Belcher’s lack of candor was a disappointment, but Wilkes’s visit with the British commander ultimately proved of immense benefit to him. Belcher was a notorious disciplinarian, and while he and Wilkes spoke in Belcher’s cabin, the British officers entertained their American counterparts with tales of abuse and cruelty that made Wilkes’s actions seem relatively benign. “[My officers] looked upon me with very different eyes,” Wilkes wrote, “and were well satisfied that my discipline was no more rigid than necessary to make my command efficient.”
Elsewhere in Fiji, however, there was scant evidence of the supposed efficiency of Wilkes’s command. The Peacock had recently arrived at Bua Bay on the western tip of Vanua Levu, where two boat-crews led by Lieutenant Perry had been sitting idle for several weeks, waiting for orders from their commander. Although Wilkes would later accuse Perry of laziness, the truth was that Wilkes had forgotten about him, and Perry had no way of knowing where his commander was. Given the tremendous time constraints under which they were all working, this was an inexcusable lapse on the part of the leader of the Ex. Ex.
But if Wilkes’s organizational skills might be lacking, at least he was a capable surveyor. As Reynolds was belatedly discovering, Hudson didn’t even know the basics of how to conduct a survey, and he wasn’t about to learn. Just as he had proven weirdly indifferent to early sightings of the Antarctic coast, Hudson now showed an abysmal lack of interest in the primary mission of the Expedition. For Hudson’s officers, who were saddled with the responsibility of carrying out one of the most ambitious survey operations ever undertaken by the U.S. Navy, it was a highly exasperating situation. “Of course we are without a system, and things are done in the most confused disorder,” Reynolds fumed, “when they are done at all. It is damnable!”
The Peacock’s most recent swing along the west coast of Viti Levu had gone so badly that the sailors had begun to grumble that there was a Jonah aboard the ship. In a single week they had rammed into so many coral reefs that it was a miracle the ship was still afloat. The Peacock ’s cutter had capsized and sunk before it could be saved. An entire day was lost unsuccessfully attempting to raise the lost boat. But there had been more: one man lost three fingers in an anchor chain; another shot his forefinger in two; yet another nearly amputated his leg; and then there had been the sailor who had crushed his ribs while working the capstan. The once happy Peacock had become a ship of gloom.
Reynolds was greatly relieved to be named second-in-command of a two-boat survey of the eastern edge of Vanua Levu. Reynolds and five sailors were to spend the next two weeks in a twenty-eight-foot whaleboat containing a mast, sail, five oars, six muskets, six pistols, four cutlasses, boxes of ammunition, two casks of water, a bag of bread, “a chest of grub,” a cask of whiskey, and an anchor and chain. “We had no more room for exercise,” Reynolds wrote, “than a chicken in the shell.” Since their orders prohibited landing on shore, they were required to find a way to sleep in this overcrowded vessel. Reynolds reserved the boat’s stern grating for himself. This put his head in unpleasant proximity with the bilge until he hit upon the idea of using an upside-down bucket for a pillow. His men were left to contort themselves around each other until they were “mixed together so, that to extricate themselves was a matter requiring some care & trouble.” When the wind picked up that first night, kicking up a steep chop, sleep became impossible. The next morning, Reynolds “felt as if I had been well cudgeled.”
The days were no easier. The weather was beautiful, without a cloud in the sky, but they had no way of shielding themselves from the sun. By noon, the brass portion of Reynolds’s sextant had become so hot that he couldn’t touch it, and the whaleboat’s interior planks were nearly as warm. At times like these, he sometimes sought relief in the water, where a submerged rock might offer a vantage point for his observations. “Often have I been up to my middle,” he wrote his family, “screwing away with my sextant upon objects perhaps twenty miles off, with a foothold that I could scarcely preserve from the depth I was in and the swash of the Seas, and surrounded by the men [in the boat] who were holding books, pencils, spy glass, and watch, all of which were used in turn.”
All agreed that surveying in an open boat did terrible things to a man’s constitution. It was said that two months of this duty was enough to shorten a person’s life by one to two years. Some of the officers would spend as many as fifty consecutive days on boat duty. By the end of their stay at Fiji, Hudson calculated that the Peacock’s four boats had covered a total of 8,225 miles.
