Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  When, a month later, Wilkes learned of the Relief’s travails, he was filled not with grateful wonder for her deliverance but with outrage and indignation. Long had committed the same sin that had resulted in the longest passage in recorded history to Rio de Janeiro. Ironically, while trying to play it safe, he had put not only his own vessel but the future of the Expedition at risk. If he had only done as Wilkes had recommended—hug the coast, rather than timidly stand off from it—none of this would have happened.

  On May 19, the Flying Fish, back under the command of Passed Midshipman Samuel Knox, arrived at Valparaiso. The Sea Gull was nowhere in sight. Shortly after leaving Orange Bay, the two schooners had encountered a particularly violent gale, and Knox had fled back to the bay. Knox had last seen the Sea Gull riding out the gale in the lee of Staten Island and had assumed she would have beaten them to Valparaiso.

  It was too early to leap to any conclusions, but if something had happened to the Sea Gull, back under the command of Passed Midshipman Reid, Wilkes blamed it on Long. By Wilkes’s logic, if the Relief hadn’t been overdue at Orange Bay, he wouldn’t have been forced to order the two schooners to wait for the storeship’s return, and the Flying Fish and the Sea Gull would have sailed safely to Valparaiso. In the meantime all they could do was wait and hope that the little schooner and her fifteen-man crew would be soon sighted sailing into the harbor.

  Before he headed for Callao and had it out with Lieutenant Long, Wilkes had other matters to attend to in Valparaiso. On May 20, the day after the arrival of the Flying Fish, a naval court of inquiry commenced aboard the Peacock. For the next week, Hudson, who was appointed president of the court, presided over a painstaking reexamination of the actions of Lieutenant Dale at Good Success Bay. After close to a dozen witnesses had been called to testify, it was established that Dale had done everything he could to get his boat-crew off the beach but had been thwarted by the rising surf of an approaching gale. Wilkes, who had insisted on the court of inquiry, would later issue a public reprimand accusing Dale of incompetence and cowardice that was completely at odds with the court’s findings.

  The Dale incident would prove to be a kind of watershed in the Expedition, establishing a pattern that would be repeated over and over again for the next three years. Just as he had done earlier with Lieutenants Craven and Lee, Wilkes had felt compelled to pounce on and attack a seemingly innocent and well-meaning officer. No matter how many times this would happen in the years ahead, Wilkes’s officers and men remained at a loss to explain their commander’s behavior.

  Some leaders have the ability to step back from even the most volatile situation and assess, as best they can, what really happened. Wilkes, on the other hand, epitomized what has been called the “emotional mind.” He responded to situations quickly and passionately. Even if subsequent events proved that his initial response was unwarranted, he clung like a bulldog to his first impression. The dismissal of Craven at Rio Negro and Lee at Orange Bay resulted from knee-jerk reactions that a more careful and rational weighing of the evidence would have shown to be completely unjustified. But this is not how the emotional mind works. “Actions that spring from the emotional mind carry a particularly strong sense of certainty,” writes Daniel Goleman, “a by-product of a streamlined, simplified way of looking at things that can be absolutely bewildering to the rational mind.” Substitute “his officers” for “the rational mind,” and you have an excellent description of how the squadron’s lieutenants and passed midshipmen responded to these early examples of Wilkes’s style of command.

  The case of Lieutenant Dale was just as perplexing. Wilkes had watched events unfold on the wave-hammered shore of Good Success Bay from the deck of the Porpoise. He had had no direct contact with Dale, and except for a few days of anxious waiting, there had been no long term repercussions from the incident. But Wilkes had been infuriated by Dale’s inability to return to the Porpoise. From his perspective, Dale’s actions amounted to a personal insult—a flagrant crime that required a swift and crushing response. Instead of a commanding officer, Wilkes was behaving much like an indignant child on a playground, and his officers were shocked by his callous bullying of a blameless lieutenant.

