Sea of Glory

fury” and wanted revenge. The bodies of ten Fijians were scattered on the beach, and when one of them proved to be still alive, the sailors immediately set upon him, shooting and stabbing the body with their bayonets and even cutting off the head. Several of the men urged Alden and Emmons to pursue the natives back to the village. Knowing that hundreds of warriors might soon be headed their way, and that there were less than two dozen of them, Alden ordered that they return to the boats.
    The bodies were placed in the stern sheets of Alden’s cutter, and after covering them with jackets, they set sail for the Flying Fish. When Underwood’s leg fell from the thwart, it was all Alden could do to lift it back up. For the duration of the eight-mile sail to the schooner, no one said a word.
     
    At that moment Wilkes and Eld were rowing back to the Flying Fish after finishing up their observations at Linthicum Island. Eld was the first to notice the three boats sailing toward them from Malolo. He said to Wilkes that it looked as if the boats’ ensigns were at half-mast. With what Reynolds called “his usual habit of contradiction,” Wilkes replied, “Oh, no, you are mistaken.” Eld took another look and said, “They are not only half mast, but they are Union down, & something must have happened.”
    “No, sir, it can’t be,” Wilkes shot back, “you are mistaken.”
    Eld repeated his claim “as peremptorily as he could.” Wilkes remained silent for a few moments, then attempted to hail Alden’s boat, but his voice failed him.
    Wilkes’s gig came up to the port side of the Flying Fish just as the cutter sailed up on the starboard. Alden was standing at the bow, his face pale and his clothes smeared with blood. “Great God, Sir,” he cried out, “Underwood and Henry are murdered. We have been attacked by the natives, and they are both dead.”
    Wilkes immediately climbed out of his gig and jumped into Alden’s cutter. As soon as the jackets were pulled back from the bodies, Wilkes fainted dead away. Eld took Wilkes into the Flying Fish ’s cabin, and as Dr. Fox tended to Clark’s lip, Underwood’s and Henry’s bodies were moved to the port deck of the schooner and covered with a tarpaulin. Upon regaining consciousness, Wilkes began to weep inconsolably. When he finally emerged from below, red-eyed and sobbing, he made his way to the two bodies and asked that the tarpaulin be withdrawn. First he knelt beside his nephew. Moaning “the poor boy and his poor mother,” he kissed and patted his face. He then turned to Underwood and whispered, “poor fellow.”
    Alden was still so full of emotion that it was impossible to extract any coherent information from him. But as far as George Sinclair was concerned, “the bloody and bruised bodies of our murdered messmates told a tale [that needed no words]. . . . My whole soul was lost in one all absorbing feeling, and that feeling was anger.”
     
    To a man, Wilkes’s officers demanded that immediate and crushing action be taken against the natives of Malolo. Although no one had been more personally attached to the victims than Wilkes, it was now his responsibility to, in his words, “prevent a just and salutary punishment from becoming a vindictive and indiscriminate massacre.” But before the natives could be punished, the bodies of the victims must be laid to rest. A burial at sea was out of the question. From Paddy O’Connell, Wilkes had learned of what had happened to the victims of the Charles Doggett massacre. Not long after the captain consigned them to the shallow, shark-infested water, the decomposing bodies had burst out of their cloth shrouds and floated to the surface. O’Connell claimed that the natives had quickly collected the corpses and feasted on the putrid flesh.
    About sixteen miles to the east, Wilkes had seen a beautiful islet that he judged to be far enough away from Malolo that they might bury Underwood and Henry, “without risk of exhumation.” That evening Alden, Emmons, and Eld, who was given command of the Leopard, took up stations around Malolo to ensure that no natives escaped during the night. Early the next morning, the Flying Fish departed on what Wilkes called “our melancholy errand.”
    They arrived at the island around nine A.M. Dr. Fox and the artist Alfred Agate were rowed to shore to supervise the digging of a common grave. An hour later, they signaled that all was ready. The bodies had been sewed up in two