Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Just a few days prior to their arrival at Sydney, Wilkes called all hands to muster. Once again praising the men for the “brilliant discovery we had made down south,” he reminded them that their orders required them to keep the discovery a secret. Almost as soon as they arrived in Sydney on March 11, Wilkes learned that d’Urville had first seen land on the afternoon of January 19 and had set foot on the continent two days later. The news came as a profound shock. “[W]e thought them all on their way home,” Reynolds reported, “lo and behold!” But there was no real cause for alarm. Yes, d’Urville had effected a landing, but what did that prove? D’Urville had traced only a 150-mile section of coast; after just a month amid the ice, he had decided to quit. “There is no question that it would have been possible to push further west,” d’Urville admitted in his journal, “and to chart a longer stretch of the ice barrier . . . , [but] I can frankly admit, I myself was weary of the tough work I had been doing, and I very much doubt whether I could have stood it much longer.” Only Wilkes, through sheer determination and nerve, had been able to verify the continental proportions of Antarctica.

  What bothered Wilkes and his officers, however, was the date that d’Urville claimed to have first sighted land: the afternoon of January 19. As the Americans well knew, it wasn’t until the end of January that they were sure land existed to the south. Soon after their arrival at Sydney, a rueful Lieutenant Alden, having heard the date of d’Urville’s discovery, met Wilkes at the gangway of the Vincennes. “[I] remarked to him that the French were ahead of us,” Alden later remembered. “‘Oh no,’ said he, ‘don’t you recollect reporting to me of land on the morning of the 19th?’”

  Alden said he didn’t remember seeing land on the nineteenth, but after consulting his journal he did recall his half-hearted mention of the appearance of land. As far as he was concerned, however, this did not constitute the date of their discovery. But Wilkes insisted that it did. Wilkes may have even altered his journal. His entry for the nineteenth makes no mention of land except for where the clause “with appearance of Land to the S.S.E.” is suspiciously jammed in at the end of a line.

  Wilkes had no reason to insist that he had sighted land on the morning of January 19; the important point—that he had been the first to verify the existence of a new continent—was not affected by the French claim. And besides, three days prior to the nineteenth, Passed Midshipmen Reynolds and Eld on the Peacock had first sighted land. But Wilkes appears to have not yet been made aware of this crucial piece of information.

  The Peacock had arrived in Sydney several weeks earlier, and the battered ship, whose stern had been worn to within an inch and a half of the woodends by the ice, was in the midst of repairs. Hudson and Wilkes had an emotional reunion at a house outside Sydney, where the two officers stayed up till four in the morning, talking about their adventures. Hudson spoke in detail about the Peacock’s travails in the ice, but he made only a passing reference—if he mentioned it at all—to Reynolds’s and Eld’s having seen land on January 16. If he were to insist that his ship had been the first to sight land, he would have to explain his inexcusable refusal to acknowledge the passed midshipmen’s discovery on the sixteenth. Reynolds summed up the “dilemma” that the Peacock’s commander had made for himself: “Captain Hudson would now give his head had he paid more attention to the thing; how to get out of the dilemma, he does not know. His judgment must be sacrificed & his neglect must be censured, if he now asserts that he saw Land on the 16th.”

  Hudson also knew that Wilkes hungered to have the honor of the discovery all to himself. That night outside Sydney, he appears to have told the Expedition’s leader exactly what he wanted to hear. “He said it had all happened as it ought to have done,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “he meeting with all the hard luck and I with the success. If anything could have raised him higher in my estimation this has done so. . . . No one could be so fortunate as I have been in having a second like him.” It was only a matter of time, however, before the truth of Reynolds’s and Eld’s discovery—and Hudson’s mystifying blunder—would be revealed to the world.

  For now, Wilkes was more than willing to take full credit for the discovery. Given the competing claims of the French, he thought it best to go public with his own claim. In the March 13 edition of the Sydney Herald, under the headline “Discovery of the Antarctic Continent,” ran a story based on information provided by Wilkes: “we are happy to have it in our power to announce, on the highest authority, that the researches of the exploring squadron after a southern continent have been completely successful. The land was first seen on the morning of the 19 January.”

