Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  As Wilkes’s instructions made clear, one of the Expedition’s primary goals was to provide charts for the nation’s whalemen. America had, by far, the largest whaling fleet in the world. Unlike European merchant vessels, which used the Pacific as a thoroughfare from place to place, the whalemen followed the desultory movements of sperm whales across the full width and breadth of the largest ocean in the world. The vast distances they traveled required the whaling captains to look to the islands of Polynesia for provisions. Since few European mariners had reason to visit many of these islands, previous exploring expeditions had neglected to survey a significant number of the islands in any systematic manner. Indeed, there were entire groups, such as the Fijis, that had not yet been properly surveyed at all. Charting hundreds of Pacific islands was a gargantuan, largely thankless, and incredibly time-consuming task, but it was the chief aim of the U.S. Ex. Ex.

  On August 13, after a passage of almost a month, they saw their first Pacific island. Reynolds immediately scampered up the mainmast to the royal yard, where he watched for more than an hour, “entranced with the Singular & picturesque loneliness of that gem of the Ocean.” Before him lay one of the easternmost islands of the Tuamotu Group, the largest collection of coral atolls in the world. The island of Reao, known to Wilkes as Clermont de Tonnere, is less than a dozen miles long with the ringlike shape typical of a coral atoll. “[W]here the white beach terminates there is a beautiful fringe of Trees & Shrubbery,” Reynolds wrote, “hiding from view the Lagoon within, but from aloft, you can look over the quiet lake, the Isles that stud its bosom, and the green strip that encompasses it round about.” How an island comprised of coral, which only grows in shallow water, had come to exist in the middle of a vast and deep ocean was a question that greatly concerned the Expedition’s scientists. “[E]ven in this enlightened age,” Reynolds wrote, “[it] has defied a satisfactory explanation.” By the end of the voyage, with a little help from Charles Darwin, the scientists of the Ex. Ex. would have an answer.

  Wilkes intended to make Reao an object lesson in what were the Expedition’s proper priorities. Surveying, not science, was to be attended to first. All the next day, the scientists watched in indignant disbelief from the decks of the Vincennes, the Peacock, and the Porpoise. After more than a year of anticipation, they were now forced to sit idly by as an island was surveyed, yet remained unexplored. The naturalist Titian Peale called it “a sorry business.” Nevertheless, as all of them would begrudgingly come to acknowledge, there was a magnificent precision in the way that Wilkes and his officers undertook a survey.

  It was essentially the same system he had developed at Georges Bank. Dividing up the four vessels of the squadron into two groups and assigning each group a specific survey area, he was able to reduce the time normally required to survey an island. One of the more interesting—and ear-splitting—aspects of his method was the way he determined the baselines of the survey. The vessels would take up positions along the shore of the island, then begin firing their guns in rapid succession. By noting the time between the gun’s flash and report, the officers were able to calculate the distance between the two vessels. (What effect this day-long display of firepower had on the island’s native population can only be guessed.) In the meantime, other officers used sextants to measure angles between the vessels and points designated on shore. Once these were completed, the vessels changed their positions and eventually worked their way around the island. It wasn’t long before they had roughed out a chart of the island complete with points of “known location along its perimeter.”

  It was now time for the boat-crews to go to work. One of the sailors used the sounding lead to determine the water’s depth while an officer with a sextant measured horizontal angles to known points on land. Each vessel had what was called a deck-board on which the information was recorded, and at the conclusion of the survey, copies of the data were sent to Wilkes along with a diagram to designate all the control points of the survey. Wilkes and his officers then compiled the various surveys to create a finished chart. The system brought a new level of speed and accuracy to the survey of the Pacific, and Reao was the first of 280 islands to be surveyed by the U.S. Ex. Ex.

  But it was punishing work, especially for those assigned boat duty. Wet, sunburned, their eyes scorched from staring through the eyepieces of their sextants and other instruments, the officers and men returned that evening wondering if they would ever be allowed to enjoy the fabled delights of the South Seas. “The Captain has pushed us so with work,” Reynolds recorded several nights later, “that we have had scarce time to eat—and there are no signs of a lull as of yet.”

