Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Wilkes would save the most horrendous display of brutality for two marines and a sailor who had been tried by courts-martial aboard the Peacock in October. The marines had gotten drunk and threatened to kill Hudson’s steward along with several officers. The sailor, an Englishman named Peter Sweeney who had joined the Vincennes in New Zealand, had been guilty of a variety of outrages stemming from a seemingly pathological hatred of all things American. The punishment Wilkes chose to inflict on Sweeney would only strengthen his prejudices.

  That fall there were nine American whaleships at Honolulu. When the American consul complained of the whalemen’s “unruliness,” Wilkes determined “to show the crews of all these vessels that authority to punish offences existed.” Sweeney and the two marines would be flogged “round the fleet,” in which a man was tied to a gallows mounted on a boat and towed alongside each ship in a squadron, where he received a portion of the lashes sentenced him by court-martial.

  In the British navy, flogging round the fleet was regarded as “a diabolical punishment” and “the equivalent to a death sentence.” Precious little is known about its use in the U.S. Navy, primarily because it was rarely resorted to. But Wilkes, who appears to have taken an almost sadistic pleasure in punishing his men, described it as “the usual manner in such cases.”

  When the time for punishment arrived on October 31, the Honolulu waterfront was thronged with people. The Vincennes was moored with her stern to the wharf, and thousands of natives, along with a sprinkling of American and European merchants and sailors, lined the shore. Many had climbed to the rooftops of the houses so that they could get a better view. The decks and rigging of the whaleships also provided good places to watch as a disorderly flotilla of native canoes jockeyed for position beside the Vincennes, the Peacock, and the Porpoise.

  The ship’s launch had been fitted out with a platform of square gratings and a gallows sufficient to accommodate three men. Under the direction of Lieutenant Robert Johnson, the boatswain’s mate and several quarter-gunners prepared the prisoners for punishment. First, the prisoners’ shirts were taken off and draped over their shoulders. Then shot-boxes were placed between their feet as their ankles were tied to the gratings and their wrists were raised above their heads and secured to the gallows. The launch was brought alongside the Vincennes, where Wilkes, in full dress uniform, read the sentences: the launch would take the prisoners from the Vincennes to the Peacock and to the Porpoise; at each vessel, the men would receive a portion of their total lashes—thirty-six and fifty for the marines Ward and Riley, respectively, and twenty-four for Sweeney. With the order, “Boatswain’s mate, do your duty,” the punishment began.

  As the quarter-gunners removed the shirts from the prisoners’ backs, the boatswain’s mate took the cat-o’-nine-tails out of its bag. After drawing the nine cotton cords of the cat (each of which ended with a knot or a lead pellet) through his fingers, the boatswain’s mate raised the cat above his head and brought it down hard across the first prisoner’s back. The bite of the cat was said to burn like hot lead. Not until the cat had fallen a total of 110 times was the punishment completed.

  But the men of the Vincennes, all of them assembled at the gangway on the spar deck, were not finished with Peter Sweeney. When the blood-spattered launch returned to the flagship, one of the sailors handed First Lieutenant Carr a letter requesting that Sweeney be discharged from the squadron. Carr passed the letter to Wilkes with the recommendation that the men’s request be granted. After reading the letter aloud, along with the names of those who had signed it, Wilkes declared that “he was glad that they had manifested such a desire.” Sweeney, the blood seeping through the back of his white navy-issue shirt and with his hands tied behind him, was transferred from the launch to a small dinghy. While one man tied him to the thwart, another cut the eagle buttons from his shirt collar. Once Sweeney’s bag and hammock had been tossed into the boat, Wilkes ordered the men to give him “three hearty cheers,” to which Sweeney responded with three angry cheers of his own. A fife and drum struck up “The Rogue’s March,” and the dinghy was towed stern-first around the harbor. The boat was eventually taken to shore; Sweeney was cut free; and, with his bag and hammock in hand, the English sailor staggered across the beach before disappearing into the crowd.

  Taking a special interest in the proceedings was a boy who had firsthand experience with Wilkes and the lash. “This example was set before a half-civilized people,” Charlie Erskine wrote, “who were just emerging from heathen darkness into Christian light! Well might it have been asked, ‘Where is our Christianity? Where is our civilization?’”

