Wilkes spent the next day finishing up the survey of the San Juans and deciding how the squadron should spend the rest of its time in the Pacific Northwest. He had once hoped to send an overland party as far east as the headwaters of the Yellowstone River on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. This would have allowed him to connect the Expedition’s surveys with previous surveys of the interior. He now realized it was too late in the season to attempt such a journey. Lieutenant Johnson had returned from a trip across the Cascade Mountains. Prior to leaving on another overland expedition, this time to Grays Harbor on the coast, Johnson fell into an altercation with Wilkes similar to what used to happen on an almost continual basis in the early days of the Expedition. Johnson had given a Bowie knife pistol belonging to the naturalist Charles Pickering to an HBC employee as a gift. When Pickering complained, Wilkes insisted that Johnson clear all subsequent gift-giving with Passed Midshipman Eld. Since this would require him to defer to a subordinate officer, Johnson refused to embark on the expedition to Grays Harbor, and Wilkes had him arrested.
Johnson was now confined to quarters and Eld was on his way to Grays Harbor, but there was yet another, much more important expedition to organize: a more than eight-hundred-mile-long overland journey from the Columbia River to San Francisco Bay. Wilkes decided that Lieutenant George Emmons was the man to lead this expedition, and as the Vincennes and the Porpoise made their way out of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and down the coast, he drew up the necessary orders. Then, of course, there was the matter of the survey of the Columbia River, which he assumed Hudson and his officers would have already begun by the time he reached the bar.
On August 6, Hudson received word in Astoria of Wilkes’s arrival at the bar. That evening, after the Flying Fish delivered him to the Vincennes, Hudson had a long talk with the Expedition’s leader. In his official report, Wilkes would have nothing but praise for his second-in-command’s handling of the cruise to the Central Pacific, even finding no fault with Hudson’s conduct during the wreck of the Peacock. In his journal, however, he would record his frustrations. It was Hudson’s inability to prioritize the Expedition’s goals that truly rankled him. “[S]uch a waste of force, time and object,” he wrote, “I would not have believed it.” Wilkes had vowed to himself that he would not allow his dissatisfaction with Hudson’s performance to interfere with their friendship, but future events would make it a difficult promise to keep.
Given what had happened to the Peacock, Wilkes decided it was too much of a risk to bring the Vincennes across the bar. Instead, he would use the Porpoise during the survey of the river while Ringgold sailed the Vincennes to San Francisco Bay, where the squadron would reconvene once the survey had been completed. The next morning Knox was temporarily transferred to the Porpoise to act as her pilot, leaving Reynolds in command of the Flying Fish for the first time in the Expedition. The schooner was to follow the brig across the bar, and both vessels were to sail to Astoria. For a twenty-five-year-old passed midshipman, this was a position of considerable responsibility, especially since it involved negotiating the waters of one of the world’s most dangerous rivers. Making the assignment all the more tension-filled was that Reynolds had a considerable audience; the Flying Fish had been crammed with sailors from the Vincennes. Luckily, he had the help of George, the one-eyed Chinook pilot.
They made it safely across the bar, but with all the people aboard, the little schooner was so weighted down that she was having a difficult time keeping up with the brig, which soon disappeared in the mist up ahead. Then George, with a broad grin stretched across his face, tapped Reynolds on the shoulder. There was the Porpoise, aground beside a sandbank. “George was much elated . . . ,” Reynolds wrote. “[A]s we passed near to the Brig I sent the Launch to her assistance, & I chuckled as much as George did, to find myself sailing ahead of the grand Commodore.”
As they approached Astoria, the sun began to show through the clouds. Although Astoria was the oldest nonnative settlement in the region, the trading post had fallen on hard times. Fort Vancouver (not far from modern Portland) had become the trading center on the river, reducing Astoria (renamed Fort George by the British) to just a few permanent structures. For Americans, however, Astoria—recently popularized in a best-selling book by Washington Irving—was visible proof of the impressive breadth of American mercantile ambitions. “It did certainly hurt my eyes to see the red banner of England flying over our possessions,” Reynolds wrote, “and I do most devoutly trust that the day will soon come for it to be struck in [this] region forever.”
