Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

It was left to Charlie Erskine, the cabin boy who had almost dropped a belaying pin on Wilkes’s head, to have the last word. In 1890, he published a book, Twenty Years Before the Mast—quite an accomplishment for a retired sailor who had been unable to read or write when the Expedition began. Charlie had a series of cards printed up, in which he described himself as “one of two survivors of the U.S. Exploring Expedition around the world, 1838-42, under Com. Charles Wilkes.” He also had his own personal collection of Expedition artifacts that included nine war clubs from Fiji that he had procured from the Smithsonian back in 1859.

  Charlie’s book revealed a side of the Expedition that would have otherwise been lost. For Wilkes and Reynolds, the Ex. Ex. had been about the officers who led it, not the lowly sailors who did most of the work. Reynolds was made livid with rage when Wilkes refused to treat him like a gentleman, but showed no concern for the sailors who were whipped on an almost daily basis. When a reform movement threatened to do away with corporal punishment in the 1840s, Reynolds wrote the Navy Department, insisting that an officer’s “power resides alone in the prompt & certain application of the lash.”

  Charlie, needless to say, had a very different attitude toward the lash, and Twenty Years Before the Mast stands as a testament to the countless sailors who suffered in anonymity. “As the sailor lives, so he dies,” he wrote in the final chapter. “There is no audience but those who share his dangers. He lies down afar from home and friends, with no one to tell to the world the story of his battles, so bravely fought, though lost; no one to witness his suffering, or note the courage with which he faced his last moment.”

  With the publication of his book, Charlie had ensured that at least one sailor’s story would not be forgotten. Fifty-three years after Wilkes had callously whipped this handsome and trusting boy, a kind of justice had at last been served.

  Epilogue

  FOR YEARS TO COME mariners around the world would rely on the charts of the U.S. Exploring Expedition. The British and French governments incorporated Wilkes surveys into the charts issued by their hydrographic offices. As late as the 1920s, the U.S. Navy was still using Wilkes charts of the Pacific. During World War II, when battle plans were being drawn up for the invasion of a speck of coral known as Tarawa, it was discovered that the only available chart of the island was made by the Ex. Ex. more than a hundred years before.

  And yet, when it came to what Wilkes considered “the greatest discovery of the century,” his efforts were almost universally dismissed well into the 1900s. In truth, Wilkes hadn’t technically discovered Antarctica since British and American sealers had glimpsed, and even ventured on, the Antarctic Peninsula as early as the 1820s, if not before. What Wilkes had done was much more difficult. By mapping a 1,500-mile section of coastline, he became the first to provide compelling evidence that a continent existed.

  Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding Wilkes’s court-martial made it impossible for his own country to take any pride in his accomplishment. Then, in 1847, Wilkes’s British rival James Ross published a narrative of his own voyage south. Taking up where the doubts raised by the court-martial had left off, Ross questioned whether Wilkes had really found a continent. “I feel myself quite unable to determine in a satisfactory manner,” he wrote, “how much of the land was really seen by him with the degree of certainty that gives indisputable authority to discovery.” Ross was willing to credit Dumont d’Urville (who died in a tragic train accident soon after his return to Paris) with having set foot on land (whether it was a continent or an island remained to be seen), but he refused to acknowledge any of Wilkes’s claims.

  With the exception of the Expedition’s own charts, no British or American maps referred to Wilkes’s findings throughout the 1860s. If it hadn’t been for German mapmakers, who were the only ones to record the American claims and adopted the name of Wilkes Land, all trace of Wilkes’s achievement might have been lost. Even as a series of British and Australian explorers—including Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Douglas Mawson—walked across the continent that Ross had thought did not exist, Wilkes received no credit for his discoveries. What these explorers only gradually came to appreciate was the difficulty of judging distances in the clear, dust-free atmosphere of Antarctica. Objects that look just three to four miles away can be as many as thirty to forty miles distant. There is also the phenomenon of “looming,” in which a temporary refraction of light makes it possible to see objects that are far below the horizon—sometimes as many as two hundred miles away. When in 1929 Mawson returned to a section of Wilkes Land that he had charted the year before, he was dismayed to discover that he had been off by as many as seventy miles in latitude. By this time the coordinates of many of Ross’s land-sightings had also proved in error, and Mawson would begrudgingly acknowledge that Wilkes “had come in for an undue amount of censure.”

