Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Samuel Clemens’s memories of Wilkes the explorer were prompted by his reading the obituary of Wilkes’s widow, Mary, in 1906; in Mark Twain’s Autobiography, vol. II, pp. 120-21. Thoreau’s reference to the Expedition appears in the final chapter of Walden, p. 560, in The Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode, Penguin, 1977. For an examination of Thoreau’s wide reading in the literature of exploration, see John Aldrich Christie’s Thoreau as World Traveler. In the pamphlet The Stormy Petrel and the Whale, David Jaffé argues that Wilkes was a major inspiration for Ahab in Moby-Dick. Jaffé cites Melville’s reference to “young ambition,” p. 21, and elsewhere says of Wilkes, “Clearly, here was a man who could have been a great national hero for any one of a dozen incredible exploits. But the hero was a tarnished one. Melville must have perceived in a sudden flash that here was a great man with a tragic flaw—a will that was unbending to the point of fanaticism or monomania,” p. 18.

  CHAPTER 1: THE GREAT SOUTH SEA

  For an account of how the names “South Sea” and “Pacific” came into being, see Ernest Dodge’s New England and the South Seas, p. 10; Herman Melville also provides an interesting version of this naming process in his lecture “The South Seas,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, pp. 411-12. In the Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798-1877 (subsequently referred to as ACW), Wilkes writes that “the adventures of discoveries” had possessed him since “my early boyhood.” He continues, “Indeed, it was this strong bias which led me to sea & the naval Service. I had indulged in the idea of procuring distinction and a craving after the excitement and scenes which such an enterprise would offer,” p. 337. Bernard Smith in European Vision and the South Pacific discusses how exploration in the first half of the nineteenth century was predominantly by sea instead of land, p. 2.

  Wilkes speaks of his traumatic separation from his father in ACW, pp. 7-8; he describes the witch, Mammy Reed, in ACW, pp. 4-5; he writes of having “no other companions than my books and teachers” in ACW, p. 12. Dodge’s New England and the South Seas contains a good account of the sea otter trade, pp. 22-25; 57-65. Even before the secret of sea otter furs became public knowledge, an American who was part of Cook’s expedition, John Ledyard, mounted a personal campaign to send a trading venture to the Northwest. He even traveled to France, where he won the support of Thomas Jefferson and John Paul Jones, but it wasn’t until 1787, when a group of six New England merchants enlisted Captains John Kendrick and Robert Gray, that an American sea otter voyage became a reality. When Astor died in 1848, he was considered to be the richest man in the United States; his great grandson, also named John Jacob Astor, would have the distinction of going down with the Titanic in 1905. Edmund Fanning, who sold the Tonquin (named for the gulf that would become famous during the Vietnam War) to Astor, wrote about the ship’s demise in Voyages to the South Seas, Indian and Pacific Oceans, pp. 137-50. F. W. Howay in “The Loss of the Tonquin” compares various known accounts of the disaster and tells of how the story eventually made its way east.

  For an account of the naval side of the War of 1812, see William Fowler’s Jack Tars and Commodores. Daniel Henderson in Hidden Coasts describes the celebrations New Yorkers regularly gave naval heroes during the War of 1812, pp. 9-10. Wilkes relates Mammy Reed’s prediction that he would one day be an admiral in ACW, p. 4. James Fenimore Cooper’s pessimistic words about Wilkes’s chances of getting a midshipman’s appointment are in ACW, p. 37. Wilkes speaks of his “hankering after naval life” in ACW, p. 16. He describes his first voyage on a merchant vessel in ACW, pp. 20-28. Wilkes’s revealing statement about how his “tastes were not in unison” with a life at sea is in ACW, p. 29. Wilkes speaks of the death of his father in ACW, p. 37. Wilkes relates his impressions of Commodore William Bainbridge in ACW, pp. 41-42. Bainbridge may have been an unfortunate role model for Wilkes. Although an acknowledged hero of the War of 1812, Bainbridge had also suffered his share of defeats and was known as “Hard Luck Bill.” See Craig Symonds’s “William S. Bainbridge: Bad Luck or Fatal Flaw?” in Makers of the American Naval Tradition, edited by James Bradford, pp. 97-99. Wilkes’s statement concerning the “debauchery” typical of a naval vessel is in ACW, p. 45. His confession that he “had but few friends” among the officers of the vessels on which he served early on in his career is in ACW, p. 104. He speaks of his long-standing love of Jane Renwick in ACW, pp. 106-7.