  “Such a villainous attempt to ruin an unoffending man,” William Reynolds later wrote, “opened the eyes of the staunchest admirers of Lieutenant Wilkes to the glaring faults of his character, and to borrow a phrase of his own, [the case of Lieutenant Dale] may be considered as the ‘turning point’ of the feelings of the officers, towards their commander. Here forward, there was no affection for his person, and consideration, humanity or justice was no longer hoped for at his hand.”

  Underlying Wilkes’s actions was the conviction that the officers whom he had inherited from Commodore Jones, and who represented the one aspect of the Expedition’s organization over which he had had no control, were incompetent. “It is astonishing,” he wrote Jane, “that all Commdr Jones men and officers with one or two exceptions are good for nothing.” What he did not take into account was that over the course of the last year his inner circle of officers had inevitably gotten to know and respect many of the officers from the previous regime. Reynolds and his friends were becoming less and less willing to stand idly by as Wilkes ran roughshod over their compatriots.

  Wilkes, who had not even a smattering of empathetic understanding, remained oblivious to this shift within the squadron. He was convinced that if he could only rid himself of Jones’s officers, all would be well. “[A]ll those I have brought into the Expedn. give me no trouble,” he assured Jane as late as June 16. “They are improving rapidly under my good tuition and I shall be able to make men of them I hope before I have done with them.”

  Before the squadron left Valparaiso for Callao in June, Wilkes implemented the first part of a plan “to get rid of many of my worthless officers.” Lieutenant Craven had made it clear that he wanted to command a schooner. Well, Wilkes would grant him his wish. He ordered Craven to remain in Valparaiso to take command of the Sea Gull when she finally arrived. More than a month overdue, the Sea Gull was assumed lost by most officers in the squadron, and Craven made it clear to Wilkes that he knew exactly what his commander was up to. Wilkes insisted, however, that he still held out hope. If, God forbid, the Sea Gull did not arrive, then, of course, Craven would be required to return to the United States. Wilkes could now turn his attention to Lieutenant Long.

  Once in Callao, Wilkes ordered that the storeship Relief be fumigated, a procedure that produced three barrels of dead rats. From Wilkes’s perspective, the rats were not the only vermin plaguing the squadron. Long was incompetent and worthy of a court-martial. In addition to Craven, now safely salted away in Valparaiso, and Lee, who had already sailed for the United States on the Henry Lee (a ship named for his uncle), there were Lieutenant Dale and an ever-growing list of lieutenants and surgeons whose chief sin was that they had formerly served under Jones. He wouldn’t be able to rid himself of all of them, but on June 21, Wilkes consigned a goodly portion to the Relief. The storeship, he announced, was too slow to be of use to the squadron. After dropping provisions at Sydney, Australia, and Honolulu, the ship was to return to the United States. “[A]fter I have rid myself of her,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “& her useless trash I shall be well off.” Long, who had won the respect of all who had served under him, did not take Wilkes’s decision well. “Much difficulty & diplomacy” were entailed, Reynolds wrote, “in quieting Captain Long.”

  It was while the Relief was being loaded with provisions for its final swing through the Pacific that some minor trouble erupted. Some of the squadron’s marines were ordered to supervise the transfer of whiskey into the storeship’s hold, but instead of maintaining proper discipline, the marines joined the sailors in sampling the wares. Wilkes was not amused by the drunken frolic that resulted. The next day, the offenders suffered twenty-four lashes each, even though twelve was the legal limit without the sanction of a court-martial. When three deserters were delivered to
Wilkes a few days later, two received thirty-six lashes while the third got forty-one—once again without a court-martial. Wilkes claimed that there was not enough time for normal due process and that the punishments were not unreasonable considering the offenses. It was a judgment that would come back to haunt him several years later.

  By now almost all agreed that the Sea Gull—which had not been seen in several months—had been lost. Wilkes wrote that her officers, Passed Midshipmen James Reid and Frederick Bacon, “were among the most promising young officers in the squadron.” He speculated that the schooner might have tripped her foremast in the gale off Cape Horn, which would have ripped up her deck and caused her to founder. “Poor, poor fellows,” lamented Reynolds, who had grown so closely attached to the vessel and her crew at Tierra del Fuego, “what a terrible lot. The two officers were young men of my age, one if he be indeed gone, leaving a wife more youthful than himself and [a] child that [he] has never seen.”