  On March 30, the Vincennes arrived at New Zealand’s Bay of Islands. Wilkes was pleased to find not only the scientists, but also the Porpoise and the Flying Fish. Many aboard the Vincennes had predicted that the schooner would never be seen again. The Antarctic waves had so battered the little vessel that the lookouts had been forced to lash themselves to the foremast when searching for icebergs. The schooner’s belowdecks had been almost constantly awash, and on February 5, the men formally requested that Lieutenant Pinkney turn back; by the following day they were on their way to New Zealand.

  Both the Flying Fish and the Porpoise had been at the Bay of Islands for the better part of a month now, and neither of their crews had made any mention of seeing land during the cruise south. But with the arrival of Captain Wilkes, all that changed. When Wilkes first told Ringgold of his discovery, the commander of the Porpoise asked Wilkes why he hadn’t mentioned seeing land when the two had spoken on January 26. Wilkes then insisted that he had mentioned it, but Ringgold apparently hadn’t heard him. After all, they had only been within hail for less than half a minute.

  Upon hearing of the Vincennes’s discoveries, Ringgold’s memory began to improve. It might not be in his log, but he now remembered seeing land as early as January 13. Lieutenant Sinclair, perhaps jaded by his horrendous ordeal aboard the Flying Fish, remained skeptical of Ringgold’s new claim. “It is somewhat strange,” he wrote in his journal, “that we did not hear that the Porpoise had seen land before the arrival of the Vins but now that the Vins has discovered a new World, it appears that the Porpoise saw it before she did. . . . We are a great Nation!” Wilkes had his own doubts about Ringgold’s claim. In a letter to Jane, he insisted that both the Porpoise and the Flying Fish had “made no discoveries although it must have been before their eyes. I was a little surprised at my ship having done nearly all the work but this is entre nous and for all we gained by the others they might as well have been elsewhere employed.”

  Five days after writing Jane, Wilkes decided to share his findings with a fellow explorer. James Ross had not had sufficient time to sail south that winter; he would soon be in Tasmania, where he would make preparations for a voyage the following season. When he had first met Ross in England during the fall of 1836, Wilkes had been the wide-eyed American without any polar experience. Now he was the one who had discovered a continent. It was too good an opportunity to miss. He must write Ross a letter, purporting to offer useful information, but also providing Wilkes the chance to rub in the fact that he had beaten the Englishman to the punch. It made no difference that he was under orders to keep his discoveries a secret. “[A]lthough my instructions are binding upon me relative to discoveries,” he wrote Ross, “I am nevertheless aware that I am acting as my govt. would order, if they could have anticipated the case.” In this fulsome, at times incoherent letter, Wilkes offers his best guess on the position of the magnetic South Pole; he tells about Piner Bay; about how he secured water from the top of an iceberg; and the weather he encountered. But most remarkable of all, Wilkes chose to include a detailed chart of his discoveries.

  It was a letter he would come to regret.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER 9

  The Cannibal Isles

  ONCE THE EXHILARATION of having discovered the world’s seventh continent had begun to wear off, Wilkes was left with a sobering realiza
tion. He had less than a year to perform the two most important surveys of the Ex. Ex.: the Fiji Islands and the Columbia River. If he was to complete the Expedition in the allotted three years, he would have to finish the Fiji survey in under two months, then get the squadron to the Pacific Northwest, a voyage of some six thousand miles, with enough time to survey the Columbia before winter set in. Any delay, no matter how minor, would require him to add another year to the Expedition. In the event of an extended voyage, the sailors’ and marines’ terms of duty would expire before the squadron returned to the United States. This meant that Wilkes might find himself without a crew if a significant number of the men insisted, as was their right, on quitting the Expedition when their time was up.

  Adding to Wilkes’s sense of embattled isolation was the lack of news from home. As incredible as it might seem, Wilkes, the leader of the U.S. Ex. Ex., had not received a single letter from his wife and children since the squadron left Rio de Janeiro, almost a year and a half ago. (To make matters worse, Hudson had gotten a letter in Sydney that was just seven months old.) “Don’t think for one moment my dear wife [that] I blame you,” he wrote Jane. “I am ever aware you have done every thing you ought and I impute it all to mishap.” Wilkes could not help but slip into an ever-deepening despair. “[Y]ou must not expect to see the same person that left you,” he warned Jane, “but a careworn and broken down old voyager who is and feels that he is doing his duty to his country most faithfully.”

