Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  That night, Wilkes began to feel a peculiar sensation, “as if cobwebs had passed over my face and eyes.” As the pain in his eyes grew progressively stronger, his sight began to dim. He soon realized he was suffering from snow blindness, a condition in which the surface of the eye has been sunburned. Wilkes was convinced he would never see again. “I felt forcibly the horror of probable blindness,” he wrote.

  He took some consolation in knowing that it had not afflicted him until after he had completed all his appointed tasks. Despite his sufferings, he insisted that they leave the next morning as scheduled, even if he had to be led down the mountain. Luckily, his condition began to improve, and he was able to put in a full day of hiking. By five P.M., they had descended all the way to Sunday Station at an altitude of six thousand feet, where they found “the soft and delightful temperature of spring.” “I cannot venture to describe,” Wilkes wrote, “the effect this produced on us after our three week’s sojourn on the cold, bleak, and barren summit.” Despite the improved weather, Wilkes was exhausted. Even after several natives had administered the “loomi-loomi,” described by Wilkes as “a gentle kneading of the limbs, which has a great tendency to restore the circulation, and relax the muscles and joints,” he remained “fairly broken down.”

  While Wilkes and his compatriots had been battling hurricanes and altitude sickness atop Mauna Loa, the officers and men left on the Vincennes had taken full advantage of their commander’s absence. “Nearly all day the Ship Has Been filled with yellow Hores,” the taxidermist John Dyes wrote. A phonetic speller, the disapproving Dyes provided a graphic description of a typical day aboard the Vincennes at Hilo: “After [the Hawaiian women] Had Regaled themselves in the Wardroom & Paid their Respects to some of the Gentlemen Rooms in private tha Vissited the Steerage Where the Same Scene took place from those tha visited the men on the Birth Deck & the Black Cookes Wher the Same Biseness were carried on, tha then went back into the Wardroom & Steerage where the young Gentelmen as tha are termed gallivanted them around the Deck to the Laughter & Sneers of all hands.”

  Reynolds’s friend Passed Midshipman William May, supposedly conducting observations ashore, lived for three months “in a straw hut by the side of a purling stream,” where, he proudly wrote Reynolds, his nights were spent “resting in the arms of a delicious little Kanacca girl, who first gave up to me her Virgin Charms.” Even the ship’s chaplain Jared Elliott succumbed to the island’s temptations. Instead of a native girl, Elliott’s attentions were directed toward the wife of a missionary. “If anyone had behaved to you as he has behaved,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “I should certainly have kicked him out of doors.” Elliott, whom May described as “a wolf in sheep’s clothes,” was eventually dismissed from the squadron and sent home in disgrace.

  Although he was well aware of the chaplain’s transgressions, Wilkes appears to have remained oblivious to the illicit goings-on aboard his flagship. By the time he returned to the Vincennes in March, after completing yet another round of pendulum experiments, he was already looking ahead to what he considered to be the most ambitious and difficult part of the Expedition: the survey of the Columbia River.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Wreck of the Peacock

  THE WEST COAST of North America was up for grabs in 1841. Al- though American citizens had begun to settle throughout the region, both California to the south and the Oregon territory to the north (extending well beyond the present border between Washington and British Columbia) were under the control of foreign powers. Mexico, which had won its independence from Spain in 1821, possessed California while Oregon, although officially under joint occupation by the United States and Great Britain, was in effect ruled by the powerful English conglomerate, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Given the HBC’s extensive system of trading posts, farms, and forts, the British had even had the audacity to suggest that their boundary should extend as far south as the Columbia River.

  The history of discovery in the region, particularly when it came to the Columbia, favored the United States. Cook had spent a considerable amount of time in the Pacific Northwest, but had not found the Columbia River. In 1792, one of Cook’s junior officers, George Vancouver, returned to lead a survey of the coast. Although Vancouver would explore the Strait of Juan de Fuca and discover and name Puget Sound, he sailed past the wall of breakers at the mouth of the Columbia without suspecting that a huge river existed on the other side. “The sea had now changed from its natural to river-coloured water,” Vancouver wrote, “the probable consequence of some streams falling into the bay. Not considering this opening worthy of more attention, I continued our pursuit to the northwest.”

