considered himself the commander’s friend, the sailor tended to resent any attempt to curb his conduct. Long after Charlie had been reassigned to another vessel, he continued to harbor a deep and obsessive hatred for the commander to whom he had once been so close. If he ever got the chance, Charlie vowed he would have his revenge.

  Against all odds, the Exploring Expedition seemed about to depart in the fall of 1837. The squadron was now in New York, with more than five hundred officers, sailors, marines, and scientists awaiting orders to sail. The necessary modifications to the overbuilt vessels had been made. The flagship Macedonian had been outfitted with an innovative forced hot-water heating system in anticipation of the Antarctic cold. A new kind of foul weather clothing coated with India rubber had been delivered. There was also a new kind of firearm—a pistol equipped with a Bowie knife that could be used both as a form of defense against hostile natives and for hacking through underbrush. For a city suddenly gripped by economic depression, the Expedition was, at least for a time, a welcome distraction. When some of its naval officers made an appearance at a play, the actors stopped the performance to give “the Lions of the day” three cheers.

  But no matter how desperately Commodore Jones might labor to bring the Expedition to fruition, a new problem inevitably threatened its dissolution. Distracted by his feuding with Dickerson, he had failed to take note of an important fact. The instruments that Wilkes had assembled more than a year ago were spread out over three cities. Some of the chronometers were at the Depot in Washington. Other instruments were at Professor Renwick’s in New York, still others in Philadelphia, and then there were all the chronometers and sextants Wilkes had taken with him to survey Georges Bank. For Jones, this was the last straw. By mid-November his health had begun to suffer from what he called “the pain, expense, and mortification, to which I have been daily subjected for the last eighteen months.” He was now regularly coughing up blood. On November 21, he resigned his command.

  Jones was the most conspicuous example of how “this great national enterprise” could destroy a person. In the absence of any proper institutional support, the Expedition had become a kind of vortex in which petty personal and professional differences, aggravated by competing political alliances, swirled in a dangerous whirlpool. In waters this fierce, only an individual of extraordinary resilience, passion, and determination had any hope of survival. In his letter of resignation, Commodore Jones complained of “the most determined and uncompromising opposition to me and to my plans up to the latest moment. . . . As regards to myself, I am but the wreck of what I was.”

  As if to mock the difficult birth of the American Expedition, word reached Washington that a new French squadron had left Toulon in August. In addition to exploring dozens of Pacific islands, the French, under the command of the veteran voyager Dumont d’Urville, planned to sail as close as possible to the South Pole.

  By the winter of 1838, President Martin Van Buren had come to the belated realization that his secretary of the navy, Mahlon Dickerson, was not capable of successfully organizing the Expedition. In an extraordinary move, he put his secretary of war, Joel Poinsett, in charge of finding a commander. Poinsett, a former congressman from South Carolina, was well educated and had traveled extensively. As minister to Mexico, he had been responsible for bringing the poinsettia, the flower that bears his name, to the United States. He also had a reputation for getting things done.

  But not even Poinsett could easily fix the Expedition. Over the course of the next few weeks, every navy captain he contacted ultimately refused his offer of command. The Expedition had become an embarrassment, a sure way to scuttle a promising career. On February 9, John Quincy Adams visited Poinsett at the War Department. Now a representative from Massachusetts, the former president had seen his dreams of a similar voyage dashed back in 1828. “I told him,” Adams recorded in his diary, “that all I wanted to hear about the exploring expedition was, that it had sailed.”

  Soon after, Poinsett found an officer of suitable seniority willing to consider the possibility of leading the Expedition. Captain Joseph Smith said he’d agree to it if he could have Wilkes as a surveyor. “I think it would be advisable to order Lieutenant Wilkes to report himself to your department at Washington without delay,” Poinsett wrote Dickerson on March 1.

  Little did anyone suspect that in less than a month, it would not be Captain Smith who would be appointed leader of the nation’s first exploring expedition, but a forty-year-old lieutenant who was more accustomed to a desk and an observatory than to the open sea. For Charles Wilkes, the voyage was about to begin.

  CHAPTER 3

  Most Glorious Hopes

  WASHINGTON IN THE SPRING OF 1838 was full of distractions for a young naval officer. But William Reynolds (no relation to the beleaguered Jeremiah N. Reynolds) was a most bookish passed midshipman. Instead of attending the teas and dances to which he received regular invitations, he preferred the Library of Congress. When he wasn’t working at the Depot of Charts and Instruments, he could be found, he wrote his sister Lydia, in the “long spacious room” of the nation’s library, perusing lavishly illustrated volumes of Audubon, Shakespeare, and Cervantes.

  But he was lonely. “[T]his is all very pleasant,” he confided to Lydia, “but I want someone to talk to about what I have seen & what I have read.” His two best
friends in the service, John Adams (nephew to the former president) and William May (son of the Washington doctor who had once been George Washington’s personal physician), had recently left town, and he was now “almost totally without society.”

  Just the year before, the three officers had attended naval school together. Prior to the creation of the academy in Annapolis, midshipmen first went to sea for several years before learning what was known as the “philosophy” of their calling. Reynolds was one of forty-five midshipmen assigned to the Gosport Ship Yard in Norfolk, Virginia, where they attended lectures by day while studying in nearby boardinghouses by night. Adams had been Reynolds’s roommate. May had lived in the next room down the hall. Of the threesome, May was the ladies’ man. Handsome and impulsive, he had already fought at least one duel. For his part, Reynolds stayed true to his studious self while in Norfolk. In a letter to Lydia, he claimed to be “perfectly indifferent to the attraction of the fair ladies. . . . [W]hile I remain here, my book, the immaculate ‘Bowditch,’ the Midshipman’s Bible, will be the only object.”

  Reynolds’s affections may have already been spoken for. In an earlier letter to his sister, he objected to her concern about being seen with a girl named Rebecca Krug, who lived just down the street from the Reynolds family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lydia had explained that if a young woman spent time with the sister of an eligible young man, it was generally assumed that the woman and man must be engaged. “Why Good God,” William wrote, “it’s absurd to think of such a thing, no one would say so, & if they did, why then, what matter who would believe them on such a foundation.” (Despite his protestations, Reynolds would later prove to have more than a neighborly affection for Rebecca Krug.)