  His one consolation, besides his faithful dog Sydney, was his nineteen-year-old nephew, Wilkes Henry. Ever since the dueling incident at Valparaiso, the boy had done everything in his power to please his uncle. In addition to fulfilling his day-to-day duties with an alacrity and good humor that endeared him to his fellow officers, he had shown a genuine interest in surveying and cartography. Although Wilkes insisted on treating him as just another officer, he did manage to find a few hours in the week to speak to the boy during his watch, a conversation that inevitably brought Wilkes “great pleasure.” “I almost chide myself for suffering the distance to exist between us,” he wrote Jane, but given his commitment to playing the part of the martinet, there was nothing else he could do.

  As had been true with the race for Antarctica, the United States was locked in a closely contested rivalry with Britain and France when it came to exploiting the economic opportunities available in the Fiji Islands. Although the group’s once considerable stands of sandalwood had long since been extirpated, the Fijis continued to offer bounteous quantities of bêche-de-mer, sea slugs that, when properly cured, brought excellent prices in China. Just the year before, Dumont d’Urville’s expedition had visited the group and had even burned a village in punishment for the killing of a French captain and the taking of his vessel. Unbeknownst to Wilkes, a British expedition, led by Edward Belcher, was also headed to Fiji.

  Over the past decade, captains from Salem, Massachusetts, had dominated the bêche-de-mer trade; in fact, one of Salem’s most experienced traders, Benjamin Vanderford, had signed on as a pilot for the Ex. Ex. Vanderford, who had spent ten months shipwrecked on the Fijis, knew better than anyone the challenges of navigating amid the more than 360 islands of this group. No reliable charts existed, and in the last twelve years, eight vessels, five of them from America, had been lost in the region. “[A]s we have so much of the Trade,” Reynolds wrote, “it was the duty of the Government to make the Survey; though even at the 11th hour.”

  Wilkes had picked the island group of Tongatapu, to the south of Samoa and just a three-day sail from Fiji, for a rendezvous point. It wasn’t until early May that the newly repaired Peacock arrived at Tonga and joined the Vincennes, Porpoise, and Flying Fish for the first time since the start of the Antarctic cruise five months earlier. Reynolds and his shipmates soon learned of the most recent indignities Wilkes had inflicted on the officers of the Ex. Ex.—despite his recent triumphs.

  Reynolds’s good friend Edward Gilchrist, the highest-ranking surgeon in the Expedition, had been dismissed for writing a disrespectful letter and sent home to the United States. Lieutenant Alden, who had dared to insist that he had not seen Antarctica on January 19, had been turned out of his comfortable cabin in favor of the more tractable Dr. Fox. The long-suffering commander of the Flying Fish, Robert Pinkney, had been confined to quarters aboard the schooner and would soon be following Gilchrist on a vessel bound for home.

  Even though Reynolds and his former roommate William May were no longer assigned to the Vincennes, Wilkes had found a way to strike out at them too. During the passage from New Zealand to Tonga, he had ordered the carpenter to lay waste to Reynolds’s and May’s much-loved stateroom, ripping out the walls and furnishings and transforming it into a “stow hole.” Reynolds was already looking ahead to the squadron’s return to the United States, when Wilkes must face “the honest vengeance of those whom he has so trampled upon.” In his journal Reynolds made a solemn pledge: “I have forgotten nothing and nothing will I forgive.”

  While in Tonga, preparations were hurriedly made for the impending survey of Fiji. The squadron’s dozen or more gigs, cutters, and whaleboats were to be used among the coral reefs. Given the violent reputation of the natives, each boat was equipped with not only the necessary surveying equipment but a formidable selection of muskets, rifles, pistols, and gunwale-mounted blunderbusses—heavy shotguns that fired buckshot. Some of the vessels were even equipped with the frames to launch Congreve war rockets, made famous by Francis Scott Key’s reference to “the rockets’ red glare” during the British attack on Fort McHenry in 1814. When it came to the safety of his officers and men, Wilkes intended to leave nothing to chance. Unfortunately, even these extraordinary measures would not, in the end, prove sufficient.

