Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Instead of taking charge of the situation, Carr stood amidships, “his arms akimbo, looking at the sails in utter ignorance what to do.” Reynolds and several other officers peered over the gangway, checking to see if the Vincennes had begun to drift backward into the rocks. Wilkes asked querulously if the ship was going astern. Normally Carr would have been the one to answer him, but the first lieutenant seemed unable to speak, so Underwood and Reynolds spoke up for him. “Yes!” they shouted.

  “This is the last,” Wilkes croaked.

  But Pilot Fauxall, in Reynolds’s words, “knew his business.” Barking out the appropriate orders, he was able to manipulate the ship’s yards and rudder so that the Vincennes came head to wind once again. With Tower Rock to leeward and the swell rolling in from the ocean, it was now “do or die.” “We were within the influence of the rollers,” Reynolds wrote. “The Surf dashed & broke upon the rocks a few boatlengths under the lee, & looking down beneath the Ship, the rocks there, were staring you in the face!”

  Although the pilot succeeded in tacking the ship, their troubles were far from over. As the Vincennes struggled to gain headway, the ship’s slippage to leeward threatened to sweep her sideways back into the rocks. There was nothing left to do but wait and see if the ship could sail herself out of danger. “[T]here was the Stillness of death about the decks,” Reynolds wrote. By now all the officers and a considerable portion of the men were lined up along the leeward gangway, “looking fixedly on the foaming breakers that were so close.”

  Normally Wilkes’s “loud, meddling & abusive” voice was an omnipresent part of life aboard the Vincennes. But for the last few minutes, he hadn’t said a word. He was nowhere to be seen in the vicinity of the helm or along the leeward side of the deck. Then Reynolds saw him. He was off by himself on the weather gangway, leaning on the booms, his face buried in his hands. For the commander of a sloop-of-war, it was an alarming and shameful display of cowardice.

  All his life, the high-strung Wilkes had been prone to fainting spells. In his narrative he would claim to have had “no very precise recollection” of the incident. John Whittle, the assistant surgeon, described Wilkes during the episode at Pago Pago as showing “the strongest symptoms of confusion and alarm and was in fact incompetent for some time to his duties.” Whatever the case may be, Wilkes was living the worst nightmare a naval officer could ever dream of. With time slowed to a crawl and with almost the entire crew assembled on deck, his ship was drifting toward disaster, and he was powerless to do anything about it. What’s more, his handpicked first lieutenant had also proven a catastrophic failure.

  Stray puffs of wind brushed languorously across the Vincennes’s sails. Under the pilot’s able direction, the ship continued to move ahead, inch by harrowing inch, but the rocks were now directly beneath them. Just then, the breeze freshened, and with a slight gurgle of water at the bow, the Vincennes slipped out to sea, with, Reynolds observed, “nothing to spare!”

  Once it was clear that the ship was no longer in danger, the pilot requested that Wilkes heave to so that he might return to the harbor in his whaleboat, which was tied to the Vincennes’s stern. But Wilkes, burning with humiliation and indignation, refused. On and on they sailed in a building breeze, with the bow of the pilot’s whaleboat slapping against the big ship’s quarter wake. When the order was finally given to heave to, Fauxhall climbed into his boat with a quiet dignity that only infuriated Wilkes all the more. Waving his hand, the pilot mockingly called out, “You may fill away now, sir! Fill away, as soon as you like.”

  “Captn. W. could have eaten him,” Reynolds wrote.

  Soon after the pilot had been dismissed, Reynolds went below to bandage his feet; he had burned them in the sun a few days before, and they hurt so badly that he could barely get them into his shoes. But almost as soon as he began to attend to his feet, Wilkes called for “All Hands.” One of the Vincennes’s whaleboats and a dinghy needed to be brought aboard, an operation that usually required only a few men and took, at the most, five minutes. But as was his wont, Wilkes demanded that the entire crew be on duty.