  Not until the survey had been completed did Wilkes determine that it was time to unleash the scientists. But first he and his officers had to make contact with the island’s inhabitants. Soon after departing from Callao he had issued an order insisting that everyone associated with the squadron exhibit “courtesy and kindness towards the natives.” To help them achieve this objective, they had an interpreter, John Sac, a minor chief from New Zealand, who after spending some time in Tahiti had lived for a number of years in the United States, where he had been exhibited as a curiosity. As a crewmember aboard the Sea Gull during her voyage to the South Shetland Islands, Sac had taken such an enthusiastic interest in killing penguins that Lieutenant Johnson had had difficulty persuading him to relent. For the most part, however, Sac had developed a reputation in the squadron for his “disciplined obedience.”

  By the time Wilkes and his officers approached the island in a small flotilla of boats, a group of seventeen natives had assembled on the beach, with an estimated hundred or so lurking in the undergrowth behind them. Wilkes was in the lead, flying a white flag of truce, but the natives, “a fine athletic race, much above the ordinary in size,” were not in a welcoming mood. Armed with long spears and clubs, the islanders made it clear that they did not want Wilkes to land. The natives in this region had a reputation for cannibalism, and Reynolds claimed that their gestures suggested that if the white men should come ashore “they would certainly be made a meal of.”

  Even though he had been born many thousands of miles away in New Zealand, Sac was able to understand the islanders, several of whom were chanting in unison. Sac reported that they were telling them, “Go to your own land; this belongs to us, and we do not want to have anything to do with you.” At that moment the surf was too high to land, so Wilkes ordered his officers to attempt to appease the natives by throwing them some trinkets. But when the trade goods washed up at their feet, the natives scornfully kicked the baubles aside.

  By this point Sac, standing at the boat’s bow with a boat hook in his hand, had struck up a conversation with the group’s leader. It was not going well. “[Sac] soon became provoked at the chief’s obstinacy,” Wilkes wrote, “his eyes shone fiercely, and his whole frame seemed agitated. Half naked as he was, his tattooing conspicuous, he stood in the bow of the boat brandishing his boat-hook like a spear with the dexterity of the savage.” Although none of them knew what he was saying, Wilkes became concerned that Sac was only making matters worse and ordered him to desist in the negotiations. Reynolds’s friend William May and another officer volunteered to swim ashore and attempt to greet the natives personally, but almost as soon as they made it to the beach, they were in full retreat and swimming back to the boats.

  This was not the way Wilkes had wanted to begin his tour as commodore. After the scientist Joseph Couthouy also proved unsuccessful in winning the natives’ trust, Wilkes ordered several of his officers to shoot off some blank cartridges. Once again, the reaction wasn’t what he had hoped. Sac reported that “they hooted at these arms, calling us cowards, and daring us to come on shore.” Quickly forgetting his own orders to treat the natives with compassion, Wilkes took up a gun armed with birdshot and fired at the natives on the beach. “[W]hen the Shot struck them,” Reynolds wrote, “they brushed away at the spot as if a fly had bitten them, manifesting the utmost unconce
rn & contempt for us & our weapons, & exhibiting more of the cannibal in their faces & gestures than was agreeable to witness.” Wilkes ordered additional officers, including the naturalist Titian Peale, the best shot in the squadron, to fire on the natives. As the birdshot tore into their legs, backsides, and faces, the natives began to retreat into the interior of the island but with, Reynolds noted, “deliberate dignity.”

  Now that he had cleared the beach, Wilkes declared that it was safe to land. It was late in the day, but he had some observations he wanted to make, and the scientists would have their first, long-awaited opportunity to collect some specimens. After a mere half hour on the beach, it was time to return to the ships.

  Wilkes felt he had provided the natives with “abundant proof of our prowess and superiority.” Many of his officers begged to disagree. “I consider the plan of policy pursued here as miserable,” wrote the assistant surgeon John Whittle. “[W]e have no doubt left these people in such a state of mind that if a ship should be unfortunately wrecked here, the crew will be murdered.”

