Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Goetzmann contends that between one-quarter and one-third of the federal budget in the 1840s and 50s went to the sciences and the arts, p. 178. On the importance of the sea as an American frontier, see Thomas Philbrick’s James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction. Goetzmann also writes insightfully about the “mountain men of the sea,” pp. 237-46.

  CHAPTER 16: LEGACY

  For information on William Reynolds during the Mexican War and while living in Hawaii in the 1850s, I have depended on the epilogue by Herman Viola in Voyage to the Southern Ocean, pp. 292-93. My thanks to Reynolds descendant Anne Hoffman Cleaver for sharing with me the letters she possesses written by Rebecca Krug Reynolds. For information on Charles Guillou, I have relied on the biographical sketch by Emily Blackmore in Oregon and California Drawings, with a commentary by Elliot Evans, pp. 1-19.

  Tyler cites a letter Jane and Charles Wilkes wrote to their son Jack in which they mention the celebration they hosted in December 1845, p. 396. Wilkes writes of the “delightful time” he and Jane had in Washington society in ACW, p. 533, in which he also tells of his and Edmund’s trip to North Carolina in the summer of 1848 and the death of his wife, pp. 637-56. Daniel Henderson in Hidden Coasts claims Jane died of blood poisoning, p. 224. Wilkes describes his move to the Dolley Madison house as well as his wooing of Mary Bolton in ACW, pp. 731-34.

  My account of the transfer of the Ex. Ex. collection from the Patent Office to the Smithsonian Institution is based largely on Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg’s “The Exploring Expedition and the Smithsonian Institution” in MV, pp. 243-53, and Stanton, p. 359. Stanton also writes about the other institutions the Expedition helped to foster and Wilkes’s essential role in “putting science into government and government into science,” p. 363. For my account of how Ringgold’s North Pacific Expedition, as well as the Ex. Ex. before it, made possible Asa Gray’s advocacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution, I have relied on Eyde in MV, pp. 38, 41; Stanton, pp. 368-70; and Goetzmann, pp. 345—58; as well as Gordon Harrington’s “The Ringgold Incident: A Matter of Judgment” in America Spreads Her Sails, edited by Clayton Barrow, pp. 100-111, and Allan Cole’s “The Ringgold-Rodgers-Brooke Expedition to Japan and the North Pacific, 1853-1859.”

  For information on the post-Ex. Ex. career of James Alden, William Hudson, and other officers, I have relied on the ZB Files, Operational Archives at the Naval Historical Center. For an account of the laying of the transatlantic cable, see John Steele Gordon’s A Thread Across the Ocean. On the international search for the lost Franklin Expedition, I have looked to two books by Fergus Fleming, Barrow’s Boys, pp. 380-425, and Ninety Degrees North, pp. 1-91, and Elisha Kane’s Arctic Explorations.

  Wilkes describes his Civil War experiences in ACW, in which he refers to the “beautiful day” on which he took Slidell and Mason from the Trent, p. 769, and how his hands became blistered at the celebration at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, p. 775; he also quotes President Lincoln’s praise of his actions, p. 776. In my account of the Trent Affair, I have also relied on Gordon Warren’s Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas, in which he quotes Wilkes’s reference to “one of the most important days in my naval life,” p. 22, as well as the Boston mayor’s praise of Wilkes and Wilkes’s humble response, p. 27, and the New York Historical Society president’s commemoration, p. 31. In a November 19, 1861, letter to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., writes from Boston that the Trent Affair “created quite a stir and immense delight, though at first every one thought it must be a violation of national law; but [Richard Henry] Dana crowed with delight and declared that if Lord John made an issue on that, you could blow him out of water,” in A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861- 1865, edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford, p. 71. On Wilkes’s subsequent activities during the war, I have relied on William Jeffries’s “The Civil War Career of Charles Wilkes.” Jeffries quotes Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’s diary entries about Wilkes, p. 327, as well as Wilkes’s letters to his wife about the “comforts” of the Vanderbilt, p. 331, and “filling my pockets” with prize money, p. 335.

  My account of William Reynolds’s career during and after the Civil War is based on Viola’s epilogue in Voyage to the Southern Ocean, pp. 296-98. The epilogue in ACW tells of Wilkes’s last years after the war, pp. 927—30. Wilkes’s son John recorded that the unpublished Physics report “was thought by the Admiral to be more valuable than any of the Scientific volumes of the U.S. Ex. Ex.,” in Haskell, p. 110. According to Victor Lenzen and Robert Multhauf in “Development of Gravity Pendulums in the 19th Century,” Francis Baily “appears to have found [Wilkes’s pendulum results] defective because of insufficient attention to the maintenance of temperature constancy and to certain alterations made to the pendulums,” p. 318. For information on Louis Agassiz’s unpublished report on fishes, see Watson in MV, p. 66. Stanton speaks of some of the absurdities contained in Wilkes’s Hydrography report, p. 362; he also refers to the many obituaries that made no reference to Wilkes’s involvement with the Ex. Ex., p. 363. The obituary describing Reynolds’s funeral is from the archives at FMC. For information on Charles Erskine, I am grateful to Daniel Finamore at the Peabody-Essex Museum, who provided me with a copy of Erskine’s calling card and a list of the artifacts that were donated to the museum, apparently by his son in the early twentieth century. I am also grateful to Jane Walsh at the Smithsonian Institution, who brought to my attention a November 11, 1859, memo describing the artifacts “Sent by order of Prof. Henry to Charles Erskine care W. Elliot Woodward, Roxbury, Mass,” in the Office of Distribution File, Record Unit 120, 1st Series, Volume 3:96, Smithsonian Institution Archives. William Reynolds expressed his fervent support for flogging in a manuscript titled “Response to the circular on naval punishment” at FMC. For an account of the attempt to abolish flogging in the 1840s, and Herman Melville’s role in it, see Robert Chapel’s “The Word Against the Cat: Melville’s Influence on Seamen’s Rights.” Charlie’s reference to the anonymity of the common sailor is from his Twenty Years Before the Mast, p. 310.

  EPILOGUE

  Ralph Ehrenberg, et al., discuss the use of Wilkes charts as late as the invasion of Tarawa during World War II in “Surveying and Charting the Pacific Basin,” MV, p. 187. James Ross undercuts Wilkes’s Antarctic claims in A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, p. 298. Kenneth Bertrand evaluates Wilkes’s discovery of Antarctica in great detail in Americans in Antarctica, 1775-1948, pp. 184-90, in which he refers to the difficulty of judging distances in Antarctica. In addition to his words about the “the greatness of his achievement,” Bertrand writes, “Time and subsequent exploration have substantiated Wilkes’s claim of an Antarctic continent and confirmed his landfalls,” p. 190. William Hobbs in “Wilkes Land Rediscovered” tells of the errors Douglas Mawson found in his own mapping efforts of the Antarctic coast, p. 634. He also cites Shackleton’s account of his firsthand experience with the phenomenon of polar looming when he sighted Wilkes’s Cape Hudson: “This is most weird. All hands saw the headland to the southwest, and some of us sketched it. Now (afternoon), although the sky is beautifully clear to the south-west, nothing can be seen. We cannot have drifted far from yesterday’s position. No wonder Wilkes reported land,” p. 643. Hobbs writes that “the naming of Wilkes Land came through German sources and that American atlases made no use of it, at least through the forties, fifties, and much of the sixties of the nineteenth century,” p. 649. James Dana’s letter to Asa Gray is dated February 12, 1846, and is at the Gray Herbarium Archives at Harvard.

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