Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  He next sought out John Quincy Adams. Although no Democrat, Adams had been a supporter of the Expedition from the very beginning; he was also a trustee of the National Institute, and Wilkes poured out his soul to the seventy-five-year-old congressman and former president. He told Adams that Tyler’s and Upshur’s reception had “overpowered him; and all the anxieties and cares and sufferings of the whole [four] years were as nothing to the anguish he had endured within the last five days.” He also complained that while he had been denied a promotion, an officer he had placed under arrest had been awarded one that spring. “I said little in answer to him,” Adams wrote in his diary, “but must wait to hear the statements of the other side.”

  On June 20, just a week after his arrival in Washington, Wilkes spoke before a crowd of more than four hundred at a special meeting of the National Institute held in the hall of the new Patent Office Building. On hand was a who’s who of political dignitaries, including Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur. It was an unusual and challenging situation for a naval officer, but Wilkes claimed to have been “glad of the opportunity of giving a truthful account of the operations we had been engaged in.” He began in a typically combative manner, recounting how disheartening it had been for himself and his officers and men to discover how little was known of the Expedition’s achievements upon their return. Holding nothing back, he made sure “to throw the blame where it belonged on those who were there present & seated near me.” Wilkes now had the audience’s undivided attention, and he proceeded to tell them the story of the U.S. Ex. Ex. “Throughout the account,” he wrote, “there was a marked interest and an audible approval when I closed.”

  Once the applause had died down, Charles Wickliffe, Tyler’s post-master general, leapt to his feet and began to take Wilkes to task for his criticisms of the current administration. This brought the influential senator William Preston, a Democrat from South Carolina, into the fray, speaking in Wilkes’s defense. But it would be John Quincy Adams who would carry the day. Refusing to be drawn into the political sniping, he drew attention to the Expedition’s many remarkable accomplishments. Upshur, who was a trustee of the Institute, was politically astute enough to realize that he must act to contain the damage Wilkes had managed to inflict. Once Adams had finished, the secretary of the navy praised Wilkes’s speech and proposed that he provide a written synopsis of the voyage. A friend of Wilkes whispered in his ear that “I could desire nothing more gratifying,” particularly when Upshur concluded by saying “that the results of the Expedition were highly valuable and honorable, not to this country alone, but to the whole civilized world.” But Wilkes remained unconvinced. “I had seen enough of him to know what a deceitful rogue he was.”

  The very next day, Upshur went on the attack, informing Wilkes by letter that his request for a general court of inquiry had been denied and that “A court martial will be called at the earliest convenient time.” By this point Wilkes had submitted a report to Upshur on the Oregon territory. As might be expected, Wilkes took a militant position regarding a possible U.S.-Canadian boundary, insisting that it lie at 54°40’, far enough north to include not only the Strait of Juan de Fuca but also Vancouver Island. Fearing that this would have an incendiary effect on the ongoing negotiations with Britain, Upshur did everything he could to delay the report’s distribution to Congress, finally insisting that the report remain confidential and not, as Wilkes’s supporters had hoped, be published and distributed to the American people that summer.

  Even as Upshur worked to quash attempts to publicize the Expedition’s results, he moved to strengthen the government’s case against Wilkes, taking the extraordinary measure of ordering Dr. Charles Guillou to report to Washington on June 27. Upshur granted Guillou unrestricted access to the Navy Department’s files, and for five days the surgeon labored to expand and bolster his charges against the leader of the Ex. Ex. All this time, Wilkes waited impatiently for the court-martial he had been led to believe was imminent. Upshur, of course, was stalling until Guillou had finished assembling seven charges against his former commander. Now, with Pinkney offering an additional four, he informed Wilkes that he would have to wait another three weeks, when a general courts-martial would be convened in New York, where “[you] must take your chances with others whom it is contemplated to bring to trial.”