  By November, the squadron had succeeded in surveying most of the islands in the group. Near Honolulu, they surveyed the Pearl River, which Wilkes predicted would one day be “the best and most capacious harbor in the Pacific.” Today it is known as Pearl Harbor. In the months ahead, Wilkes planned to send the Peacock and the Flying Fish to the islands to the west, including the Gilbert, Marshall, and Caroline groups. The Porpoise, on the other hand, was to sail to the southeast, back to the Tuamotu and Society Islands, where Ringgold was to survey islands that the squadron had not been able to visit during its first swing through the region.

  While Hudson and Ringgold spent the winter sailing hither and yon across the Pacific, Wilkes would remain in the Hawaiian Islands. He planned to sail the Vincennes to Hawaii, the largest island in the group, where he hoped to “swing the pendulum” atop the huge volcano of Mauna Loa. In March, he would return to Honolulu to meet up with the Porpoise before departing for the Columbia River, where they would rendezvous with the Peacock and the Flying Fish in May.

  In anticipation of the Peacock’s five-month cruise to the Central Pacific, Reynolds spent much of November purchasing provisions. “I had crammed every stow hole full,” he wrote, “& felt that I had no more to do, when on the last day of November, I was thrown into despair.” A day before Reynolds was to depart, Wilkes transferred him to the Flying Fish. In contrast to the Peacock, the schooner, now under the command of Passed Midshipman Samuel Knox, had been poorly provisioned. “I regarded with a sad stomach,” Reynolds wrote, “the very scanty supply upon which I was to depend while others [aboard the Peacock] were feasting on the bountiful store, which I had taken so much trouble to procure.” Gone were the days of falling in love with a schooner’s fine lines.

  By December 3, Wilkes and the Vincennes were on their way to Hilo Bay on the eastern shore of Hawaii. Larger than the other seven islands of the group combined, Hawaii is also the youngest island of the group, having come into existence approximately a million years ago (a blink of the eye in geological time) and is made up of five distinct volcanoes. Of these volcanoes, Mauna Loa is by far the biggest. Its summit is 13,677 feet above sea level—over two and a half miles high—but this statistic does not do justice to the volcano’s proportions. Measured from the seafloor, Mauna Loa is more than five and a half miles high, higher than even Mount Everest and K-2. Mauna Loa is also astonishingly broad, containing an estimated ten thousand cubic miles of rock, making it the most voluminous volcano on earth. Indeed, Mauna Loa is so heavy that it has depressed the seafloor by almost five miles. Measured from its base below the seafloor, Mauna Loa is ten and a half miles high—almost twice the height of Mount Everest.

  Prior to the visit of the U.S. Ex. Ex., there had been only three recorded ascents of Mauna Loa. The first unsuccessful attempt had been made in January 1779 by a party from Cook’s final expedition. Just a few weeks before Cook’s death in Kealakekua Bay on the western side of Hawaii, four men, including the American corporal of marines, John Ledyard, attempted to scale the volcano. After two days of climbing, Ledyard and his companions encountered a thicket so dense that they were forced to turn back. Fourteen years later, Archibald Menzies, a botanist with George Vancouver’s expedition, encountered the same thicket and also decided to abandon his attempt. Not until his third try, on February 1794, when he followed the advice of Hawaii’s ruling
chief Kamehameha I, who suggested he approach the mountain from the southeast, did Menzies and three others reach the snow-covered summit. Menzies, an experienced and hardy naturalist, described the climb as “the most persevering and hazardous struggle that can possibly be conceived.”

  Since Menzies’s ascent, which Vancouver failed to mention in his narrative of the expedition and which was therefore unknown to Wilkes, two other scientists—the Scottish botanist David Douglas in 1834, and the scientist M. Isidor Lowenstern in 1839—had reached the top of Mauna Loa. In both instances, dreadful weather conditions reduced the naturalists’ time at the summit to a few hours. Wilkes, on the other hand, intended to create a temporary observatory atop Mauna Loa. This required that he bring the necessary equipment and provisions, including the panels of his pendulum house as well as his cumbersome and extremely delicate pendulum clock.