  Finally, in 1958-59, the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition made an aerial reconnaissance of a portion of Wilkes Land. As was to be expected, it was found that Wilkes had consistently underestimated the distance between the Vincennes and the coast. However, where he had been able to get close to land, in the case of the Knox Coast and Piner Bay, his chart had been dead on. What impressed the Australians was the accuracy of Wilkes’s estimate of longitude—an extremely difficult thing to calculate at high latitude, not to mention aboard a storm-tossed sailing vessel. The photographic evidence also indicated that Wilkes had faithfully distinguished between what he took to be the overall contours of a continent and where he had actually seen land. Contrary to Ross’s insistence that his chart was nothing more than a fabrication, Wilkes was found to have “adhered to high standards of cartographic integrity.”

  “After more than a century,” writes Antarctic expert Kenneth Bertrand, “during which disparagement was most often his reward, there can now no longer be any doubt of the greatness of his achievement.”

  Wilkes had been his own worst enemy. His aching need for praise and control drove him to some astounding accomplishments but had also led him to commit acts that earned him almost universal censure and scorn. Wilkes needed, more than anything else, someone to rein him in, to be, as he described his wife Jane, “my moderation.” Once the Expedition left Norfolk, Wilkes found himself alone with the torment and compulsions that had seethed within him since childhood. Without Jane to domesticate his demons, he could no longer play the part of the talented, passionate man of good feeling—the role that had won him the affection and loyalty of Reynolds and his fellow officers. He must be who he actually was—a scared and needy lieutenant of very limited experience and nautical ability and yet who yearned to be a hero. If he had any hope of seeing the Expedition to its conclusion, he must reinvent himself. The leader who emerged from the breakdown in Rio de Janeiro was almost unrecognizable to his officers: a haughty, unfeeling tyrant who abused and mocked the very men he had once treated as his friends.

  But would the Expedition have been more successful if it had been led by a cooler, more capable captain? Probably not. The scientist James Dana was in a unique position to judge such things. Prior to the Expedition, he had served as a teacher to midshipmen in the Mediterranean and was therefore highly knowledgeable when it came to the workings of the U.S Navy. He had had four years to observe Wilkes as a leader and several more to see how he supervised the publication of the Expedition’s reports when he answered his friend Asa Gray’s queries about his former commander: “Wilkes although overbearing with his officers, and conceited, exhibited through the cruise a wonderful degree of energy and was bold even to rashness in many of his explorations. I know so well what Naval officers very generally are, that I much doubt if with any commander that could have been selected, we should have fared better, or lived together more harmoniously and I am confident that the navy does not contain a more daring explorer, or driving officer.”

  It wasn’t the Expedition or its long and fruitful aftermath that went wrong; it was what happened immediately following it
s return to the United States. If Wilkes had been able to handle the return in a more calculated and tactful manner, everything might have worked out differently. Even at that late hour, even after all the outrages he had committed, it would have still been possible for him to save the Expedition’s reputation. But for Wilkes to have accomplished this late-inning rescue, he would have needed the right kind of advice—especially in the last critical months prior to the Vincennes’s arrival in New York. There are strong indications that as the survey of the Columbia River drew to a close, Wilkes began to realize that he needed just this kind of assistance, and the person he turned to was William Reynolds.