  With Craven and many of the other senior lieutenants eliminated from the squadron, Wilkes began to reshuffle his officers. For a brief time Reynolds feared he might be transferred off the Vincennes to another vessel. Wilkes was now able to reappoint his special favorite Overton Carr (whom he referred to as “Otty” in his letters to Jane) as his first lieutenant. Wilkes liked to think of himself as coolly objective in his dealings with his officers, insisting to Jane that his lieutenants were “not a little astonished at my decision and impartiality for it makes no matter with me who the individual is that offends, I give him the necessary rebuke.” But Otty Carr was the exception. “He is so much in my confidence,” he wrote Jane, “from having been my flag Lieutenant and so long with me that it gives me pleasure to aide him in his duties,” adding that Carr “has risen further than your dear husband by holding on to my coat.”

  There was another Wilkes intimate, however, who was giving him no such pleasure. While in Valparaiso, his teenage nephew, Midshipman Wilkes Henry, had been a principal in a duel. Dueling had a long and undistinguished history in the U.S. Navy. One historian has claimed that between 1798 and 1848, thirty-six naval officers were killed in eighty-two duels, approximately two-thirds as many as died in combat during that same period. For a young man whose sense of self-worth was defined by his willingness to die in a noble cause, the dark and romantic tradition of dueling was difficult to resist. Put a steerage full of teenage naval officers together with too much time on their hands, and some sort of trouble was bound to occur. When someone felt his sense of dignity had been slighted, a formal challenge was sure to follow.

  When it came to the Ex. Ex., young Wilkes Henry did not have the best of role models. Reynolds’s friend William May had fought several duels, including a bloodless square-off four years earlier against another Expedition lieutenant, A. S. Baldwin. (As was often true after a duel, the two former opponents were now good friends.) Wilkes Henry’s duel dated back to what Wilkes described as a “foolish quarrel” with Passed Midshipman George Harrison in Rio de Janeiro. Unable to arrange the duel in Rio, they were forced to wait until the squadron’s arrival in Valparaiso, where Henry took along fellow midshipman James Blair as his second. Luckily, no one was hurt. “[T]hey took two shots at each other,” Wilkes told Jane, “to little effect.” Wilkes felt he had no alternative but to dismiss all four officers (the two principals and their seconds) from the squadron, calling them “a pack of young boobies.” But it was Wilkes Henry in whom he was most disappointed. “Oh how I do regret I ever consented to his coming in the Expedition,” he wrote Jane.

  Knowing that dismissal would ruin his nephew’s naval career, Wilkes continued to agonize over the decision. He consulted Hudson, the one man in the squadron whom he felt he could talk to about such matters. “I told him that I should never forgive myself if any accident happened to [Wilkes],” he told Jane. Hudson’s own son was a midshipman in the squadron. “[H]e said he could readily enter into my feelings.”

  On June 22, Wilkes received a letter signed by most of the officers in the Expedition requesting that he not dismiss the duelists and their seconds. The officers promised that they would not allow a similar incident to occur. Wilkes gladly took the opportunity to reevaluate his original decision, especially since it was clear that the officers were most concerned not about Harrison but about his nephew. “[W]hen you know that their fondness for Wilkes has induced them to take this interest for them all,” he wrote Jane, “I am sure you will feel as much gratification as I do about it.” “[A]ll my troubles about Wilkes are at an end,” he happily declared.

  The officers’ collective plea of June 22 provided an opportunity of another sort for the commander of the Expedition. The letter represented a surprising gesture of support from the officers, especially given Wilkes’s most recent actions. He might have used the incident as a rallying point—a way to start to rebuild his officers’ morale. He had pared the officer corps down to the extent that it was now dominated by his inner circle. A few nicely timed compliments and promotions would have instilled a renewed sense of purpose and loyalty in a group of men who were yearning for some sign of approval from their commander. Instead, Wilkes listened to Captain Isaac McKeever.