  Reynolds worked as quickly as he could to bandage his feet, but in a few minutes there was another cry for all hands. A few minutes after that, a sailor came below and informed Reynolds that the captain was waiting for him. Reynolds went up on deck and was shocked to see that all two hundred men were standing idly at their stations. Reynolds hobbled to his station and was told that he should consider himself suspended. Outraged by what he perceived to be a calculated effort to humiliate him, Reynolds, despite his blistered feet, paced furiously up and down the leeward gangway as Wilkes glowered at him from the quarterdeck. Then came the next order: “to confine myself to my apartment.”

  For the next six days, as the Vincennes sailed for the island of Upolu in western Samoa, Reynolds remained confined to his windowless, eighty-five-degree stateroom. When he asked Wilkes’s secretary when he would learn what the charges against him were, he was told “that it was Cap. Wilkes’s way ‘to punish first & inquire afterwards.’”

  One night, not long after the suspension of William Reynolds, Wilkes was alone on the quarterdeck, leaning against the rail, when he was approached by the Vincennes’s quartermaster. Thomas Piner was one of the oldest sailors in the U.S. Navy and was generally recognized, Wilkes wrote, as “a very faithful and tried seaman.” Piner apologized for the interruption but said he had “something to tell me which he thought it was important I should know.” He then related a conversation he had overheard in the galley involving some officers and the scientist Joseph Couthouy. Couthouy claimed that Wilkes was guilty of exceeding his orders in a manner that endangered the future of the Expedition. He urged the officers present to join him in an effort “to displace” Wilkes from command.

  To learn that “almost a mutiny had broken out in my ship” was clearly upsetting to Wilkes, but it was also something of a relief; he could now take action against a person who had become a major thorn in his side. Wilkes thanked Piner for his loyalty and said that he would “see to it.” Before leaving, the quartermaster assured him that the men, if not the officers, were happy to serve under him, “for they saw I was up to my business and they had full confidence in myself .”

  Couthouy was not only a man of science, he was also an experienced sea captain, who had increasing difficulty submitting to the authority of a commander for whom he had lost all respect. A few days later, once the Vincennes arrived at Apia on the north side of Upolu, Couthouy learned that the French expedition under d’Urville had been there the year before and that the French flagship, the Astrolabe, had been so loaded with shells and coral that her berth deck had resembled “a complete museum.” The news drove Couthouy to a desperate, flailing rage. Because of Wilkes’s orders concerning the drying of coral specimens, he would never be able to equal the collections of the French.

  That night Couthouy regaled the officers in the wardroom with some of the more colorful passages from his journal. The scientist’s timing could not have been worse. The walls of the Vincennes were thin, and Wilkes, whose cabin was nearby, could hear the theatrical rumble of Couthouy’s voice, and in many instances make out the words. Wilkes decided it was time he read the officers’ journals.

  As he suspected, Couthouy’s log proved highly critical of his actions. Much more troubling, however, was the evidence he uncovered of his own officers’ disloyalty. “I found no difficulty in ascertaining all who were disposed to give countenance to Mr. Couthouy’s Statement,” he later wrote. He sent for Hudson, and the two friends had a “long and confidential talk.” Wilkes showed him a list he had made of the officers “who were false and true.” To put the “cabal” on notice, he would make an example of Couthouy.

  Wilkes claimed in his Autobiography that he assembled a total of twenty-two officers for his showdown with Couthouy. In reality, however, it was only five: Hudson, Carr, the surgeon Edward Gilchrist, the geologist James Dana, and Couthouy. Wilkes laid out the facts
as he knew them and accused the scientist of conspiring to overthrow his command. “I never saw any one so taken aback,” he remembered. “He stood convicted before his own party.” Wilkes went on to insist that an attack on him was an attack on the Expedition and that it would “not be broken up by any intrigues or Mutinous conduct by any or many, and they might all rely upon it—I should keep My Word.” He ended by warning Couthouy that “if I heard any more of his action to this end, I should land him on the first desert island we came to, bag & baggage, and leave him.”

  Couthouy had been an indefatigable member of the scientific corps. But after this incident, he seemed a broken man. Health problems and his continued difficulties with Wilkes would eventually lead to his detachment from the squadron and his early return to the United States. If Wilkes had appeared vulnerable after the debacle at Pago Pago, it was now clear to all that his almost maniacal will was as powerful as ever.