On the evening of July 3, after twelve days of surveying, Reynolds returned for a brief respite aboard the Peacock. “[T]he little motion [the ship] had at her anchor,” he wrote, “was so different from the quick & irregular jumping of the boats that I tottered, lost my balance & staggered as a drunken man.” He soon discovered that the mood aboard the Peacock was even worse than when he had left. Yet another accident had occurred. While firing the guns to measure baselines for the boats, a sailor had unwisely slipped a cartridge of powder into his shirt. A spark from the gun’s touchhole flew onto the cartridge, and more than three pounds of gunpowder exploded. Reynolds’s friend Dr. Guillou didn’t give the poor sailor much of a chance. He now lay on a cot on the ship’s deck, his horribly scorched skin covered with swatches of oil-soaked linen. “Oh! It was piteous to see him so,” Reynolds wrote. “He lingered on, in the most intense pain & groaning continually so that no one could rest in the ship.”
As if this weren’t enough of a nightmare, the Peacock’s officers and men had received an entirely different kind of scare from the natives. That morning, off the island of Tavea, a young chief and his party of three canoes had come alongside with some news that they wanted to share with the Papalangi. The chief’s wife excitedly informed Hudson that they had just taken three prisoners from a rival village and had “roasted them & eaten part!” What’s more, in one of their canoes was a piece of a body, wrapped in plantain leaves. “The infernal devils were eager to show their hellish food,” Reynolds wrote, “and they held up the flesh, in the Canoe alongside, that it might be seen. Not content with this, they brought a skull on board, all raw & bloody, with the marks of their teeth, where they had torn away strips of flesh; and one of their Epicures, was crunching an Eye, to which was hanging some of the fat & muscles of the face & cheek.” Perhaps enjoying the fact that the Americans were so obviously taken aback, the native munching the eye exclaimed, “Vinaka, vinaka,” or “Good, good.” Hudson turned and vomited over the Peacock’s side.
For six feet of cloth, the purser William Spieden purchased the skull for the Expedition’s collection. “Everybody in the Ship seemed oppressed with a weight of horror,” Reynolds wrote, “& there was a crushing & awfully nervous feeling came over me, which I could not shake off.” The next morning, Reynolds went to the forward part of the ship to look at the skull. “God!” he wrote, “to think that this had but a day or two ago contained a cunning brain!”
As the officers proceeded with the survey, the scientists were performing some of the most important work of the Expedition. Although the botanist William Rich was, in the words of James Dana, proving “so-so,” William Brackenridge and Charles Pickering were more than making up for his lack of expertise. Indeed, the two scientists had become an informal team, with Brackenridge, a broad-shouldered Scot, who had formerly been in charge of the famed Edinburgh Gardens, providing the practical know-how while the diminutive Pickering, whose technical expertise in a variety of fields was unsurpassed, assisted in classification of the 650 different plant species they found in Fiji. It was Pickering who had discovered that as long as they didn’t bring any objects of value with them, the natives showed no interest in doing them any harm. This enabled the two scientists to trek unmolested into the interiors of the islands, where they found a new species of tomato as well as a virulent species of poison ivy that they carefully collected with sticks. In Vanua Levu, Brackenridge found the last remaining groves of sandalwood, which
had been previously assumed to be extinct in Fiji.
The philologist Horatio Hale was working up a vocabulary that would ultimately grow to 5,600 words and include five different words for “foolishness.” Hale observed that while the Fijians were primarily known for their savagery, they were also the most skilled craftsmen in the Pacific, creating beautifully wrought canoes, houses, and pottery. But it was the geologist, James Dana, who made a truly groundbreaking discovery during the Expedition’s stay in Fiji.