In the last few days, an inspiring change had come to Astoria. The officers and men of the Peacock had been busy erecting a collection of crude buildings that included a barbershop, a ninepin alley, and a bakery. Reynolds could see the houses “spread over the sunny side of the hill, with the big ensign of the Peacock, waving over the largest shantee.” With considerable pride, Reynolds guided the Flying Fish into the anchorage. “And so I had the honor of anchoring the first public vessel of the United States, in the waters of this famous place.”
Wilkes soon discovered that Hudson had done virtually nothing when it came to furthering the survey of the river. It also became apparent that the Peacock’s officers and men had not yet recovered from the trauma they’d experienced at the bar. “I at once inaugurated the strictest discipline,” Wilkes wrote, “and with all my energies thrown into the work, I soon made an impression upon them.”
They began at Bakers Bay just inside the bar. One evening early on in the survey, Wilkes learned that the HBC’s chief factor Dr. McLoughlin had arrived in Astoria to negotiate the sale of a brig that might serve as a replacement for the Peacock. Even though it was almost dark and fog had begun to appear about the edges of the shore, making navigation on the river virtually impossible, Wilkes resolved to sail immediately for Astoria in the Flying Fish.
It had been almost two years since Reynolds had last been on a vessel with the Expedition’s commander. “I really felt the cold shiver run all through me,” Reynolds wrote, “on finding myself once more alongside of C.W. You might as well bring holy water, near the Devil. He, that is, C.W. or the devil either, for there can’t be much difference.” Then Wilkes—the unfeeling, tyrannical demon—did a surprising thing. By now it had begun to rain, and noticing that Reynolds was without a coat, Wilkes turned and asked “if I had no Pea Jacket?” It was an unmistakable and, coming from Wilkes, extraordinary gesture of concern, but Reynolds was having none of it: “as if he could wheedle me into the belief that he cared for my comfort,” he wrote in his journal.
Wilkes quickly negotiated the purchase of the brig, which he renamed the Oregon, then continued with the survey. While Knox and Reynolds surveyed the bar in the schooner, Wilkes would survey the river between Astoria and Fort Vancouver. On August 18, he left Astoria with a group of boats, leaving Hudson to follow close behind in the Porpoise. A few hours later, Hudson ran the Porpoise so hard aground that it was feared she would not be floated off till the following spring tide. Finally, after a delay of two days, Hudson managed to free the brig. “I would be happier and more efficient doing the work myself with two assistants,” Wilkes grumbled in his journal.
Although Wilkes and Hudson continued to avoid a direct confrontation, there was little doubt that tensions were simmering between the two officers. Beginning with the near sinking of the Peacock in Antarctica, Hudson, initially regarded as the best seaman in the squadron, had experienced mishap after mishap. His inability to learn even the rudimentary principles of surveying had made him an object of derision even among his own officers. “[I]t is a truth that the boys in this Squadron,” Reynolds wrote, “are employed on duties, that are beyond the capacity of . . . Cap H.” For Hudson, whose son William Junior was a midshipman in the squadron, the last few weeks had been especially humiliating, and on August 25, he attempted to strike out at the man whose undeniable proficiency cast a glaring light on his own failings.
When Wilkes boarded the Por
poise after a long day of survey work, he was shocked to discover that his broad blue commodore’s pennant had been replaced by the coach whip of a lieutenant commander. He asked the officer of the deck why the change had been made. The officer explained that Hudson, who was standing just a few feet from Wilkes, had ordered the switch. By replacing the swallow-tail pennant, Hudson had publicly confirmed what all suspected to be the case—that Wilkes was a commodore in name only. Barely able to contain his rage, Wilkes ordered that his pennant be immediately hoisted to the masthead. “It shows,” he wrote that evening, “how much [Hudson] feels his situation under me. . . . I little thought he would venture upon such an expedient with me, after all that has passed between us. . . . I have little doubt myself that he is ashamed of it.”