  Wilkes also met with Reynolds, informing the passed midshipman that he had been confined to quarters not for being late to his station but “because I had come on deck in an improper & disrespectful manner & set a bad example to the crew.” As Reynolds was well aware, Wilkes was nearsighted. It would have been impossible for him to make out his facial expressions when he came up the fore hatch. When Wilkes said he hoped it would not happen again, Reynolds replied that “I could not amend, while I was not conscious of any impropriety.” He was tempted to insist on a court-martial to exonerate himself, but “like many others have done this cruise, I subdued my feelings at whatever sacrifice.”

  By this time, the squadron had arrived at Upolu’s beautiful Apia Bay. The next day Reynolds and Lieutenant George Emmons set out on an overland expedition to survey a harbor on the opposite side of the island. After a week’s confinement, Reynolds had difficulty containing his enthusiasm. “I was enraptured with the loveliness around me, & I strode on with a light step, care banished from my mind . . . ; when I behold a glorious prospect, my heart would burst, did I not give way & exult & rejoice aloud!”

  They stopped at a village for the night, and before dinner they went to a freshwater pool for a bath. Nearly the entire village followed them, and as Reynolds took off his clothes, one of the natives drew attention to the contrast between his white body and his tanned face, neck, and hands. “Those parts of me, he said were ‘Samoa,’ the rest ‘Papalangi [Polynesian for white person],’ and he proceeded to assure his hearers with an air of triumphant satisfaction, ‘that . . . a short time would make us Samoa all over.’”

  Accompanying Reynolds and Emmons on this journey was the Expedition’s philologist, or linguist, Horatio Hale. As the officers faded off to sleep, Hale, Reynolds reported, “sat up late learning the language from pretty lips, both in song & story.” Just twenty-three years old, Hale was the son of Sarah Josepha Hale, who as editor of the Godey’s Lady’s Book was one of the most influential women in the United States (not to mention the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”). As a student at Harvard, Horatio Hale had visited a group of Native Americans from Maine who had taken up residence near the college grounds. Soon after, he published a vocabulary of the Indians’ language that, along with some lobbying on the part of his powerful mother, won him a post on the Ex. Ex.

  Unlike his colleague Charles Pickering, who was more interested in what differentiated the various peoples they had so far visited (especially when it came to race), Hale was in search of what these peoples had in common. As it so happened, the vocabularies and oral traditions that he had so far collected from the Tuamotus, Tahiti, and now Samoa pointed to a remarkable similarity among the inhabitants of Polynesia—a fact first observed by James Cook.

  In his voyages across the Pacific, Cook had noticed that as far east as Easter Island and as far west as New Zealand and as far north as Hawaii, the people not only looked similar, they spoke only slight variations of the same language. But if they shared a common origin, Cook was hard-pressed to explain how these people managed to scatter themselves across such an immense space. He had seen the natives’ oceangoing outrigger canoes. They were capable of incredible speeds and had, on several occasions, literally sailed circles around his pudgy ships. But if the canoes were fast, they could only sail effectively with the wind, and the trade winds blew from the southeast. Since the Polynesians looked nothing like Native Americans, he reasoned that they must have come from the west. But how did they sail against the trade winds? And exactly where did they originally come from?

  Not until recently have archeologists and ethnographers been able to determine the location of the Polynesian homeland, what is referred to as Hawaiki in legends and myths. Between 4000 and 2000 B.C. people began to venture out from the islands of Southeast Asia. The gradual development of the outrigger canoe enabled them to sail farther and farther to the east and south, but it was not until the first millennium B.C. that the distinctive culture of Polynesia first emerged in Samoa and Tonga.

  In its pristine state, a Polynesian island was not a particularly good place for humans to live—edible vegetables, especially those containing starch, were nowhere to be found; there were no large animals. The Polynesians’ oceangoing canoes became their arks, transporting dogs, pigs, breadfruit seedlings, taro, and, inevitably, rats to islands that had never before seen the like. Once on a new island, the Polynesians set to work re-creating an agricultural society similar to the one they had left behind, a process that led to the extinction of countless indigenous species of animals and plants.

