Sea of Glory

waded out to Perry’s launch.
    Perry knew the wind would have to moderate if he was to sail the launch, now doubly overloaded, out of the harbor. As dusk approached they counted no fewer than fourteen fires along the shore. Every now and then a native would fire off a musket. Around midnight the lookout cried out that the cutter was surrounded by swimming natives. Some of them were diving underwater and attempting to lift the anchor while others tried to cut the anchor cable. The sailors began shooting into the darkness and were eventually able to capture two of the natives, who were quickly tied up and thrown into the bottom of the boat. When the natives on shore realized that they had lost two of their people, “they danced and wailed around their fires,” in the words of one sailor, “like so many fiends.”
    The next morning, Perry decided to try once again to tack out of the bay. As soon as they made sail, the natives began following them along the reef. “[T]he least accident would have thrown our poor fellows ashore,” Reynolds wrote, “only to be murdered.” There was a steep chop and the boat was soon full of water. The natives had gathered at the edge of the reef, where it looked as if the cutter was sure to run aground. As his men bailed with “Hats, Shoes & buckets,” Perry was able to weather the barrier and finally reach the safety of open water.
    Upon hearing Perry’s report, Wilkes announced that they were going to get the boat back. He and Hudson would be leading a fleet of eleven boats, plus the schooner, in an assault on Solevu. Earlier, Wilkes had ordered Reynolds to resurvey the bay in which the squadron was presently anchored, and when Reynolds headed out at two P.M., he was hopeful that he would be able to complete the work in time to join Wilkes and Hudson. But when he returned to the Vincennes at sundown, he was told that they had left two hours before. “I felt as bad as if I had been whipped,” he wrote, “& heartily wished Captain Wilkes & his resurveying at the———.”
    Wilkes and his expedition of eighty men arrived at Solevu the next morning. The tide was low, and there was a wide mudflat between them and the cutter, which had been drawn up into the shallows of a small, winding creek. Using Whippy as his interpreter, Wilkes demanded that the natives hand over the boat and all the articles that had been left in it. “It was a novel position for a Fegee warrior to find himself in,” Reynolds wrote. “For never in the annals of his people had so large a body of white men appeared in arms, offering fight, upon their very shores.”
    The chief agreed to surrender the boat, and it was soon carried down to the water’s edge. But after inspecting the boat, Wilkes’s officers reported that it was missing the men’s personal effects. “My conditions not being complied with,” Wilkes wrote, “I determined to make an example of these natives.”
    That afternoon, the fleet moved in for the attack. The boats grounded in about two feet of water, and the men, all of them armed with muskets, waded the rest of the way to shore under the leadership of Hudson. Wilkes elected to remain in his gig, which had been equipped with a Congreve war rocket.
    The village had been left deserted, and the natives, loaded with their possessions, could be seen climbing up a nearby hill, where they paused to watch the ensuing scene. In only a matter of minutes, the entire village was in flames. The popping of burning bamboo sounded so much like the report of a musket, that it was briefly believed the natives were fighting back, but such was not the case. This did not prevent Wilkes from firing a few of his rockets at the natives up on the hill. Partway between a skyrocket and a modern-day missile, the rocket left a smoky contrail before bursting into flame, and the Fijians could be heard shouting out, “Curlew! Curlew!,” or “Spirits! Spirits!” Lieutenant Sinclair reported that “we have since heard the most exaggerated accounts of the destructive effect of these ‘Flying Devils’ as the Natives called the rockets.”
    That evening aboard the Flying Fish, Wilkes and Hudson congratulated themselves on “having punished the insolence of these cannibals without any loss on our side.” But, as the geologist James Dana observed, the Fijians probably had a very different view of the incident. “Burning villages is of no avail as punishment,” he wrote in a letter to the botanist Asa Gray.