Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Not until May did the lethargic Hudson finally order the Peacock and the Flying Fish to start sailing east. Contrary to Wilkes’s instructions, which insisted that he sail directly to the Pacific Northwest, Hudson decided to stop at Honolulu for provisions before continuing on to the Columbia River. On June 13, they spied the green island of Oahu. It was, Reynolds wrote, “as good a sight for our eyes, as ever the first glimpse of the New World, was to the vision of Columbus.” They were now almost two months behind schedule, with more than two thousand miles between them and the Columbia River.

  By the end of May, Wilkes decided to leave Purser Waldron at Astoria to wait for the Peacock while he and Drayton visited Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters at Fort Vancouver, approximately one hundred miles up the Columbia. There he met Dr. John McLoughlin, a tall, imposing figure who served as the company’s chief factor. Wilkes, traveling by canoe with just a handful of servants and an artist, met McLoughlin in a deceptive guise. Instead of the commodore of a four-vessel squadron, Wilkes looked more like a curious fact-gatherer intent on visiting American settlers in the Willamette River valley to the south. For McLoughlin, it was a most nonthreatening introduction to the Ex. Ex. By the time the survey of the Columbia River was under way in August—an undertaking that was hardly in the HBC’s best interests—enough goodwill existed between the company and the Expedition that the squadron was allowed to do as it pleased. All in all, it would prove to be a masterful, even if inadvertent, diplomatic performance on Wilkes’s part.

  As Drayton continued up the Columbia, Wilkes traveled south up the Willamette River, where he met with recently arrived American missionaries and farmers who complained of the HBC’s unchallenged authority in the region. By the middle of June, he was back at Fort Vancouver. There was still no word from the Peacock and the Flying Fish. Wilkes was becoming convinced that they had met with some kind of accident. As soon as he completed his survey of the Columbia, he would have to mount a massive search operation. For now, he would return to Fort Nisqually and finish his pendulum experiments.

  By the beginning of July, his experiments had been completed. Excellent progress had also been made on the survey of Puget Sound. It was time for a Fourth of July celebration. That morning, two brass howitzers were brought ashore to the observatory, where they were fired twenty-six times, once for each state of the union. “The reports of the guns not only astonished the natives,” Charlie Erskine remembered, “but waked up the red-coats in the fort, who came running up to the observatory with the Indians, nearly out of breath, to inquire the cause of the racket. We pointed to our country’s flag, which was so proudly waving in the breeze over the observatory. . . . They then called us a crew of crazy Americans.”

  Around nine o’clock, the officers and men of the Vincennes, dressed in white shirts and trousers, were mustered on the deck and landed on shore. A procession was formed, with Wilkes and his officers at the head, followed by the port and starboard watches, the marines, and a fifer and drummer. Striding proudly beside the master-at-arms, clearly enjoying his first time ashore since his arrest, was Veidovi, along with Wilkes’s dog Sydney.

  For Wilkes, whose relations with his officers and men had been so acrimonious and difficult, it was a day like no other. “It was truly gratifying,” he wrote, “to see them all in such good health and spirits, not a man sick, and their clothes as white as snow, with happy and contented faces.” That night, he and his officers had dinner together for the first time in more than a year. The pendulum house had been transformed into a banquet hall and the feasting continued until well past midnight. What might have been a night of unalloyed celebration was inevitably tempered with talk of the Peacock. “It was impossible to conjecture her fate,” Wilkes wrote, “yet her continued absence and detention beyond the time of her anticipated arrival, naturally excited many fears and surmises, which as the time passed on, made each one [of us] more certain that some disaster had befallen them.”

  The Peacock and the Flying Fish left Honolulu on June 2. Prior to their departure, Hudson had told Reynolds and the schooner’s commander, Passed Midshipman Samuel Knox, that he intended to use the schooner to locate the channel across the Columbia River bar before he risked the much larger, and deeper, Peacock. As a consequence, the two vessels sailed to the Pacific Northwest in tandem, with the ship carrying short sail so as not to lose the Flying Fish. Not until Sunday, July 18, after a passage of forty-six days—more than twice as long as it took the Vincennes and the Porpoise—did the Peacock and the Flying Fish finally reach the mouth of the Columbia. They were now almost three months late.

