Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42

The spring of 1837 was not good to the Exploring Expedition. In June, Jeremiah Reynolds decided to make public his grievances against the secretary of the navy. In a series of scathing letters published in The New York Times, he excoriated Dickerson, eventually forcing the secretary to respond with two letters of his own. This war of words did neither man credit, serving only to further tarnish the image of what one wag renamed “the Deplorable Expedition.” In the meantime, the Expedition was denied the services of one of the most talented writers in the country when political infighting made it impossible for the friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne to secure him a position as the voyage’s historiographer.

In May, the Panic of 1837 struck the nation’s economy. For the last six years, state governments had been piling up huge debts to finance the construction of canals and railroads. Land speculation was rife all over the nation, and imports were outpacing exports. Much of America’s economic expansion had been made possible by English capital, and when a financial crisis rocked Europe, many British creditors called in their loans. On May 10, banks in New York suspended the payment of coined money. Soon banks across the country were closing their doors. Just a few months into the presidency of Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, the American economy was in chaos. In this climate of frightening loss and uncertainty, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, a tenuous enterprise in the best of economic times, struggled to become a reality.

Wilkes decided it was time to embark on a new endeavor. That spring he proposed that the Depot of Charts and Instruments sponsor a survey of Georges Bank, a 10,000-square-mile section of tumultuous shoal water approximately a hundred miles off Cape Cod. A prime fishing ground, the Banks were notoriously dangerous. To provide an accurate chart of this serpentine-shaped shoal would be an immense service to mariners throughout the region. For a thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant who had not commanded a ship in fourteen years, it was a challenging test. It also happened to be an assignment that would demonstrate whether he had the ability to coordinate a survey of the kind that would make up the primary mission of the Exploring Expedition, and on June 14, Dickerson granted his request.

Saying good-bye to Jane and the children, Wilkes traveled to the navy yard in Norfolk, where the eighty-eight-foot brig Porpoise awaited him. He planned to employ what was, for the American navy, a new and revolutionary system of surveying known as the quincunx method. Dickerson had given him permission to borrow some of the instruments he had purchased in Europe. Using two schooners and a fleet of whaleboats, along with specially designed buoys equipped with flags, he and his officers would create a series of interlocking triangles with sides of between a half-mile and three miles in length. Their positions would be established by chronometer and later confirmed by the celestial observations of Professor William Bond at Harvard. The small open boats would be used to measure soundings on shoals that, in some cases, were only a few feet below the water’s surface.

It took longer than he had expected, but Wilkes was able to complete the survey in two months. Sometimes deploying all eleven whale-boats at one time, he insisted that his officers and men meticulously survey even the roughest portions of the bank. No one would improve on Wilkes’s work at Georges Bank until well into the twentieth century.

In September, he and his officers returned to the Boston Navy Yard to finish the necessary calculations and to work on the chart. Word of Wilkes’s survey quickly reached the acknowledged master of American navigation, Nathaniel Bowditch. As a young sailor, Bowditch had taught himself enough mathematics and astronomy to uncover more than eight thousand errors in the leading navigational guide of his day. In 1802 he came out with his own guide, The New American Practical Navigator, immediately recognized as the most accurate and comprehensive text on celestial navigation ever published. At sixty-four, he was revered in maritime circles as the paramount navigator in the world.

Wilkes was invited to Bowditch’s home in Boston, and once in the presence of his idol, the normally self-assured naval officer found himself “greatly abashed.” The two men went for a walk, and Bowditch questioned Wilkes about the survey. Placing his cane in the lieutenant’s hand, Bowditch asked Wilkes to draw a diagram in the dirt. “Oh, I see, I see,” he replied, nodding his head. “That will do.”

Several days later, Bowditch and a friend appeared unannounced at the navy yard to inspect Wilkes’s chart. Wilkes would later remember what followed as “one of the most gratifying incidents of my life”: “The large and rough chart was spread out on the table with each and every station occupied. He took out from his vest pocket a hand full of small change, five & ten cent pieces, and put them on each station on the chart; these were numerous. Then he explained the whole process [to his friend].… [A]fter fully examining all our work which was recorded in a large volume …, he passed a very complimentary speech as to the satisfaction he had derived from the whole.” Bowditch subsequently contacted several important government officials about Wilkes’s skill as a surveyor. “To him I think I owe, in part,” Wilkes later wrote, “my appointment to the Command of the Ex. Ex.”

