Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  To a man, Wilkes’s officers demanded that immediate and crushing action be taken against the natives of Malolo. Although no one had been more personally attached to the victims than Wilkes, it was now his responsibility to, in his words, “prevent a just and salutary punishment from becoming a vindictive and indiscriminate massacre.” But before the natives could be punished, the bodies of the victims must be laid to rest. A burial at sea was out of the question. From Paddy O’Connell, Wilkes had learned of what had happened to the victims of the Charles Doggett massacre. Not long after the captain consigned them to the shallow, shark-infested water, the decomposing bodies had burst out of their cloth shrouds and floated to the surface. O’Connell claimed that the natives had quickly collected the corpses and feasted on the putrid flesh.

  About sixteen miles to the east, Wilkes had seen a beautiful islet that he judged to be far enough away from Malolo that they might bury Underwood and Henry, “without risk of exhumation.” That evening Alden, Emmons, and Eld, who was given command of the Leopard, took up stations around Malolo to ensure that no natives escaped during the night. Early the next morning, the Flying Fish departed on what Wilkes called “our melancholy errand.”

  They arrived at the island around nine A.M. Dr. Fox and the artist Alfred Agate were rowed to shore to supervise the digging of a common grave. An hour later, they signaled that all was ready. The bodies had been sewed up in two hammocks, which were already soaked with Underwood’s blood. Wilkes ordered that the bodies be placed together in his gig and wrapped in the American flag. With Sinclair following in the tender’s boat, they rowed for shore.

  About twenty sailors, all dressed in white, made up the procession that took the two bodies to a grove of banyan trees in the center of the island. “It was a lonely and suitable spot . . . ,” Wilkes wrote, “in a shade so dense that scarce a ray of the sun could penetrate it.” The grave had been dug deep into the white sand, which was soon stained red with blood. Agate read the funeral service, and when three volleys were fired over the grave, a flock of birds took wing overhead. “Poor Capt. Wilkes,” Sinclair wrote, “his heart seemed nearly broken. He sobbed like a child and I felt for him from the very bottom of my soul.” Once the grave had been filled, tree branches were used to erase their footprints from the sand, while footprints were purposely left in an entirely different part of the island in hopes of diverting any natives that might come looking for the burial site. Wilkes decided to name it Henry Island, while designating the islands of which it was a part the Underwood Group.

  On their return to Malolo that evening, they found the Porpoise anchored in the bay. Emmons had told Ringgold about the killing of Underwood and Henry, and Ringgold’s men were already cleaning their muskets and pistols, filling their cartridges with gunpowder, and making other preparations for the impending conflict. Although Wilkes would later claim that he attempted to exercise due restraint in his actions against the natives, the journals of his officers tell a different story. “[W]ar was now declared against the Island,” Emmons wrote, “& orders issued by Capt. Wilkes to spare only the women & children.”

  That night Emmons and Alden patrolled the shores of Malolo in their cutters. It was evident that the Fijians were also preparing for battle. Warriors dabbed with paint and armed with muskets patrolled the shore, shouting out taunts and occasionally firing at the boat-crews. When the sailors had the opportunity to fire back, the Fijians dropped down at the flash of the musket in an attempt to dodge the ball.

  The next morning three divisions of about seventy officers and men under the command of Lieutenant Ringgold were rowed to shore at the southern tip of Malolo. Wilkes had instructed them to march across the island to Sualib, the village where the murders had occurred. Sualib was reputed to be an impregnable fortress, and Wilkes ordered Ringgold to kill as many warriors as possible and burn the village. On the northeastern side of the island was the lightly defended village of Arro (today called Yaro). Wilkes, who led the fleet of boats commanded by Alden, Emmons, and Midshipman Clark, would be responsible for burning Arro while also pursuing any natives attempting to escape by canoe. The Flying Fish and the Porpoise would stand by with their guns trained on shore.

