Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  It was an unusual collection of sailing vessels. European exploring expeditions had relied on sturdy but slow ships such as colliers, built to carry coal from the northern ports of England, or, in the case of the latest French expedition, a beamy horse-transport, euphemistically referred to as a corvette. Not only could these vessels bear heavy loads of provisions and men; they could withstand punishment from uncharted hazards such as rocks and ice. Since the initial fleet of heavily reinforced vessels had proven unseaworthy, the Americans had been forced to settle for this eclectic assortment of ships, brigs, and schooners. Sleek and quick, instead of broad and strong, the vessels of the U.S. Exploring Expedition made for an inspiring sight as they glided away from Hampton Roads.

  The U.S. Ex. Ex. carried with it the expectations of a young, upstart nation that was anxious to prove it could meet and perhaps surpass what had already been achieved by dozens of European expeditions. But, as all of the Ex. Ex.’s officers and scientists knew, it was very late in the game to be launching an expedition of this scale. The potential for new discoveries in the Pacific was limited, and European scientists were highly skeptical that anyone from the United States might return with significant results. Then there was the potential for disaster—losing a ship, even the entire squadron, in a storm off Cape Horn or on a hidden reef in the Pacific. But it was the prospect of sailing amid the icebergs in this fragile hodgepodge of a fleet that was the most daunting. “On me Rested everything,” Wilkes wrote. “I communed with myself under very distressing thoughts.”

  His instructions called for a three-year dash around the globe. In the next five months alone he was to investigate a group of “doubtful” shoals in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, provision at Rio de Janeiro, survey the mouth of the Rio Negro in Patagonia, then, after establishing a base of operations at Cape Horn, lead a portion of the squadron on the first of two assaults on the Antarctic regions to the south. To avoid being frozen in for the winter, he was instructed to return to Cape Horn no later than early March 1839.

  Then it was on to the Pacific. The squadron would provision in Valparaiso, Chile, then proceed to the Navigator, Society, and Fiji groups—surveying islands all the way—before assembling at Sydney, Australia, in the late fall of 1839 to prepare for yet another push south. By March they would be on their way back north. After provisioning at the Hawaiian Islands, they would continue on to the northwest coast of America in the summer of 1840, where they were to pay particular attention to the Columbia River and San Francisco Bay. But even if they had reached their native continent, they would be farther away from home than at any time during the Expedition since their instructions required them to proceed west to the United States—a voyage of at least 22,000 miles. After stops at Japan and the Philippines, it was on to Singapore, the Cape of Good Hope, and, finally, New York City, which Wilkes hoped to reach by the summer of 1841, almost exactly three years after leaving Norfolk.

  As was customary on previous European exploring expeditions, Wilkes kept his instructions a secret throughout the voyage. If circumstances required that he depart from the original plan, he did not want his officers second-guessing him; so he gave them a minimum of information. Even now, with the coast of Virginia rapidly receding behind them, no one except himself and Jane back home in Washington knew where the squadron was headed.

  The direction of the prevailing winds required them to sail a zigzag course to Brazil, heading east and south toward Africa, before sailing west and south across the equator to Rio de Janeiro. Wilkes determined to sail first for the island of Madeira, about four hundred miles off Morocco. There the squadron would gather at Funchal Roads before continuing south to the Cape Verde Islands and then on to Brazil.

  Wilkes was well aware that if they were to reach Cape Horn by December, time was already running out. Over the next few days it became clear that a fast passage south would be virtually impossible. The Peacock was in much worse condition than he and Hudson had originally suspected. Once the squadron had entered the swell of the open ocean, the Peacock’s seams began to leak so severely that Hudson was forced to chop a hole in the berth deck to drain it of water. It would require several weeks of repairs at Rio de Janeiro to make the vessel seaworthy. Then there was the matter of the Relief. The sluggish storeship soon proved to be a virtual sea anchor, slowing the squadron’s progress to a crawl. Just four days out from Norfolk, Wilkes ordered Lieutenant Long to bypass Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands and proceed directly to Rio.

  After pushing himself so hard all spring and summer, Wilkes found these new and unexpected problems particularly difficult to bear. The squadron was barely out of sight of land, and already he was exhausted. “[T]he fatigues of all are now and then too much for me,” he admitted in a letter to Jane.