In the months after completing the survey of Georges Bank, some of Wilkes’s staunchest advocates proved to be the passed midshipmen who had served under him. Instead of ruling over his officers in a manner that inspired fear and trembling, Wilkes had acted as if he were one of them. He had accompanied them in the whaleboats and had taken the lead when confronting the worst portions of the Bank. A commander usually dined alone in his cabin; Wilkes chose to mess with his officers in the wardroom. This appears to have fostered a remarkable sense of loyalty and enthusiasm, and most of Wilkes’s passed midshipmen would follow him to his next assignment – a survey of the waters in the vicinity of Savannah, Georgia.

There was one young sailor, however, who chose not to make the voyage south. Charles Erskine, sixteen, had served as Wilkes’s cabin boy. One of five children, whose father had abandoned the family when he was still an infant, Charlie was strikingly handsome, with bright blue eyes and an infectious smile. Late in life, Wilkes would remember him as “one of the most beautiful boys I ever beheld.… [T]hough lowly bred, he had a certain refinement of manner and look that drew all hearts towards him.” Wilkes took such a keen interest in the boy that for a time aboard the Porpoise he became the father figure Charlie had never known.

The falling out came in Boston, Charlie’s hometown. They were at the navy yard completing the chart of Georges Bank. Wilkes was anxiously awaiting orders from Washington, and Charlie was directed to make a quick trip to the post office on the other side of the Charles River. On his way back, Charlie decided to stop by his mother’s house for a surprise visit. “I shall never forget her fond embrace,” he later wrote, “and the ‘God bless you, my darling boy!’ when I left her.” While he waited to cross the river to the navy yard in Charlestown, his hat, along with the letters he had carefully placed inside it, was knocked into the water by a schooner passing through the drawbridge. By the time he’d recovered his hat, the letters were wet but still readable.

When Charlie reached the Porpoise, Wilkes was waiting for him, with “a look as dark as a thunder-cloud.” Wilkes asked what had taken him so long. Charlie explained that his hat and the letters had been knocked into the river. Wilkes suspected that Charlie had taken the opportunity to enjoy himself in Boston and decided to teach the boy a lesson. Before Charlie knew what was happening, the boatswain’s mate had laid him across the breech of a cannon and begun whipping his backside with the colt – a three-foot length of half-inch rope. “[W]e were lying not more than a quarter of a mile in a straight line from where my mother lived,” he remembered, “and if she had been at an open window at the front of the house she could have heard my piercing cries.” Charlie would not be able to sit for three weeks. His white duck trousers had been cut through by the colt, and threads of cloth were stuck to his ripped and bleeding flesh. “When I shipped [on the Porpoise] I had made up my mind to try to be somebody and to get ahead in the world,” he wrote, “but now my hopes were blasted. My ambition was gone, yes, whipped out of me – and for nothing.”

By the brutal standards of the U.S. Navy, there had been nothing unusual in Wilkes’s treatment of Charlie. Many a ship’s boy had been whipped for far less. But Wilkes had not consistently operated by the usual standards of the navy. As had been true with the passed midshipmen aboard the Porpoise, he had been more of a friend and mentor than a commander to Charlie. When all was going well, this approach made for what was known as a “happy ship.” But when a sailor needed to be disciplined, it could all fall apart. Since he considered himself the commander’s friend, the sailor tended to resent any attempt to curb his conduct. Long after Charlie had been reassigned to another vessel, he continued to harbor a deep and obsessive hatred for the commander to whom he had once been so close. If he ever got the chance, Charlie vowed he would have his revenge.