  Reynolds possessed all the sensitivity, charm, and discretion that Wilkes lacked. He was also a talented writer. With Reynolds acting as Wilkes’s partner rather than foe, the Expedition might have had the reception and the narrative it deserved. But it was not to be. If it was not too late to save the Expedition, it was too late to reclaim Wilkes’s and Reynolds’s friendship. And so, on a rainy summer night on the Columbia River, as Wilkes and a jacketless Reynolds stood side-by-side on the deck of the Flying Fish, the United States Exploring Expedition began its long, sure slide into obscurity.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ACW Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, Department of the Navy, 1978

  DU Duke University

  FMC Franklin and Marshall College

  KSHS Kansas State Historical Society

  LOC Library of Congress

  LRWEE Letters Relating to the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, Rolls 1-7 of the National Archives microfilm, Records Relating to the United States Exploring Expedition Under the Command of Lt. Charles Wilkes, 1836- 1842 (Microcopy 75)

  MV Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985

  NA National Archives

  For anyone wanting to know more about the U.S. Exploring Expedition, the best place to start is William Stanton’s The Great United States Exploring Expedition. Wonderfully written and researched, Stanton’s book approaches the Expedition in terms of its contribution to the rise of science in America. Magnificent Voyagers, an illustrated catalogue of a 1985 exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution edited by Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, is much more than a catalogue, containing articles that analyze the Expedition from a multitude of perspectives. An earlier book, David B. Tyler’s The Wilkes Expedition, is also useful, as is the important group of essays about the Expedition published by the American Philosophical Society in Centenary Celebration: The Wilkes Exploring Expedition of the United States Navy, 1838-1842. Daniel Henderson’s biography of Wilkes, Hidden Coasts, makes good use of Wilkes’s own writings but seems reluctant to criticize or evaluate its subject. William H. Goetzmann’s New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery investigates the impulse to explore by sea and land that culminated in the Expedition and the many U.S. expeditions to the West that followed. Echoing observations made by William Stanton in The Great United States Exploring Expedition as well as Stanton’s earlier and seminal investigation of science and race in nineteenth-century America, The Leopard’s Spots, Barry Alan Joyce assesses a portion of the scientific legacy of the Expedition in The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. Alan Gurney’s The Race to the White Continent: Voyages to the Antarctic examines the Exploring Expedition in the context of the other European voyages to Antarctica, while Kenneth Bertrand’s Americans in Antarctica and Philip Mitterling’s America in the Antarctic to 1840 are also essential reading. Frances Barkan’s The Wilkes Expedition: Puget Sound and the Oregon Country provides an excellent account of the Expedition’s accomplishments in the Pacific Northwest.

  Only a hundred copies of the fifteen published scientific reports of the Exploring Expedition were printed by the U.S. government. The Smithsonian Institution Libraries has recently digitized all these publications, a mammoth undertaking that makes these exceedingly rare works available to a general audience for the first time. To view these fascinating, stunningly illustrated reports, as well as the original edition of Wilkes’s Narrative, go to http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/usexex/.

  Wilkes’s five-volume narrative of the Expedition is a padded, uneven read, but parts of it, particularly his description of the assault on Antarctica, are exhilarating. Wilkes’s personality is best revealed in his not always reliable, but always self-serving Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes (ACW). William Reynolds is well served by Voyage to the Southern Ocean, a collection of the letters he wrote home during the Expedition edited by Anne Hoffman Cleaver, a Reynolds descendant, and E. Jeffrey Stann. Reynolds’s public and private notebooks from the Expedition, as well as his letters written during the Expedition, are at Franklin and Marshall College (FMC). An edition of Reynolds’s private journal, edited by myself and Thomas Philbrick, will be published by Penguin in 2004.

  The scientist and artist Titian Peale’s journal has been published in a magnificently illustrated volume edited by Jessie Poesch, while the officer George Colvocoresses and the sailors Joseph Clark and Charles Erskine each published accounts during their lifetimes. Just a year after the return of the Expedition, the surgeon James Palmer published a narrative poem titled Thulia: A Tale of the Antarctic, about the exploits of the schooner Flying Fish, which also includes a prose account of the cruise.