While in Sydney, Dana had come upon a newspaper article briefly describing Charles Darwin’s new theory of the origin of coral atolls. “The paragraph threw a flood of light over the subject,” Dana later wrote, “and called forth feelings of peculiar satisfaction, and of grateful-ness to Mr. Darwin.” Darwin had hit upon what would become known as the theory of subsidence. The process begins with the rise of a volcanic island. Over time, coral starts to grow in the warm and shallow waters of the new island; then, as the island sinks ever so gradually beneath the waves, the coral continues to grow upward until a lagoon is formed between the coral, now known as a barrier reef, and what is left of the original island. Finally, the island sinks completely below the water’s surface, leaving an empty circular lagoon.
Darwin thought it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove his theory, but in Fiji, Dana found undeniable proof of subsidence. Amid the stunning variety of coral islands in this group, Dana located what would become literal textbook examples of the three stages of coral formation at the islands of Chichia, Matuku, and Nanuku. But for Dana, whose interest in volcanoes dated back to his first voyage as a midshipmen’s instructor in the Mediterranean, this was just the beginning. Still to come in the Expedition’s tour of the Pacific were the active volcanoes of Hawaii. Besides corroborating Darwin’s theory of subsidence, Dana would begin to work toward a sweeping view of geological change that would anticipate what has been called “one of the great unifying concepts of modern geology”—the theory of plate tectonics.
By the middle of July, both the Vincennes and the Flying Fish had joined the Peacock at Bua Bay. A gale had been blowing for several days, and Wilkes used this period of forced confinement to assess the progress of the survey as his officers plotted and finished their calculations. Wilkes now realized that another month was needed to finish the survey. Unfortunately, the squadron was running short of food, forcing Wilkes to cut the men’s daily provisions by a third. Although Wilkes would never officially condone the practice, his officers on boat duty knew that the only way to feed their men in the days ahead might be to barter with the natives for food. They also knew that any time they set foot on land, they did so at their peril.
Earlier in the month, a two-boat survey led by Lieutenant Perry and Passed Midshipman Knox had been sent to chart Solevu Bay, approximately twenty miles to the south. Around noon on Sunday July 12, Perry’s cutter was sighted sailing toward the anchored squadron. There was no sign of Knox’s boat, but it soon became apparent that two boats’ worth of men were crowded into the launch, along with two native hostages.
Knox and Perry, it turned out, had been trapped in the bay for several days by the gale. As the boat-crews sat at anchor in the middle of the bay, the natives on shore left little doubt that if the sailors should come ashore for any reason, they would not have long to live. When their provisions finally ran out, Perry and Knox had no choice but to attempt an escape—even though they would have to beat against the gale-force winds. As soon as they began to tack their way out, Knox’s deeply laden boat missed stays. The strong winds blew the boat ashore, and the sailors were almost immediately surrounded by natives armed with clubs, spears, and even a few guns. The boat’s blunderbusses and muskets were so soaked with rain and seawater that they were unusable, and Knox and his men fully expected a hand-to-hand fight to the death.
But for reasons that were not clear, the chief granted them mercy. (Whippy would later claim that it was the first instance he had ever heard of a grounded vessel’s crew not being murdered.) Taking what weapons and equipment they could, Knox and his men abandoned the boat to the natives and waded out to Perry’s launch.
Perry knew the wind would have to moderate if he was to sail the launch, now doubly overloaded, out of the harbor. As dusk approached they counted no fewer than fourteen fires along the shore. Every now and then a native would fire off a musket. Around midnight the lookout cried out that the cutter was surrounded by swimming natives. Some of them were diving underwater and attempting to lift the anchor while others tried to cut the anchor cable. The sailors began shooting into the darkness and were eventually able to capture two of the natives, who were quickly tied up and thrown into the bottom of the boat. When the natives on shore realized that they had lost two of their people, “they danced and wailed around their fires,” in the words of one sailor, “like so many fiends.”
The next morning, Perry decided to try once again to tack out of the bay. As soon as they made sail, the natives began following them along the reef. “[T]he least accident would have thrown our poor fellows ashore,” Reynolds wrote, “only to be murdered.” There was a steep chop and the boat was soon full of water. The natives had gathered at the edge of the reef, where it looked as if the cutter was sure to run aground. As his men bailed with “Hats, Shoes & buckets,” Perry was able to weather the barrier and finally reach the safety of open water.