Against all odds, the Exploring Expedition seemed about to depart in the fall of 1837. The squadron was now in New York, with more than five hundred officers, sailors, marines, and scientists awaiting orders to sail. The necessary modifications to the overbuilt vessels had been made. The flagship Macedonian had been outfitted with an innovative forced hot-water heating system in anticipation of the Antarctic cold. A new kind of foul weather clothing coated with India rubber had been delivered. There was also a new kind of firearm – a pistol equipped with a Bowie knife that could be used both as a form of defense against hostile natives and for hacking through underbrush. For a city suddenly gripped by economic depression, the Expedition was, at least for a time, a welcome distraction. When some of its naval officers made an appearance at a play, the actors stopped the performance to give “the Lions of the day” three cheers.

But no matter how desperately Commodore Jones might labor to bring the Expedition to fruition, a new problem inevitably threatened its dissolution. Distracted by his feuding with Dickerson, he had failed to take note of an important fact. The instruments that Wilkes had assembled more than a year ago were spread out over three cities. Some of the chronometers were at the Depot in Washington. Other instruments were at Professor Renwick’s in New York, still others in Philadelphia, and then there were all the chronometers and sextants Wilkes had taken with him to survey Georges Bank. For Jones, this was the last straw. By mid-November his health had begun to suffer from what he called “the pain, expense, and mortification, to which I have been daily subjected for the last eighteen months.” He was now regularly coughing up blood. On November 21, he resigned his command.

Jones was the most conspicuous example of how “this great national enterprise” could destroy a person. In the absence of any proper institutional support, the Expedition had become a kind of vortex in which petty personal and professional differences, aggravated by competing political alliances, swirled in a dangerous whirlpool. In waters this fierce, only an individual of extraordinary resilience, passion, and determination had any hope of survival. In his letter of resignation, Commodore Jones complained of “the most determined and uncompromising opposition to me and to my plans up to the latest moment.… As regards to myself I am but the wreck of what I was.”

As if to mock the difficult birth of the American Expedition, word reached Washington that a new French squadron had left Toulon in August. In addition to exploring dozens of Pacific islands, the French, under the command of the veteran voyager Dumont d’Urville, planned to sail as close as possible to the South Pole.

By the winter of 1838, President Martin Van Buren had come to the belated realization that his secretary of the navy, Mahlon Dickerson, was not capable of successfully organizing the Expedition. In an extraordinary move, he put his secretary of war, Joel Poinsett, in charge of finding a commander. Poinsett, a former congressman from South Carolina, was well educated and had traveled extensively. As minister to Mexico, he had been responsible for bringing the poinsettia, the flower that bears his name, to the United States. He also had a reputation for getting things done.

But not even Poinsett could easily fix the Expedition. Over the course of the next few weeks, every navy captain he contacted ultimately refused his offer of command. The Expedition had become an embarrassment, a sure way to scuttle a promising career. On February 9, John Quincy Adams visited Poinsett at the War Department. Now a representative from Massachusetts, the former president had seen his dreams of a similar voyage dashed back in 1828. “I told him,” Adams recorded in his diary, “that all I wanted to hear about the exploring expedition was, that it had sailed.”

Soon after, Poinsett found an officer of suitable seniority willing to consider the possibility of leading the Expedition. Captain Joseph Smith said he’d agree to it if he could have Wilkes as a surveyor. “I think it would be advisable to order Lieutenant Wilkes to report himself to your department at Washington without delay,” Poinsett wrote Dickerson on March 1.

Little did anyone suspect that in less than a month, it would not be Captain Smith who would be appointed leader of the nation’s first exploring expedition, but a forty-year-old lieutenant who was more accustomed to a desk and an observatory than to the open sea. For Charles Wilkes, the voyage was about to begin.

CHAPTER 3 Most Glorious Hopes (#ulink_c90a63af-b628-570a-b681-d43b32c5eafe)

WASHINGTON IN THE SPRING OF 1838 was full of distractions for a young naval officer. But William Reynolds (no relation to the beleaguered Jeremiah N. Reynolds) was a most bookish passed midshipman. Instead of attending the teas and dances to which he received regular invitations, he preferred the Library of Congress. When he wasn’t working at the Depot of Charts and Instruments, he could be found, he wrote his sister Lydia, in the “long spacious room” of the nation’s library, perusing lavishly illustrated volumes of Audubon, Shakespeare, and Cervantes.

