Mad for Glory

by Robert Booth

  At last there was a revolt against the government. Poinsett’s house, among others, was on one of the main streets down which the rebel forces marched, and it was known that Poinsett had given shelter to some Spaniards, including the former viceroy’s widow. As the mob tried to smash in the door, Poinsett, with his usual courage, presented himself above them on the balcony, dramatically unfurling a large American flag and extemporizing a speech about the republic that it symbolized and the asylum that was offered to all who sought its protection. The crowd fell silent and then charged off down the street to resume its violence elsewhere.

  Incredibly, David Porter came sailing back into Poinsett’s life, and once again he was caught up in a fatal swirl of paranoia and revenge. As a fighter of pirates in the Caribbean in the early 1820s, Porter had done a splendid job for the U.S. Navy, but on one expedition he had gotten carried away and landed some men on a Puerto Rican beach. Puerto Rico belonged to Spain, which, in light of the new Monroe Doctrine, had every right to retaliate against the United States and the countries and islands that relied on American protection. When the subsequent court martial resulted in a one-year suspension from duty, Porter decided to quit the navy and even the United States.

  In the summer of 1825 he contacted Minister Poinsett in hopes of finding work in the Mexican navy, such as it was, with one frigate, two brigs, a schooner, and some gunboats. French and Spanish naval forces were active in the Caribbean, menacing the ports of Cuba and Mexico, so the Mexican government authorized Poinsett to signal an interest in Porter’s services, to which Porter responded, “I think I see before me a bright field of glory.” He entered into negotiations toward becoming Mexico’s first admiral. Despite his total ignorance of the country’s politics and culture and his inability to speak or understand Spanish, Porter arrived in Mexico in the spring of 1826, impressed its leaders, and in July took command of the navy. Of course he soon argued with his superiors and his Mexican officers, whom he disparaged and largely replaced with Americans, including a nephew and two of his sons. He further insulted his employers by insisting on being made a brigadier general in the army.

  In December 1826, Admiral Porter and his Mexican fleet put out to sea in search of the enemy and his shipping. After some success in capturing Spanish merchantmen off Cuba, Porter’s navy was chased east by a superior Spanish fleet under Angel Laborde. In contravention of international law, the Mexican Admiral Porter holed up at Key West, Florida, and went off to New Orleans to recruit more sailors and ships. In his absence, his men attacked an American merchant vessel, and U.S. naval forces were on their way to Florida to expel him when Porter escaped to Mexico. There he misrepresented his achievements, made claims for payment of $13,000 per month, and demanded that the Mexicans build him a steam frigate.

  The Mexicans pointed out that, although he had harassed Spanish shipping, he had scored no naval victories. Admiral Porter put back out to sea in 1828 but lost his largest brig in a fight with a Spanish frigate. Returning, he went on the attack against Mexico’s treasurer, which alienated most of Porter’s defenders, including the newspaper publisher. His inability to use the language continued to hurt him, as he was powerless to spin public relations as he had in America. Poinsett tried to elicit better behavior from Porter, who complained, “I am tormented to death with attempts to thwart and injure me.” After General Santa Anna stepped in to support a presidential candidate, Porter became uncontrollable. Poinsett received a letter from the admiral confessing, “I would not have any more scruples about shedding Mexican blood than any other blood.” Poinsett cautioned him to stay neutral, but Admiral Porter dove deeper into presidential politics, which earned him such enmity that twice he had to fight off assassins. Finally he was placed under arrest, and in September 1829 he was allowed to leave the country.

  Poinsett was not badly damaged by his connection to Porter, but he too became controversial. His encouragement of a certain type of Freemasonry led to his undoing when the fraternal society was seen as allied with the revolutionaries against the government. He was successful in negotiating a boundary treaty, but his treaty of commerce was not ratified because Mexico refused to agree to return fugitive slaves to American owners. Poinsett found it difficult to stay current with the ever-changing cast of strong men and power brokers in Mexico, and his good relations with the British turned sour. He took pleasure in collecting manuscripts about Aztec and Mayan ruins, and he sent cuttings of various plants and trees back to his estate in Charleston. One of the flowers, of the genus Euphorbiaceae, had bright green and red leaves that made it popular as a Christmas plant, now known as the poinsettia.

  Returning to the United States in 1829, Poinsett became embroiled in another near-revolution. This one, centered in Charleston, was arguably the greatest challenge to American nationhood between 1815 and 1861. The 1828 federal tariff had been bitterly opposed in the South and had led many South Carolina politicians to contend that federal duties on incoming cargoes need not be paid. The nullification movement, claiming to nullify the primacy of federal laws over state laws, turned virulent and threatened to lead to secession.

  State Senator Poinsett, among the leaders of the state’s Union Party, courageously opposed the sometimes-violent “nullies” for three years. In 1832 the state legislature passed a law upholding nullification and bidding defiance to the federal government, which had the effect of a revolution, as the state devoted an enormous sum to arm its citizens to fight federal forces.