  As the fog began to clear that morning, the officers of the Flying Fish made preparations for the arrival of Captain Hudson. When Knox discovered that his dress uniform had been eaten by mice, Reynolds gloated that he had left his uniform safely tucked away in a drawer aboard the Peacock; but Knox was to have the last laugh.

  As far as the officers of the schooner were concerned, the conditions were not favorable for crossing the bar. There was a heavy swell running, and the breakers at the river mouth were dangerously high. The Peacock was well to weather of them, and instead of sailing down to deliver Hudson to the Flying Fish, the ship steered straight for the breakers ahead. “[I]t would be useless to deny that we had a presentiment that disaster & distress, or death, would happen to some of the vessels, or to some of us . . . ,” Reynolds wrote. “I never could get rid of this feeling, and, like the others, could only hope for the best.”

  A sense of foreboding also seems to have possessed the Peacock’s captain. Hudson had told Wilkes of his concern about the Columbia River bar as early as the previous fall in Honolulu. His dread of the Columbia may have contributed to his now being three months behind schedule. But the Peacock’s lateness only added to her captain’s anxieties, especially given the prospect of having to explain himself to the judgmental Wilkes. When finally faced with the breakers that had been figuring so prominently in his thoughts for the last eight months, Hudson appears to have panicked. Instead of using the schooner to search out the channel as he had previously planned, he decided to save a few hours by sailing boldly across the bar in the Peacock. His rashness in Antarctica had nearly sunk the ship; his officers and men could only hope that they would be luckier this time.

  At 11:30 A.M., approximately seven miles from Cape Disappointment, Hudson called “All Hands to Work Ship into Port.” With his copy of the sailing directions in his hand, he walked to the forward part of the ship, where he would divide his time between the forecastle and the foreyard, as Lieutenant George Emmons climbed up to the foretop yard. The directions indicated that they should head east for Cape Disappointment until Chinook Point bore east-northeast. But just as they reached the proper bearing, they encountered a steep, violent sea. Hudson became convinced that they were too far to the south. He wore the ship around and headed for a section of smooth water that he took to be the channel.

  The Peacock forged ahead against the ebbing tide. After five minutes, they were almost abreast of Cape Disappointment, approximately two miles to the north. Some of the men had even begun to believe that they just might make it, when the Peacock’s keel struck bottom as the bow burrowed into the sand. The helm was immediately put a-lee in an effort to turn the ship back out to sea. The yards and sails were also brought into play, but there was no longer any way to control the Peacock; she was stuck fast on the bar as waves burst against the ship’s sides. All the sails were quickly furled, and Lieutenant Emmons was dispatched in the cutter to see if there was any hope of pushing the ship through to deeper water. The building seas nearly capsized Emmons’s boat, but he did manage to cast the lead. The Peacock, he regretted to inform Hudson, was aground for good.

  As the waves continued to build, the ship began to bounce up and down on the hard sand of the bar. Part hobbyhorse, part jackhammer, the Peacock was pounding so severely that Hudson feared the ship might soon begin to break apart. Behind them, they could see the Flying Fish hoverin
g just beyond the breakers, “like a child watching the agonies of its parent without being able to afford any relief.” “We saw the sea of wild foam she was among,” Reynolds wrote, “& we gave her up for lost, from that moment.” Knox ordered the helmsman to steer for the disabled ship, but Hudson would have none of it and raised the signal flag indicating danger. “With very sad & heavy hearts we stood to seaward & hove to,” Reynolds wrote.

  Back aboard the Peacock, conditions were worsening. The bucking of the hull was whipping the masts back and forth, and to ease the strain, the royal and topgallant yards were lowered to the deck. By now the waves were too wild to permit them to take to the boats. Until the seas moderated, they were trapped aboard the Peacock. Hudson was tempted to cut away the masts to ease the motion of the hull, but since the yards were used to lower the boats, this would have left them with no way to escape from the wreck—assuming that the waves would eventually begin to diminish. The hold had begun to fill with water, and Hudson organized two gangs to keep the pumps working around the clock.