But he was lonely. “[T]his is all very pleasant,” he confided to Lydia, “but I want someone to talk to about what I have seen & what I have read.” His two best friends in the service, John Adams (nephew to the former president) and William May (son of the Washington doctor who had once been George Washington’s personal physician), had recently left town, and he was now “almost totally without society.”

Just the year before, the three officers had attended naval school together. Prior to the creation of the academy in Annapolis, midshipmen first went to sea for several years before learning what was known as the “philosophy” of their calling. Reynolds was one of forty-five midshipmen assigned to the Gosport Ship Yard in Norfolk, Virginia, where they attended lectures by day while studying in nearby boardinghouses by night. Adams had been Reynolds’s roommate. May had lived in the next room down the hall. Of the threesome, May was the ladies’ man. Handsome and impulsive, he had already fought at least one duel. For his part, Reynolds stayed true to his studious self while in Norfolk. In a letter to Lydia, he claimed to be “perfectly indifferent to the attraction of the fair ladies.… [W]hile I remain here, my book, the immaculate ‘Bowditch,’ the Midshipman’s Bible, will be the only object.”

Reynolds’s affections may have already been spoken for. In an earlier letter to his sister, he objected to her concern about being seen with a girl named Rebecca Krug, who lived just down the street from the Reynolds family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lydia had explained that if a young woman spent time with the sister of an eligible young man, it was generally assumed that the woman and man must be engaged. “Why Good God,” William wrote, “it’s absurd to think of such a thing, no one would say so, & if they did, why then, what matter who would believe them on such a foundation.” (Despite his protestations, Reynolds would later prove to have more than a neighborly affection for Rebecca Krug.)

By May of 1837, William and the rest of his class were in Baltimore, nervously awaiting their examinations. The first midshipman to be examined failed, or “bilged,” after a grueling seven hours of interrogation. As it turned out, both Adams and May bilged, while Reynolds earned the rank of passed midshipman.

The following winter, after a brief stint aboard the newly launched Pennsylvania – at 210 feet and 3,104 tons displacement, the largest ship in the U.S. Navy – Reynolds enjoyed an extended stay at home in Lancaster. William was the second oldest of eight children. His father, a former newspaper publisher and state legislator, was now managing an ironworks in nearby Cornwall, Pennsylvania, where the family had taken up residence. It had been his father’s good friend Congressman James Buchanan who had secured Reynolds’s midshipman’s appointment back in 1831, and William’s younger brother John was now a cadet at West Point. Of his seven brothers and sisters, it was Lydia, three years his junior, to whom Reynolds was closest. In addition to his usual letters, William often included enclosures for Lydia that were not to be shared with the rest of the family. So it was not unusual that, without his friends Adams and May to talk to in Washington, Reynolds turned to Lydia soon after reporting to his new assignment: the Depot of Charts and Instruments.

On April 20, the very day Reynolds reported for duty at the Depot, Charles Wilkes was approved by President Van Buren as commander of the U.S. Exploring Expedition. Most members of the service viewed the appointment of so junior an officer as an insult to the navy – even though all previous, more senior candidates had refused the position. But Reynolds was inclined to think differently. His friend William May had served with Wilkes during the survey of Georges Bank. May had nothing but good things to report about his young commander.

Perhaps inevitably, Reynolds began to consider volunteering for the impending Exploring Expedition. Since the Depot was located on the grounds of Wilkes’s house, he had already had ample opportunity to meet the new leader of the Expedition. “I like Captain Wilkes,” he told Lydia, “which is important (to me).” May was planning to get over a recent love affair by shipping out on the Ex. Ex. “It is most likely, I shall bear him company,” Reynolds wrote, “though I may not share his desperate motives.”

On May 13, he wrote Lydia from the office of the observatory. “I cannot give up the Exploring Expedition,” he declared. “I shall offer myself to Captain Wilkes today or tomorrow, therefore be ye all prepared.” As if to emphasize the strength of his resolve, he sealed the letter with Wilkes’s own family crest. “The seal,” he explained to Lydia, “is Mr. Wilkes coat of arms, a Norman cross bow.” With this wax seal the destinies of William Reynolds and Charles Wilkes would be joined for the next four years.