  Ever since the Frenchman Pierre Bouguer had conducted pendulum experiments in the Andes Mountains in Peru in 1737, scientists had been using pendulums, which measure the force of gravity, to determine the density of the earth’s more dramatic topographical features. Bouguer had found that the rocks of the Andes appeared to be less dense than the rocks of the Peruvian lowlands, thus becoming the first to realize that the density of the earth’s crust is variable. (Today these density variations are known as Bouguer anomalies.) Wilkes planned to take gravity readings not only atop Mauna Loa but at other locations across the island of Hawaii. If all went according to plan, his results would represent a major contribution to the study of the earth’s shape and density, known as geodesy.

  Wilkes included the naturalist Charles Pickering and the horticulturalist William Brackenridge in the Expedition, but there was one scientist who was noticeably absent. The geologist James Dana, destined to pioneer the science of volcanology, had been assigned to the Peacock. It was an astonishingly self-serving decision on the part of Wilkes, who apparently did not want the talented scientist to overshadow his own accomplishments at Mauna Loa. (Prior to the Peacock’s departure, Dana had been able to make a brief visit to Hawaii, spending just a single day at the volcano of Kilauea.) For this particular expedition, Wilkes would have the island and its volcanoes to himself.

  “I look upon [the climb up Mauna Loa] as being one of the great works of my cruise,” he wrote Jane. “It requires no small exertion to accomplish it, but I have not much fear if the naked natives will hold out against the cold of its summit.” As always, uppermost in Wilkes’s thoughts was what this “novel and arduous enterprise” would do for his reputation. When he returned from the top of Mauna Loa, he confidently told Jane, “No one will be able to take away my fame.”

  Wilkes had employed the services of a leading Hawaiian missionary and doctor by the name of Gerrit Judd to organize the party of more than two hundred natives required to carry the equipment and provisions. Although the climb promised to be difficult, Wilkes was not about to go without some of the comforts he had come to expect aboard the Vincennes. His retinue included his steward, cook, his Chilean servant Juan, and, of course, Sydney. To make sure Judd had someone to talk to while he performed his experiments, Wilkes also brought along the American consul Peter Brinsmade. Since Wilkes had promised to pay him several times his annual missionary’s salary for his efforts, Judd was particularly anxious to please the man whom he deferentially referred to as “the Commodore.” Wilkes was delighted to discover that Judd had provided primitive sedan chairs for both himself and the consul, and he even sketched a drawing for Jane, showing him seated proudly on a parasol-equipped chair mounted on two poles shouldered by four natives. The Hawaiians, he told Jane, referred to him as “Komakoa,” or Great Chief, and “considered it a high honor to be thus employed.”

  But even the normally humorless Wilkes recognized the absurdity of the scene. As he and Brinsmade took up the rear, the diminutive Dr. Judd led a procession that included not only two hundred native bearers, but also their wives, children, and mothers-in-law. In addition to the pendulum clock, which required ten men, the natives lugged a small cannon for high-altitude sound experiments, the panels of the portable house, boxes of miscellaneous equipment, tents, and untold numbers of calabashes of food and water. There was even a herd of livestock that included a multitude of goats and one large, rowdy steer. “Little Dr. [Judd] sprang upon his horse, a lame one,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “and off he hobbled full of importance & business as the adjutant of our party. I laughed until the tears came into my eyes. So would you have done.” For Wilkes, this adventure was to provide a much-needed diversion. “I [was] most contented,” he wrote, “by feeling I was getting rid of [the] ship for a month at least and all its cares, duties, noise, etc. etc.”

  Since Mauna Loa is so wide, it is impossible to see the summit from its base; as a consequence, the volcano appeared to be much lower than it actually was. “From Hilo, Mauna Loa looks as if one might walk over its smooth surface without difficulty,” Wilkes wrote; “there is, indeed, so much optical deception in respect to this mountain that it served to give us all great encouragement.” Instead of marching directly up Mauna Loa, Wilkes planned first to visit the crater of Kilauea to the southeast. Although just over four thousand feet high, Kilauea (pronounced Keyla-WAY-ah) is the most active volcano in the world, and from Hilo, Wilkes could see “the silvery cloud which hangs over it by day.” As night came on, the fires beneath this pillar of steam gave the cloud a reddish hue, providing a haunting, almost biblical destination point for the climbing party.

