Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Three weeks later, Benjamin Vanderford, the Salem bêche-de-mer captain who had served as the Expedition’s pilot and interpreter in Fiji, also fell ill. Always a heavy drinker, he began to hallucinate, and after falling into horrifying convulsions, he quickly lost consciousness and died. For Veidovi, the Fijian chief, it was a shattering loss. Vanderford had promised to serve as his protector once they reached the United States. Veidovi retreated to his berth and from that day forward showed a “total disregard of everything that passed around him.”

  Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., Robert Pinkney, the latest officer to return from the Expedition under arrest, had recently arrived in town, and the newly appointed secretary of the navy Abel Upshur was shocked by the lieutenant’s account of a commander who proudly insisted that he was above the law. In his annual address Upshur had vowed to do everything he could to stop abuses on the part of the service’s superior officers. Wilkes sounded like just the kind of commander who needed to be made an example of. (That he was the leader of an expedition mounted by Jacksonian Democrats only encouraged Upshur, who was part of John Tyler’s Whig administration.) Given the seriousness of Pinkney’s accusations, Upshur decided that he could not put Wilkes on the promotion list for that spring.

  In March, Jane Wilkes received a letter from Dr. John S. Wily, a family friend and former navy surgeon. “You have no time to lose,” Wily urged. “Should your husband be left out of the new batch [of promotions], he is irretrievably injured. Take no denial. The principle on which the Secretary is acting is totally subversive of naval discipline and legally wrong. A man is innocent till found guilty, but here we see a death blow given to an officer when absent on duty by a discontented subaltern, whose charges may be trivial, malicious, or unfounded, and against which he has no means of defending himself. . . . Go to Senators, as many as possible. Say if Charles is to be tried, let him be tried; but not condemned now which is virtually the case. . . . I would almost rather he was dead, than so shamefully dishonored.”

  Jane would do exactly as Wily suggested, even writing a memorandum in which she detailed her efforts on her husband’s behalf. Twice Jane visited Secretary Upshur. By the second visit, Upshur had had enough of Jane’s passionate advocacy and told her, she later wrote, that “if I urged the matter any further I should ruin my husband.” Jane responded with a letter of apology for her “too urgent appeal,” stating, “I therefore will wait patiently until the decision of his peers shall (as it most assuredly will) restore my husband to his full standing in the service to which his whole life has been devoted.”

  Back aboard the Vincennes, Wilkes was doing everything he could to return to the United States as quickly as possible. Although it looked as if he would not make the May 31 deadline, he still had hopes of returning before the Senate adjourned for the summer. “I shall push hard to get home . . . ,” he had written Jane from Singapore, “and I am in hopes [Congress] will sit late.”

  During a brief stop at Cape Town, Wilkes visited the observatory made famous by the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Here he came across a new British chart that showed the tracks of Ross’s and d’Urville’s voyages to Antarctica but made no reference to his own. Still worse, it was clear to Wilkes that Ross had used information from the chart he had sent him. “[T]he truth will come out one of these days,” he insisted in his journal. After another quick stop at St. Helena, where the officers dutifully visited the home where Napoleon had spent his last days in exile, they were off for the final sprint to New York.

  On May 16 Wilkes issued a general order requiring that a committee composed of Hudson, Emmons, and the naturalist Charles Pickering collect from each and every officer “all Journals, rough notes, writings, memorandums, drawings, sketches, paintings, as well as all specimens of every kind collected or prepared since leaving the United States.” Even though this had been the policy from the very beginning, it was not a popular order. To have spent four years of one’s life on a voyage round the world and to have nothing left to show for it seemed unnecessarily harsh, especially since there was already more than enough material in the Expedition’s collections. Emmons possessed a Fijian bow and arrow that had been taken during the bloody boat fight off Malolo. “But here they go,” he wrote bitterly, “and if the Government wants them I have not another word to say.” Adding to the resentment of Emmons and others was the rumor that Wilkes was harboring an extensive collection of his own in a cabinet given to him by the consul in Singapore.

