Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Wilkes had changed, but less so than Reynolds, who had only known him for a few brief months prior to the Ex. Ex., might have thought. All his life, Wilkes had cast himself as the righteous outsider who must battle against the forces of ignorance and ineptitude to achieve what others thought could never be done. He was the antithesis of the “team player,” and as he had proven with Ferdinand Hassler more than a decade before, he was capable of turning on the people closest to him if he thought it served his best interests. For a few brief months, his original corps of passed midshipmen had been an integral part of Wilkes’s campaign to prove to Washington, if not the navy, that he was the natural choice to lead the Expedition. Little did Reynolds and the others realize that once they had served Wilkes’s initial purposes, all bets were off.

  Wilkes’s interpersonal skills had always been next to nonexistent, but for much of his professional life he had benefited from the advice of Jane, whom he referred to as “my moderation.” Reynolds and his compatriots had become part of Wilkes’s world at a time when Jane’s influence was at its height; indeed, she seems to have scripted many of the moves that won him command of the Ex. Ex. But now Wilkes was without Jane’s steadying hand. On occasion he would consult Hudson, but his good-natured second-in-command was not about to tell him anything he did not want to hear. Without restraint, Wilkes’s fanatical and outspoken personality inevitably began to raise havoc with the officers of the squadron.

  A year into the Expedition, Wilkes had essentially re-created the environment in which he had always operated: it was he, and he alone, against the rest of the world. It was a turbulent, hurtful, and ultimately wasteful way to conduct one’s life, but it was the only way he knew how to do it. Except for his first lieutenant Overton Carr, the purser Robert Waldron, and the surgeon John Fox, there were no officers aboard the Vincennes he could trust. This meant that despite being the leader of a nonmilitary expedition, Wilkes conducted himself as if he were in the midst of a war—not with icebergs and uncharted reefs, but with his own officers.

  At some point, Wilkes became known as the Stormy Petrel, a nickname that would stay with him for the rest of his life, and as any sailor knows, the appearance of a stormy petrel means that rough weather is ahead. The squadron as a whole, but the Vincennes in particular, became a nonstop whirlwind of activity. In addition to their daily surveying duties, the officers and men were constantly harassed by the cry, “All Hands on Deck!”—an order Wilkes issued as many as fifteen times a day. Under these conditions, it was impossible to count on more than an hour’s undisturbed sleep a night. But if Wilkes drove his men hard, he drove himself even harder. Every night, he worked well past midnight on his charts. Surgeon John Fox later reported that Wilkes averaged no more than five hours sleep a night and often went for days at a time with no sleep at all. Sleep deprivation leads to a loss of emotional control as well as a failure to make complex social judgments—just the areas in which Wilkes’s personality was already lacking.

  Underlying Wilkes’s determination to push himself and his men “to the wall” was an unshakable sense of dread. “It is almost impossible to give the constant anxiety I was under,” he later wrote, “arising from the feelings I had of the incompetency of the officers.” The true source of this “constant anxiety” was not a lack of confidence in his officers, but in himself. Too controlling to adequately delegate his many responsibilities, turned rabid with exhaustion, paranoia, and loneliness even as he clung pathetically to the tattered notion of his infallibility, Wilkes was in danger of becoming a caricature of the enlightened explorer. Instead of his boyhood hero James Cook, the Stormy Petrel was acting more like that tyrant of legend William Bligh. Whether or not his officers would go the way of Fletcher Christian remained to be seen.

  On September 10, the island of Tahiti came within view. Compared to the low coral atolls of the Tuamotus, Tahiti’s high volcanic peaks were a wonderful contrast and reminded several of the officers of the Expedition’s first landfall, Madeira. But Tahiti was much more than a physical place for the officers and men of the Ex. Ex.; it represented the holy ground of Pacific exploration—the magical island where European civilization had first come in significant contact with the exotic world of Polynesia (a term coined in the eighteenth century by the Frenchman Charles De Brosses, meaning “many islands”).