  The incline was not steep, but the coarse basalt over which they walked was making short work of their shoes, and Wilkes sent down orders to the Vincennes for additional shoes and leather sandals for the natives. Three days later, with Kilauea not far ahead, they reached the upper edge of a dense stand of trees. “[O]n turning its corner,” Wilkes wrote, “Mauna Loa burst upon us in all its grandeur. . . . The whole dome appeared of a bronze color, and its uninterrupted smooth outline was relieved against the deep blue of a tropical sky. Masses of clouds were floating around it, throwing their shadows distinctly on its sides. . . . I now, for the first time, felt the magnitude of the task I had undertaken.”

  A group of ten sailors, including Charlie Erskine, Joseph Clark, and the quartermaster Tom Piner, pushed ahead to Kilauea. Erskine and his friends sat with their feet dangling over the crater’s edge, transfixed by the bubbling pools of bright-red lava, one of which sent up jets fifty to seventy-five feet in the air. Erskine estimated that the crater, known to scientists as a caldera, was “seven times as large as Boston Common”—about two by three miles across and a thousand feet deep.

  A sailor named Bill Richmond began, in Erskine’s words, “to spin a yarn about the kind of purchase he could rig in order to hoist one of the big icebergs we had seen in the Antarctic seas so as to drop it into this volcano. What a sizzling it would make!” It was dark by the time the rest of the expedition arrived. Wilkes immediately voiced his displeasure with Charlie and his compatriots. “He called us a ‘pack of foolish virgins,’” Erskine remembered, “and said ‘I don’t believe you could find half a dozen landlubbers so silly as to perch themselves there.’” Wilkes ordered the men to move away from their dangerous roost and make camp for the night.

  The next day Wilkes and Dr. Judd decided to get a closer look at Kilauea. An eruption in 1832 had filled the caldera with solid lava to within six hundred feet of the top. Later that same year, the middle of this new crater floor had collapsed, leaving a six-hundred- to one-thousand-foot-wide rim that had become known as the Black Ledge. It was now possible to use the Black Ledge as a kind of ramp down to the caldera floor. “The crackling noise made in walking over this crisp surface (like a coating of blue and yellow glass) resembles that made by treading on frozen snow in very cold weather,” Wilkes wrote. “Every here and there are seen dark pits and vaulted caverns, with heated air rushing over them. Large and extended cracks are passed over, the air issuing from which, at a temperature of 180 degrees, is almost stiflin
g.” The Black Ledge’s sharp crust cut the men’s shoes, but it was Sydney that suffered the most. The pads of the dog’s feet were so severely injured that he would be lame for several days.

  A portion of the Black Ledge had partially collapsed, and Wilkes and his party scrambled down the fractured pieces of basalt to the caldera floor. They were now close enough to the pools of lava that the soles of their shoes began to smoke as the tips of their walking sticks caught fire. Their guide warned that a lava pool could suddenly overflow in a matter of seconds. Wilkes judged it “one of the most horrible deaths . . . [to be] cut off from escape by the red molten fluid.” When one of the nearby lava pools began to percolate ominously, they decided it was time to retreat to the Black Ledge.

  Later, Gerrit Judd would return to the crater floor of Kilauea. Wilkes wanted a sample from one of the lava pools for the Expedition’s collection, and Judd, always eager to please his leader, offered to give it a try, taking with him a frying pan lashed to a long pole. As a precaution against the tremendous heat, he wore thick woolen socks and leather sandals over his shoes, as well as gloves. He had worked his way down into a hollow that was between twenty and thirty feet below what Wilkes called “the great fiery lake” in the southern portion of the crater. He was climbing up black rocks that were so hot that his spit bounced off them as it would on a griddle. Above him he could see jets of lava shooting up twenty-five feet in the air and then dropping down into the lake. If the pool should overflow, he would be immediately burned to death. Quite sensibly, he ordered the natives in his party to retreat to higher ground. He was about to follow them when he heard a peculiar sound about fifty feet away. Instead of fleeing in panic, Judd went to have a closer look. “In an instant, the crust was broken asunder by a terrific heave,” Wilkes wrote, “and a jet of molten lava, full fifteen feet in diameter rose to the height of forty-five feet, with a most appalling noise.” Judd began to run for it, but realized that he was now under a ledge of rock, with nowhere to go on either side of him. The heat had become so intense that it was impossible for him to look in the direction of the lava; the rocks beneath his feet were shaking in anticipation of what he assumed would be another explosion of lava. “Although he considered his life as lost,” Wilkes wrote, “he strove, although in vain, to scale the projecting rock.”