  President Jackson sent in warships and troops, and Poinsett became the head of the central commission coordinating state activities with the federal military leaders. He told the president, “I fully concur with you in your views of Nullification. It leads directly to civil war and bloodshed and deserves the execration of every friend of the country.” Poinsett urged Jackson to send a large army to South Carolina, and went so far as to lead an armed party of union men into the streets of Charleston to oppose a mob of nullifiers. Having skirted actual warfare several times, the two factions, led by Poinsett’s Union Party and by the State Rights Party, finally compromised and resolved the crisis late in 1834.

  With peace restored to South Carolina, Poinsett, fifty-six, finally married a long-time widow, Mary Izard Pringle, and retired to her plantation, White House, to enjoy his books and become a rice grower and horticulturalist, raising plants that he imported from around the world. His unionist politics had estranged him from most of Charleston society, but he found a refuge in the Charleston Literary and Philosophical Society, to which, as its president, he presented a very interesting essay in 1834 on “the natural progress of the human race from barbarism to civilization” based on his observations of the peoples of wild places that he had visited in Asia and South America. Poinsett remained well known and highly regarded by those in top circles of the federal government, to which he was called by Jackson’s protégé and successor, President Martin Van Buren, to become secretary of war in 1837.

  Service in Van Buren’s cabinet was the culmination of Poinsett’s long-held ambitions. Although he never had a chance to fight in the uniform of the United States, he now directed its entire military establishment, army and navy. He did the bidding of Congress and the president with regard to the enforced removal of Native Americans westward across the Mississippi, and he was required to oversee the wars that were fought between federal troops and the Seminoles and some of the other tribes. At the same time, he improved the department’s business operations, reorganized and upgraded the artillery based on European models, and completely revised the procedures for cavalry combat based on the French system, which he had employed while directing the patriot army of Chile.* Perhaps recalling the proposals of his former colleague Porter (now marooned in Istanbul), and certainly thinking of his own connection to the Pacific while consul general in Chile, Poinsett commissioned the first Pacific exploring expedition ever undertaken by the United States. Led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes—three other commanders had turned down the appo
intment—it involved six navy vessels, including two large sloops of war, hundreds of sailors, and many naturalists, biologists, ethnographers, and other scientists, artists, and collectors. Wilkes proved unfit for the job, and the United States Exploring Expedition had many dark moments, including an incident in Polynesia in which eighty natives of Fiji were murdered and two villages incinerated. In the tradition of Porter and Downes, it had proved impossible for a U.S. Navy officer to encounter island cultures without resorting to slaughter.† Poinsett’s lifelong interest in art and literature blossomed in Washington, D.C., to the benefit of the nation. Long a member of the Columbian Institute, he planned and organized the transition of that organization into a new one, the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts, founded to conduct research and present exhibits in its museums. Its success was such that in 1846 it would form the basis of “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge” now known as the Smithsonian Institution.

  In 1841, at the end of Van Buren’s term, Secretary Poinsett retired to his plantation, where for ten years he lived happily with his wife, Mary, reading, gardening, running the farm, and coming out of retirement for one more cause: the founding, at Washington, of the National Gallery, opened in 1850, the year before his death, on December 12, in his seventy-third year.

  Nukuhiva: Like Shadows

  After Nukuhiva had suffered many more visits from white men with their diseases and their weapons in the 1820s and 1830s, a French fleet arrived in 1842 and took permanent possession of the Marquesas for King Louis Philippe and his empire. David Porter, far away in Turkey, knew nothing about it. The long-time consular official had endured a twelve-year descent into paralysis.

  In that same year, 1842, at Nukuhiva, a couple of young American whalemen decided to jump ship and explore the island. One of them, Herman Melville, would write a picaresque account of their adventures, and his novel would get him off whalers and into the salons of New York. Unlike Porter’s book, Melville’s Typee was a best-seller. In it he relates his adventures humorously, as two American sailors try to stay on the good side of the Taipi tribe, among whom they live in loose captivity, making friends, partying, sightseeing, and nosing around in villages for evidence of cannibalism. They encounter the Enana talents for beauty, artistry, happiness, and love.

  Melville wrote, “During my whole stay on the island I never witnessed a single quarrel, nor anything that in the slightest degree approached even to a dispute. The natives appeared to form one household, whose members were bound together by the ties of strong affection. The love of kindred I did not much perceive, for it seemed blended in the general love; and where all were treated as brothers and sisters, it was hard to tell who were actually related to each other by blood.” This was as true of the Taipi as of any other tribe on the island; however, the French, their new lords and masters, were given fair warning: “By many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as by events which have passed before their eyes, these people have been taught to look upon white people with abhorrence. The cruel invasion of their country by Porter has alone furnished them with ample provocation; and I can sympathize in the spirit which prompts the Typee warrior to guard all the passes to his valley with the point of his leveled spear, and, standing upon the beach, with his back turned upon his green home, to hold at bay the intruding European.”