  The ship was now broadside to the waves, which crashed against the topsides and drenched the men on deck. In hopes of relieving the strain on the hull, Hudson used the port fore yardarm to lower an anchor over the side. With the anchor in place, the sea pushed the Peacock ’s stern around, and she was soon bow-first to the waves. By now the tide was approaching dead low and there was only nine feet of water under the main chains. The shoaling sand began to raise havoc with the rudder, wrenching it back and forth so severely that the iron tiller broke off seven inches from the rudder head. Soon the rudder had gnawed a gaping hole through the bottom of the hull.

  At 8:45 P.M. the anchor cable broke. The ship swung sideways to the seas and was soon being blasted by the waves. This time the starboard anchor was let go, and once again, the Peacock swung gradually into the swell. This provided some temporary relief, but by midnight the ship was being tossed about so violently that the timbers and planking had begun to pull apart. They could see sand in the hold of the ship, and Hudson determined that it was useless to keep the pumps going. At two A.M. a huge wave broke over the port bow, stoving in the port bulwarks at the waist of the ship and flooding the spar deck. In an attempt to drain the water, they chopped a hole in the starboard bulwarks.

  What the officers and crew of the Peacock didn’t know was that they had a special advocate among the small crowd of onlookers gathered at the bluff on Cape Disappointment. Although the Vincennes’s purser Robert Waldron had long since left Astoria, his black servant John Dean had remained to keep an eye out for the ship and schooner. As dawn approached, Dean organized a rescue party of Chinook Indians that included one of the river’s two native pilots. At daybreak they headed out in a canoe, and by six A.M. they were alongside the Peacock. Perhaps miffed that a boatload of Indians led by a young African American had been able to venture across seas that he had considered impassable, Hudson did not choose to mention Dean’s rescue party in his official report. Dean would take the artist Alfred Agate and his portfolio of drawings and paintings; the purser William Speiden, who clutched the ship’s accounts and moneybox; and the dismissed surgeon Charles Guillou. By seven A.M. the waves had quieted to the point that Hudson judged it safe to begin launching the ship’s boats.

  Hudson insisted that the officers and men take only the clothes on their backs. The scientifics were the one exception, and with their journals in their arms, Dana, Peale, Hale, and Rich climbed into one of the boats. The charts and surveying equipment were loaded into another while the marines and some of the sailors were crowded into the third and fourth boats, and they were off. The more than sixty officers and sailors left aboard the ship watched the boats’ progress across the turbulent river with the knowledge that their own lives depended on the boats’ safe—and speedy—return.

  Later that morning Emmons was able to get another load of people ashore, but by noon, when he returned to pick up the remaining officers and sailors, the seas had built back up again. The Peacock’s side-to-side motion had become so severe that she was in danger of capsizing. Hudson ordered that the masts be cut away with an ax. Beginning with the foremast, the spars fell, one after the other. On the stump of the mizzen, Hudson raised the American flag union down—a sign of distress.

  “This led me to believe that the ship was going to pieces,” Emmons wrote, “and I redoubled my efforts to get through the surf to her.” One of the boats reared so high on a wave that it toppled end over end, tossing the crew headlong into the boiling sea. One sailor broke a hip, several others were also injured, but all were rescued by the boat led by Lieutenant DeHaven. Realizing that there was no hope of reaching the Peacock in these conditions, Hudson had his men switch the flag to union up. Emmons understood immediately that he and the others were to return to shore. “Seeing how useless my efforts were,” he wrote, “and that by continuing to persevere, I was not only risking the means but jeopardizing the lives that were looked to for success, I turned back. And with feelings that I will not attempt to describe nor shall I soon forget.”