  Wilkes describes his cruise to the Pacific aboard the Franklin in ACW, pp. 109-43. He tells of meeting Captain Pollard in ACW, pp. 168-70. For another account of the Wilkes-Pollard meeting, see my In the Heart of the Sea, pp. 207-10. William Cary’s narrative Wrecked on the Feejees was found in manuscript in an attic in the town of Siasconset on Nantucket and published a few years later in 1887. Walter Whitehall’s The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem speaks about the sandalwood trade and also includes the memorial written in 1834, pp. 12-13. Amasa Delano describes the killing of seals in his Narrative of Voyages and Travels, pp. 306-7. My information on Nathaniel Palmer’s encounter with Bellingshausen is based largely on the chapter “Lands Below the Horn” by Robert Morsberger and W. Patrick Strauss in America Spreads Her Sails, edited by Clayton Barrow, Jr., pp. 21-40. Davis’s and Burdick’s sealing voyages to the Antarctic Peninsula are analyzed in Kenneth Bertrand’s Americans in Antarctica, 1775-1948, pp. 89-101. The 1828 memorial from the citizens of Nantucket is included in J. N. Reynolds’s Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition, pp. 165-66.

  CHAPTER 2: THE DEPLORABLE EXPEDITION

  For information about John Barrow, see Fergus Fleming’s Barrow’s Boys: The Original Extreme Adventurers, pp. 1-12. A. Hunter Dupree writes about the disappointing aftermath of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in Science and the Federal Government, pp. 27-28. In his 1825 Inaugural Address, John Quincy Adams speaks of how European voyages of discovery have not only brought glory to their nations but contributed to “the improvement of human knowledge.” He continues, “We have been partakers of that improvement and owe for it a sacred debt, not only of gratitude, but of equal or proportional exertion in the same common cause,” in Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, volume II, edited by James Richardson, p. 312.

  As early as 1811, President James Madison had selected the sealer Edmund Fanning to lead a small exploring expedition to the Pacific. Unfortunately, the outbreak of the War of 1812 meant that what would have been known as the Fanning Expedition never left port. Prior to that, in 1790, a Maryland surveyor named John Churchman unsuccessfully attempted to convince Congress to fund a voyage to Baffin Bay off the west coast of Greenland to conduct magnetic experiments; see Dupree’s Science and the Federal Government, pp. 9-11.

  Elmore Symmes speaks of John Symmes’s stint in St. Louis in “John Cleves Symmes, The Theorist” in Southern Bivouac, p. 558. For an account of Terra Australis Incognita, see Jacques Brosse’s Great Voyages of Discovery, pp. 14- 16. As Reginald Horsman relates in “Captain Symmes’s Journey to the Center of the Earth” in Timeline, Symmes read Cook’s Voyages when he was just eleven years old; Horsman also describes what it would have been like for a ship to sail into the “great verges,” p. 8. As Horsman also relates, a novel entitled Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery, purportedly based on a sea captain’s journal of a voyage into the interior of the earth, was published in 1820. E. F. Madden provides a brief overview of the holes in the poles in “Symmes and His Theory,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, pp. 740-49. The Symmes petition was presented by R. M. Johnson of Kentucky and appears in Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 17th Congress, 1st Session, p. 278. A second petition from an Ohio delegation was presented to Congress on February 7, 1823, in Debates and Proceedings, 17th Congress, 2nd Session, p. 191.

  For information on Jeremiah Reynolds, who despite being a famous person of his day has virtually slipped through the cracks of history, I have depended on R. B. Harlan’s The History of Clinton County, Ohio, pp. 5
80-85, and Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of Ohio, pp. 431-33. Instead of his relationship with Symmes, it has been Reynolds’s connection to Edgar Allan Poe that has interested most scholars; see Robert F. Almy’s “J. N. Reynolds: A Brief Biography with Particular Reference to Poe and Symmes” in The Colophon, pp. 227-45, and Aubrey Starke’s “Poe’s Friend Reynolds” in American Literature, pp. 152-59. In Remarks on a Review of Symmes’ Theory, Jeremiah Reynolds speaks of Weddell and the open polar sea, then continues, “suppose, like Weddell, under some fortuitous circumstances, the icy circle should be passed, a few days press of sail would reach the 90°, where anchor might be cast on the axis of the earth, our eagle and star-spangled banner unfurled and planted, and left to wave on the very pole itself, where, amid the novelty, grandeur, and sublimity, of the scene, the two little vessels would turn once around in twenty-four hours,” p. 72.

