Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  By May of 1837, William and the rest of his class were in Baltimore, nervously awaiting their examinations. The first midshipman to be examined failed, or “bilged,” after a grueling seven hours of interrogation. As it turned out, both Adams and May bilged, while Reynolds earned the rank of passed midshipman.

  The following winter, after a brief stint aboard the newly launched Pennsylvania—at 210 feet and 3,104 tons displacement, the largest ship in the U.S. Navy—Reynolds enjoyed an extended stay at home in Lancaster. William was the second oldest of eight children. His father, a former newspaper publisher and state legislator, was now managing an ironworks in nearby Cornwall, Pennsylvania, where the family had taken up residence. It had been his father’s good friend Congressman James Buchanan who had secured Reynolds’s midshipman’s appointment back in 1831, and William’s younger brother John was now a cadet at West Point. Of his seven brothers and sisters, it was Lydia, three years his junior, to whom Reynolds was closest. In addition to his usual letters, William often included enclosures for Lydia that were not to be shared with the rest of the family. So it was not unusual that, without his friends Adams and May to talk to in Washington, Reynolds turned to Lydia soon after reporting to his new assignment: the Depot of Charts and Instruments.

  On April 20, the very day Reynolds reported for duty at the Depot, Charles Wilkes was approved by President Van Buren as commander of the U.S. Exploring Expedition. Most members of the service viewed the appointment of so junior an officer as an insult to the navy—even though all previous, more senior candidates had refused the position. But Reynolds was inclined to think differently. His friend William May had served with Wilkes during the survey of Georges Bank. May had nothing but good things to report about his young commander.

  Perhaps inevitably, Reynolds began to consider volunteering for the impending Exploring Expedition. Since the Depot was located on the grounds of Wilkes’s house, he had already had ample opportunity to meet the new leader of the Expedition. “I like Captain Wilkes,” he told Lydia, “which is important (to me).” May was planning to get over a recent love affair by shipping out on the Ex. Ex. “It is most likely, I shall bear him company,” Reynolds wrote, “though I may not share his desperate motives.”

  On May 13, he wrote Lydia from the office of the observatory. “I cannot give up the Exploring Expedition,” he declared. “I shall offer myself to Captain Wilkes today or tomorrow, therefore be ye all prepared.” As if to emphasize the strength of his resolve, he sealed the letter with Wilkes’s own family crest. “The seal,” he explained to Lydia, “is Mr. Wilkes coat of arms, a Norman cross bow.” With this wax seal the destinies of William Reynolds and Charles Wilkes would be joined for the next four years.

  Back in March, when Wilkes had first received orders to return to Washington, he did not want to leave the Porpoise and his young and enthusiastic group of officers. After their success at the Georges Bank, they were continuing to do excellent work on Georgia’s Calibougue Sound. The orders simply said to proceed without delay to Washington. “What could it mean?” Wilkes wondered out loud. When one of his officers suggested that it might have something to do with the Exploring Expedition, Wilkes shook his head. “Oh no, I have done with it and [am] content to let it alone.”

  Within a few days, Wilkes was back in Washington, where he learned that Captain Joseph Smith, the latest candidate to lead the Exploring Expedition, had requested that he accompany him as a surveyor. Wilkes would be given command of his own vessel. But he still had his reservations. Smith was not in good health. In addition, many of the officers Smith would inherit from Commodore Jones were senior to Wilkes and would quite naturally object to their junior being elevated to such a high post. After talking it over with Jane, he decided to have nothing to do with an expedition led by Smith.

  It is impossible to know if Wilkes anticipated what happened next, but when Smith learned that he would not have Wilkes as a surveyor, he—like so many captains had done before him—declined the offer to command the Expedition. Soon after, Secretary of War Poinsett began to consider offering the post to Wilkes. Even though the lieutenant lacked comparable command experience, he was clearly a competent surveyor. And besides, who else was there? The navy rumor mill would later accuse Wilkes of having schemed to wrest the command from Smith, but Wilkes insisted, “I never thought of such a thing. I was too young an officer to aspire and did not dream of it.”

