Sea of Glory

disgust when I looked back on the troubles I had gone through and the low company I was thrown with.” For the young Wilkes, it was now a matter of pride. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the adversity he had encountered, he would continue on until he received his commission. Years later he would write, “I have little doubt now that if the treatment I had received had been opposite to what it had been I would have abandoned the idea of following the sea life. I should have seen all its bad features and my tastes were not in unison with it.” This was as close as Wilkes would ever come to admitting that his character—at once scholarly, aloof, and condescending—was ill suited to a life at sea.
    Not until three years later, after several more merchant voyages, did Wilkes finally receive his appointment in the navy as a midshipman, primarily through the intervention of his father’s friend Monsieur Hyde de Neuville, the French minister. After a brief visit to Washington, D.C., to thank de Neuville for his help, Wilkes returned to New York to discover that his father had died. “I never saw him after I entered the Navy,” Wilkes wrote, adding, “I shall not attempt to describe the feelings I experienced . . . and the desolation which home seemed to have undergone.” A few weeks later, Wilkes was in Boston reporting to Commodore William Bainbridge and the USS Independence.
     
    In Bainbridge, Wilkes found the embodiment of the ideal naval officer. More than six feet tall, Bainbridge radiated an undeniable sense of authority. “His presence was commanding,” Wilkes remembered, “and when in full uniform he gave as well as he commanded respect.” He was also an officer who was not shy about picking favorites. “He was very decided in his prejudices,” Wilkes wrote; “while he encouraged those of whose characters he entertained a high opinion, he was a bitter enemy to the low and vulgar, and no officer could, if he lost his good opinion, expect to regain it.” It was a model of command Wilkes would look to for the rest of his life.
    Soon after being transferred to the Guerriere for a cruise of the Mediterranean, Wilkes discovered that not all naval officers carried themselves with the dignity of Commodore Bainbridge. “Debauchery and drunkenness in a Commander was the order of the day,” he later remembered. “[W]hen in port conviviality turned to drunken frolics.” In the boisterous camaraderie of steerage, where the midshipmen socialized in “messes,” Wilkes—ambitious, solemn, and hardworking—was the odd man out. “I may have had but few friends,” he remembered, “but I had no enemies or any that I was not in the best of terms among the officers.”
    After a nearly fatal bout with what was described as “African fever,” Wilkes returned home to New York in 1821. He had been away for more than three years and discovered that since his father’s death, “my family had been broken up.” His older sister had married and moved to Albany, while two of his brothers, both lawyers, were living in New York. A twenty-three-year-old orphan in search of a home, Wilkes, who as a child had tended to socialize with girls instead of boys, began seeing a woman he had known since he was a child. Jane Renwick, “though not handsome,” according to Wilkes, “showed great intelligence . . . and [was] ever open to administer to the wants of others.” The Renwicks had been close family friends of the Wilkeses, and there had been many times while growing up that young Charles had come to blows with Jane’s brother James over his unmerciful teasing of his sister. For Wilkes, Jane Renwick was the love of his life.
    The evenings Wilkes spent over the next few months with Jane and her mother turned out to be some of the happiest times he had ever known. “We had a never ending source of amusement,” Wilkes remembered. “I often read aloud, and while they read I drew, and the hilarity and fun was charming.” When he received orders to report to the Franklin for a cruise to the Pacific, Wilkes found it “hard indeed for me to return to duty and at the same time forego all the delights of the Society of those I was deeply in love with.”
    The Franklin proved to be just the ship for an officer of Wilkes’s interests. On the gun deck there was a library, and Wilkes, with the help of an assistant, became the librarian. But perhaps the best part of the cruise was its destination: the newly established