Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  To be sure, Wilkes maintained a tight leash on the schooners. Every morning the Sea Gull and the Flying Fish were ordered to take up positions on each quarter of the Vincennes. As the little vessels wallowed in the man-of-war’s wake, the fifteen-man crew of each schooner toed a seam so that Wilkes might inspect them through a spyglass. “That third man, Mr. Reid,” Wilkes was heard to shout to the passed midshipman in command of the Sea Gull, “his legs are dirty, sir! The next man’s head has not been combed! Look at that lubber’s neck handkerchief! Stand up, you scoundrels!”

  On September 13, Wilkes, in accordance with instructions from the secretary of the navy, ordered all the officers to begin keeping a daily journal. The journals were to include “all occurrences or objects of interest, which may, at the time, be considered even of the least importance.” At the end of the voyage, the journals would become the property of the U.S. government. The order was not limited to journals. Everything related to the Expedition—“memorandums, remarks, writings, drawings, sketches, and paintings, as well as all specimens of every kind”—must be turned over to Wilkes at the end of the voyage.

  Reynolds had been keeping a journal since the voyage began—a habit that dated to well before the Ex. Ex. “I cannot think of letting this go before any ones eyes but those few at home,” he wrote. Even though it was in obvious violation of regulations, he decided to keep the existence of his personal journal a secret and begin keeping another for his commander.

  Two days later, Reynolds had the forenoon watch. The Vincennes was charging along at ten knots in a stiff breeze. “[W]e all felt elated and excited from the speed at which we were going,” Reynolds wrote. Up ahead they spied an unknown brig, and Wilkes told Reynolds to make more sail so that they might catch up to it. After issuing the necessary orders, Reynolds glanced aloft and noticed that something was wrong with the main topgallant sail, the next-to-highest sail on the center mast. Through his speaking trumpet he called out to ease one of the control lines so that the sail would draw properly. A gust of wind blew the sail out with terrific force, causing the released rope to run so quickly that it caught the man at the yard around his neck and yanked him off his feet. “[O]ne awful cry came from his lips,” Reynolds recounted. With the rope wrapped around his neck, the sailor, George Porter, swung from the yard, his body “showing terribly distinct against the clear sky.”

  It was now up to Reynolds to get Porter down. But how? “[D]id we haul on the rope, it would be to choke him instantly,” he wrote, “did we slack it, he would be dashed on deck. There he hung!” The rigging of the ship was now alive with sailors, making their way toward their helpless shipmate. The first thing to do was to take in the sail. Once the flapping canvas had been tamed, one of the men was able to catch Porter’s body, only to have it pulled from his grasp when the ship rolled to leeward. A second attempt proved successful and the rope was immediately cleared from Porter’s neck. His face was completely black. “He is dead!” the men shouted down from aloft. But by the time Porter had been brought down to the deck, he was showing signs of life. The rope had wrapped around his jaw and the back of his head, making it impossible for him to breathe but not breaking his neck. The men knew he was going to survive when Porter opened his eyes and worriedly asked the surgeon if this meant he might miss his daily ration of grog. Laughing, one of the sailors claimed that Porter “was not born to be hung, or he would not have missed so good a chance.”

  By September 16, the Vincennes was anchored at Funchal on the south shore of Madeira. For a squadron attempting a quick passage to Rio de Janeiro and then on to Cape Horn, a stop at the already well-known island might seem ill advised, especially since there were not the facilities required to begin repairing the Peacock. But Wilkes felt the opportunity to provision and recruit the men would do the squadron good, and Madeira, a lush, volcanic outcropping of stunning beauty a few hundred miles west of Casablanca, was renowned for not only its fresh vegetables and fruits but also its wine.