  As the men were being rowed in, three canoes were seen sailing for Malololailai, and Emmons and Alden were sent off in pursuit. Serving as Emmons’s interpreter was a Hawaiian known as Oahu Jack. Once they were in firing range, Jack asked the natives where they were from. When they replied “Malolo,” Emmons unleashed his blunderbuss, immediately killing six natives as the rest dove into the water. “[A]s it was mere slaughter to kill them unresistingly,” Alden ordered that the remaining natives be taken alive. But his men refused to listen. Crying, “Kill! Kill!,” they raised their cutlasses and prepared to spear the natives like fish. When one of his men grabbed a Fijian by the hair and drew back his sword, Alden trained his pistol on his own man, who was about to behead a woman. There were also several children, and after putting the male captives in irons, Emmons and Alden returned the women and children to shore.

  George Sinclair was in the shore party’s second division commanded by Robert Johnson. As he and seventy others took up their positions around the village, he could not help but be impressed by the size and sophistication of the Fijian fortress. It was completely surrounded by a twelve-foot-wide ditch. Behind the ditch was a ten-foot-high palisade built of large coconut tree trunks knitted together by a dense wicker-work. Inside this imposing wall of wood was another ditch, probably dug the night before, with the dirt piled up in front to form a four-foot-wide parapet. Natives were already standing in the ditch, with only their heads exposed, prepared to fire their muskets and shoot their arrows through narrow openings in the palisade.

  Several chiefs, distinguishable by their white headdresses, stood outside the stockade, taunting the sailors as they approached. A Congreve war rocket was fired, followed by a volley of gunfire, and the natives quickly retreated into the fort. Waving their spears and clubs in the air, the villagers behind the stockade shouted out, “Lako-mai!” or “Come on!”

  Ringgold wanted to avoid a direct assault, preferring instead to fire on the fort from a distance in hopes of setting the village aflame with a rocket. Unfortunately, Robert Johnson didn’t learn this until some of the people in his division, led by George Sinclair, had already begun to storm the barricade. Sinclair scurried across a narrow causeway that led to a gate. There he saw a warrior about to hurl a long spear. “I gave him the contents of the left barrel of my gun,” Sinclair wrote, “fifteen buckshot, which sent him to Kingdom Come.”

  Ringgold shouted out to Sinclair to return, but Sinclair quickly realized that the gate he had partially entered was constructed like a fish weir—it was easy enough to get in, but getting out was a different matter. He also realized he would be more exposed to enemy fire by retreating back across the causeway than by staying close under the stockade. He could see the natives, “thick as pigs,” in the ditch on the other side of the palisade. “The bullets from our men were pouring in thro the Stockade as thick as hail,” Sinclair wrote, “but the natives were in a measure protected by this inner ditch.” In addition to warriors firing muskets, there were women with bows and arrows. An arrow glanced off a gatepost and struck Sinclair on the lapel of his jacket, but caused him no injury.

  He had an easy shot at a native just four feet inside the gate, but when he fired his gun, the native dropped down to the ground, and the ball passed over his right shoulder. Sinclair had heard rumors that the Fijians could dodge a musket ball, and now he knew they were true. When the native sprang back to his feet, William Hayes, captain of the maintop aboard the Porpoise, was waiting for him and stabbed the native in the eye with his bayonet.

  The action continued at a frantic pace, the air filled with the crackle of gunfire and the angry sizzle of Congreve rockets. Sinclair had just shot a native with his pistol when someone shouted out that a warrior was about to throw a short club at him. He ducked and the club ric
ocheted off a nearby gatepost. Before the native could get a second club out of the maro tied around his waist, Sinclair fired his pistol, and the native dropped to the ground. Suddenly there was much shouting and confusion within the fort as several warriors carried the native’s body to a nearby hut. Sinclair later learned that he had killed the chief of Sualib.

  All the while, sailors were coming up to the gate, two by two, and firing into the village as Ringgold continued to pepper the village with rockets, but to little effect. About fifteen minutes into the battle, a rocket hit the thatched roof of one of the houses and burst into flame. If the fire should spread, the village would soon become an inferno. A warrior climbed up onto the roof and attempted to dislodge the rocket, but more than a dozen guns were quickly trained on him, and he fell, his body riddled with musket balls.