  What is remarkable, in retrospect, is how long it took for the two cultures to meet. Magellan had been the first to sail across the Pacific in 1521-22. Except for two uninhabited atolls, he had not seen a single island until he’d come across Guam, almost nine thousand miles from South America. In the intervening years, Spanish galleons regularly sailed from South America to the Philippines, but the route they followed like a well-worn trail seldom brought them into contact with the islands and their people. A handful of European mariners had ventured to scattered portions of the Pacific, but for the most part the ocean remained almost completely unexplored through the middle of the eighteenth century, more than 250 years after Magellan.

  That all changed with the voyage of Samuel Wallis, the British naval officer who stumbled on the island of Tahiti in 1768, two years before it was visited by James Cook. The island seemed almost too good to be true. The lush hills and valleys were filled with fruit, vegetables, pigs, and birds; the surrounding waters abounded with fish. With everything they needed at their fingertips, the Tahitians, whose physical size and beauty stunned the Europeans, were free to live a life of apparent ease. Best of all, from the sailors’ perspective, the women, wearing little more than the flowers in their hair, were willing to fulfill the men’s every desire for the price of an iron nail. When the ready supply of nails ran out, Wallis became concerned that his ship might be pulled to pieces by his sailors’ frantic search for additional trade goods.

  Even before Wallis returned to England to tell Cook about his discovery, Tahiti was visited by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe. Bougainville’s report of a virtual Garden of Eden, which he dubbed “New Cythera,” was taken as proof of the Enlightenment’s belief in the innate goodness of natural man, uncorrupted by the evils of society. But by the time Cook arrived on the scene a year later, Tahiti was no longer the utopia it had once been. Venereal disease was now rampant on the island, and in a matter of weeks Cook’s surgeon reported thirty-three cases among the sailors and marines. In subsequent years a host of European-borne diseases would ravage the native population.

  Three decades after its discovery, Tahiti received a visitation of a different sort. Where the French had seen an Eden, the London Missionary Society saw an island of barbarous heathens in desperate need of the Word of God. Not until 1815, when King Pomare II embraced Christianity so as to help him defeat his tribal rivals, did the Society begin to make genuine inroads. Then, with the arrival of a young, charismatic reformed ironmonger named John Williams two years later, Christianity started to spread not only throughout Tahiti but to islands across Polynesia.

  By the time the Ex. Ex. arrived at the island, seventy-two years after Cook, the paradise of the South Pacific had become thoroughly Christian. Hundreds of Tahitians, the women adorned in full-length dresses and floppy bonnets, the men in a ragged assortment of Western pants and shirts, made their way to church every Saturday (the holy day on Tahiti because the first missionaries had forgotten to take into account the time change). Much to the missionaries’ dismay, Tahiti had recently become an occasional provisioning stop for the British and American whaling fleets, and the boisterous sailors threatened to undermine the natives’ tenuous grasp of Christian morality. All the while, the French and British governments were eyeing each other warily over control of Tahiti. The island that had once been an icon was in danger of becoming a colony.

  Cook had originally come to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, and Wilkes, having just reread his great predecessor’s narrative, was intent on re-creating history. “We anchored in Matavai Bay under Point Venus,” he wrote, �
��perhaps in the very position once occupied by Captn Cook. . . . The stillness of the harbour with nothing to disturb its placid surface was refreshing, filled as the air was with the fragrance of flowers on shore.” But instead of lovely women offering their charms, the squadron was soon surrounded by canoe-loads of natives offering to wash their laundry. In emulation of Cook, Wilkes ordered his officers to erect the squadron’s portable observatories on Point Venus, where several tents, a forge, and a carpenters’ work station were also assembled as a crowd of Tahitians gathered around them. “[T]hey hovered about us,” Reynolds wrote, “as if it was actually necessary to their happiness to be always near us, & never quitted the Point so long as we remained.”

  Reynolds was quickly introduced to one of the wonders of the South Pacific—the coconut. Soon he was drinking as many as thirty of them a day. “Let me record its praises here,” he wrote in his journal, “I owe my life to the milk of the Cocoa Nut, & like the Natives, I would rather die, than harm a tree.”