  A letter from Jeremiah Reynolds on the subject of “an Antarctic Expedition” appears in Doc. No. 88, House of Representatives, 20th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 3-4. A series of memorials and letters of support (from such notables as Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones and Secretary of the Navy Samuel Southard) are included in Rep. No. 209, 20th Congress, 1st Session. Reynolds’s 1828 report on uncharted islands and shoals is in Doc. No. 105, House of Representatives, 23rd Congress, 2nd Session. In a letter dated June 22, 1838, Wilkes’s old naval friend Lieutenant R. R. Pinkham, a Nantucketer, charges that Reynolds’s report “was copied word for word, from the Nantucket Inquirer, after Jenks [editor of the newspaper], Thornton, and myself had spent months in collecting [the information]” (KSHS). The launching of the “strong and splendid discovery ship Peacock” is described in the New York Mirror, October 4, 1828, p. 106.

  Wilkes tells of his chance meeting with Jane and her mother at a chemistry lecture in ACW, p. 209. For the relationship between science and the U.S. government, see A. Hunter Dupree’s Science and the Federal Government, as well as Robert Bruce’s The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876, George Daniel’s American Science in the Age of Jackson, and Nathan Reingold’s “Definitions and Speculations: The Professionalization of Science in America in the Nineteenth Century” in The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic, edited by Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn Brown, pp. 33-69. For information concerning Ferdinand Hassler, I have depended on Ferdinand Cajori’s The Checquered Career of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, as well as Albert Stanley’s “Hassler’s Legacy” in NOAA Magazine, pp. 52-57. For information on Wilkes’s brother-in-law James Renwick see the Dictionary of American Biography and ACW, pp. 724-27. Wilkes describes his relationship with Hassler in ACW, pp. 216-25.

  Wilkes’s October 5, 1828, letter to Secretary of the Navy Samuel Southard is in Collection 250, Box 28, Folder 11 of the Southard Papers at the Princeton University Library. Jeremiah Reynolds’s October 28, 1828, letter to Southard, in which he describes Wilkes’s and Renwick’s “spirit of dictation,” is also at Princeton. Senator Hayne’s arguments against the 1829 expedition are in No. 94 of 20th Congress, 2nd Session.

  For information on the South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition, see Edmund Fanning’s Voyages Round the World, pp. 478-91, which includes a report from the expedition’s leader, Benjamin Pendleton; see also William Stanton’s The Great United States Exploring Expedition (subsequently referred to as Stanton), pp. 26-28. The geologist James Eights’s description of the South Shetland Islands is contained in Edmund Fanning’s Voyages to the South Seas, pp. 195-216. Wilkes tells of being stricken with smallpox in ACW, pp. 285-86. In his introduction to Voyage to the Southern Ocean, Herman Viola speaks of how Wilkes’s bout with smallpox prevented him from meeting William Reynolds on the Boxer, p. xxix. Wilkes describes his surveying duty at Newport, Rhode Island, in ACW, pp. 286-93. He tells of his fallout with Hassler in ACW, pp. 294-96.

  For information about the Depot of Charts and Instruments and Wilkes’s role in creating what became known as the Capitol Hill Observatory, I have relied on Steven Dick’s “Centralizing Navigational Technology in America: The U.S. Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, 1830-1842” in Technology and Culture and “How the U.S. Naval Observatory Began, 1830-65” in Sky and Telescope. Wilkes describes his family’s introduction to Washington, D.C., in ACW, pp. 300-303. Harold Langley speaks of the importance of politics to a successful navy career in Social Reform in the United States Navy, 1798-1862, p. 23. My discussion of Andrew Jackson’s relationship with the U.S. Navy owes much to John Schroeder’s Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829-1861, pp. 22-28. Jackson’s words of praise concerning the incident at Quallah Batoo are quoted in Schroeder, p. 28.

  Jeremiah Reynolds was not only a proponent of science; he was also possessed with a Jacksonian sense of the United States’ imperialist destiny: “Our flag should be borne to every portion of the globe, to give to civilized and savage man a just impression of the power we possess, and in what manner we can exercise it when justice demands reparation for insulted dignity”; in Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac, p. ii. For the influence of Reynolds’s “Mocha Dick, the White Whale of the Pacific” on Melville, see Perry Miller’s The Raven and the Whale, pp. 20-22. My references to Reynolds’s 1836 “Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition” are from the edition published by Harpers in 1836; pp. 31, 72-73, 90, 98. My thanks to Susan Beegel and Wes Tiffney for their comments concerning scientific collecting in the nineteenth century. John Schroeder in Shaping a Maritime Empire cites Ohioan Thomas Hamer’s defense of an exploring expedition, p. 34. Southard’s motion to fund “an exploring expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas” was approved by a vote of 44-1 on April 27, 1836; in Register of Debates in Congress, 24th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 1298-99; see also pp. 3470-73 for the debates that occurred on May 5, 1836.