  But if Upshur was confident that he had built a strong case against him, Wilkes knew that the secretary was without a crucial source of information. Prior to his departure from the Vincennes, Wilkes had collected and boxed all his officers’ journals, as well as many other crucial papers, and brought them with him to Washington, where they remained in his sole possession. Not until the middle of July did Upshur realize that Wilkes had these important documents. “You will send to the Department as soon as practicable after the receipt of this letter,” Upshur wrote on July 15, “the Journals of all the officers and Scientific Corps.” When Wilkes showed the secretary’s letter to Senator Silas Wright, a Democrat from New York, Wright smiled and asked him when it would be “practicable” for him to turn over the journals. “Never” was Wilkes’s reply. Wright laughed “and said that was right.”

  When he wasn’t preparing for the impending courts-martial, Wilkes continued to promulgate, in the only way presently available to him, the accomplishments of the Expedition. That summer he transformed his house into a miniature museum, and on July 9, in between speeches on the House floor, John Quincy Adams stopped by for a look. “[A]t the earnest and repeated entreaties of Lieutenant Wilkes,” he recorded in his diary, “I went over to his house and inspected a great number of the drawings collected during the exploring expedition—portraits of men, women, and children, of the ocean, and Feejee Islands. Fishes, birds, plants, shells, and navigating charts are in great profusion, more than I had time to examine.”

  The courts-martial were scheduled to begin on July 25 aboard one of the finest ships of the line in the U.S. Navy, the North Carolina, lying off New York’s Castle Garden. The masts of the huge ship towered above the rest of the vessels in the harbor. “The morning was beautiful,” a reporter from the New York Herald wrote, “the sun shining in unclouded splendor, and the soft and gentle breezes producing the most pleasing and agreeable sensations as we were being conveyed to the vessel. The ship itself was in beautiful trim, the deck as white as snow, being covered with awnings to shelter those on board from the otherwise insupportable heat of the sun, and crowded with the seamen and marines pursuing their various occupations. . . . Anon the boatswain’s shrill whistle sounded, announcing the arrival of a boat with some of the officers detailed for the Court, when the guards and marines and the watch fell in, and gave them a salute as they made their appearance on deck.”

  There were thirteen officers of the court, including nine commodores, two commanders, and two lieutenants. Although Wilkes would later claim that it had been a “picked court,” there were several members who were disposed to look kindly on him. Commodore Charles Ridgely had assisted him during the preparation of the Ex. Ex., fitting out the Flying Fish and the Sea Gull with great dispatch at the New York Navy Yard. Commodore Jonathan Downes had been equally helpful at the Boston Navy Yard. Wilkes had asked that the officers against whom he had brought charges—William May, Robert Johnson, Charles Guillou, and Robert Pinkney—be tried before him; then his case would finally be called. “The evidence in the course of these trials,” the Herald reported, “is expected to bring to light many, if not all the proceedings of the celebrated exploring expedition, which have hitherto been like a sealed book to the citizens of these United States, who are deeply interested in all which occurred. . . . [T]he readers of the Herald will be furnished with a report of the proceedings day by day, which will be distributed all over the country.” For better or worse, the nation’s first significant exposure to the U.S. Ex. Ex. would be by way of the often vituperative testimony given during the five courts-martial, each held one after the other over the course of the next month and a half.


  Lieutenant Samuel Francis “Frank” Du Pont was the youngest member of the court and no stranger to the antagonisms that could develop between a commander and his officers. Two years earlier, while serving aboard the Ohio in the Mediterranean, Du Pont and three other lieutenants had been placed under arrest and sent home after running afoul of Commodore Isaac Hull, who accused them of disrespect. Secretary Paulding would later exonerate Du Pont and the other lieutenants, but the 1840s would become infamous as a decade in which outbreaks between captains and lieutenants became distressingly commonplace. When the Cyane returned after a three-year cruise in 1841, nearly every officer was court-martialed, including the captain. Much of the dissension could be traced to the lieutenants’ dissatisfaction over their prospects for promotion. Commodore Hull, for example, had become a captain at the age of thirty-three; in 1842 a lieutenant was well into his forties before he could expect a promotion, and he inevitably began to resent the “Old Man” on the quarterdeck. As he anxiously awaited news from Washington concerning his promotion, Du Pont was predisposed to look with sympathy toward the complaints of the Expedition’s junior officers.