  Soon the fire was spreading throughout the village. An interpreter shouted out that all the women and children would be allowed to escape out the rear gate. As the flames increased, the warriors were forced to abandon the inner ditch, which exposed them to unrelenting fire from the sailors’ muskets. Sinclair’s double-barrel gun became so hot that he couldn’t touch the barrel. “The scene was grand, and beautiful and at the same time horrible,” he wrote, “what with the volleys of musketry, the crackling of the flames, the squealing of the Pigs . . . , the shouting of men and women and the crying of children. The noise was deafening, above which you could hear rising now and then, the loud cheers of our men with ‘There they go,’ ‘Down with them,’ ‘Shoot that fellow,’ etc. etc.”

  A weeping girl was seen stumbling about the village with her arms outstretched. Henry Eld ordered the men not to shoot in the child’s direction. Pushing his way through one of the gates, he attempted to reach her, but the scorching heat forced him back.

  Soon the entire village was engulfed in flames. Ringgold and his men retreated to a nearby coconut grove where they waited “until the conflagration should have exhausted its fury.” After about an hour, some of the men attempted to enter the village. The heat was still so intense that Sinclair feared his cartridge box might explode. They found calabashes of water, hampers of yams, and many pigs, all burned to death; the villagers had clearly anticipated a long siege. They found spears, clubs, and muskets that had been abandoned by the natives in the ditch. In one of the houses they found Underwood’s cloth cap—“all mashed by the blows which had felled him.” Most of the dead had been burned to cinders in the fire, with only four or five bodies, including that of the young girl, found lying amid the ashes. One of the victims was identified as the chief whom Sinclair had dispatched with his pistol. “[T]o satiate their revenge,” several of the sailors threw the body onto one of the smoldering houses “and roasted him.”

  The trees surrounding the village were stuck full of arrows, most of them fired by the women of the village. Everyone agreed that the natives had put up a stiff resistance, and yet the sailors had sustained only a single significant injury—one man had received a bad gash in the leg from an arrow. As smoke billowed into the clear blue sky and the inescapable smell of burning flesh filled their nostrils, the sailors attempted to slake their thirst with coconuts. Soon it was time to march to Arro. “We continued as we had commenced,” Sinclair wrote, “to destroy every house and plantation that we came across, and as we marched in three lines, I do not think that one escaped us.” The villagers who were still alive had fled to the hills, and Ringgold and his men encountered only one native (who was quickly stabbed by several bayonets) during their march to Arro.

  They reached the village around sunset. “It must have been a most beautiful place,” Sinclair wrote, “situated as it was beneath the shade of a grove of lofty trees.” It was now a wasteland. The village had been abandoned by the time Alden had begun the work of burning it. “Thank God we have taught these villains a lesson,” Sinclair wrote that night. “[A] load has been taken off my conscience; I hope, however, we have not yet done with them.”

  Even as Sinclair was writing these words, George Emmons was finishing up the last engagement of the day. He had spent much of the afternoon in pursuit of a group of five canoes sighted leaving Malolo that morning. He figured they must have escaped to Malololailai, and around four P.M., he sailed his cutter in among the mangrove swamps of the island in search of the missing canoes. Sure enough, there they were—five canoes making their way along the outer reef of the island. The canoes each contained eight warriors; the vessels’ sides had been built up to shield the natives from attack. Emmons had half his normal crew—just seven men. “I thought the odds were too great to allow [the Fijians] any more advantages than they already possessed,” he wrote. Emmons raised the cutter’s sails, which enabled the men who had been pulling oars to take up their muskets, and sailed for the nearest canoe. Once they were within range, Emmons opened fire with his blunderbuss. “Many were killed at the first discharge,” he wrote, “and others were thrown in so much confusion that but little resistance was made.” One native, however, was able to throw three spears at Emmons. After successfully dodging all of them, Emmons could see that the native was reaching for yet another spear. “[ H ]aving discharged my last pistol,” he wrote, “I jumped into the canoe and jerked [the] spear out of his hands while Oahu Jack dispatched him with a hatchet.”