  Perhaps most important, as far as Wilkes was concerned, this 305-square-mile island, much of it devoted to jagged peaks that reached as high as a mile above the surrounding sea, had long been associated with the more than four-hundred-year-long tradition of European exploration. Madeira was first colonized by Portugal in 1434 by one of the knights of Henry the Navigator, the prince traditionally credited with spearheading his country’s pioneering voyages down the west coast of Africa and, ultimately, to the East Indies. Several decades later, Christopher Columbus lived for a time at Madeira and the neighboring island of Porto Santo. He married a member of the local lesser nobility, and his conversations with the many sailors who touched at this famous island may have led him to first consider a voyage west. Even the island’s eponymous wine was associated with voyages to distant lands. When a trading vessel returned to Madeira from the East Indies with an unopened cask in her hold, the wine was found to have a uniquely sweet, fortified flavor—a consequence of its having been repeatedly baked in the equatorial heat. Thus was born the wine that quickly became a favorite in Elizabethan England and in colonial America. In 1768, James Cook, on his way to his first voyage of discovery, stopped at Madeira, where he took on more than three thousand gallons of wine.

  For the next nine days, the officers and scientists fanned out across the island. In emulation of his renowned predecessor, Wilkes secured several casks of choice Madeira, which he and, on occasion, his officers would enjoy throughout the duration of the voyage. The stop was, Wilkes claimed, “of infinite benefit to the officers and crews.”

  After touching at Porto Praya in the Cape Verde Islands (also visited by Cook), the squadron headed west across the Atlantic. During the long passage to Rio de Janeiro, Reynolds ran into unexpected trouble with the Vincennes’s first lieutenant Thomas Craven. Reynolds had served with Craven before and had found him to be a capable and friendly officer. But for no apparent reason during the passage to Rio, Craven accused Reynolds of neglect of duty and gave him a thorough dressing down. “If any one on shore had spoken to me in that way,” Reynolds wrote in his journal, “I should have struck him & certainly I felt very much inclined to do to Mr. Craven.”

  What Reynolds didn’t realize was that ever since the Expedition’s departure from Norfolk, Craven had become the object of his commander’s intense and increasingly vindictive envy. Wilkes was suffering under a deep sense of insecurity. As so many navy captains had already pointed out, he had precious little experience at sea, while Craven was recognized as one of the best seamen in the squadron. If Wilkes hadn’t been so insecure about his own nautical ability, he might have recognized how lucky he was to have Craven for a first lieutenant. Instead, he felt threatened by him. Even as Wilkes strove to present an urbane and judicious face to Reynolds and his friends, he covertly worked to undermine Craven. By October, Wilkes’s constant harassment and fault-finding had pushed his first lieutenant to take out his frustrations on Reynolds, whom all recognized as one of the commander’s favorites.

  Reynolds decided he must report the incident to Wilkes. “I understand you, Mr. Reynolds,” Wilkes assured him, “& depend upon it, such things shall not happen again.” Reynolds felt confident that his troubles with Craven were now over, adding, “Had I not known Captain Wilkes well and been fully aware that he was free from all petty notions such as that my rank will permit [Craven] to inflict insult without fear . . . , I never would have gone to him with my complaint against his First Lieutenant.”

  “Bah!” Reynolds would later write in the margins of his journal, “he hated Craven & this was the reason he took my part—cove that I was, not to have seen through him then.”

  As the squadron made its way south and west across the middle of the Atlantic, Wilkes directed a daily search for shoals, islands, and even a volcano that had been reported but had never been independently verified. Spreading out all five vessels from north to south, so that an estimated twenty miles of latitude could be continuously scanned on a clear day, they sailed over
the coordinates of these “vigias,” or doubtful shoals. Invariably they found no sign of any hazard, and Wilkes would later send a list of these phantom shoals to the secretary of the navy. As the Ex. Ex. was proving, exploration was as much about discovering what did not exist as it was about finding something new.

  At night during the passage to Rio de Janeiro, the sea seemed to catch fire. Bursts of light sparkled at the vessels’ bows while glowing contrails curled in their wakes—a phenomenon known as “the phosphorescence.” Referred to today as “bioluminescence,” this greenish-yellow light is believed to be caused by tiny dinoflagellates, single-celled marine organisms that undergo a light-producing oxidation process when disturbed. “Every drop that was tossed up shone from its own light,” Reynolds recorded, “and as it fell again into the ocean, diffused around rings & circles of the same intense glow, the night being black as Erebus.”