  The officers and men of the Expedition quickly learned that the Tahitians’ reputation for sexual promiscuity was still well deserved. Wilkes assured Jane that, unlike former expeditions, whose ships became “floating brothels,” he allowed no women on his vessels and required his men to be back aboard by sunset. “This has won great praise from the missionaries,” he reported.

  Reynolds was shocked by the Tahitians’ sexual openness (like “beasts in the fields,” he recorded), but he was even more disturbed by the conduct of the missionaries. Instead of striving to teach the natives any substantive religious truths, they ruled by spiritual intimidation. “[T]he only evidence of Religion, that I noticed among the Natives, were the observance of External forms, & a fear of the Missionaries.” In the pages of his journal he began to articulate a radical concept for the first half of the nineteenth century—that of cultural relativism. “Who can judge one nation by another?” he wrote. “What man can say, this people shall be my standard, by them I will judge all others? [The Tahitians] differ from us widely, but they are unconscious that they are wrong—that, which we could point at, with the finger of Shame & condemn as obscene & sinful, they deem of no harm, but as worthy of commendation & observance.” In the months ahead, as the squadron made its way west to the islands of Samoa, Reynolds would find even more reason to question his preconceived notions of the innate superiority of Western society.

  Tahiti proved to be an important crossroads for the scientists. Finally, they were set free. Couthouy and Peale would continue to grumble about Wilkes’s dictatorial style, but the rest of the scientists found little to complain about as they rushed about the island on various expeditions into the interior. Charles Pickering was designated a “naturalist,” but his primary interest was in what we would call today anthropology. He was becoming increasingly fascinated by the stunning variety of peoples he had so far seen—from the African slaves of Rio to the Yahgans of Cape Horn, the Native Americans of the Andes, and now the Polynesians of the Tuamotus and Tahiti. After spending several weeks with the Tahitians, he, like Reynolds, recognized that Western standards did not necessarily apply in the South Pacific. “[T]hese people are not to be judged precisely by the same rule as ourselves,” he wrote in his journal. Unlike the Expedition’s officers and scientists, who staggered about the underbrush in their thick, sweat-soaked clothes and lugged heavy boxes of provisions and equipment, the nearly naked Tahitians seemed perfectly adapted to the considerable demands of their environment. “Strip [a Tahitian] entirely in the morning and without an implement in his hand, turn him into the woods; then pay him a visit at night. We shall find him clothed from the lace of the Cocoa-nut tree, a garland on his head; a house over him, made of the Wild Bananas; thongs & cordage of all sorts from the bark of the Poorow tree; baskets made by plaiting the segments of a Cocoa-nut leaf; perhaps a mat to sleep on; cups or wash-bowls of Cocoa-nut shell, or even tumblers & casks of the joints of the large Bamboo; a Cap or an Umbrella if it is wanted of the Banana leaf; a fire kindled; [with] provisioning enough for a week.”

  As the scientists had a field day, Wilkes continued to antagonize his officers. Robert Pinkney, the commander of the Flying Fish, was unfairly accused of having neglected the schooner’s condition. When Pinkney wrote a letter of complaint to the secretary of the navy, Wilkes refused to forward the correspondence to Washington. As he boasted to another officer, “action could not be taken against him, until his return to the U. States”—and that was at least two years away.

  On October 11, the Vincennes anchored in one of the most unusual harbors in the South Pacific—Pago Pago, a deep, L-shaped canyon in the center of the mountainous island of Tutuila in what is today eastern or American Samoa. Since the prevailing southeasterly trade winds blow directly into the harbor, Pago Pago is easy enough for a sailing vessel to enter but is extremely difficult to leave. About a half-mile from the entrance, the harbor bends almost at a right angle to the west. Here, between precipices that reach as high as one thousand feet, Wilkes reported that the firing of a gun produced “a remarkable reverberation, resembling loud peals of thunder.” In a few weeks the harbor of Pago Pago would prove to be an important testing ground for the leader of the Ex. Ex.