At the end of August, Emmons, along with Eld, who had just completed his survey of Grays Harbor, left on their overland journey to San Francisco. In early September, Wilkes agreed to the linguist Horatio Hale’s request that he be detached from the Expedition so that he could continue his work among the native peoples of the region. It wasn’t just the amazing variety of languages that Hale wanted to explore further; there was also a storehouse of oral traditions unlike anything else he’d encountered. Given that the region was soon to be overrun by thousands of white settlers, Hale’s work with the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest would prove to be one of the most enduring achievements of the Expedition.
As Wilkes pushed on with the survey between Astoria and Vancouver, eventually charting close to a hundred miles of river, Reynolds and Knox struggled to make sense of the ever-shifting sands and currents of the Columbia’s lower reaches. “For more than three weeks we toiled on, solitary and alone . . . ,” Reynolds wrote. “[W]e were sick & tired of the Mouth of the Columbia, as well we might be. Besides the duty was very dangerous. Once we came within an ace of having to abandon the Schooner & take to the boats, and in fact almost every moment was attended with infinite risk.”
They had a brief respite when they took the schooner up to Astoria for provisions. Previous to the arrival of the squadron, Astoria had been the somewhat lonely residence of the Birnie family. In recent days the Birnies’ many young children had become closely attached to the surgeon Charles Guillou and the Expedition’s newest outcast Robert Johnson, who renamed the collection of temporary shacks “Bobville.” In early October, with the arrival of Wilkes and the rest of the squadron, Bobville came to a sudden end. Now that the survey of the upper part of the river was complete, it was time to sail for San Francisco.
Once the Porpoise and the Oregon had been safely taken across the bar, Wilkes ordered that they wait until he finished the survey of the inner portion of the river mouth in the Flying Fish. Over the course of the next few days Wilkes continued to make unmistakable overtures to Reynolds. “He seemed at this time,” Reynolds wrote, “to manifest great consideration towards me, as if desirous to obliterate the remembrance of the past. We had no intercourse together, since he hurried me out of the Vincennes, and now as the cruise [w]as near its end, he imagined that a few smooth words, false & hollow though they be, will be sufficient to wipe away all sense of the thousand outrages, we have groaned under during his tyrannical reign.”
One morning Wilkes sent out Knox and Midshipman Blair to record soundings, leaving Reynolds in command of the schooner. “Now, the duty on which he sent Knox,” Reynolds wrote, “belonged to me, and it was evident to all, that he was trusting the Schooner to me, to flatter me up to the top of his bent. I thank my stars, that I am not of so gullible a nature, as to be so easily duped.” Reynolds, as passionate as the man he had come to loathe, would never forgive Wilkes for not being the ideal leader he had naively believed him to be at the beginning of the voyage. Even though Wilkes had proven himself as capable as Hudson was ineffectual during the survey of the Columbia, Reynolds refused to alter his opinion of his commander.
Reynolds’s feelings were surely encouraged by the surgeon Charles Guillou, who had become one of his closest friends in the squadron and who was already preparing to bring charges against Wilkes at the end of the voyage. But there were others, such as Henry Eld and the geologist James Dana, who would come to recognize that Wilkes, despite his obvious faults, was a remarkably resilient and resourceful survivor. “The more I see of him,” Eld would later write his father, “the more I am impressed with his indomitable perseverance & tenacity[,] ‘like a cork he cannot be sunk.’”
Why then did Wilkes attempt to win over Reynolds—a lowly and still very angry passed midshipman? There is always the possibility that Wilkes honestly regretted that relations between the two of them had become so embittered, especially in light of his deteriorating relationship with his former confidant William Hudson. But there is also the possibility that, as Reynolds suspected, Wilkes had belatedly come to realize that for political reasons he now needed all the friends he could get—particularly if they were as articulate and popular as William Reynolds.
Events were unfolding back in Washington that did not bode well for Wilkes’s return to the United States. A packet of mail had recently arrived at Fort Vancouver containing letters from several of the officers whom Wilkes had dismissed. They gleefully reported to their friends in the squadron that the secretary of the navy was lending a sympathetic ear to their tales of Wilkes’s outrages. In recounting this unsettling development to Jane, Wilkes insisted that “my conscience . . . acquits me of having done anything that would cause even a tinge to my cheek.” Still, if there should be charges brought against him, no matter how frivolous, “I should be rather inclined to court a full investigation of all my acts [if] it became necessary.”
