Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  On Friday, July 31, Reynolds was aboard the Vincennes, at anchor beside the Peacock off Vanua Levu, talking with William May. May was at work on a chart of the harbors of Tutuila in Samoa, which Reynolds had surveyed with Joseph Underwood. The two men got to talking about Underwood and began to speculate about when the surveying party might return.

  Soon after, Reynolds was seated beside the stern window of the Vincennes’s cabin, working on a chart of Bua Bay, when a boat, followed by several others, rowed past the ship’s stern. He knew it must be the surveying party, but chose to continue with his work, being in the middle of a particularly difficult calculation. Suddenly May burst into the cabin, shouting, “Oh, Reynolds! Underwood and Henry are killed, murdered by the natives.”

  That night, Alden told his tale—recounting the slow, agonizing unfolding of events that had led to the massacre on the beach and then the swift and overwhelming response. Like all of them, Reynolds felt nothing but anger and hatred for the natives of Malolo. “[L]et no one say that there was one life too many taken,” he insisted.

  For Wilkes, the need for retaliation had not yet been laid to rest. Privately, he blamed Alden for allowing Underwood and Henry to go on shore and for not keeping better track of the hostage. “[I]t is extremely difficult after such a distressing calamity to find fault,” he wrote Jane, “particularly when one is so nearly interested as I am in its results and when no possible good could come from the investigation.”

  But it was Underwood whom he blamed the most. “[ I ]t was owing to the overconfidence of Lt. Underwood,” he wrote Jane. “[He] must have perceived the suspicious appearances about the natives but did not act upon them until it was too late.” Underwood was dead, but Wilkes would have his revenge. He ordered that the lieutenant’s personal effects be put up for auction. “There was a general feeling of indignation among the officers when this order was known,” Reynolds wrote. “They felt it would be sacrilege to deprive the widowed wife of the relics of her lost husband.” Underwood had been one of many officers who had drawn up his will prior to the Fiji survey, and the executor of that will, James Blair (who had been Wilkes Henry’s second during the duel at Valparaiso), protested Wilkes’s actions as “illegal and without precedent.” Wilkes’s malice and hurt would not be thwarted, however, and the auction went forward. “Decency and humanity were outraged in the Exhibition that followed,” Reynolds wrote.

  But Wilkes was not finished. Upon the completion of the survey, Veidovi was transferred from the Peacock to the Vincennes. Under Hudson’s charge, the Fijian chief had been allowed on deck and had spoken frequently with the officers. But everything changed when he arrived on the Vincennes. “He soon found that Lieut. Wilkes was a very different white man from the humane Lieut. Hudson,” Reynolds wrote. Wilkes ordered that Veidovi be kept in confinement. Like any Fijian chief, he took great pride in his immense crop of hair, which extended as many as eight inches from his head. Before being taken prisoner, he had more than a dozen barbers to attend him; instead of a pillow, he had slept on a finely crafted neck-stand that prevented his hair from being crushed at night. Wilkes decided it was time to remove this last vestige of his former life. “A close crop was made of his head by our ship’s barber,” Wilkes wrote, “who was much elated by the job and retained locks for presentation.” Veidovi, on the other hand, was devastated. “[I]t was some time before he became reconciled to his new costume,” Wilkes wrote, “and the mortification he experienced in having his huge head of hair [chopped] off.”

  None of these actions seemed to quell Wilkes’s anger and anguish as the squadron set out from Fiji in the middle of August. As late as October, he wrote Jane that “the fate of poor Wilkes . . . continues to grieve and depress me. I have borne up against the shock it gave me as well as I could but I feel so in the land of strangers even in my own ship that I have little if any communication with my officers.”

  Whether it was by death or by dismissal, the squadron had lost its best and most capable officers. Reynolds didn’t know how the rest of them could continue under Wilkes’s spiteful and vindictive leadership. Making matters worse was the addition of another year to the cruise. “[T]his slapping on an additional twelvemonth, makes a horrible abyss,” he wrote, “the bottom of which no one can see, or have the heart to look for. Our spirits are broken.”

