Sea of Glory

trickier. “You must write by every chance to the Cape of Good Hope and to Batavia or Singapore, up to October 1841,” he directed. “Boston and Salem vessels are most numerous in the East Indian trade, and if you see none advertised, why be sure and send a package to the Navy Department and to the Lyceum at Brooklyn every month, and I cannot help getting some of them.” Finally, he wanted to be remembered to his youngest sister, now approaching three years old. “I send Elly some kisses,” he wrote, “and would give all my money for a sight of her sweet little face.”
     
    By the time he reached Honolulu, Charles Wilkes had begun to emerge from the cocoon of sorrow, rage, and despair that had enveloped him since the death of his nephew. Forty letters from Jane were waiting for him. But instead of softening the jagged edges of his psyche, the news from home only made the bitterness of his recent loss all the more difficult to bear. Inevitably, he took out his frustrations on his officers and men. As early as the dismissal of Lieutenant Lee at Cape Horn, he had complained to Secretary of the Navy James Paulding of a “cabal” of officers that was attempting to undermine the Expedition. In Honolulu, he appears to have received a private letter of encouragement from Paulding that he interpreted as a carte blanche. “Cabals of discontented officers must be promptly arrested,” Paulding insisted, “and their leaders either kept in subjection or detached from the squadron, as it is not to be endured that the purposes you are sent to attain are to be defeated.”
    In the months ahead, Wilkes launched into a virtual rampage, dismissing officers at a rate that outdid anything the squadron had seen since the detachment of the Relief in Callao. Lieutenant Pinkney, who had spent the last five months confined to quarters aboard the Peacock, was soon on his way back to the United States. When Wilkes discovered that Dr. Guillou had torn out several pages from his journal (claiming that they were of “a personal nature”), Wilkes took the opportunity to dismiss the surgeon, who would remain as an unpaid passenger aboard the Peacock. “[T]hey, of course, have complaints to make against me,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “but [they] are so absurd & silly that they will go to work in my favor & show how strictly I have maintained the discipline of the Squadron.”
    When Joseph Couthouy appeared in Honolulu fully recovered from illness and expecting to resume his duties as conchologist, Wilkes acted quickly to remove the headstrong scientist, once and for all, from the squadron. Wilkes was convinced that Couthouy had been writing letters to Jeremiah Reynolds and others back in the United States that were critical of him. Soon after seeing a copy of the Niles Register that contained a letter from an unnamed participant in the Expedition who claimed that the commander of the squadron was “getting delirious,” Wilkes insisted that the conchologist turn over all his specimens and notes before returning to the United States. “Couthouy says he will publish [reports against] me when he goes home and all this sort of stuff,” Wilkes wrote Jane. “Be it so, he will find I am all marble as far as . . . his influence.”
    Wilkes’s claims of invulnerability were more than mere bravado. It was extremely difficult for an officer to bring charges against a superior. He had to wait until the end of the cruise, which could be years after the incident, then risked endangering his reputation in the service if he still insisted on preferring charges. As a result, few subordinates went to the trouble of attempting to bring a superior to justice. This meant that captains and commodores were, in the words of a leading naval historian, “virtually immune to any serious punishment.”
    But by dismissing so many officers from the squadron, Wilkes was creating a problem for himself. When the angry and disaffected officers returned to Washington, they would inevitably corroborate each other’s account of a commander run amok. Wilkes, on the other side of the world, would be unable to counter their claims. By the time the squadron returned to the United States, he would belatedly begin to realize that he had laid the groundwork for his own undoing.
    The commander of the Ex. Ex. had yet another chink in his supposedly impregnable armor. Wilkes might wear the uniform of a captain and fly the pennant of a commodore from his flagship’s masthead,