  On an evening in March, Poinsett requested that Wilkes meet with him at his home. The two men sat beside the fireplace in Poinsett’s parlor. The secretary began by asking Wilkes to describe how he thought the Expedition should be organized. It was, of course, a topic that he had been considering for most of his life. The squadron should be made up of only young officers with the technical training required to conduct a nautical survey. The scale of the Expedition must be reined in. Instead of large and unwieldy ships, a brig similar to the Porpoise and several even smaller schooners should be used; they were the only craft suitable for surveying the coral-fringed islands of the South Pacific. As part of this reduction in scale, the scientific corps must be cut by at least two-thirds to less than a dozen men.

  Poinsett asked if he thought an expedition along the lines he’d just described could be quickly and successfully organized. Wilkes insisted that it could. Poinsett had been staring at the fire; he now turned to look directly at Wilkes. “I have been authorized by the President,” he said, “to offer you the command of the expedition.” Wilkes was unable to respond. “Why do you hesitate?” Poinsett asked. “Are you afraid to undertake it?” Wilkes struggled for words. “No sir, but there are very many reasons that crowd upon me why I should not accept it.” They continued to talk, and once Poinsett made it clear that he would have almost total control in organizing the Expedition, Wilkes tentatively accepted the appointment. “[I]t was so entirely unexpected,” he remembered, “I [told him] I must have time to think the matter over.”

  That night Wilkes and Jane had what he later described as “a good cry.” Jane assured her husband that he had acted honorably throughout these difficult proceedings and that he would “establish a name which both she and our children would glory in.” When they finally went to bed, Wilkes almost immediately nodded off. But Jane could not sleep. Her husband would soon be leaving on a voyage that would last at least three years, and Jane, already a mother of three, was five months pregnant.

  Almost immediately, enormous pressures came to bear on Poinsett to rescind Wilkes’s appointment. The young lieutenant might be one of the navy’s top surveyors and a creditable scientist, but this meant nothing to the naval officers who outranked him, almost all of whom, it seemed, joined in a shrill chorus of dissent. Letters of outrage poured into the War Department. “The year Lieutenant Wilkes entered the Navy,” Captain Beverley Kennon wrote Poinsett, “I was the third lieutenant of the Washington 74; the year he was made a lieutenant, I commanded a ship of war in the Pacific Ocean.” Kennon insisted that he be given the command. But Kennon had already been offered the position, only to refuse it back when the voyage had become a laughingstock. But now, with a lowly lieutenant given the command, it was no laughing matter. The navy’s pride was at stake.

  Wilkes was not without his proponents. In a most extraordinary gesture of support, Joseph Smith, the captain under whom Wilkes had refused to serve, wrote to wish the lieutenant well. Smith reported having been roundly criticized by “his brother officers” for providing Wilkes with the opportunity to gain the command. But he assured Wilkes that no “blame can attach to you.” “I hope now you will be off & off soon,” he wrote. “I have faith in your acquirements of science, in your industry & in what is still more important, your boldness of purpose & boldness of execution. I wish you all success & every propitious breeze.”

  The controversy made its inevitable way to Capitol Hill. During a debate over a naval appropriations bill in April, a congressman brought up Wilkes’s appointment, calling it “a violation of rank.” An
other congressman pointed out that the rules of seniority applied only in a time of war. It was only right that someone of Wilkes’s scientific expertise be appointed to the command. Even the sainted James Cook had been “made a Lieutenant for the purpose” of leading an exploring expedition. Yet another congressman claimed that a reputable source had told him that Wilkes had been appointed because he had agreed to dismiss Jeremiah Reynolds, who had become “obnoxious to the Department.” So it went, a ceaseless din of outrage that would continue long after the squadron had sailed.