  Under partial rations, against light and baffling headwinds, the squadron sailed for Hawaii.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mauna Loa

  OVER THE LAST FEW DECADES, the Hawaiian Islands, known to Wilkes as the Sandwich Islands, had become the epicenter of American whaling in the Pacific. Five of six whalers that passed through Honolulu were from New England or New York. That fact, combined with the strong American missionary presence throughout the island group, made Hawaii one of the few places in the Pacific where the United States exerted more of an economic and cultural influence than her European rivals. But not even this most American of Polynesian communities knew what to make of the U.S. Exploring Expedition when the squadron arrived in late September 1840—especially when several hundred sailors, all dressed in white shirts and pants, with handkerchiefs around their necks, black tarpaulin hats on their heads, and Spanish dollars in their pockets, descended on Honolulu.

  It was an ideal town for a sailor. Years of catering to the crews of whaleships had schooled the inhabitants in the fastest way to separate a sea-weary mariner from his money. Dance halls with fiddlers, prostitutes, and plenty of alcohol were open at almost all hours, and the Expedition’s sailors and marines quickly availed themselves of the local attractions. There was, however, an important difference between the Expedition and the whaling fleet. The sailors of the Ex. Ex. were proud to be representing the United States of America, and the more they drank, the more patriotic they became. A group of them procured a giant ensign and began to march through the streets of Honolulu, shouting, singing, waving the flag, and at every corner, pausing to give three hearty cheers for their native land. “It was glorious fun for them,” Reynolds wrote. “Two weeks liberty, plenty of money & their own masters. No wonder they went into such half-crazy excesses.”

  Of these sailors, Charlie Erskine had perhaps the best reason to celebrate. For the last year and a half he had been struggling to teach himself to read and write. In Honolulu he wrote the first letter of his life. “Mother, Mother, Dear Mother,” it began, “While fair away a cruseing amoung the islands of the sea, I never, Oh no Dear mother, I never, never will forget to think of thee. By going to Mr. F.D. Quincy 25 Commercial Street you will get one hundred dollars from Your absent son Charlie.”

  Soon after the Peacock’s arrival in Honolulu, Reynolds received his mail from Captain Hudson. “I got such a pile of letters and papers as I could scarcely carry—my arms were full,” he wrote. “I was completely puzzled, I did not know which seal to crack first, and after inspecting and turning and tossing I found it was no use to select and so picked them as I could.” After several delightful hours of reading, he turned in for the night. “All that I had learned was floating through my head,” he wrote, “and it was near 3 before I fell asleep.”

  For Reynolds it was a joyous relief to know that his family was, as of ten months ago, “all well and happy and had not forgotten or neglected me.” He good-naturedly scolded Lydia for dashing off letters that “were not any too lengthy,” insisting, “There is nothing about Home too trifling to be overlooked.” During the long passage to Honolulu, he had begun to think about his standing in the navy, and he felt nothing but pessimism concerning the chances of his getting a promotion any time soon. “I shall be 30 years of age,” he wrote his family, “when, by the present method of filling the vacancies occasioned by deaths and resignations, I may be made a Lieutenant. . . . What a prospect is this! It is enough to drive one crazy.” But he didn’t want them to worry and assured them with characteristic cheerfulness, “I am far from being miserable.”

  He gave his family detailed mailing instructions for the duratio
n of the Expedition. Although Wilkes kept the future movements of the squadron “a profound mystery,” the officers generally assumed that they would spend the summer of 1841 surveying the Columbia River, then return to America via the Cape of Good Hope after stopping at Singapore. Reynolds had learned of three different routes for getting letters to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River—by way of Montreal, St. Louis, and New Orleans. After that, it would be a little trickier. “You must write by every chance to the Cape of Good Hope and to Batavia or Singapore, up to October 1841,” he directed. “Boston and Salem vessels are most numerous in the East Indian trade, and if you see none advertised, why be sure and send a package to the Navy Department and to the Lyceum at Brooklyn every month, and I cannot help getting some of them.” Finally, he wanted to be remembered to his youngest sister, now approaching three years old. “I send Elly some kisses,” he wrote, “and would give all my money for a sight of her sweet little face.”