Back in March, when Wilkes had first received orders to return to Washington, he did not want to leave the Porpoise and his young and enthusiastic group of officers. After their success at the Georges Bank, they were continuing to do excellent work on Georgia’s Calibougue Sound. The orders simply said to proceed without delay to Washington. “What could it mean?” Wilkes wondered out loud. When one of his officers suggested that it might have something to do with the Exploring Expedition, Wilkes shook his head. “Oh no, I have done with it and [am] content to let it alone.”

Within a few days, Wilkes was back in Washington, where he learned that Captain Joseph Smith, the latest candidate to lead the Exploring Expedition, had requested that he accompany him as a surveyor. Wilkes would be given command of his own vessel. But he still had his reservations. Smith was not in good health. In addition, many of the officers Smith would inherit from Commodore Jones were senior to Wilkes and would quite naturally object to their junior being elevated to such a high post. After talking it over with Jane, he decided to have nothing to do with an expedition led by Smith.

It is impossible to know if Wilkes anticipated what happened next, but when Smith learned that he would not have Wilkes as a surveyor, he – like so many captains had done before him – declined the offer to command the Expedition. Soon after, Secretary of War Poinsett began to consider offering the post to Wilkes. Even though the lieutenant lacked comparable command experience, he was clearly a competent surveyor. And besides, who else was there? The navy rumor mill would later accuse Wilkes of having schemed to wrest the command from Smith, but Wilkes insisted, “I never thought of such a thing. I was too young an officer to aspire and did not dream of it.”

On an evening in March, Poinsett requested that Wilkes meet with him at his home. The two men sat beside the fireplace in Poinsett’s parlor. The secretary began by asking Wilkes to describe how he thought the Expedition should be organized. It was, of course, a topic that he had been considering for most of his life. The squadron should be made up of only young officers with the technical training required to conduct a nautical survey. The scale of the Expedition must be reined in. Instead of large and unwieldy ships, a brig similar to the Porpoise and several even smaller schooners should be used; they were the only craft suitable for surveying the coral-fringed islands of the South Pacific. As part of this reduction in scale, the scientific corps must be cut by at least two-thirds to less than a dozen men.

Poinsett asked if he thought an expedition along the lines he’d just described could be quickly and successfully organized. Wilkes insisted that it could. Poinsett had been staring at the fire; he now turned to look directly at Wilkes. “I have been authorized by the President,” he said, “to offer you the command of the expedition.” Wilkes was unable to respond. “Why do you hesitate?” Poinsett asked. “Are you afraid to undertake it?” Wilkes struggled for words. “No sir, but there are very many reasons that crowd upon me why I should not accept it.” They continued to talk, and once Poinsett made it clear that he would have almost total control in organizing the Expedition, Wilkes tentatively accepted the appointment. “[I]t was so entirely unexpected,” he remembered, “I [told him] I must have time to think the matter over.”

That night Wilkes and Jane had what he later described as “a good cry.” Jane assured her husband that he had acted honorably throughout these difficult proceedings and that he would “establish a name which both she and our children would glory in.” When they finally went to bed, Wilkes almost immediately nodded off. But Jane could not sleep. Her husband would soon be leaving on a voyage that would last at least three years, and Jane, already a mother of three, was five months pregnant.

Almost immediately, enormous pressures came to bear on Poinsett to rescind Wilkes’s appointment. The young lieutenant might be one of the navy’s top surveyors and a creditable scientist, but this meant nothing to the naval officers who outranked him, almost all of whom, it seemed, joined in a shrill chorus of dissent. Letters of outrage poured into the War Department. “The year Lieutenant Wilkes entered the Navy,” Captain Beverley Kennon wrote Poinsett, “I was the third lieutenant of the Washington 74; the year he was made a lieutenant, I commanded a ship of war in the Pacific Ocean.” Kennon insisted that he be given the command. But Kennon had already been offered the position, only to refuse it back when the voyage had become a laughingstock. But now, with a lowly lieutenant given the command, it was no laughing matter. The navy’s pride was at stake.