  Anyone interested in braving the massive amount of unpublished material connected with the Expedition should consult Daniel C. Haskell’s indispensable The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 and Its Publications 1844- 1874, published by The New York Public Library in 1942. Most of the existing officers’ logs, letters, and courts-martial records are at the National Archives (NA) in Washington, D.C., although the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution also have much Ex. Ex. material. The twenty-three officer journals at the National Archives are available on microfilm as Records Relating to the United States Exploring Expedition Under the Command of Lt. Charles Wilkes, 1836-1842 (Microcopy 75), Rolls 7-25. A good number of the officers retrieved their journals at some point after the Expedition; as a result, many of the journals are now scattered among various repositories, the locations of which are listed in the bibliography; these journals are also available on microfilm. The courts-martial records related to the Expedition are also available on microfilm from the National Archives, Microcopy 75, Rolls 26 and 27.

  In 1978 an important cache of Wilkes material was donated to Duke University. Used here for the first time in a book-length examination of the Ex. Ex., the Wilkes Family Papers at Duke contain dozens of letters Wilkes wrote to his wife Jane during the Expedition, as well as letters from Jane, their children, Wilkes’s brother Henry, his brother-in-law James Renwick, and others. Other important collections of Wilkes papers are at the Kansas State Historical Society (KSHS), the Library of Congress (LOC), and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

  PREFACE: YOUNG AMBITION

  My thanks to Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, for providing me with the total weight of the Expedition’s collections. I have inherited the concept of the sea as America’s first frontier from my father, Thomas Philbrick, whose James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction describes how the country’s fascination with the sea was reflected in the popular literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. See also my foreword to American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology, edited by Peter Neill, Library of America, 2000, pp. xiii-xvii. I am also indebted to Daniel Boorstin’s concept of “sea paths to everywhere” in The Discoverers, particularly the chapter “A World of Oceans,” pp. 256-66. As John Noble Wilford points out in The Mapmakers, Lewis and Clark were instructed to locate “the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the purpose of commerce,” p. 225. For my comparison of Cook’s second voyage to the voyages of earlier explorers, I am indebted to Boorstin’s The Discoverers, pp. 280- 8
9. For an account of British exploration before and immediately following Cook, see Glyndwr Williams’s “To Make Discoveries of Countries Hitherto Unknown: The Admiralty and Pacific Exploration in the Eighteenth Century,” in Pacific Empires, edited by Alan Frost and Jane Samson, pp. 13-31. William Goetzmann provides the statistics concerning the number of European expeditions to the Pacific in New Lands, New Men, p. 268.

  For an excellent overview of the many accomplishments of the U.S. Ex. Ex., see Herman Viola’s “The Story of the U.S. Exploring Expedition” in MV, pp. 9-23. In an 1841 report, Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur stated his ambitious goal to expand the U.S. Navy until it was at least “half the naval force of the strongest maritime power in the world.” At that time the American navy included eleven ships of the line, seventeen frigates, eighteen sloops, two brigs, nine schooners, three storeships, and three receiving ships in commission. See Claude Hall’s Abel Parker Upshur, p. 127. For information on China’s and Portugal’s exploratory efforts, see Boorstin’s The Discoverers, pp. 156-95. Gavin Menzies provides an intriguing, if perhaps overstated, account of Chinese exploration in 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2003).

  Secretary of the Navy James Paulding’s instructions outlining the intended destinations of the Ex. Ex. are in volume one of Charles Wilkes’s Narrative, pp. xiii-xxiii. According to Geoffrey Smith in “Charles Wilkes” in Makers of American Diplomacy, edited by Frank Merli et al., the Ex. Ex. was the “last global voyage wholly dependent upon sail,” p. 14.

  William Reynolds’s enthusiastic words about the Ex. Ex. are from the October 29, 1838, entry of his private journal. On the Lewis and Clark Expedition as a model of good leadership, see James Ronda’s “‘A Most Perfect Harmony’: The Lewis and Clark Expedition as an Exploration Community” in Voyages of Discovery, edited by James Ronda, pp. 77-88. William Reynolds’s enthusiastic remarks about the Expedition and Wilkes appear in his private journal, recorded on October 29, 1838.