  Later that same year, in May 1792, three hundred years after Columbus arrived in America, a humble sea otter trader from Boston by the name of Robert Gray also detected evidence of a strong flow of freshwater along the coast. Unlike the British explorer, Gray thought it was worthy of more attention, particularly if it might yield him some additional otter pelts. Taking advantage of a break in the weather, the thirty-seven-year-old captain managed to sail the 212-ton sloop Columbia Rediva over the wave-whipped bar. Once within the six-mile-wide river mouth, Gray found a new world that rivaled anything discovered by Columbus.

  At that time of year, the river would have been roiling with salmon, many of them more than five feet long. As he gradually felt his way up the river, Gray was astounded by the size of the trees—some as high as three hundred feet. A merchant instead of an explorer, Gray was most interested in the pelts offered to him by the Clatsop, Tillamook, and Chinook Indians living along the river. By the time he had sailed just fifteen miles, Gray had accumulated 150 otter, 300 beaver, and several hundred other animal furs. Later that summer, after successfully recrossing the bar, Gray encountered Vancouver and told the explorer about the river. Vancouver dispatched a lieutenant to the bar, who eventually ventured almost a hundred miles upstream. The fact remained, however, that an American merchant captain had outdone a government-sponsored explorer from the most powerful maritime nation on earth.

  By the time Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1805-6 at Fort Clatsop near the mouth of the Columbia, the river had been visited by close to a dozen American ships. In 1811 the New Yorker John Jacob Astor launched his plan to establish the trading post of Astoria. Although the War of 1812 forced Astor to sell Astoria to the British, who renamed it Fort George, the recorded history of the river, as its name would suggest, began with Captain Gray’s Columbia.

  Wilkes’s awkward meeting in Fiji with Captain Belcher had made it clear that the British considered the region their own. “The Officers of Belcher’s vessels, like true Englishmen, heard with surprise that we intended to Survey that Coast . . . ,” William Reynolds wrote. “You may be sure that when Belcher reaches England his Government will do something towards increasing the Colony they have there already. . . . They want a large slice of the Main and if we do not take care, they will be in the Columbia River before us, and we may get them out, if we can.”

  When the Porpoise returned from her sweep through the Tuamotu and Society Islands on March 24, 1841, Wilkes was seething with more than his usual anxiety and impatience. If it had been possible, he would have left immediately for the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, the Porpoise’s bottom was in need of recoppering, requiring that they remain in Honolulu for another ten days.

  Ringgold and his officers soon realized that their commander was motivated by something more than a need to reach the Columbia River in a timely fashion. Word had made its way to Oahu that the U.S. naval vessels St. Louis and Yorktown were due to arrive shortly. No one knew for certain if Wilkes had improperly assumed his rank, but everyone had his suspicions and could only wonder what would happen if the squadron were to encounter a naval vessel commanded by a legitimate captain. “I feel curious to know the fate of the proud Swallow tail,” wrote the Porpoise’s first lieutenant Robert Johnson, referring to the commodore’s pennant.

  The Yorktown was captained
by John Aulick, an officer who had objected so vehemently to Wilkes’s appointment that he had attempted to intimidate Wilkes during a private meeting in Washington. If there was an officer in the U.S. Navy who would delight in calling Wilkes’s bluff, it would be Captain Aulick. In a letter to Jane, Wilkes claimed to be unconcerned about the possible threat. “I should rejoice to meet him with my broad Pendt. Flying,” he insisted. “Before I get home I shall be fairly set down as Comdr.” As of the end of March, however, Wilkes’s promotion had not yet come through, and he apparently thought it best to postpone, if not avoid altogether, a meeting with his nemesis. On April 5, the Vincennes and the Porpoise escaped safely from Honolulu and were on their way to the Columbia River, where they were to meet the Peacock and the Flying Fish at the end of the month.