Wilkes was not without his proponents. In a most extraordinary gesture of support, Joseph Smith, the captain under whom Wilkes had refused to serve, wrote to wish the lieutenant well. Smith reported having been roundly criticized by “his brother officers” for providing Wilkes with the opportunity to gain the command. But he assured Wilkes that no “blame can attach to you.” “I hope now you will be off & off soon,” he wrote. “I have faith in your acquirements of science, in your industry & in what is still more important, your boldness of purpose & boldness of execution. I wish you all success & every propitious breeze.”

The controversy made its inevitable way to Capitol Hill. During a debate over a naval appropriations bill in April, a congressman brought up Wilkes’s appointment, calling it “a violation of rank.” Another congressman pointed out that the rules of seniority applied only in a time of war. It was only right that someone of Wilkes’s scientific expertise be appointed to the command. Even the sainted James Cook had been “made a Lieutenant for the purpose” of leading an exploring expedition. Yet another congressman claimed that a reputable source had told him that Wilkes had been appointed because he had agreed to dismiss Jeremiah Reynolds, who had become “obnoxious to the Department.” So it went, a ceaseless din of outrage that would continue long after the squadron had sailed.

Wilkes might have easily been overwhelmed by the pandemonium. But by keeping the details of the Expedition to himself and Jane and by focusing solely on the tasks ahead of him, he plowed ahead. First he had to determine what vessels were to be included in the squadron. Two sloops-of-war, the 127-foot Vincennes and 118-foot Peacock, were already slated to be part of the Expedition, as was the 109-foot storeship Relief the only vessel remaining from Jones’s original squadron. In keeping with what he had outlined to Poinsett, he added three smaller vessels – the 88-foot brig Porpoise and two 70-foot schooners, former New York pilot boats that were rechristened the Flying Fish and the Sea Gull.

What Wilkes needed to find as quickly as possible were commanders for the Peacock, the Relief, and the Porpoise who did not outrank him, not an easy task given his lowly place on the list. He first appealed to Lieutenant William Hudson from Brooklyn, New York. Although without any surveying experience, Hudson, forty-four years old, had a reputation as an excellent seaman and had already expressed interest in joining the Expedition back when Jones was to be the leader. He was also one of Wilkes’s closest friends in the navy. Unfortunately, even though Hudson and Wilkes had been promoted to lieutenant on the same day, Hudson ranked slightly above his putative commander, and to serve under a junior officer was unheard of. Only after Poinsett had assured Hudson in writing that the Expedition “was purely civil” did he agree to take the position.

Wilkes’s choice to command the Relief was another old friend, Lieutenant George Blake, who had served with him during the survey of Narragansett Bay. When it looked like Hudson might not sail with them, Blake asked Wilkes if he would make him second-in-command. Wilkes equivocated, and Blake decided to back out of the Expedition altogether. This forced Wilkes to go with Lieutenant Andrew Long, the man Jones had chosen for the Relief and who only agreed to the position once Wilkes had promised that the commander of the Porpoise would not outrank him. Wilkes chose Lieutenant Cadwallader Ring-gold, thirty-five, from a prominent Maryland family. With the loss of Blake, Wilkes was left without a single commanding officer with previous surveying experience.

Wilkes claimed that his most difficult task involved the scientific corps. He must eliminate twenty of the twenty-seven scientists. First to go was the head of physical sciences. Wilkes would take over that department, along with all subjects related to surveying, astronomy, meteorology, and nautical science. It was a tall order for one man, even without the extra burden of leading the Expedition. Wilkes’s choices for the rest of the corps proved to be quite good. The naturalist Titian Peale, son of the famous painter and museum founder Charles Willson Peale from Philadelphia, had already accompanied expeditions to Florida and the West. A capable artist and a crack shot, Peale was a collector par excellence. James Dwight Dana, the Expedition’s geologist, was just twenty-five and had already published his System of Mineralogy, the standard text on the subject. In the weeks before the squadron’s departure, he would undergo a sudden religious awakening and, at the urging of his evangelical parents, join the First Church of New Haven. Dana was destined to become a giant in his field, and while his Christian beliefs would sometimes lead his science astray, the strength of his conversion appears to have made possible the startling breakthroughs that awaited him, encouraging him to look beyond the myriad details of the natural world and seek out the bigger picture. “As a Christian,” the geologist James Natland has written, “Dana could now make bold his science.”