  By the second day of the trial of William May, it had become obvious to Du Pont that something out of the ordinary had occurred between Wilkes and his officers during the four years of the Ex. Ex. “One of the witnesses examined today,” he wrote his wife, “showed by his manner & tone, as well as the force of his words, that bitter & heart-burning hostility which pervades the officers of the Exploring Exp. against their commander. The Court is crowded with them, hanging on every word that is said with an intensity of interest & feeling that I have never seen equaled. I have seen frequently excitement on shipboard, & in Squadrons, but the indignation which seems to pervade these young men, must have sprung from some cause not usual in the Service. They are the handsomest & most prepossessing fellows you can well conceive.”

  One of these prepossessing fellows was the accused’s best friend, William Reynolds. After finally being sprung from the Porpoise in early July, he had rushed home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In Rio de Janeiro he had received a letter from his sister Lydia reporting that their neighbor Rebecca Krug “is still single and as much admired as ever.” By the time he returned to New York two weeks later to testify at May’s court-martial, he and Rebecca were approaching, if they had not already reached, an understanding. Before the summer was out, they would be married.

  Wilkes had brought two charges against May. In addition to accusing him of disrespect during their confrontation over the box of sea shells at the end of the voyage, Wilkes reached back more than two years to when May had burst into his cabin after learning that Reynolds had been transferred from the Vincennes to the Peacock. May was represented by his brother, a lawyer from Washington, who claimed that the earlier charge should be barred by the statute of limitations, suggesting that Wilkes had only introduced it “as a menace to the accused.” The court was cleared to give the judges the opportunity to decide on the protest in private. When the court was reopened, the judge advocate, a young naval officer named Charles Winder, announced that the first charge had been eliminated. For Reynolds, who could not help but take the charge very personally, it was a hopeful sign.

  The trial hinged on whether May had spoken to Wilkes in an insulting manner, and for much of the next two days, witnesses were paraded before the judges to testify as to the general character of both May and Wilkes. May was universally regarded as an energetic and cooperative officer, although some, such as Samuel Knox, did acknowledge that he “is easily excited.”

  The vast majority of the testimony, however, concerned Wilkes. Lieutenant Walker was asked, “what is his general manner and tone of voice when excited or offended?—and is he quickly excited or offended?” Walker’s answer was repeated word-for-word in both the court-martial records and the Herald: “In reply to the first part of the question, I would say, that, under such circumstances, his manner is violent, overbearing, insulting, taxing your forbearance to the last degree to endure it. As to the second part, he is capricious and often easily excited.”

  Knox may have had some criticisms of May, but they were nothing compared to his description of Wilkes: “His manner and tone of voice when excited was rather incoherent, and rude withal. He is quickly excited, and offended and his general conduct towards the officers is overbearing.” Lieutenant Alden’s testimony was more reasoned and insightful than most. When asked if Wilkes was only responding to provocation when he spoke to an officer in an offensive manner, Alden had an interesting answer: “No sir, in most cases directly the contrary; I have noticed that those the most attentive to their duty would fall under his displeasure the soonest; those that tried the hardest to do their best.” As Alden recognized, Wilkes’s intense insecurity meant that he inevitably felt threatened by his most capable officers; it was the loyal but barely competent ones, such as Carr and Hudson, who won his unstinting praise. Finally, toward the end of the day, Reynolds got his chance to join the chorus of the disaffected: “his tone and voice, when excited,” he testified, “was very passionate, harsh, unofficer-like, and insulting. He is easily offended, and his general manner to his officers is extremely harsh and disagreeable.”

  As was becoming obvious to all, Wilkes had an almost preternatural ability to get under an officer’s skin. But as Du Pont increasingly began to appreciate, Reynolds and his compatriots had lacked the maturity to effectively combat Wilkes’s peculiar and highly sophisticated form of psychological warfare: “[T]here does not seem [to have been] a man of any experience or knowledge to contend with such difficulties, among them.” Instead of strengthening May’s cause, the cumulative effect of all the Wilkes bashing inevitably began to work to their enemy’s advantage. Where the officers came off as young and overwrought, Wilkes remained, according to Du Pont, “perfectly self possessed,” while his “broken & wretched” appearance spoke eloquently of the sufferings he had endured over the last four years.