  After a passage of just twenty-two days, Wilkes sighted the fog-shrouded fist of basalt known as Cape Disappointment on April 28. Stretching for six miles to the south was a continuous line of breakers, where the milky waters of the Columbia River collided with the blue swell of the Pacific. “Mere description can give little idea of the terrors of the bar of the Columbia,” Wilkes wrote. “[A]ll who have seen it have spoken of the wildness of the scene, and the incessant roar of the waters, representing it as one of the most fearful sights that can possibly meet the eye of the sailor.”

  Even today, now that a series of dams has done much to tame the fury of the Columbia, the waters between Cape Disappointment and Point Adams are a war zone. The river might be compared to a colossal 1,243-mile-long water cannon firing, on average, 150 billion gallons of water a day into the ocean surge of the Pacific. The resulting impact is stupendous. A modern-day Columbia River pilot likens it to “two giant hammers smashing into each other.” It is the only river in the United States where incoming vessels are required to use a river-bar pilot. Navigational guides rank it as the third most dangerous river entrance in the world, and the Coast Guard station at Cape Disappointment today averages one rescue mission a day. Since Captain Gray first discovered the river, the chaotic waters stretching across its mouth have claimed more than two thousand shipwrecks; at least seven hundred people have drowned.

  In 1841, before dams, jetties, channel buoys, and motor power had begun to domesticate the river, mariners regarded the Columbia as nothing less than a malevolent monster. Waves at the bar were known to reach a hundred feet, and ships had waited as many as eleven weeks before conditions moderated to the extent that their captains dared to risk crossing the bar. Even then, things could go terribly wrong. Two of the thirty-five ships supplying the Hudson’s Bay Company had been lost and twenty-six sailors drowned. “Perhaps there have been more lives lost here, in proportion to the number of those who have entered this river,” a traveler wrote in the 1830s, “than in entering almost any harbor in the world.”

  Wilkes had brought along a man from Honolulu who claimed to be a Columbia River pilot. He also had sailing directions that had come to him indirectly through Captain Belcher. On Cape Disappointment and Adams Point, the Hudson’s Bay Company had trimmed the branches of several tall, conspicuously situated trees to help mariners locate the elusive channel across the bar. Unfortunately, the high seas raging across the river mouth when Wilkes arrived made it impossible to attempt a crossing.

  That night, as the Vincennes and the Porpoise wallowed in the turbulence outside the bar, Wilkes decided on a change of plan. Too impatient to wait for conditions to moderate at the bar, he would head north up the coast. Even though his orders limited him to the Columbia River and San Francisco Bay, he would sail to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and, heading east and then south, survey the inland coastline all the way to Puget Sound. It was an audacious, typically impulsive decision on Wilkes’s part. But before he could begin to survey the region that would one day contain the cities of Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, Wilkes nearly lost it all on the appropriately named Destruction Isle.

  At night in a dense fog, both the Vincennes and the Porpoise were sailing up the coast with their studdingsails set. When sailing along a dangerous shore, it was common practice to ready the anchor cables in case of emergencies. Wilkes, who judged the coast to be at least forty miles to the east, ordered that the hawse holes (through which the anchor cables were led) be closed; it would make the deck drier in the high seas. That night Wilkes was awakened by the cry of “Rocks Ahead!” An undetected current had swept them to the east. The two vessels were immediately rounded up and were soon struggling against mountainous seas that threatened to dash them against the rocks. “The moment we found ourselves in deep water,” William May later wrote Reynolds, “a tremendous bustle of bending cables and giving orders ensued.”

  On May 2, at 6:30 P.M., exactly forty-nine years after Vancouver, the Vincennes and the Porpoise anchored in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They were soon surrounded by canoes of natives in conical grass hats who asked “whether we were Boston or King George’s ships”—national designations that dated back to the days when American fur trading was dominated by Boston merchants. Over the last few months, Wilkes’s attitude toward the captive Fijian chief Veidovi had softened considerably, and Veidovi was now allowed on the Vincennes’s deck. “It was amusing to us,” Wilkes wrote, “to observe the contempt our prisoner . . . entertained for these Indians, which was such that he would hardly deign to look at them.”