Dana’s friend the botanist Asa Gray was also chosen for the civilian corps, and like Dana, would rise to the top of his field. Unfortunately, after changing his mind several times, Gray would back out of the Expedition at the last minute and be replaced by the lackluster William Rich from Washington. Rounding out the scientific corps was the young philologist, or linguist, Horatio Hale from Harvard; the naturalist Charles Pickering from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia; the conchologist (a collector of mollusks and shells) Joseph Couthouy from Boston; and the horticulturalist William Brackenridge, a Scotsman currently living in Philadelphia, who had once supervised Edinburgh’s famed botanical garden. It was a young, diverse group that, for the most part, represented the best American science had to offer in 1838.

Over the next five months, Wilkes pushed to achieve what others had failed to accomplish in two years. Each vessel needed to undergo extensive modifications; equipment and provisions must be arranged for; commissioned and noncommissioned officers, as well as sailors and marines, had to be selected. Hundreds of men had already been recruited by Jones, but the months of turmoil and indecision had taken their toll as they bided their time at navy yards in Virginia and New York. But it was the Expedition’s officers who were the most disaffected. Indeed, from Wilkes’s perspective it sometimes seemed as if the entire U.S. Navy were in league against him. “At times I felt almost overwhelmed at the Situation and the responsibilities upon me,” he wrote, “but they were of short lived depressions.”

It was in the fitting out of the Vincennes and the Peacock at Norfolk that Wilkes received the stiffest resistance. The commodore in charge of the navy yard made it clear that he and his officers did not approve of Wilkes’s appointment and would do as little as possible to assist in the preparation of the squadron. Appealing to friends at navy yards in New York and Boston, Wilkes was able to procure much of what was denied him at Norfolk. From Boston he received a fleet of whaleboats, while the two schooners were purchased and modified at the New York Navy Yard in just two weeks.

Still, when it came to overhauling the Vincennes and the Peacock, which were to be equipped with additional spar decks built over the preexisting gun decks, Wilkes had no choice but to deal with the refractory officers in Norfolk. Making it all the more difficult was the temporary loss of his most stalwart advocate, Secretary of War Poinsett. In April, Poinsett was struck down by an illness that, it was feared, might kill him. This meant that Wilkes had no one to turn to when his request to replace some of the vessels’ iron water tanks with wooden casks was refused. (If one of the ships was wrecked on a reef Wilkes argued, the wooden casks would provide more buoyancy than the tanks and could be more easily transferred to shore.) So Wilkes took his grievances to the president of the United States.

Martin Van Buren, known as “the little magician,” appeared quite pleased to see Wilkes. He quickly promised to get him his water casks. Then he asked a question: “Why is there such opposition against you?” Wilkes said he thought it had to do with his being so junior a lieutenant. Van Buren told him that over the last few weeks he had been visited by a virtual parade of captains protesting his appointment. Just that morning Commodore Isaac Chauncey, president of the Navy Board, had urged him to suspend Wilkes. The commodore had claimed that “this young Lieut[enant] did not ask nor would he receive any advice which had been proffered him. No one knew what he was doing.” Van Buren assured Wilkes that he had his total support and encouraged him to “come direct to me” if he encountered any more trouble.

In addition to preparing six vessels for a voyage around the world and recruiting the necessary officers and men, Wilkes had to prepare the instruments, including twenty-four chronometers. As head of the physical sciences department, he also had several pendulum experiments to conduct before the Expedition could sail. A pendulum is used to determine the force of gravity; by comparing different readings at different locations around the globe, it is possible to determine the contours of the earth, as well as the density of its interior. In the grass field that stretched from the back of his house to the Capitol building, Wilkes erected “Pendulum Houses,” temporary shelters that would accompany them on their travels. To assist him, Wilkes assembled a group of six passed midshipmen, including William Reynolds, William May (who had successfully retaken his examination), and several others from the Porpoise. For Wilkes, this little community of science on a hill, so near to his own home (where Jane was now almost eight months pregnant), seems to have provided a haven from the storm.