  As the officers reluctantly turned over their specimens and artifacts, the gun deck of the Vincennes became crowded with crates and boxes. Reynolds’s volatile friend William May, whom Wilkes had recently named master of the ship, was loath to give up a box of shells he had procured at Fiji after the Vincennes’s purser had declined to buy it. On the top of the box, May wrote out “Purchased at Public Sale after the Comdr of the Ex. Ex. had refused them.” When Wilkes saw the box, he immediately assumed May was attempting to mock his order. He called May into his cabin and demanded that he remove the words from the top of the box. May responded that “he would do no such thing,” and Wilkes ordered him to leave the cabin and consider himself under suspension. Even though Wilkes had made attempts to mend fences with May (just as he’d done with Reynolds at the Columbia River), he now determined to draw up formal charges against the passed midshipman.

  As the month of June approached, Wilkes’s tension level was reaching an almost unbearable pitch, and he pushed his ship and his men as hard as he had at any point during the voyage. Despite near gale-force winds, he insisted that no sails should be shortened without his approval. On June 1, the always reliable George Emmons was the officer of the deck. Of all the Expedition’s officers, no one had given more of himself than Emmons. In Fiji he had spent more days in an open boat than anyone else; at the Columbia bar he had supervised the successful rescue of the Peacock’s crew; just a few weeks later, while suffering from malaria, he had braved hostile native tribes, grizzly bears, and uncooperative guides to complete a grueling overland expedition to San Francisco. If there was an officer who deserved Wilkes’s gratitude, it was George Emmons.

  But when Emmons sent an officer to Wilkes’s cabin “to inform him that I was fearful our spars or rigging might give away if we continued under the same sail,” the commander of the Ex. Ex. ridiculed the lieutenant’s concern by insisting that he make more sail. Emmons dutifully set the fore topgallant sail and the jib. Under the increased strain, the Vincennes parted her bobstay—the chain that led from the tip of the bowsprit down to the cutwater at the bow’s waterline. Without the bobstay, the Vincennes would quickly lose the bowsprit. Emmons had no choice but to put the helm up and begin to reduce sail. Wilkes erupted from his cabin, appearing on deck “very much excited, &” according to Emmons, “immediately commenced giving his orders in a manner that put all order & system of carrying on duty out of the question. . . . I, however, did not partake of his excitement and continued to repeat his orders—that he might not accuse me of disrespect—and at the same time see what a mess he had got every thing in, until he finally ordered me below & sent for the 1st Lieut.” Of course, First Lieutenant Walker did exactly what Emmons had attempted to do—shortening sail and replacing the bobstay before bringing the ship back on course under reduced sail.

  By the morning of June 9, the Vincennes was approaching the foggy coast of the United States. At noon of the next day, she anchored off Sandy Hook, where a steamer came alongside and began towing the ship into New York Harbor. The question that concerned all aboard the flagship was what Wilkes would do with his broad pennant. Reynolds was not on hand to witness the scene, but others would later tell him about Wilkes’s final act as Commodore of the U.S. Ex. Ex. “Curiosity was now on tip toe among the officers of the Vincennes to see how this bravado would terminate,” he wrote. Would Wilkes dare anchor at the navy yard with the pennant flying or would he replace it with the coach whip of a lieutenant commander? “He did neither,” Reynolds wrote. “H
is impudence—great as it was—could not carry him through the first alternative. His bloated pride would not allow him to adopt the other.” As the ship approached the Battery, Wilkes called the crew to muster and “expressed to them my thanks for the manner in which they had conducted themselves during the cruise.” A salute was fired, his pennant was hauled down, and Wilkes turned over the ship to Hudson. Hitching a ride with the pilot, Wilkes was able to slip ashore without having to confront the officer whom Reynolds termed “the real Commodore of the Station.”

  Wilkes might call himself the discoverer of Antarctica, as well as the surveyor of Fiji and the Columbia River, but for many of his officers, none of these accomplishments seemed to matter anymore. Of the disaffected, no one was more embittered than William Reynolds. By the time he reached Rio de Janeiro, his feelings for his commander had become a dark obsession that threatened to permanently disfigure his once balanced, sensitive, and ebullient personality. “[Wilkes] has done wrongs that he can never repair,” he wrote. “He has in the gratification of his personal prejudices, his own venom & spite, inflicted injuries on men whose shoes he is unworthy to unloose, that can never be wiped away . . . ! There is not a dissembler in existence more vile or more depraved than the same Mr. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, whom I once thought was every thing pure and honorable.”

