Sea of Glory

surveyed with Joseph Underwood. The two men got to talking about Underwood and began to speculate about when the surveying party might return.
    Soon after, Reynolds was seated beside the stern window of the Vincennes ’s cabin, working on a chart of Bua Bay, when a boat, followed by several others, rowed past the ship’s stern. He knew it must be the surveying party, but chose to continue with his work, being in the middle of a particularly difficult calculation. Suddenly May burst into the cabin, shouting, “Oh, Reynolds! Underwood and Henry are killed, murdered by the natives.”
    That night, Alden told his tale—recounting the slow, agonizing unfolding of events that had led to the massacre on the beach and then the swift and overwhelming response. Like all of them, Reynolds felt nothing but anger and hatred for the natives of Malolo. “[L]et no one say that there was one life too many taken,” he insisted.
    For Wilkes, the need for retaliation had not yet been laid to rest. Privately, he blamed Alden for allowing Underwood and Henry to go on shore and for not keeping better track of the hostage. “[I]t is extremely difficult after such a distressing calamity to find fault,” he wrote Jane, “particularly when one is so nearly interested as I am in its results and when no possible good could come from the investigation.”
    But it was Underwood whom he blamed the most. “[ I ]t was owing to the overconfidence of Lt. Underwood,” he wrote Jane. “[He] must have perceived the suspicious appearances about the natives but did not act upon them until it was too late.” Underwood was dead, but Wilkes would have his revenge. He ordered that the lieutenant’s personal effects be put up for auction. “There was a general feeling of indignation among the officers when this order was known,” Reynolds wrote. “They felt it would be sacrilege to deprive the widowed wife of the relics of her lost husband.” Underwood had been one of many officers who had drawn up his will prior to the Fiji survey, and the executor of that will, James Blair (who had been Wilkes Henry’s second during the duel at Valparaiso), protested Wilkes’s actions as “illegal and without precedent.” Wilkes’s malice and hurt would not be thwarted, however, and the auction went forward. “Decency and humanity were outraged in the Exhibition that followed,” Reynolds wrote.
    But Wilkes was not finished. Upon the completion of the survey, Veidovi was transferred from the Peacock to the Vincennes. Under Hudson’s charge, the Fijian chief had been allowed on deck and had spoken frequently with the officers. But everything changed when he arrived on the Vincennes. “He soon found that Lieut. Wilkes was a very different white man from the humane Lieut. Hudson,” Reynolds wrote. Wilkes ordered that Veidovi be kept in confinement. Like any Fijian chief, he took great pride in his immense crop of hair, which extended as many as eight inches from his head. Before being taken prisoner, he had more than a dozen barbers to attend him; instead of a pillow, he had slept on a finely crafted neck-stand that prevented his hair from being crushed at night. Wilkes decided it was time to remove this last vestige of his former life. “A close crop was made of his head by our ship’s barber,” Wilkes wrote, “who was much elated by the job and retained locks for presentation.” Veidovi, on the other hand, was devastated. “[I]t was some time before he became reconciled to his new costume,” Wilkes wrote, “and the mortification he experienced in having his huge head of hair [chopped] off.”
    None of these actions seemed to quell Wilkes’s anger and anguish as the squadron set out from Fiji in the middle of August. As late as October, he wrote Jane that “the fate of poor Wilkes . . . continues to grieve and depress me. I have borne up against the shock it gave me as well as I could but I feel so in the land of strangers even in my own ship that I have little if any communication with my officers.”
    Whether it was by death or by dismissal, the squadron had lost its best and most capable officers. Reynolds didn’t know how the rest of them could continue under Wilkes’s spiteful and vindictive leadership. Making matters worse was the addition of another year to the cruise. “[T]his slapping on an additional twelvemonth, makes a horrible abyss,” he wrote, “the bottom of which no one can see, or have the heart to look for. Our spirits