  Wilkes might have easily been overwhelmed by the pandemonium. But by keeping the details of the Expedition to himself and Jane and by focusing solely on the tasks ahead of him, he plowed ahead. First he had to determine what vessels were to be included in the squadron. Two sloops-of-war, the 127-foot Vincennes and 118-foot Peacock, were already slated to be part of the Expedition, as was the 109-foot storeship Relief, the only vessel remaining from Jones’s original squadron. In keeping with what he had outlined to Poinsett, he added three smaller vessels—the 88-foot brig Porpoise and two 70-foot schooners, former New York pilot boats that were rechristened the Flying Fish and the Sea Gull.

  What Wilkes needed to find as quickly as possible were commanders for the Peacock, the Relief, and the Porpoise who did not outrank him, not an easy task given his lowly place on the list. He first appealed to Lieutenant William Hudson from Brooklyn, New York. Although without any surveying experience, Hudson, forty-four years old, had a reputation as an excellent seaman and had already expressed interest in joining the Expedition back when Jones was to be the leader. He was also one of Wilkes’s closest friends in the navy. Unfortunately, even though Hudson and Wilkes had been promoted to lieutenant on the same day, Hudson ranked slightly above his putative commander, and to serve under a junior officer was unheard of. Only after Poinsett had assured Hudson in writing that the Expedition “was purely civil” did he agree to take the position.

  Wilkes’s choice to command the Relief was another old friend, Lieutenant George Blake, who had served with him during the survey of Narragansett Bay. When it looked like Hudson might not sail with them, Blake asked Wilkes if he would make him second-in-command. Wilkes equivocated, and Blake decided to back out of the Expedition altogether. This forced Wilkes to go with Lieutenant Andrew Long, the man Jones had chosen for the Relief and who only agreed to the position once Wilkes had promised that the commander of the Porpoise would not outrank him. Wilkes chose Lieutenant Cadwalader Ringgold, thirty-five, from a prominent Maryland family. With the loss of Blake, Wilkes was left without a single commanding officer with previous surveying experience.

  Wilkes claimed that his most difficult task involved the scientific corps. He must eliminate twenty of the twenty-seven scientists. First to go was the head of physical sciences. Wilkes would take over that department, along with all subjects related to surveying, astronomy, meteorology, and nautical science. It was a tall order for one man, even without the extra burden of leading the Expedition. Wilkes’s choices for the rest of the corps proved to be quite good. The naturalist Titian Peale, son of the famous painter and museum founder Charles Willson Peale from Philadelphia, had already accompanied expeditions to Florida and the West. A capable artist and a crack shot, Peale was a collector par excellence. James Dwight Dana, the Expedition’s geologist, was just twenty-five and had already published his System of Mineralogy, the standard text on the subject. In the weeks before the squadron’s departure, he would undergo a sudden religious awakening and, at the urging of his evangelical parents, join the First Church of New Haven. Dana was destined to become a giant in his field, and while his Christian beliefs would sometimes lead his science astray, the strength of his conversion appears to have made possible the startling breakthroughs that awaited him, encouraging him to look beyond the myriad details of the natural world and seek out the bigger picture. “As a Christian,” the geologist James Natland has written, “Dana could now make bold his science.”

  Dana’s friend the botanist Asa Gray was also chosen for the civilian corps, and like Dana, would rise to the top of his field. Unfortunately, after changing his mind several times, Gray would back out of the Expedition at the last minute and be replaced by the lackluster William Rich from Washington. Rounding out the scientific corps was the young philologist, or linguist, Horatio Hale from Harvard; the naturalist Charles Pickering from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia; the conchologist (a collector of mollusks and shells) Joseph Couthouy from Boston; and the horticulturalist William Brackenridge, a Scotsman currently living in Philadelphia, who had once supervised Edinburgh’s famed botanical garden. It was a young, diverse group that, for the most part, represented the best American science had to offer in 1838.

  Over the next five months, Wilkes pushed to achieve what others had failed to accomplish in two years. Each vessel needed to undergo extensive modifications; equipment and provisions must be arranged for; commissioned and noncommissioned officers, as well as sailors and marines, had to be selected. Hundreds of men had already been recruited by Jones, but the months of turmoil and indecision had taken their toll as they bided their time at navy yards in Virginia and New York. But it was the Expedition’s officers who were the most disaffected. Indeed, from Wilkes’s perspective it sometimes seemed as if the entire U.S. Navy were in league against him. “At times I felt almost overwhelmed at the Situation and the responsibilities upon me,” he wrote, “but they were of short lived depressions.”