  Reynolds’s anger made it impossible for him to recognize the magnitude of what the Expedition had accomplished. He thought only of the odious Wilkes. “Not one hope has been realized,” he insisted. It was only in the context of the suffering he and his fellow officers had endured that Reynolds could compare the Expedition to anything else in American history: “I look upon the hardships, dangers & servitude that we have undergone in this Expedition as parallel in their extent to the worst years of the ‘Revolutionary War’ & if its operations had been protracted for 48 months longer, every one of us would have been expended, from a wearing out of the system.” Although he had since gained some of the weight back, Reynolds, almost six feet tall and already rail thin at 147 pounds when the cruise began, had dropped to just 135 pounds—“enough to have satisfied a dozen Shylocks,” he wrote his family. “I am thin as a shadow, and ugly as thin. My general title of ‘Old Reynolds,’ is no misnomer. I look old & feel accordingly.”

  And yet despite everything, the fact of the matter was that they had experienced the adventure of their lives. Rio de Janeiro marked their complete circumnavigation of the world. They had literally gone where no man had gone before, and while Reynolds might not appreciate it, others could not help but be in awe of what he and his shipmates had achieved. Reynolds reported that the officers of the Delaware stationed at Rio “looked at me as if I were a natural curiosity. They had not seen an Explorer in full bloom.”

  They left Rio de Janeiro on May 22. The Porpoise passed close to the Delaware’s stern and Reynolds was delighted to hear her band playing “‘Sweet Home’ as loud as they could blow.” Frequent calms and headwinds prolonged the return to New York. Not until early July did they reach the navy yard, and to Reynolds’s considerable anguish he was required to keep watch aboard the Porpoise for several more days. He soon learned that Veidovi had died the day after the Vincennes’s arrival, “in consequence,” the New York Herald explained, “of having no human flesh to eat.” A few days later the Herald reported that the surgeons at the navy hospital where Veidovi had died had “already cut off his head, and it has been laying in pickle for several days.” Soon after, the Fijian’s fleshless skull became a permanent part of the Expedition’s collection.

  On the morning of the Fourth of July, two young men came aboard the Porpoise, both of them looking for Lieutenant William Reynolds. It wasn’t until one of them asked, “Which of you, is it?” that Reynolds knew the man’s voice to be that of his older brother Sam. After four long years, the two brothers didn’t recognize each other.

  Sam and his friend took William ashore to see some of the holiday celebration in New York. By July 6, he had been granted a leave of absence and spent the night at the American Hotel. Then it was on to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “The return home!,” he recorded on the last page of his journal, “cannot be written here.”

  Part Four

  CHAPTER 14

  Reckoning

  WILKES ARRIVED in Washington on June 13, 1842. His house on the hill was “almost as I had left it.” His wife and children—including Janey, Edmund, and Eliza—could not have been more pleased to see him. But the absence of his eldest son Jack “made a void in my little flock,” he noted sadly.

  He had once dared to assume that if he should successfully complete his mission, a grateful nation would shower him with praise and recognition. He had fashioned out of disaster one of the largest, most sophisticated scientific and surveying enterprises the world had ever seen. He had found a new continent, charted hundreds of Pacific islands, collected tons of artifacts and specimens, and explored the Pacific Northwest and the Sulu Sea. And he had now returned to find that nobody in New York, Washington, or, it seemed, the entire nation apparently cared.

  Jane could not conceal her concern for her husband. He had left a youthful, ambitious forty-year-old man. He had been gone four years but had aged at least ten. His eyes had sunk deep into his skull; he had a cough that wouldn’t go away; but as she knew better than anyone, his travails had not yet ended. “She was aware,” Wilkes wrote, “that an onslaught would be made upon me and an endeavor made to cast all my service into the Shade.”