  By the time he reached Honolulu, Charles Wilkes had begun to emerge from the cocoon of sorrow, rage, and despair that had enveloped him since the death of his nephew. Forty letters from Jane were waiting for him. But instead of softening the jagged edges of his psyche, the news from home only made the bitterness of his recent loss all the more difficult to bear. Inevitably, he took out his frustrations on his officers and men. As early as the dismissal of Lieutenant Lee at Cape Horn, he had complained to Secretary of the Navy James Paulding of a “cabal” of officers that was attempting to undermine the Expedition. In Honolulu, he appears to have received a private letter of encouragement from Paulding that he interpreted as a carte blanche. “Cabals of discontented officers must be promptly arrested,” Paulding insisted, “and their leaders either kept in subjection or detached from the squadron, as it is not to be endured that the purposes you are sent to attain are to be defeated.”

  In the months ahead, Wilkes launched into a virtual rampage, dismissing officers at a rate that outdid anything the squadron had seen since the detachment of the Relief in Callao. Lieutenant Pinkney, who had spent the last five months confined to quarters aboard the Peacock, was soon on his way back to the United States. When Wilkes discovered that Dr. Guillou had torn out several pages from his journal (claiming that they were of “a personal nature”), Wilkes took the opportunity to dismiss the surgeon, who would remain as an unpaid passenger aboard the Peacock. “[T]hey, of course, have complaints to make against me,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “but [they] are so absurd & silly that they will go to work in my favor & show how strictly I have maintained the discipline of the Squadron.”

  When Joseph Couthouy appeared in Honolulu fully recovered from illness and expecting to resume his duties as conchologist, Wilkes acted quickly to remove the headstrong scientist, once and for all, from the squadron. Wilkes was convinced that Couthouy had been writing letters to Jeremiah Reynolds and others back in the United States that were critical of him. Soon after seeing a copy of the Niles Register that contained a letter from an unnamed participant in the Expedition who claimed that the commander of the squadron was “getting delirious,” Wilkes insisted that the conchologist turn over all his specimens and notes before returning to the United States. “Couthouy says he will publish [reports against] me when he goes home and all this sort of stuff,” Wilkes wrote Jane. “Be it so, he will find I am all marble as far as . . . his influence.”

  Wilkes’s claims of invulnerability were more than mere bravado. It was extremely difficult for an officer to bring charges against a superior. He had to wait until the end of the cruise, which could be years after the incident, then risked endangering his reputation in the service if he still insisted on preferring charges. As a result, few subordinates went to the trouble of attempting to bring a superior to justice. This meant that captains and commodores were, in the words of a leading naval historian, “virtually immune to any serious punishment.”

  But by dismissing so many officers from the squadron, Wilkes was creating a problem for himself. When the angry and disaffected officers returned to Washington, they would inevitably corroborate each other’s account of a commander run amok. Wilkes, on the other side of the world, would be unable to counter their claims. By the time the squadron returned to the United States, he would belatedly begin to realize that he had laid the groundwork for his own undoing.

  The commander of the Ex. Ex. had yet another chink in his supposedly impregnable armor. Wilkes might wear the uniform of a captain and fly the pennant of a commodore from his flagship’s masthead, but the fact remained that the secretary of the navy still addressed him in official correspondence as a lieutenant. But none of this seemed to trouble Wilkes. Ever since Mammy Reed had predicted he would one day become an admiral, he had been driven by a sense of election. “[T]here is an all protecting care over me,” he assured Jane even before the squadron set out from South America, “and both you and I must strive to deserve it.” Like that other self-crowned hero of the age, Napoleon, Wilkes did not feel bound by the rules that governed most men, and it annoyed him that others were so slow to appreciate that destiny had earmarked him for greatness. When his replacement at the Depot of Charts and Instruments, Lieutenant James Gilliss, wrote him as a friend instead of a superior, Wilkes was outraged. “I am now of different flesh & blood from him,” he told Jane. “The idea of a Lt. in the Navy writing to me on terms of familiarity—that day has gone by and I hope you will carry yourself with all due dignity to these jackanapes and vulgar upstarts. . . . I cannot my dear Jeanie any longer think and feel as a Lieutenant. I am only opposed to them and goading of them to their duty.”