  Still uppermost in his thoughts was Poinsett’s refusal to make Hudson and himself captains. It cast a pall over everything. Wilkes decided that they needed to do something to distinguish them from the other lieutenants in the squadron. If they couldn’t wear their captain uniforms (with an epaulet on each shoulder), then they would modify their lieutenant uniforms. Instead of epaulets on their left shoulders, both Wilkes and Hudson would do without epaulets altogether. But if their uniforms were without visible indications of rank, Wilkes insisted that his officers refer to them not as Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Hudson—the way you addressed a lieutenant—but as Captain Wilkes and Captain Hudson.

  He then decided he should have a flag lieutenant, an executive secretary who would be responsible for everything from carrying sensitive messages to making dinner arrangements. Overton Carr had been with him at the Depot even before the survey of Georges Bank. Short, boyish, and unfailingly loyal, Carr was the perfect yes-man, and he became Wilkes’s flag lieutenant. If the politicians in Washington wouldn’t do it, Wilkes would provide himself with the necessary trappings of command.

  He soon discovered what so many new captains had learned before him: life was very different in the aft cabin of a man-of-war. For one thing it was lonely. As the leader, he was expected to establish a certain distance between himself and his officers. When he appeared on the quarterdeck, his officers were expected to tip their caps and leave him to the solitude of the weather rail. Except for the occasional nights he invited a few officers to dine with him, he ate alone in his cabin. Most captains had learned how to adjust to the isolation and responsibility of command through years of experience at sea, but Wilkes had seized this position of authority almost overnight. He had not had the time and opportunity to establish a style of command appropriate to a voyage around the world.

  There was no right or wrong way to lead a ship and a squadron—every captain had his own approach, depending on his talents and temperament. Some, with Nelson being the most famous example, used the power of their personalities, as well as their considerable skills and physical courage, to inspire their officers and men to do their bidding. Some relied on the threat of the lash; others might employ a well-timed joke. Cook, though he carefully monitored his crew’s health, was also renowned for his “paroxysms of passion.” A seemingly insignificant incident could cause him to curse, flap his arms wildly about, and stamp repeatedly on the deck. Whatever the command style, consistency was essential to successful leadership. As long as the officers and men knew what to expect, they could adapt to just about anything. But if the officers’ and crews’ expectations should go unfulfilled in any significant or even insignificant way, the complex interpersonal chemistry of a crowded ship could be quickly and irrevocably altered, transforming a vessel that had once operated like a well-oiled machine into a pressure cooker about to explode.

  In the beginning, Wilkes seems to have employed the only command style with which he had any recent experience—the genial approach he had used during the survey of Georges Bank. Just as he had once messed with his officers aboard the Porpoise, he frequently left his cabin to socialize in the Vincennes’s wardroom. As if to distract himself from the immensity of the challenges ahead, he
directed his attention to the more easily managed details of shipboard life. He embarked on a personal campaign to rid the officers’ pantries of spiders. Every day the leader of the U.S. Ex. Ex. would venture into his officers’ quarters to search out and squish these annoying creatures. When some of the officers began to grow facial hair, he concocted elaborate schemes to convince them of the inappropriateness of the practice without directly forbidding it. When the ringleader, Lieutenant Johnson, finally shaved off his mustache, Wilkes “rejoiced with others that this speck of discord had vanished,” adding in a letter to Jane that “I shall be quite adept in studying characters before I get back.” It was a petty but telling incident that indicated the lengths to which Wilkes was willing to go to avoid even the hint of conflict with his officers—at least for now.

  At this early stage in the voyage, William Reynolds and his compatriots were too enthralled with the grandeur of the undertaking to regard Wilkes as anything but the dashing and inspirational leader of the youngest naval squadron any of them had ever known. “It is so strange to me to look around and find none but youthful faces among the officers,” Reynolds wrote Lydia, “a young Captain, with boys for his subordinates—no gray hairs, no veterans among us.” Since they were all so young, they were given responsibilities that would have normally been at least three, even four years away. Reynolds was appointed an officer of the deck, an honor usually reserved for a lieutenant. With a speaking trumpet held to his lips, he issued the orders that kept the twenty sails of the Vincennes drawing to maximum advantage. “I cannot explain to you the feeling,” he enthused to Lydia, “for though we only take advantage of or oppose the wind and waves, it seems as if we directed them. . . . To handle the [sails’] fabric with exquisite skill, to have hundreds move at your bidding, to run in rivalry and successfully with the Squadron and passing vessels, to laugh at the wind and bid defiance to the waves, ah! The excitement is good and glorious. . . . My proffession, above any other in the world. Hurrah! For the Exploring Expedition!”