  Reynolds was assigned surveying duty under Lieutenant Joseph Underwood. With Reynolds in a whaleboat named the Greyhound and Underwood in the larger launch Leopard, they were to circumnavigate the island in a clockwise direction, stopping when necessary at villages along the way. The first day of sailing proved as dangerous as anything Reynolds had experienced off Tierra del Fuego. Strong winds and huge waves made surveying, let alone staying upright, extremely difficult. “[T]he Compass whirled like a top,” Reynolds wrote, “from the jumping motion of the Boat & the Seas that broke over us [and] drenched all hands.” They spent that first night at the village of Leone, where Reynolds was immediately impressed by the gentleness of the natives. “I noticed in the men, a fondness & care displayed towards their children,” he wrote, “which I had not expected to find. While on the beach many huge fellows had infants & babbling youngsters in their arms.” After picking up their two boats and placing them carefully on land, the natives led Reynolds and Underwood to their village. “There was a deep quiet,” he wrote, “& the little scene around me, in the grove of the Magnificent Bread Fruits, was so simply innocent, that my soul was touched. My pride as a white man melted away & I thought in my heart, these people have more claim to be good than we. . . . I could not help thinking, what would be the reception of these people in our Land ?”

  At Fagasa, on the northwestern side of Tutuila and only a few miles’ walk from the inner reaches of Pago Pago Harbor, which almost cuts the island in half, they found Midshipman Wilkes Henry. Henry had been stationed at Fagasa to measure the tides and make other observations. The commander’s falling out with his officers had been as difficult for Henry as it had been for his uncle. Remarkably, the young midshipman had been able to remain on good terms with his fellow officers without being disloyal to Wilkes. Reynolds had nothing but admiration for the boy, and when heavy rains made it impossible to survey the next day, he and Underwood were pleased to spend the morning and afternoon in the village’s “big house,” talking with Henry and the natives. But the next day, when they returned to the village after surveying the harbor, they discovered that Commodore Wilkes, along with Waldron and nine sailors, had walked across the island to pay Henry a visit. It was time to move on.

  A little more than a week later, Reynolds and Underwood had completed their circumnavigation of Tutuila. The following afternoon the Vincennes weighed anchor and began to beat out of Pago Pago. Five days earlier, the Peacock and the Flying Fish, which had been sent ahead to the island of Upolu in western Samoa, had attempted to do the same thing. Given her fore-and-aft rig, the schooner had had no problem, but it had taken four hours for the square-rigged Peacock to tack her way out to sea. The large ocean swell at the harbor mouth made it difficult for the ship to carry her momentum through the
eye of the wind, and several times it had looked as if the Peacock might be in danger of fetching up on the rocks.

  From the beginning, it did not go well for the Vincennes. Even though the water was as smooth as glass within the inner reaches of the harbor, the ship was unable to complete her first tack—gradually losing all forward motion until she lay motionless in the water with her bow pointed into the wind, known as missing stays. “[B]ut this was not to be wondered at,” Reynolds wrote. “Our first Luff [Lieutenant Carr, who was responsible for executing the maneuver] had disgraced himself often before.” Luckily, the harbor pilot, an Englishman named Edmund Fauxall, stepped in and issued the orders required to get the ship moving again. The Vincennes proceeded along well enough until she reached the swell at the harbor mouth. “Now the greatest care & the nicest skill & judgment were required,” Reynolds wrote. “The ship was to be watched & tended, for she had a critical chance to play.” They were approaching the western edge of the entrance, a high bluff known as Tower Rock. Wilkes nervously asked the pilot if he thought the Vincennes would weather the obstruction. “I do not know yet, Sir” was the response. Soon enough it became clear that another tack would be required. The pilot issued the appropriate order. Wilkes repeated the order, and it was now up to Carr to tack the ship. “Had we gone round then,” Reynolds claimed, “all would have been right, but the Ship refused stays.” In addition to backing the head yards of the ship, it was often common to lower the headsails and haul the mizzen yard to weather so as to coax the bow through the wind. “Nothing was done to help her,” Reynolds bitterly observed; “she lost her way, gathered Stern-board & finally fell off with her head right on the rocks.” Like a stalled airplane plummeting to the ground, the Vincennes was drifting helplessly to her destruction.