  Washington had changed dramatically in the last four years. When Wilkes had left in August 1838, the Jacksonian Democrats had been in power. Now with the Whig John Tyler as president, Wilkes’s former allies had been thrust to the sidelines. At a time when political differences were at their height, Tyler was not about to dwell on the achievements of an expedition mounted by the previous administration. But there was more than party politics at work. Tyler’s secretary of state, Daniel Webster, was in the midst of delicate negotiations with the British government concerning the boundary between Maine and Canada. It had been briefly feared that the two countries might even go to war over the border dispute. Tyler had hopes that Webster might be able to expand his negotiations to include the border in the Pacific Northwest, and the last thing he wanted in the summer of 1842 was for Wilkes to call attention to the importance of that region to the American people. As a result, Tyler and his secretary of the navy, Abel Upshur, had instituted a news blackout when it came to the results of the Expedition. Whereas President Van Buren and his secretary of the navy, James Paulding, had regularly published Wilkes’s reports, with Van Buren proudly announcing the discovery of Antarctica in his annual address in 1840, no official mention of the Expedition had been made in almost a year. To Wilkes’s considerable dismay and indignation, the administration had no interest in the findings he had earlier assumed would win him every concession and accolade he might desire.

  The navy had also changed in the last four years. Reform was in the air. Secretary of the Navy Upshur had vowed to protect junior officers suffering under a captain’s immoderate and tyrannical rule. Just a few months before he had restored to duty a lieutenant who had been put under arrest by Commodore Charles Morgan of the Mediterranean Squadron. Both Lieutenant Robert Pinkney and Surgeon Charles Guillou claimed that Wilkes was guilty of far worse outrages against his officers. Subjecting the leader of the Ex. Ex. to an extensive court-martial proceeding would not only serve Upshur’s agenda within the department, it would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Wilkes to trumpet the findings that the Tyler administration wanted kept under wraps.

  Wilkes, however, was determined that the Expedition—and, of course, himself—would get the recognition they deserved. As it so happened, on the very day he arrived in Washington, there was a meeting scheduled of the newly created National Institute for the Promotion of Science. Spearheaded by former secretary of war Joel Poinsett, the man who had chosen Wilkes to command the Expedition, the National Institute, a forerunner
of the Smithsonian Institution, had been awarded custody of the Expedition’s collections. Wilkes had joined the Institute by mail during the voyage, and he now realized that the organization might provide him with a way to circumvent the Tyler administration. Wilkes hurriedly made his way to the meeting, where Poinsett enthusiastically heralded his return and proposed that he deliver a lecture about the voyage later in the month.

  In the days ahead, Wilkes began to marshal support from influential Democrats while formally announcing his return to the Tyler administration. He had already been counseled by his brother-in-law in New York to control his emotions as best he could. “Let Charles by all means keep cool,” James Renwick wrote Jane. “His friends will be sufficiently indignant, he must conciliate.” But when Wilkes first met Secretary Upshur, he was anything but conciliatory. “[The secretary’s] reception of me was very cold,” he wrote. “He never offered to shake hands with me, nor requested me to take a seat. I felt indignant at such treatment and my spirit rose.” Wilkes proceeded to take a seat, and as he launched into a furious soliloquy condemning the action that the Navy Department had taken against him, Upshur sat silently in his chair, nervously taking off and putting back on his reading glasses. Wilkes ended his diatribe by warning Upshur that he was about to lose “the brightest feather he could put into his bonnet” if he continued on this course. Immediately following the meeting, Wilkes wrote Upshur requesting that a general court of inquiry be called to investigate his conduct during the Expedition. He knew that if he could win a favorable result in the more informal circumstances of a court of inquiry, his case would never go to trial.

  He had also been advised to appeal directly to the White House. “As to the President,” Renwick cautioned, “he can be counseled and not driven.” But once again, Wilkes’s attempts at diplomacy failed miserably. On the evening he called on the president, Wilkes found Tyler with a dozen of his cronies, seated around a fireplace, squirting tobacco juice into the fire. “I was literally struck [dumb] with surprise to find myself in such a company at the President’s House,” he wrote. “It was exactly like a Virginia or North Carolina bar room, and after the chair was brought forward, the President said, ‘be seated, Sir,’ and this was all the recognition I got of my presence.” Wilkes was convinced that Tyler had no idea who he was; either that or he was “determined to ignore all that had anything to do with the Expedition.” Seething with hurt and anger, Wilkes excused himself from the room.