  For information on Mahlon Dickerson’s tenure as secretary of the navy, see W. Patrick Strauss’s “Mahlon Dickerson” in American Secretaries of the Navy, vol. 1, edited by Paolo Coletta, pp. 155-63. Strauss’s “Preparing the Wilkes Expedition: A Study in Disorganization” in Pacific Historical Review provides a good, blow-by-blow account of the many missteps associated with the beginnings of the Expedition. Jackson’s letters to Dickerson about his interest in the Expedition are in the Letters Relating to the Wilkes Exploring Expedition (LRWEE), National Archives (NA). For an analysis of Commodore Jones’s involvement in the Ex. Ex., see Gene Smith’s Thomas Ap Catesby Jones: Commodore of Manifest Destiny, pp. 70-92.

  Wilkes’s letters to Dickerson concerning the purchase of instruments in Europe appear in LRWEE. Wilkes’s trip to Europe to purchase instruments for the Expedition is chronicled in the dozens of letters he wrote his wife Jane in the Wilkes Family Papers at the Library of Congress; see also Doris Esch Borthwick’s “Outfitting the United States Exploring Expedition: Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s European Assignment, August-November, 1836” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, which quotes from the November 4, 1836, letter to Jane in which Wilkes refers to “these giants,” p. 171. For information on James Ross and his discovery of the magnetic North Pole, see Fergus Fleming’s Barrow’s Boys, pp. 291-92; 334-35. On what was referred to as the “Magnetic Crusade,” see John Cawood’s “Terrestrial Magnetism and the Development of International Collaboration in the Early Nineteenth Century,” pp. 585-86.

  The scientist Walter Johnson’s February 14, 1837, letter describing the insufficiencies of Wilkes’s collection of instruments as well as Charles Pickering’s February 15, 1839, letter about the lack of microscopes and Wilkes’s March 18, 1837, letter withdrawing his name from consideration as astronomer are in LRWEE.

  In April 1837 the Expedition’s newly constructed vessels participated in sea trials. According to Daniel Ammen, who witnessed the trials, “had the object been to build vessels of exceptional slowness the success would have been undoubted”; in The Old Navy and the New, p. 28. The rancorous public exchange between Jeremiah Reyno
lds and Dickerson is reprinted in Reynolds’s Pacific and Indian Oceans. The reference to the “Deplorable Expedition” appears in the January 25, 1838, issue of the Long Island Star; cited in David Tyler’s The Wilkes Expedition (subsequently referred to as Tyler), p. 19. For an account of the attempts made by the friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne to secure him a position with the Expedition, see James Mellow’s Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, pp. 84-87. For information on the Panic of 1837, I have relied on Arthur Schlesinger’s Political and Social History of the United States, 1829-1925, pp. 53-61.

  Wilkes describes his survey of Georges Bank and his meeting with Nathaniel Bowditch in ACW, pp. 325-30, 360-68. According to Barbara Mc-Corkle in “Cartographic History, 1524-1850” in Georges Bank, edited by Richard Backus, “a better survey was not undertaken until 1930-1932,” p. 16. Wilkes speaks of his relationship with his cabin boy Charlie Erskine in ACW, pp. 331-33; Erskine’s account is in his Twenty Years Before the Mast, pp. 10-11. Lieutenant James Glynn in an October 21, 1837, letter to George Emmons describes being cheered at a New York theater; cited in Tyler, p. 1; see also Stanton, p. 54. Stanton describes the heating system in the Macedonian, p. 54. In an October 31, 2002, personal communication, the arms expert Charles Thayer describes the genesis of the Bowie knife pistol. Jones designed the pistol and described it as “ideal for penetrating into the interiors of islands inhabited by savages.” Jones’s attempts to retrieve the Expedition’s instruments are detailed in his letters to Poinsett in LRWEE, as is his November 21, 1837, letter of resignation. According to Stanton, word reached Washington of the French voyage to the Pacific and Antarctica in July of 1837, pp. 50-51.