  In the weeks ahead, as the squadron weaved its way among the Tuamotus toward Tahiti, eventually surveying a total of seventeen islands, the frustrations of the scientists only increased. Even when the natives proved friendly or the island uninhabited, Wilkes was reluctant to let them go ashore until after the survey was already well in hand. When no scientists were permitted to land on the island of Raraka, Titian Peale wrote out in bold letters across the page of his journal, “WHAT WAS A SCIENTIFIC CORP SENT FOR?” A few days later, Couthouy finally got the opportunity to collect some sizeable specimens of coral. But when he left them to dry outside his cabin door, Wilkes complained of the smell and ordered that no more coral could be dried below the spar deck. Couthouy insisted that European expeditions “had experienced no difficulty in the preservation of large and numerous specimens.” Wilkes replied that “he did not care a damn for what had been done in previous expeditions . . . , and that he should take the responsibility of deciding all matters relative to our collections according to his own views.” Like it or not, this was going to be the Wilkes Expedition.

  If his relations with the scientists had reached a new low, it was even worse with his officers, many of whom had once considered themselves the commander’s friends. Like Charlie Erskine before them—the cabin boy who had become so infuriated with Wilkes that he had contemplated murder—they had swung from ardent adoration to an equally passionate hate. “[W]e would have given ourselves to him entirely,” Reynolds wrote Lydia, “but he [did] not [know] how to use the men who were so much attached to him and by his own doings he has turned his warmest friends into deathly foes.”

  As was true on any naval vessel, the officers of the Vincennes ate their meals in two different groups or messes, with the lieutenants in the wardroom and the passed midshipmen and midshipmen in steerage. As was also true on any naval vessel, it was common for members of both messes to socialize in their cabins, with Reynolds’s and May’s carpeted stateroom serving as an especially popular gathering spot. But as relations between the commander and his officers deteriorated, Wilkes began to resent what he saw as an excessive fraternization among his junior and senior officers. On August 20, he issued an order: “The commander has observed with regret, not only a tendency to familiarity among officers of different grades, but that the apartments of all grades of officers have been converted into a lounge by the juniors, which must in the nature of things produce a familiarity having a tendency to destroy . . . discipline.”

  Reynolds responded with what might be described as the steerage’s declaration of independence. “In regard to the Selection of friends, or the privilege of enjoying their Society,” he wrote, “so long as we do not impinge on the martial law of the quarter deck, or assemble for seditious purposes, we are strongly & firmly of the belief, that the delicacy of the question should forbid all interference, & must beg to be allowed to follow the sacred bent of our own inclinations.” There was no longer any doubt as to how matters stood between the commander and his officers. “From this time forward,” Reynolds wrote, “there was ‘war to the knife’ between Captn. Wilkes & most of his officers.”

  By mutual agreement, all social contact between Wilkes and his officers ceased. “I have given up inviting the officers to my table,” he wrote Jane, “as I found it incompatible with my duties and I was desirous to widen the dividing line between us.” Wilkes would later claim that he had, from the very beginning of the Expedition, chosen to remove himself from regular contact with his officers. Reynolds insists, however, that it was only after this bitter exchange that the policy became strictly enforced. “Henceforward the door of the Cabin was only passed on matters of duty,” he wrote, “and the commander was left to the delight of his own society.” For Wilkes, whose original style of command had involved an unusual amount of interaction with his officers and who had spent much of his professional life working at home in the company of his family, it was going to be a very lonely voyage across the Pacific.

  At the island of Napuka (called Wytoohee by the Expedition), the natives once again appeared unwilling to allow them to land. John Sac was in a boat and already conversing with a group on shore when Wilkes rowed up in his six-oared gig with his broad commodore’s pennant flying. Thumping his chest, Wilkes shouted out to Sac, “Tell them that I am the Big Chief !” Sac duly communicated this information, but the natives were apparently unimpressed, forcing Wilkes and his party to return to the Vincennes without landing on the island.