  Wilkes had first met McKeever, the commander of the USS Falmouth, at Valparaiso and had been immediately seduced by him. Unlike the hated Commodore Nicholson back in Rio de Janeiro (who would later direct the unsuccessful search for the crew of the Sea Gull ), McKeever immediately referred to him as Captain Wilkes. He also had nothing but praise for Wilkes and the Expedition. Wilkes would later remember that McKeever “gave me encouragement to go forward with resolution and confidence.”

  Other officers in the squadron took notice of McKeever’s attentiveness, particularly when the Falmouth followed the squadron to Callao. Once in Peru, McKeever continued his curious wooing of Wilkes, even offering him his ship’s launch and a cutter. “Capt. McKeever seems to feel great interest in the Expedition,” warily noted Lieutenant Johnson, formerly of the Sea Gull and now first lieutenant of the Porpoise. “I hope he has no sinister views.”

  Not until early July did it become generally known what McKeever expected as his part in what Johnson termed the “famous bargain.” The removal of so many senior lieutenants from the squadron had created an opening for a sailing master aboard the Vincennes. At the very beginning of the Expedition, Wilkes had promised his officers that all promotions would be made within the squadron’s own ranks. But it turned out that Captain McKeever had a nephew aboard the Falmouth, Lieutenant Edwin DeHaven, who wanted to join the Expedition. Wilkes agreed to make DeHaven his sailing master.

  For the junior officers of the Expedition eager for promotion, it was a crushing blow. Reynolds was at the head of the list for the promotion to sailing master, but now he would have to wait. “The Falmouth came in,” he bitterly recorded in his journal, “Cap McKeever, gave us his Launch, Ist Cutter and his Nephew: which latter, was heartily wished at the d___l by us.” Wilkes would have never acknowledged it, but he was, in effect, continuing the cycle of abuse: just as he had been devastated by Poinsett’s refusal to grant him an acting appointment, now he was imposing the same injustice on Reynolds and his fellow officers. “[T]he wound that has been inflicted will rankle all the cruise,” Reynolds predicted. “I feel as if my very life had been taken away.” For Reynolds and his fellow officers, this was the true turning point of the Expedition.

  CHAPTER 6

  Commodore of the Pacific

  ON JULY 15, 1839, just a day out of Callao, Wilkes did for himself and Hudson what the secretary of the navy had refused to do. He made the two of them captains. After leaving Norfolk almost a year before, Wilkes had removed the epaulet from his uniform, but on that mild clear morning, he appeared on the quarterdeck of the Vincennes wearing what Reynolds described as “an immense pair of Epaulettes.”

  There was more to come. As captain and commander of a squadron, Wilkes felt he was now entitled to the honorary rank of Commodore of the U.S. Exploring Expedition
. So it was that at precisely 9:00 A.M. the narrow streamer, known as a “coach whip,” at the masthead of the Vincennes was replaced by the broad, blue, swallow-tailed pendant, or pennant, of a commodore.

  It was an audacious, even outrageous act, without precedent in the U.S. Navy. Wilkes would later admit that the move could have been considered “a bold and unwarranted stroke of policy on my part.” The timing was also suspect. Why now, rather than at the beginning of the Expedition? In a letter to Jane, Wilkes claimed that it was his “excessive modesty” that had delayed his donning of the epaulets. “It will give [Hudson and me] much more respect,” he wrote, “and I think add to my influence over the officers and crew.” In his official journal, Wilkes dubiously asserted that he had “assumed the uniform in obedience to orders of the Secty. Of the Navy. . . . My reasons for not having done this heretofore [are] but known to myself.”

  As far as the officers of the U.S. Ex. Ex. were concerned, Wilkes’s reasons were quite obvious. The squadron was on the verge of a wilderness larger than all the world’s landmasses combined. Once amid the islands of the Pacific, it would take months, perhaps years, for official correspondence to catch up with them. Beyond the reach of the administration, with little chance of encountering another U.S. naval vessel, Wilkes—the self-crowned commodore of the Exploring Expedition—had made it unmistakably clear that he now felt free to do exactly as he pleased.

  But could he pull it off? Could he, in the words with which a captain commanded a lieutenant to implement an order, make it so?