  These are extraordinary words coming from a man who was still, by all rights, a lieutenant, suggesting that Wilkes was delusional if not delirious. But as Reynolds recognized, there was more than a little method to Wilkes’s madness. “I wish almost, that the plea of insanity could be advanced for him,” Reynolds wrote, “for his acts proclaim him to be either crazy, beyond redemption, or to be a rascally tyrant & a liar.” Wilkes’s unswerving belief in himself had led him down a dangerous, potentially catastrophic path, but his claims of being a captain were more than mere wish fulfillment. As always, he had a plan.

  As the news of his many accomplishments reached the United States, he was convinced that the secretary of the navy would have no choice but to promote him to captain. In fact, Wilkes would later claim that both Paulding and Secretary of War Poinsett had promised him a captaincy before the completion of the voyage. As long as the promotion came through, he could safely return to the United States with his commodore pennant flying. By extending the duration of the voyage by a year, Wilkes felt he had made this a virtual certainty. “[I]t will enable me to add many [things] to increase the glory of the cruise,” he wrote Jane. “I shall certainly make it a brilliant one.”

  That fall, a vessel from Mexico arrived in Honolulu with the latest news from the United States. Wilkes was pleased to learn that the discovery of Antarctica “was received with great Enthusiasm.” He was also pleased to learn that as of the middle of September Congress was still in session. “[ I ]f the American Nation could be depended upon,” he wrote Jane, “I should think they would have passed our promotions before the adjournment of the Senate.” In the meantime, he continued to conduct himself as if his promotion had already occurred.

  If Wilkes felt free to oppress his officers, he was under even fewer constraints when it came to the sailors and marines. The Ex. Ex. was a nonmilitary operation, but a naval code of discipline still prevailed. Buttressed by the Articles of War, a naval captain ruled with what Herman Melville called “a judicial severity unknown on the national soil.” But there were limits. Unless formally sentenced in a court-martial, no sailor could receive more than twelve lashes. So far, however, this had not deterred Wilkes. Since the squadron left Norfolk, there had been no less than twenty-five instances in which men had received double the legal limit, and in Honolulu Wilkes’s enthusiasm for the lash reached new, appalling h
eights.

  His decision in Fiji to add another year to the Expedition had created a problem. The sailors’ and marines’ terms of duty expired in November, and Wilkes was required to provide them with transportation home if they chose not to reenlist. After their raucous two-week fling in Honolulu, most of the sailors opted to remain with the squadron. Those who did decide to leave were replaced with native Hawaiians, who would be returned to Honolulu after the squadron’s visit to the Pacific Northwest. When it came to the marines, Wilkes adopted a different policy. The marines functioned as the squadron’s police force, and Wilkes knew that it would be difficult to find adequate replacements in Hawaii. He therefore demanded that they remain with the Expedition until its conclusion. When four marines refused to reenlist, Wilkes responded by placing them in solitary confinement in a rat-infested fort in Honolulu. Twelve days later, he cut their meager rations of taro and goat’s milk in half. A week after that, the marines, all of them in double irons and deathly pale after almost a month’s imprisonment, were brought back to the Vincennes. Wilkes asked if they were now willing to return to duty. When they refused, he threw them in the ship’s brig. Two days later he brought all four to the gangway and asked if they had changed their minds. After they once again insisted that their enlistments had expired, Wilkes gave each of them a dozen lashes, then threw them back in the brig.

  Marines were in a peculiar situation when it came to flogging. The U.S. Army had outlawed the practice back in 1812; but it was still legal in the navy. This meant that a marine on land couldn’t be flogged; but if he should be unlucky enough to serve aboard a naval vessel, he, along with the sailors, must fear the lash. Three days later, Wilkes ordered the marines back to the gangway, where they were each given another twelve lashes. Only then, “for the preservation of their lives,” did the marines agree to reenlist.