  As the two vessels made their way through Admiralty Inlet and into Puget Sound, Wilkes marveled at the contrast between this inland waterway and the mouth of the Columbia. “Nothing can exceed the beauty of these waters, and their safety: not a shoal exists . . . that can in any way interrupt their navigation. . . . I venture nothing in saying there is no country in the world that possesses waters equal to these.” Today, there are no fewer than four U.S. Navy bases on Puget Sound; none exists on the Columbia River.

  At the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost of Fort Nisqually, situated between modern Tacoma and Olympia, Wilkes made initial contact with the powers-that-be in the Pacific Northwest. Relations would prove surprisingly cordial between the Americans and the HBC throughout the squadron’s time in the territory, and Wilkes quickly went to work, sending surveying parties throughout Puget Sound and beyond, as two log cabins were built to replace the pendulum houses damaged on the summit of Mauna Loa. When Wilkes received word from an HBC employee that the Peacock had arrived at the bar, he resolved to travel overland down to the Columbia, where he would lead the officers of the Peacock and the Flying Fish in the survey of the river.

  But when he reached Astoria on May 23, after an arduous five-day journey by horse and canoe, he was disappointed to discover that he had received erroneous information. The Peacock and the Flying Fish had not yet arrived. They were now more than a month overdue.

  Wilkes would later admit to having felt a strong sense of trepidation back in early December when he drew up the sailing instructions for the Peacock’s and the Flying Fish’s cruise to the central Pacific. He was well aware of Hudson’s deficiencies as a surveyor. He was also concerned that his second-in-command lacked the discipline, judgment, and determination to complete the cruise in the allotted time. As they all knew, the Expedition’s highest priority was the survey of the Columbia River, and Wilkes could only hope that Hudson would break off the cruise in time to reach the Pacific Northwest between April 15 and May 1. His orders could not have been more explicit: “it must not be later than the latter date.”

  By May 1, the Peacock and the Flying Fish were still thousands of miles from the west coast of North America. “This cruise of now, more than six months,” Reynolds wrote, “has had less to redeem it, than any other, I ever made.” Hudson had wasted days searching out nonexistent islands and spent just hours surveying new discoveries. At Tabiteauea (known to them as Drummond Island) in the Gilbert or Kiribati Group, the squadron encountered hostile natives armed with stingray-tipped spears and swords studded with shark teeth. Despite unmistakable evidence to the contrary, Hudson insisted that the natives were harmless and l
ed a party ashore. Sure enough, a sailor was lured away from the group and never seen again. In retaliation, Hudson attacked the village the next day, killing an estimated twenty natives. “More War!” Reynolds wrote. “It seems to me, that our path through the Pacific is to be marked in blood.”

  The cruise was particularly exasperating for those aboard the schooner. While the officers of the Peacock were allowed to visit native villages, Hudson almost never permitted those aboard the Flying Fish to go ashore. In the last 180 days, Reynolds had spent exactly twelve hours and fifteen minutes on land. “This Schooner kills me,” he wrote. “No more exercise to be had, than a large bird might find in a small cage, and without this I cannot enjoy life. No society & no books. It worries my very soul, with nothing around us, but Sea & sky.”

  There was one member of the Expedition, however, for whom the last six months had provided plenty of food for thought: the geologist James Dana. Having seen what an extremely young volcanic island looked like in Hawaii, Dana could now identify the relative age of an island by the amount of erosion it exhibited. By the end of the cruise, he had begun to recognize an unmistakable pattern: each island chain possessed a distinct chronology, with the oldest island at one end of the chain and the youngest at the other. “There is a system in their arrangements,” he wrote, “as regular as in the mountain heights of the continent.” It is now believed that chains of volcanic islands are formed as the Pacific plate moves over what are called “hot spots”—stationary heat sources emanating from deep within the earth. Although the theory of plate tectonics would not be posited until the twentieth century, Dana’s recognition of the linear pattern of island chains was a first, crucial step toward formulating this revolutionary concept.