  Reynolds also took great interest in the scientists assigned to the Vincennes: the bespectacled naturalist Charles Pickering, the broad-shouldered Scottish gardener William Brackenridge, and the bearded collector of mollusks Joseph Couthouy. Although Couthouy had once been a merchant captain, the others were no sailors, and it was taking these studious landlubbers some time to adapt to the cramped quarters of a tossing ship. In spite of all, they created their own wonderfully weird worlds within their staterooms, stuffed till nearly bursting with specimens and artifacts. Reynolds marveled at the “dead & living lizards, & fish floating in alcohol, and sharks jaws, & stuffed Turtles, and vertebrates and Animalculae frisking in jars of salt water, and old shells, and many other equally interesting pieces of furniture hanging about their beds, & around their state rooms.” For his part, Reynolds enjoyed slightly more sumptuous quarters. His and roommate William May’s stateroom had become the talk of the Vincennes. White and crimson curtains now hung from the bulkhead; silver candlesticks and a mirror adorned the bureau; a Brussels carpet lay across the deck while a cutlass and one of the new Bowie knife pistols gave the room a “man of war finish.”

  Reynolds and May were part of Wilkes’s inner circle of half a dozen or so acting lieutenants and passed midshipmen, who had either served with him on the Porpoise or assisted at the Depot of Charts and Instruments. During the early days of the voyage, this core group of officers, whom Wilkes referred to as “our Washington folks” since they had spent considerable time that summer making observations on the grounds of his Capitol Hill home, served as a kind of surrogate family for the Expedition’s commander. In a letter to Jane he recounted the time when Reynolds and May, who shared a watch together, had breakfast with him in his cabin. The two handsome and dark-haired officers, who looked so much alike that they could have been brothers, insisted that “it was not possible for them to be more comfortable and contented.”

  In addition to Reynolds, May, Flag Lieutenant Overton Carr, and Wilkes’s second-in-command William Hudson, his trusted circle of officers included Lieutenants Robert Johnson, William Walker, and James Alden, along with Passed Midshipmen Samuel Knox, who commanded the schooner Flying Fish, and Henry Eld, serving under Hudson in the Peacock. Wilkes’s most intimate associate on the Vincennes was the purser (the naval equivalent of a comptroller), Robert Waldron. Waldron had been with Wilkes on the Porpoise and spent an hour of just about every evening in Wilkes’s cabin, gossiping about the latest goings on among the officers and men. Also part of this group was the commander’s teenage nephew, Wilkes Henry, the eldest son of his widowed sister Eliza. Henry had been his personal clerk aboard the Porpoise, and Wilkes had secured a midshipman’s appointment for the boy so that he could accompany him on the voyage. Overall, Wilkes was pleased with the group of officers he had assembled. “[Y]ou will be glad to learn,” he wrote Jane, “that we have got along very smoothly thus far, and that they one and all exhibit the greatest desire to do their duty.”

  Charlie Erskine couldn’t believe it. Almost a year after being whipped by Charles Wilkes, the boy was once again under his command. That summer Charlie had been reassigned to the Porpoise, then at New York and being outfitted for the Expedition. As long as he could stay on the Porpoise and have nothing to do with the squadron’s leader, he figured he would be safe. But on the morning of August 17, as the squadron prepared to set out from Norfolk, Wilkes’s gig came alongside the Porpoise with orders for Erskine to join the Vincennes. Unaware of his former cabin boy’s feelings toward him, Wilkes wanted Charlie to serve on the flagship. “I felt more like jumping overboard than sailing with my worst enemy,” Charlie remembered. He begged Lieutenant Ringgold to let him remain on the Porpoise, but Ringgold told him he had no choice but to get into the gig.