  Even without her masts, the Peacock continued to beat against the bar. Hudson could only wonder how much longer the ship would last, but this did not prevent him from ordering his men to eat their dinner on the wave-washed deck. Ever so gradually, the waves began to diminish until Emmons was able to reach the ship in the early evening. Only after all the remaining officers and sailors had been transferred into the boats did Hudson leave the ship. It was dark by the time they reached the sanctuary of Bakers Bay, tucked inside Cape Disappointment. In the glow of several shoreside fires, the Peacock’s officers and crew gathered together and gave their captain three heartfelt cheers.

  The next morning Emmons ventured out to see what was left of the ship. The hull and deck had been pulled apart, scattering hundreds of specimens and artifacts to the wind and waves. Only the ship’s bowsprit could be seen above the water, pointing pathetically into the sky. For Emmons, who as a midshipman had been assigned to the Peacock back in 1828 when she had been first launched in New York, it was a particularly moving sight. “Thus have I witnessed the beginning and end of the Peacock . . . ,” he wrote. “[T]here is some consolation in knowing that after the many narrow risks she has run this cruise that her fate has finally been prolonged until reaching her native shore.”

  For the last two days, the officers and men of the Flying Fish had been left to flit nervously back and forth along the outskirts of the bar, helpless witnesses to the destruction of the Peacock. The immense height of the seas had made it impossible for them to determine how many, if any, had escaped from the wreck alive. But when they saw Emmons’s boat rowing toward them on July 20, they knew, for the first time, that at least someone had survived. “I was too impatient to wait,” Reynolds wrote, “& jumping on the taffrail, screamed at the top of my voice, to know if all were saved? There was one moment of silence & suspense, ere the answer came back. The very sea seemed stilled. All hands safe on shore & well! Hurrah! Hurrah! There was no controlling it. The feeling would burst out, and there was another hearty cheer!”

  With the help of Old George, a one-eyed Chinook Indian whom Reynolds described as “the queerest looking pilot I ever put my eyes on,” the Flying Fish soon crossed the bar and joined the castaways at Bakers Bay. John Dean had presented Hudson with the orders Wilkes had prepared weeks before, instructing him to begin the survey of the river. It was an opportunity for Hudson to redeem himself, in some measure, for the loss of the ship. Instead, he chose to take the majority of his crew up the river to Astoria, where they would wait in idleness until Wilkes’s arrival. “If Captain Hudson possessed the gumption to conduct a survey,” Reynolds wrote, “his place would have been on board this Schooner, at once, driving on with all the boats & finishing [the survey of the] bar, while the weather was fine.” Instead, Reynolds and Knox were left alone at Bakers Bay.

  Ever since the Fourth of July, Wilkes had been in seemingly ceaseless motion. With his observations at
Nisqually completed, he took over the leadership of the surveys of Puget Sound. As each day brought no word of the Peacock, he drove himself and his men harder and harder since it now looked as if they would have to perform the survey of the Columbia on their own. “In this state of feeling,” Wilkes wrote, “the officers of the Vincennes showed a highly commendable spirit, and aware that additional labors were thus to be thrown upon them, strained every nerve to avoid any further loss of time.”

  Although Vancouver had surveyed much of the region forty-nine years earlier, Wilkes would leave his own indelible, if largely unappreciated, stamp upon the land. Almost three hundred Washington place names can be attributed to the Ex. Ex. For example, Elliott Bay along the eastern shore of Puget Sound was named for Midshipman Samuel Elliott and is the site of modern-day Seattle. Even Veidovi (whom Wilkes called “Vendovi”) would have an island named for him. Despite Wilkes’s reputation for self-glorification, not a single island, cove, or strait is named for the commander of the Ex. Ex.

  By July 27, the squadron had made its way to the San Juan Islands, the labyrinth of more than 450 islands and reefs that lay scattered over the international water boundary between British Columbia and the United States. The forty-ninth parallel had already been discussed as a possible boundary between the two countries, and Wilkes quite rightly realized that if this did become the case, these islands would be of special interest. That afternoon Passed Midshipman William May arrived from Nisqually with a letter informing Wilkes of the loss of the Peacock. “This news, although bad,” Wilkes wrote, “was a great relief to me; for I had feared not only the loss of the vessels, but had apprehensions for the lives of the persons on board. A heavy load that had long hung over my mind was removed.”