  One of the canoes managed to escape as the rest of the natives jumped into the water and swam in various directions. After shooting at a group of four natives who had reached the shallows (killing one and wounding two), Emmons and his men set to work butchering those still in the water. He later told Sinclair that the Fijians’ “heads were so hard that they turned the edges of the cutlasses and our men had in some cases to finish them off with their boat axes.” With two of the canoes in tow, Emmons returned to the Porpoise just before midnight.

  That night a large number of sharks were seen swimming about the schooner and brig. “[The sharks] must have had their fill of Fiji meat,” Sinclair wrote, “as they refused even to taste a piece of fat pork that was put over for them.”

  Belowdecks, the officers and men settled into their berths and hammocks and tried, as best they could, to sleep.

  Early the next morning a group of natives appeared on the beach near where the schooner was anchored. Wilkes and an interpreter got in his gig and pulled for shore. It was low tide, and as they approached the edge of the reef, the men withdrew, leaving a woman with a white chicken in her hands, which she offered to Wilkes as a token of peace. She also had several articles that had belonged to Underwood and Henry.

  Wilkes took the personal effects but refused the bird. He had learned that it was Fijian custom for a defeated people to sue for mercy before “the whole of the attacking party, in order that all might be witnesses.” He felt that if he didn’t insist on these terms, the people of Malolo would “never acknowledge themselves conquered.” Wilkes told the woman that he would assemble his men on a hill in the southern part of the island around noon. If her chiefs and her people did not appear soon after, the attack would begin again.

  Late that morning Wilkes and close to a hundred officers and men climbed the hill. “The day was perfectly serene,” he wrote, “and the island, which but a few hours before, had been one of the loveliest spots in creation, was now entirely laid waste, showing the place of the massacre, the ruined town, and the devastated plantations. The eye wandered over the dreary waste to the beautiful expanse of waters beyond and around, with the long lines of white sparkling reefs, until it rested, far in the distance on the small green spot where we had performed the last rites to our murdered companions. A gentle breeze, which was blowing through the casuarina trees, gave out the moaning sound that is uttered by the pines of our own country, producing a feeling of depression inseparable from the occasion, and bringing vividly to my thoughts the sad impression which this melancholy and dreadful occurrence would bring upon those who were far away.”

  About four P.M. Wilkes heard the sound of “distant wailings.” A long line of nat
ives could be seen making their way over the hills toward them. When the line stopped at the foot of the hill, Wilkes threatened to destroy them with his war rockets if they did not climb the hill to do obeisance. Falling to their hands and knees, with their faces toward the ground, the natives crawled up the hill to within thirty feet of Wilkes and his officers. As the natives behind him uttered “piteous moans,” an old man stood and begged Wilkes for mercy, “pledging that they would never do the like to a white man.” Offering Wilkes two young girls, which were quickly refused, the old man said that they had lost close to eighty men, and that they considered themselves a conquered people.

  Through an interpreter, Wilkes lectured them about the power of the white man, insisting that if anything like this should ever occur again, he would return to the island and exterminate them. He also insisted that early the next day they must come to the town of Arro with all the provisions they could gather and that they would spend the entire day filling casks of water for his ships. Wilkes later claimed that “this was according to their customs, that the conquered should do work for the victors.”

  The next morning the Flying Fish and the Porpoise were brought to Arro, where seventy natives were already waiting for them. By the end of the day, three thousand gallons of water had been loaded into the brig and schooner, along with twelve pigs and about three thousand coconuts. The natives also produced Underwood’s pocket watch, which had been melted in the fire at Sualib, and Henry’s eyeglasses.

  With the task of revenge completed, Wilkes was left with nothing but the enormity of his loss. For the next few days he would be, by his own admission, “unfit for further duty.”