  It was in the fitting out of the Vincennes and the Peacock at Norfolk that Wilkes received the stiffest resistance. The commodore in charge of the navy yard made it clear that he and his officers did not approve of Wilkes’s appointment and would do as little as possible to assist in the preparation of the squadron. Appealing to friends at navy yards in New York and Boston, Wilkes was able to procure much of what was denied him at Norfolk. From Boston he received a fleet of whaleboats, while the two schooners were purchased and modified at the New York Navy Yard in just two weeks.

  Still, when it came to overhauling the Vincennes and the Peacock, which were to be equipped with additional spar decks built over the preexisting gun decks, Wilkes had no choice but to deal with the refractory officers in Norfolk. Making it all the more difficult was the temporary loss of his most stalwart advocate, Secretary of War Poinsett. In April, Poinsett was struck down by an illness that, it was feared, might kill him. This meant that Wilkes had no one to turn to when his request to replace some of the vessels’ iron water tanks with wooden casks was refused. (If one of the ships was wrecked on a reef, Wilkes argued, the wooden casks would provide more buoyancy than the tanks and could be more easily transferred to shore.) So Wilkes took his grievances to the president of the United States.

  Martin Van Buren, known as “the little magician,” appeared quite pleased to see Wilkes. He quickly promised to get him his water casks. Then he asked a question: “Why is there such opposition against you?” Wilkes said he thought it had to do with his being so junior a lieutenant. Van Buren told him that over the last few weeks he had been visited by a virtual parade of captains protesting his appointment. Just that morning Commodore Isaac Chauncey, president of the Navy Board, had urged him to suspend Wilkes. The commodore had claimed that “this young Lieut[enant] did not ask nor would he receive any advice which had been proffered him. No one knew what he was doing.” Van Buren assured Wilkes that he had his total support and encouraged him to “come direct to me” if he encountered any more trouble.

  In addition to preparing six vessels for a voyage around the world and recruiting the necessary officers and men, Wilkes had to prepare the instruments, including twenty-four chronometers. As head of the physical sciences department, he also had several pendulum experiments to conduct before the Expedition could sail. A pendulum is used to determine the force of gravity; by comparing different readings at different locations around the globe, it is possible to determine the contours of the earth, as well as the d
ensity of its interior. In the grass field that stretched from the back of his house to the Capitol building, Wilkes erected “Pendulum Houses,” temporary shelters that would accompany them on their travels. To assist him, Wilkes assembled a group of six passed midshipmen, including William Reynolds, William May (who had successfully retaken his examination), and several others from the Porpoise. For Wilkes, this little community of science on a hill, so near to his own home (where Jane was now almost eight months pregnant), seems to have provided a haven from the storm.

  With departure set for August 10, Reynolds wrote his sister Lydia to ask for her help in preparing the clothing he would need. He had left a pair of his red cotton drawers at home, and he requested at least eight more just like it. He also put in orders for eighteen pairs of thin cotton socks, twelve calico shirts, two bedsheets, four pillowcases, and six woolen stockings. He asked that she find his white hat; he would need it to shield himself from the brutal Polynesian sun. He fully expected the voyage to transform him into “a weather beaten, wrinkled, uncouth savage. [M]ay you all have a pleasant time in civilizing me [on my return].”

  Every third night, Reynolds and May stayed up until four in the morning, assisting Wilkes with his observations while the other four passed midshipmen split the other two nights between them. “The nights pass most swiftly & pleasantly,” he wrote. “Everything is so interesting & occupies the attention so entirely that time flies. I breakfast at the fashionable hour of 12.” For Wilkes it meant that he was almost never asleep, and Reynolds and the others developed an almost reverential awe of their commander. “I like Captain Wilkes very much,” Reynolds wrote Lydia. “He is a most wonderful man, possesses a vast deal of knowledge, and has a talent for everything.”