  On other nights, it was the sky that demanded their attention. As they approached the latitude of Rio de Janeiro, they saw what were known as Magellanic Clouds. The explorer Magellan and his men had recorded sighting these “shiny white clouds here and there among the stars” on the first leg of their voyage around the world. Similar in appearance to the Milky Way, and most easily seen in the Southern Hemisphere, Magellanic Clouds remained a mystery well into the twentieth century—although that did not stop John Cleves Symmes from speculating that they had something to do with his hole at the South Pole. Now known to be galaxies external to our own Milky Way, some as many as 195,000 light-years away, Magellanic Clouds were just one of several spectacular celestial phenomena observed by the Exploring Expedition during the passage to South America. One night, dozens of falling stars lit up the sky. “[A]h! these evenings defy slumber,” Reynolds wrote, “and long after the usual hour of rest the upper deck is thronged with ardent gazers, who glow with rapture as they look.”

  Some of the more ardent gazers in the squadron were the Expedition’s two artists, Alfred Agate and James Drayton. In an era before photography, artists were a crucial part of any expedition, providing drawings and paintings that were later used to create illustrations for the published scientific reports and narrative. Although both accomplished artists, Agate and Drayton had the benefit of a relatively new invention, the camera lucida—an optical device that projected the virtual image of an object onto a piece of paper for tracing. In the months ahead, the two artists, as well as the naturalist Titian Peale, would use the camera lucida to create images of hundreds of specimens and artifacts, as well as portraits of the many different peoples they encountered. They also created drawings and paintings depicting important scenes and events during the voyage, often basing their work on sketches provided by the squadron’s officers.

  On the afternoon of November 23, under full sail, the Vincennes stood in for Rio. Soon she had entered a circular bay almost one hundred miles in circumference surrounded by the spurs of a low mountain range. Ships from all over the world were anchored in groups around the bay. As the Vincennes sailed up the harbor, she passed the USS Independence, the flagship of the Brazil squadron, and Commodore John Nicholson’s band struck up “Hail Columbia.” Under normal circumstances, naval ceremony required that Wilkes fire a salute in recognition of his superior officer, but because of the delicacy of the chronometers aboard the Vincennes, Wilkes decided to forgo this custom. He sent an officer to the Independence to explain the reason behind the apparent slight, but Nicholson “appeared somewhat put out,” Wilkes remembered, “and it was industriously circulated that I had intentionally treated him with disrespect.”

  The Peacock had preceded the Vincennes by three days and was already undergoing repairs, but the Relief, which had been sent ahead soon after leaving Norfolk, was nowhere to be seen. Not until four days later, one hundred days after leaving Norfolk, did the storeship arrive, making it one of the longest passages to Rio on record. Instead of following the prevailing breezes east before heading south and west for South America, Lieutenant Long had sailed a more direct, but very slow course. Wilkes already had little confidence in Long (he had been, after all, one of the officers he had inherited from Jones’s original expedition), and he took the opportunity to berate him in the presence of the Peacock’s Captain Hudson.

  Wilkes planned to stay in Rio for at least a month. While the squadron underwent repairs, he would conduct his initial gravity and magnetic experiments. He made arrangements with the Brazilian authorities to create a base at an old convent on Enxadas Island at the mouth of Gunabara Bay facing Rio. Here Wilkes created the same hive of activity that had existed at his Capitol Hill home the previous summer. “[T]he tents are spread,” Reynolds recorded, “and the portable houses for the Instruments are put up, and the Instruments are fixed in their stands . . . , and there is a hum and a life and a stirring spirit pervading the usually quiet island.”

  In addition to supervising his own experiments, Wilkes was responsible for coordinating the scientists’ journeys into the Brazilian interior, where they would collect no less than five thousand specimens for shipment back to the United States. Wilkes also supervised the repair of the Peacock and the fumigation of the Porpoise, and he quickly found himself spread too thin. “I have too much anxiety or rather too many persons depending upon me,” he wrote Jane. He knew that his own observations must meet exacting standards since they were to be later integrated with observations being made by Lieutenant Gilliss at the Depot and Professor William Bond at Harvard.