For his part, Reynolds already took for granted that charges would be brought against the commander of the Ex. Ex. “Captain Wilkes has preferred charges against so many of his Officers (and they in return have done him the like favor),” he wrote his father, “that the difficulties can only be settled by a General Court Martial, after our return.” As far as he was concerned, there was no question which side was going to win: “The Evidence in every case will I am sure be dead in favor of the Officers.”
On October 9, the Flying Fish crossed the Columbia bar for the last time. Wilkes had decided that the schooner would not be accompanying the Porpoise and the Oregon to San Francisco. Instead, Knox and Reynolds were to put the finishing touches on the survey of the outer edge of the bar, then survey a portion of the coast to the south before sailing to Oahu. After rendezvousing in Honolulu, the squadron would return to the United States via Singapore and the Cape of Good Hope, a voyage of some 22,000 miles. (Wilkes had hoped to stop at Japan, but now realized that there wasn’t sufficient time if they were to return by May 1842.)
As Wilkes was being rowed from the schooner to the Porpoise, Knox asked if he might take the Flying Fish back to Astoria to refit. The last year of near-constant service had reduced her sails to rags; almost all her running rigging needed to be replaced. Having been so forcefully rebuffed by Reynolds, Wilkes was not about to assent to Knox’s request, no matter how legitimate it might be. “Refit at sea” was his lofty reply. “This was about as practicable,” Reynolds wrote, “as it would be for a half drowned man to mend his clothes in the water.” Reynolds seemed almost relieved by his commander’s return to his old despotic ways; it was so much easier to hate a man who was, as he recorded in his journal, “a headstrong, obstinate, ignorant fool.”
Two weeks later the officers and men of the Flying Fish were, in Reynolds’s words, refitting “with a vengeance.” With no other vessels to help them, it had taken ten days to complete the survey of the bar. By then it was too late in the season to survey the Oregon coast. They had already decided to sail for Oahu when, in a furious gale on October 25, their forestay broke. Since the forestay held up both of the schooner’s masts, they were in imminent peril of becoming a dismasted wreck. “We did not think it too uncharitable,” Reynolds wrote, “to wish that ‘the man’ who told us ‘to refit at sea,’ had been lashed
to the said stay, when it blew away.”
Once they’d repaired the stay, the wind shifted to the west, transforming the rocky coast of Oregon into a lee shore. Over the next few days, a succession of gales would shred their already tattered sails to ribbons and push them terrifyingly close to the wave-battered rocks. Only after they’d patched together a makeshift mainsail were they finally able to put Oregon behind them for good.
By that time, Wilkes had already arrived at Sausalito Bay. The town of Yerba Buena, now known as San Francisco, comprised just a few out-of-repair buildings that were, according to Wilkes, “not calculated to produce a favorable impression on a stranger.” But if the town wasn’t much, the harbor was “one of the most spacious, and at the same time safest ports in the world.” Wilkes predicted that if it did not become a part of the United States, the region would one day combine with the Oregon territory to become “a powerful maritime nation [that would] control the destinies of the Pacific.”
By the end of October the overland party led by Emmons and Eld had arrived and the survey of San Francisco Bay had been completed. Wilkes had learned that recently elected president William Henry Harrison had died, putting John Tyler in office. “This is all the news we have,” he wrote Jane, “and amuse ourselves with wise and potent arguments as to what our fate will be under the newcomers into power.” Whatever the situation in Washington, Wilkes was convinced that he now had the Expedition firmly under control, ending a letter to his wife with these supremely confident, eerily impersonal words: “For myself, I am ready to meet all and everybody. . . . I am superior and master now of all & the storms are hushed. Few will venture to put themselves in array against me. The Expedition I go for and he who attempts to frustrate its actions or course must and shall rue the day he ever made the attempt.”
Sea of Glory Page 32