  But for all his sympathy, even Melville could not see what was coming. The Enana were overwhelmed by French weaponry and the persistence of French priests and waves of venereal disease and other illnesses first introduced by Porter and his crew. The Taipi held out longest, but they too were brought under French rule, consolidated with the rest under a puppet king, none other than Mouina, the Teii veteran of Porter’s campaigns. As “le roi de Noukaheva” he covered his splendid tattoos with a “military uniform, stiff with gold lace and embroidery, while his shaven crown,” wrote Melville, “was concealed by a huge chapeau bras, waving with ostrich plumes. There was one slight blemish, however, in his appearance. A broad patch of tattooing stretched completely across his face in a line with his eyes, making him look as if he wore a huge pair of goggles; and royalty in goggles suggested some ludicrous ideas.”

  The degradation of the Enana had begun in earnest, and there would be no more comic novels about this doomed island, the saddest place on earth. Forty-five years later the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, thirty-eight, very sick and willing to go anywhere to find a sanctuary where he might survive, chartered a schooner in San Francisco and took his family to Nukuhiva to see if it might be the right place. It was not; rather, it was one vast grave. Islanders had been disappearing at a rate of twelve dead for every one born, falling before the overwhelming diseases of the white men. By the 1880s, with hundreds left where tens of thousands had lived, most of the villages and towns had been abandoned, and anyone hiking on the steep hillsides would encounter the “melancholy spectacle” of houseless stone platforms.

  Still, Stevenson wanted to make contact, as Porter had. On a sultry, cloudy day, he and a schoolboy guide went up into the highlands, where “drenching tropical showers succeeded bursts of sweltering sunshine.” They followed the green pathway of the road far into the bush, looking for the great platform where the feasts had been held and the religious ceremonies performed, as when Opotee had witnessed the dead warriors laid out with such palpable intent.

  At last man and boy came to the spot: “As far as my eyes could pierce through the dark undergrowth, the floor of the forest was all paved. Three tiers of terrace ran on the slope of the hill; in front, a crumbling parapet contained the main arena; and the pavement of that was pierced and parcelled out with several wells and small enclosures. No trace remained of any superstructure, and the scheme of the ampitheatre was difficult to seize.” Stevenson envisioned the spectacle on “the high place [that] was sedulously tended. No tree except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach upon its grades, no dead leaf to rot upon the pavement. The stones were smoothly set, and I am told they were kept bright with oil. On all sides the guardians lay encamped in their subsidiary huts to watch and cleanse it.

  “No other foot of man was suffered to draw near; only the priest, in the days of his running, came there to sleep—perhaps to dream of the ungodly errand; but in the time of the feast, the clan trooped to the high place in a body, and each had his appointed seat. There were places for the chiefs, the drummers, the dancers, the women and the priests. The drums—perhaps twenty strong and some of them twelve feet high—continuously throbbed in time. In time, the singers kept up their long-drawn, lugubrious ululating song; in time, too, the dancers, tricked out in singular finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and gesticulated, their plumed fingers fluttering in the air like butterflies.”

  Neither priest nor shaman was able to stop the plagues, for, as Stevenson found, the people had resigned themselves to the death that “reaps them with both hands.” In these end-times, he wrote, “the Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race. The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets the reality with relief.” By hanging and by poisoning, the Enana sought escape. Stevenson wrote that “this proneness to suicide” accorded with “the widespread depression and acceptance of the national end. Pleasures are neglected, the dance languishes, the songs are forgotten.”

  Sailing to Byzantium

  David Porter, U.S. chargé d’affaires to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire, had no interest in returning to the United States. He had been rejected there many times, and had made terrible mistakes.

  After his disaster in Mexico, Porter found it impossible to live with his wife, Evelina, and their children—some were not his, he claimed—and he became obsessed with money. He demanded payment from the Spanish, the Cubans, and the Mexicans as well as the federal government of the United States. No
thing happened. In desperation, he went to the new president, Andrew Jackson, a fighter of wars and a taker of territory. Jackson felt sorry for the forgotten hero and found him a job in the Department of State, one that would send him far away. A position in Tripoli fell through, but then one was discovered at Istanbul—the old Constantinople, once the capital of Christianity in the east and now the epicenter of the Ottoman Empire. Porter packed up and sailed away, leaving his family behind.

  Porter found that he had little to do there, but the execution of his modest duties was punctuated by vicious fights with underlings. He pursued literary renown, but in writing, as in war, Porter could never get clear of the British. Long before, in 1822, responding to a lengthy assault by an English reviewer, he had put out a new edition of his Journal of a Cruise minus some of the raw passages and with the addition of a sustained counterattack in the preface. It too had drifted out of public view without much notice. He tried again in 1835, with the publication of Constantinople and Its Environs, a temperate work that was soon eclipsed by a beautifully illustrated British volume on the same topic.

  As a connoisseur of Pacific expeditions, he must have read about Poinsett’s Wilkes expedition with jealousy, and he may have read the book by the English naturalist Charles Darwin, Journal and Remarks 1832–1835, popularly known as Voyage of the Beagle. If so, Porter would have been surprised to find himself mentioned in a way that would eventually have epochal consequences. Darwin, in this account of the scientific voyage of HMS Beagle to the Galápagos, gave credit to Captain Porter, that close observer of the giant tortoises, as the first to have speculated about their variations from island to island and what that might mean about the origin of species.