Upon hearing Perry’s report, Wilkes announced that they were going to get the boat back. He and Hudson would be leading a fleet of eleven boats, plus the schooner, in an assault on Solevu. Earlier, Wilkes had ordered Reynolds to resurvey the bay in which the squadron was presently anchored, and when Reynolds headed out at two P.M., he was hopeful that he would be able to complete the work in time to join Wilkes and Hudson. But when he returned to the Vincennes at sundown, he was told that they had left two hours before. “I felt as bad as if I had been whipped,” he wrote, “& heartily wished Captain Wilkes & his resurveying at the———.”
Wilkes and his expedition of eighty men arrived at Solevu the next morning. The tide was low, and there was a wide mudflat between them and the cutter, which had been drawn up into the shallows of a small, winding creek. Using Whippy as his interpreter, Wilkes demanded that the natives hand over the boat and all the articles that had been left in it. “It was a novel position for a Fegee warrior to find himself in,” Reynolds wrote. “For never in the annals of his people had so large a body of white men appeared in arms, offering fight, upon their very shores.”
The chief agreed to surrender the boat, and it was soon carried down to the water’s edge. But after inspecting the boat, Wilkes’s officers reported that it was missing the men’s personal effects. “My conditions not being complied with,” Wilkes wrote, “I determined to make an example of these natives.”
That afternoon, the fleet moved in for the attack. The boats grounded in about two feet of water, and the men, all of them armed with muskets, waded the rest of the way to shore under the leadership of Hudson. Wilkes elected to remain in his gig, which had been equipped with a Congreve war rocket.
The village had been left deserted, and the natives, loaded with their possessions, could be seen climbing up a nearby hill, where they paused to watch the ensuing scene. In only a matter of minutes, the entire village was in flames. The popping of burning bamboo sounded so much like the report of a musket, that it was briefly believed the natives were fighting back, but such was not the case. This did not prevent Wilkes from firing a few of his rockets at the natives up on the hill. Partway between a skyrocket and a modern-day missile, the rocket left a smoky contrail before bursting into flame, and the Fijians could be heard shouting out, “Curlew! Curlew!,” or “Spirits! Spirits!” Lieutenant Sinclair reported that “we have since heard the most exaggerated accounts of the destructive effect of these ‘Flying Devils’ as the Natives called the rockets.”
That evening aboard the Flying Fish, Wilkes and Hudson congratulated themselves on “having punish
ed the insolence of these cannibals without any loss on our side.” But, as the geologist James Dana observed, the Fijians probably had a very different view of the incident. “Burning villages is of no avail as punishment,” he wrote in a letter to the botanist Asa Gray. “They only laugh at it. A few weeks will repair all the damage. They have heretofore sneered at men-of-war, as they had done nothing here except burning a town, and it is very important that some more effective mode of exciting their fears should be adopted.”
Just eleven days after the burning of Solevu, Wilkes would do as Dana suggested. In addition to reducing yet another beautiful Fijian village to a smoking ruin, he would drench its sands in blood.
CHAPTER 10
Massacre at Malolo
IT WAS TO BE WILKES’S final survey in Fiji—a week-long swing through the westernmost islands of the group. Beginning with the Yasawas to the north, Wilkes would work his way down to the constellation of tiny islands known as the Mamanuca Group, finishing with Malolo, not far from the big island of Viti Levu. Now, with his survey of Fiji almost completed, he could finally begin to look to the future with optimism and pleasure. “I feel I have now got to the top of the hill,” he wrote Jane, “and every day shortens the time [until my return].” In typical fashion, he ended the letter with a word about his nephew, who would be accompanying him on the survey: “Wilkes is quite well & a good boy.”
The survey party left Bua Bay on July 16. Whippy had warned that they were headed toward one of the most dangerous parts of Fiji—a place where no white man dared reside—so Wilkes made sure that the party had sufficient safety in numbers. In addition to three boats—led by Alden, Emmons, and Underwood—there would be the Porpoise and the Flying Fish, with the schooner flying his commodore’s pennant. The large number of vessels prompted Lieutenant Sinclair to wonder if “we must be bound on some war party”—words that would prove tragically prophetic.
Sea of Glory Page 24