  Once a small pioneering outpost was established, there was intense pressure to increase the size of the population. Archeological evidence has suggested that in some instances the population density reached astonishingly high levels. One archeologist working on Upolu claims that the interior portions that were virtually vacant when Reynolds, Emmons, and Hale journeyed across the island once contained between 100 and 242 people per square kilometer—a density that would have had a disastrous effect on the island’s ecology. This fostered the development of culturally sanctioned methods of population control—from infanticide to ritual sacrifice to cannibalism, as well as additional voyages of discovery.

  Hale would think long and hard about how the early navigators made their way east against the trade winds. Using meteorological data collected by the Expedition, he would eventually be able to demonstrate that, contrary to accepted wisdom, the southeast trade winds are by no means constant. In fact, during the months of January, February, and March, westerly and northwesterly winds prevail all the way to the Tuamotus. If the early Polynesian voyagers ventured east during these months, using the stars to fix their latitude, they knew they could retrace their steps home during the other nine months of the year.

  Around 200 B.C. voyagers set out from Tonga and Samoa for the Southern Cook Islands; soon after that, they were venturing to the Societies and Tuamotus; the Marquesas were reached around 100 B.C., while the Hawaiian Islands weren’t settled until sometime between A.D. 300 and A.D. 800. New Zealand was discovered last, around A.D. 1000- 1200.

  Hale and the Expedition had retraced the routes of these early voyagers back to their starting point in Samoa, an island group where native ways had not been as thoroughly westernized as they had been to the east. But in five years’ time, Reynolds predicted, Upolu would be another Tahiti. “I could not help thinking,” he wrote, “how much better it would be to let them go on their old way. But no, no! we must have all the world like us.”

  For Reynolds, Upolu would always be the jewel of the South Pacific. (He was in good company. Fifty years later the writer Robert Louis Stevenson would decide to live out the rest of his life on the island.) What made Reynolds’s time on Upolu particularly memorable was his introduction to a chief ’s daughter named Emma. Just fifteen years old and “the image of faultless beauty, & the pearl of pure & natural innocence,” Emma tempted Reynolds with thoughts of leaving the tribulations of the Expedition behind. “I could not help thinking of a life in this Eden,” he wrote. “A hal
f wish came in to my head, that I could free myself from my Ship, & under the shade of the delicious groves, form the mind of sweet Emma—ripen the bud into the full bloom of maturity—cherish the flower, & wear it forever! What a dream!”

  On November 10, the squadron sailed from Apia Bay. Wilkes had hoped to continue on to the Fiji Islands, but time was running out if they were to sail south again in mid-December. They must proceed directly west to Sydney, Australia, where they would undergo the necessary preparations. Little did Reynolds realize that his time aboard the Vincennes was about to come to an end.

  The next day he discovered that First Lieutenant Carr had consigned his India rubber jacket to the lucky bag, the ship’s equivalent of the lost and found, the contents of which were periodically sold at auction to the crew. Another officer had borrowed the jacket while Reynolds was away from the ship, and someone had found it on the gun deck. What particularly rankled Reynolds was that Carr had known it was his jacket and still ordered it to be placed in this “receptacle of all the old & dirty clothes, blankets, soap, etc. that may be kicking about the decks.”

  When Reynolds asked Carr if he could have the jacket back, the first lieutenant responded “in a short & peculiarly snappish tone, ‘You shan’t have it, Sir!’” Reynolds protested and Carr threatened to report him to Wilkes. Reynolds replied that he would save him the trouble and report the matter himself.

  Reynolds was not surprised when Wilkes informed him that he “entirely approved” of Carr’s actions. Wilkes insisted that the orders of the ship required that all stray clothes be thrown in the lucky bag. Reynolds pointed out that no such written order existed. “Well, it was my order,” Wilkes blustered, “and if my own coat was found it would share the same fate!” When Reynolds explained that he had been away from the ship when the jacket appeared on the gun deck, Wilkes asked for the name of the officer who had borrowed it. Reynolds indignantly refused to tell him, and the interview was soon ended. Ten minutes later Reynolds was informed that he had been transferred to the Peacock.