  Once on board the Vincennes, Charlie was promoted to mizzen-top man. “I liked my station, the ship’s officers, and the crew,” he remembered. But at Sunday service the next day he found himself staring across the quarterdeck at Charles Wilkes. “[W]hen I saw him, it made me revengeful,” he wrote, “and I felt as if the evil one had taken possession of me.”

  It was Charlie’s first experience aboard a full-rigged ship. Unlike the sloops, schooners, and brigs on which he had previously served, the Vincennes possessed three masts and three decks—the spar, gun, and berth decks. The crew of two hundred men was divided into sixteen messes, twelve men in a mess. While the officers ate on tables set with plates, forks, knives, and spoons and employed servants to attend to their personal needs, Charlie and his messmates sat on a piece of canvas spread out on the deck and ate their salt beef out of two wooden tubs known as kids. When not eating or on watch, Charlie slung his hammock from a beam that was just four and a half feet above the deck, with only twenty-eight inches between the sailors on either side of him. As he and the rest of his watch rocked to the creaking sounds of a wooden ship at sea, Charlie found himself reliving the punishment he had suffered at the hands of Wilkes. “I only wish I could forget the past,” he wrote, “and that it might not so constantly haunt me.”

  Eleven days after leaving Norfolk, at midnight on August 29, Charlie came on deck to relieve the lookout on the lee quarter. There was a slight swell, but little wind. While walking the Vincennes’s deck, Charlie paused to look down the cabin skylight. Sitting at the table was “the man who had ordered me to be flogged.” Even at this late hour, Wilkes was awake, studying a chart. Charlie remembered the sting of the colt as if he had been punished yesterday.

  The officer of the deck began to walk forward, leaving Charlie alone beside the skylight. Stacked on a nearby rack were some belaying pins—iron cylinders to which were fastened the ropes of the ship’s running rigging. As if in a trance, he found himself reaching for one of the belaying pins and holding it over the skylight. If he waited another second, the roll of the ship would bring Wilkes’s head directly beneath the heavy iron pin. But just as he was about to drop the pin through the pane of glass, Charlie was transfixed by
a vision of his mother. “My God!” he gasped. “What does this mean?” Greatly shaken, he returned the belaying pin to the rack, unable at first to disengage his fingers. The officer of the deck sang out through his speaking trumpet, “A bright lookout fore and aft!” Charlie blurted, “Ay, ay, sir,” and the Vincennes sailed on for Madeira, her officers and men oblivious to how close they had come to losing their commander.

  On September 6, a low, dark object appeared on the horizon. Word quickly spread through the Vincennes that a wreck had been sighted, and soon all hands were on deck. Spyglasses were traded among the officers, each one reporting on what he saw. One claimed he saw a bare mast extending above the waterlogged hull; another said he saw people standing on the deck, waving in distress.

  But as the Vincennes bore down on the distant object, it was realized to be a huge tree, its sun-bleached branches raised high in the air. It was a cottonwood that had drifted on the Gulf Stream all the way from the Mississippi River. Two boats were dispatched to investigate, and soon the entire squadron had assembled around the tree. The men in the boats discovered a large school of fish hovering among the tree’s submerged, barnacle-encrusted branches, and as they harpooned specimens for the scientists, the nimble Sea Gull tacked and jibed amid the fleet with what Reynolds called “a graceful beauty in her motion and appearance that is indescribable, but which to the eye of a Sailor is lovely to behold.”

  The two schooners had come to be regarded as, in the words of another officer, “the pets of the squadron.” Their refined fore-and-aft rigs not only made them lovely to look at, they enabled them to sail closer to the wind than any other vessel in the fleet. Being a distinctly American type of craft developed in the eighteenth century to negotiate the convoluted coastline of the Atlantic seaboard, the schooners also appealed to the officers’ patriotism, and Reynolds predicted that “the English will look upon [them] with jealous eyes.” Though the vessels were comparatively small, every lieutenant in the squadron yearned to command one of the schooners, and when Wilkes, at the last minute, had put two lowly passed midshipmen in charge of the vessels, it had caused more than a little grumbling. In answer to queries, Wilkes claimed that the schooners were nothing more than tenders to the Vincennes and as a consequence did not constitute independent commands. Given time, he insisted, all the officers would have ample opportunity for glory.