  The following day saw testimony from Wilkes and several of his more loyal officers. Hudson, Du Pont remarked, was “universally condemned [in the Navy] for the loss of his ship & his having waived his rank to go with Wilkes, of whom he’s said to have been much afraid.” Hudson’s testimony would do nothing to redeem him in the eyes of his fellow officers. At one point he would insist, “I don’t recollect a solitary act of rudeness or insult on [Wilkes’s] part that I have seen or has come to my knowledge.” But later, when asked if he had heard Wilkes “make use of profane and violent language,” Hudson would lamely admit, “I think I have.”

  “I am more & more convinced,” Du Pont wrote his wife that evening, “that all the charges brought against these younger men are but trivial, or come from trivial circumstances, & those against Wilkes himself are not much more serious. He was a disagreeable, overbearing, & disgusting commander, but I doubt if he has transcended his authority, & the whole matter could easily have been arranged [through a court of inquiry] by the Secretary.” The truth was that a navy secretary with a political ax to grind had used the petty complaints of five officers as an excuse to mount a series of courts-martial that worked to the detriment of not just Wilkes but the entire Expedition. The Ex. Ex. and the nation it represented had been ill served by Abel Upshur.

  On Saturday, July 30, May’s brother delivered his closing statement, known as the defence. This handwritten document has become part of the permanent record in the Navy Courts-Martial Records at the National Archives. Most of May’s defence is written in one hand and describes in thorough but unexceptional detail what occurred between May and Wilkes regarding the box of shells. There are a few pages, however, in which the handwriting appears to be that of May’s articulate friend William Reynolds. In these pages, Reynolds rises above the pettiness of the proceedings to address what was for him the real issue of the trial: Wilkes’s failure of character. One paragraph in particular stands as a lasting testament to the feelings of the squadron’s most eloquent officer: “Little
did I dream when I volunteered for duty in the Exploring Expedition, how it would result for me. . . . But it is the quality of our nature to be fallible & its misfortune that we are too often the victims of deceit. I had not then learned the philosophy which teaches that he who would attempt enterprises of great command, must begin his government by laying its foundations in his own breast, in control of his own passions & that he who would survey the world must first sound the depth & shallows of his own character.”

  At the conclusion of May’s defence, the court was cleared for two hours while the judges came to their decision. “As is usual with courts martial,” the Herald reported, “the decision of the court cannot be made public until it has been approved by the President, the members being all sworn to secrecy.” It was on to the trial of Lieutenant Robert Johnson.

  Wilkes had arrested Johnson for refusing to lead the expedition from Puget Sound to Grays Harbor. Johnson’s lawyer, who all agreed was one of the best they’d seen in a navy court-martial, chose to ignore the fact that Johnson had improperly given away a government-issue pistol. Instead, it was Wilkes who was put on trial as Johnson’s lawyer pulled apart his account of the confrontation between himself and the lieutenant on the deck of the Vincennes. It had occurred during what is always a hectic, noisy, and distracting time aboard a sailing vessel—the weighing of the anchor. As the men worked the capstan and the huge anchor rose up out of the water amid the deafening screech and clatter of chain, Wilkes and Johnson had squared off. For Wilkes it was all black and white: either Johnson was going to lead an expedition to Grays Harbor or he was going to be guilty of disobeying orders. For Johnson, it was much more complicated. Wilkes had inserted a clause in his orders requiring him to gain Passed Midshipman Henry Eld’s approval before he dispensed with any more government property. In the navy, an officer was not supposed to submit to the judgment of an inferior officer, and Johnson wanted to discuss this aspect of Wilkes’s order. But Wilkes was in a hurry; he was already annoyed at Johnson; and rather than talking it over with him, he placed Johnson under arrest.