  It had been in Tonga that James Cook had first heard of a land known as “Feejee” (the Tongan name for the island group), where there lived a people feared by the Tongans “on account of the savage practice to which they are addicted . . . of eating their enemies whom they kill in battle.” Whether or not the Fijians’ reputation for cannibalism had anything to do with it, Cook, like the Dutch explorer Tasman before him, was satisfied with only a fleeting glimpse of the Fijis before the combination of bad weather and a terrifying network of coral reefs persuaded him to move on to a more accessible group of islands.

  It wasn’t until 1789 that a European navigator made his way into the midst of Fiji, but it was under less than ideal circumstances. William Bligh had just suffered the mutiny on the Bounty when he and a handful of supporters, all of them jammed into a tiny ship’s launch, found themselves surrounded by unfamiliar islands. Even though they were at one point pursued by two large sailing canoes, Bligh, one of the most skilled surveyors of his generation, was able to sketch a chart of what he had seen. In the intervening decades, others added to Bligh’s hurried observations, but by 1840 only a small portion of the hundreds of Fijian islands had been laid down on any chart.

  In Tonga, Wilkes decided to construct his own chart of the group based on all available information. Though incomplete, it provided ample evidence of the dangers of these islands. “[I]n addition to the frightful display of rocks & reefs,” Reynolds wrote, “[the chart] is garnished here & there, with notices such as ‘Brig Eliza lost’; ‘Am. Brig lost,’ etc. etc.’” Wilkes told his officers that he expected to lose no fewer than two vessels during the survey. Fear of shipwreck and cannibals prompted many of the officers to make out their wills. “[I]t is somewhat amusing to see the dispositions that each one made in case he should be the victim,” Reynolds wrote. Four months later, no one would be laughing.

  Even though the squadron already had the services of Benjamin Vanderford at its disposal, Wilkes felt it necessary to secure yet another experienced pilot at Tonga named Tom Granby. “You will find when we get to the Islands,” Wilkes assured Granby, “that I know as much about them as you do.” Granby smiled. “You may know all about them on paper,” he replied, “but when you come to the goings in
and goings out, you will see who knows best, you or myself.”

  Two days later, even Wilkes was beginning to appreciate the truth of Granby’s words. They were headed to the island of Ovalau, centrally located off the east coast of Viti Levu, the largest island in the group, with the second largest island, Vanua Levu, to the north. To the east was a long necklace of islands known as the Lau Group, and Wilkes sent Ringgold and the Porpoise to investigate those islands. The rest of the squadron was approaching what was known as the Koro Sea, a perilous body of water speckled with islands and coral reefs.

  At five P.M. on May 6, they sighted the island of Totoya; unfortunately it was thirty miles from the position indicated on Wilkes’s chart. The wind had built to a gale, requiring them to take three reefs in the topsails. Prudence would have dictated that they heave to for the night, especially since the Flying Fish, now under the command of Lieutenant George Sinclair, was having difficulty in the tumultuous seas. But even with darkness approaching, Wilkes elected to push on, “feeling assured we should thus save much time and probably find smoother water.” Wilkes did later admit, however, that “it is by no means a pleasant business to be running over unknown ground, in a dark night before a brisk gale, at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour.”

  In the early morning hours they almost ran into Horse-Shoe Reef, which the pilot had estimated to be at least twenty miles away. Daylight revealed a dazzling array of islands, all of them “girt by white encircling reefs.” But the Flying Fish was nowhere to be seen. Impatient to begin his survey, Wilkes continued on toward the high, jagged peaks of Ovalau.

  The Peacock eventually followed the Vincennes into the anchorage at the village of Levuka, and Reynolds was immediately captivated by the view. “The Island was high and clothed in the most luxuriant verdure,” he wrote, “with many bold points of rocks and immense forests; and here and there shining waterfalls glanced amid the foliage. . . . We saw many little villages peeping from amidst the trees and scattered huts clinging to the projecting ridges of rocks, clear up to the highest parts of the Island. . . . After the Ice [of Antarctica], we hailed with joy our return to the ever green Isles of the Tropics.”