  Particularly torturous were the pendulum experiments. Wilkes had procured a sixty-eight-inch-long nonadjustable, or “invariable,” free-swinging pendulum from Francis Baily. After suspending the pendulum from an iron tripod, he set up a pendulum clock behind the tripod. Both the clock and the invariable pendulum were swung, and since the two pendulums were different lengths, they swung at different rates. Every so often, however, they would coincide. Observing the two pendulums through a telescope set up on the opposite side of the room, he would record the exact time of the coincidence, repeating the observation over and over again for days on end. Eventually, enough data was accumulated to determine the precise duration of a single swing of the pendulum. With this time and the length of the pendulum, it was then possible to calculate the force of gravity.

  As the experiments wore on, Wilkes started to experience terrible headaches. He demanded complete quiet, and when a man mending a sail in an adjacent room of the convent building accidentally made a noise, Wilkes “went off in a minute,” according to an officer assisting him in the experiment. “Where is he?” Wilkes screamed. “The son of a bitch. . . . I’ll pound him! Where is he? By God, I’ll throttle him!” For the officers who had worked with him prior to the voyage’s departure, it was a startling change in behavior. “These little outbreaks,” Reynolds wrote, “were rather ominous for the future harmony of the squadron.”

  Wilkes was exhibiting the symptoms of a man who had been stretched beyond his capabilities. The less in control he felt, the more he became fixated on the issue of rank. At one point Commodore John Nicholson, commander of the Independence on station at Rio, addressed him as “Mister,” instead of “Captain,” Wilkes. When Wilkes expressed his outrage in a letter, Nicholson coolly responded, “To call you a Captain or Commander would not make you one.” It was a statement that appears to have cut Wilkes to the quick.

  Late one night, as he sat alone beside his “wagging pendulum,” he burst into tears. “I had a good cry,” he admitted to Jane (from whom he would withhold nothing throughout the voyage), “which relieves me not a little. How few, my dear Janie, would believe that the Commdr. Of the Expg Expedn. could be so easily brought to the sinking mood against all the duties that he is surrounded with.”

  In late December, Wilkes finally finished his pendulum experiments. By then, Lieutenant Long and the Relief were already on their way south. It was time, he decided, for some relaxation. With his flag lieutenant, Overton Carr, and a servant, he went ashore to enjoy a heated bath. But when he e
merged from the warm water, he collapsed into his servant’s arms. “I was conscious,” he remembered, “but could not speak.” Carr immediately took him to a nearby hotel and put him to bed. When news spread that the commander had fainted and was now catatonic, it “produced a sensation throughout the fleet,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “and officers came [running from] all directions.” Just three months into the voyage, he was physically and emotionally depleted. Although the surgeon Edward Gilchrist pronounced “the case a very serious one” and suggested a regimen of “restoratives,” Wilkes opted for nothing more than a good night’s sleep. The next morning he was up and back at work, “to the great surprise of everybody.” The fact remained, however, that the commander of the Ex. Ex. was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

  On January 6, the squadron departed from Rio de Janeiro, but not before Wilkes and Nicholson exchanged a final, acrimonious flurry of correspondence. Wilkes accused the commodore of “endeavoring to decry [the Expedition’s] National character and destroy its efficiency by not extending to the Commanding Officers the courtesy and etiquette that their situation . . . commands.” It all came down to Nicholson’s having called him Mr. Wilkes. Baffled and irked by Wilkes’s tormented rage, Nicholson asked him a very good question: Rather than pretend to be something he wasn’t, why didn’t he instead choose to relish the fact that he, a young lieutenant, had been given such a prominent command? “You should feel more highly the honor which has been conferred upon you, as Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, . . . than all the empty and evanescent titles that could be given by either the people or officers of our own Country or any other.” Nicholson would ultimately send copies of his correspondence with Wilkes to Paulding at the Navy Department with a cover letter referring to “the wrong impressions he appears to entertain relative to his supposed rank.”