  What made this incident particularly galling to Wilkes was that, as he and his officers could plainly see, just a short way down the beach Hudson’s boat-crews had succeeded in reaching the shore and were engaged in pleasant conversation with the natives. Wilkes ordered one of his officers to inform Hudson that he must immediately vacate the beach. That night he wrote a letter chastising his second-in-command for unreasonably risking his men’s lives when, in fact, his only crime had been that he had succeeded where Wilkes had failed.

  On the morning of September 2, Wilkes signaled the Flying Fish to come within hail. They were just off Kauehi, and he wanted the schooner to transport several of the scientists to the island. The Vincennes was lying with her maintopsail aback, moving at a leisurely one knot. The schooner approached from windward and astern, and as she sailed under the ship’s stern, Wilkes hailed her commander, Lieutenant Robert Pinkney, to head up and wait, or heave to. Not hearing the order, Pinkney continued on, sailing to leeward of and parallel to the Vincennes. Wilkes, irritated that Pinkney had not immediately responded to his hail, ran to the leeward side of his ship and shouted, “Heave to! Mr. Pinkney, I told you to heave to!” Since the schooner was now less than a hundred yards from the ship, there wasn’t room for her to heave to in the Vincennes’s lee without risking a collision. This did not deter Wilkes, who was now jogging along the gangway so as to keep abreast of the Flying Fish. “Why don’t you heave to, Mr. Pinkney?” he screamed through the speaking trumpet.

  Pinkney could have first headed downwind so as to create a sufficient gap between himself and the ship and then hove to. That was what Wilkes later claimed he had expected him to do. Instead, Pinkney decided to try to sail past the Vincennes and, once ahead of the ship, heave to to windward. But when he put the helm hard down, there was not sufficient space between the Flying Fish and the Vincennes, and the schooner rounded head to wind directly in front of the ship. By this point, Wilkes had made it to the bowsprit. “What do you mean, sir!” he shouted. “What do you mean? I never saw anything of the like! God damn you! I did not tell you to heave to under my bows!” If not for the quick-witted Lieutenant Joseph Underwood, who ordered the foretop-sail backed, the Vincennes would have surely run down the schooner and very likely killed all hands.

  From Reynolds’s perspective, it appeared as if Wilkes’s excessive badgering of the Flying Fish’s commander had pressured him into doing something he would not ordinarily have done. The real fault lay with Wi
lkes’s style of command. As was becoming increasingly clear, even to the youngest boys in the squadron, Wilkes, despite his claims of being “another John Paul Jones,” was no seaman. He might be adept at pushing the Porpoise through the ice, but he seemed at a loss when it came to the more nuanced intricacies of maneuvering his ship among other vessels. While at Valparaiso the Vincennes had become caught up in the rigging of a bark from Hamburg, and Wilkes’s “lubberly obstinacy” had deeply embarrassed Reynolds and the other officers. In truth, Wilkes did not have the sea experience or the personality to negotiate a ship in close quarters. His passionate nature made it impossible for him to issue orders in a composed and careful manner, and he was without the natural, ingrained sensitivity to the movements of a sailing vessel that is essential to being an effective seaman.

  It didn’t help matters that the officer he had chosen as his first lieutenant, Overton Carr, was equally lacking in seamanship skills. But to Wilkes’s mind, whatever difficulties he encountered were always the fault of others. He claimed that the incident with the Flying Fish had caused the officers aboard the schooner to be “almost beside themselves and nonplused as ignorance is always in such situations.” But it had been Wilkes, not the officers of the Flying Fish, who had lost control of his emotions, and for the duration of the voyage, he would do everything in his power to persecute the schooner’s commander, Robert Pinkney.

  Reynolds began to wonder if Wilkes was suffering from some kind of mental imbalance. “We find ourselves entirely at a loss to account for his motives,” he wrote Lydia, “or to imagine how any man in a sane mind could be guilty of such wrong headed measures.” As far as Reynolds could tell, Wilkes was no longer the same person he had come to admire in Washington. “The nature of the man has become changed,” he wrote, “he is as one possessed by a demon.”