Sea of Glory

lead pellet) through his fingers, the boatswain’s mate raised the cat above his head and brought it down hard across the first prisoner’s back. The bite of the cat was said to burn like hot lead. Not until the cat had fallen a total of 110 times was the punishment completed.
    But the men of the Vincennes, all of them assembled at the gangway on the spar deck, were not finished with Peter Sweeney. When the blood-spattered launch returned to the flagship, one of the sailors handed First Lieutenant Carr a letter requesting that Sweeney be discharged from the squadron. Carr passed the letter to Wilkes with the recommendation that the men’s request be granted. After reading the letter aloud, along with the names of those who had signed it, Wilkes declared that “he was glad that they had manifested such a desire.” Sweeney, the blood seeping through the back of his white navy-issue shirt and with his hands tied behind him, was transferred from the launch to a small dinghy. While one man tied him to the thwart, another cut the eagle buttons from his shirt collar. Once Sweeney’s bag and hammock had been tossed into the boat, Wilkes ordered the men to give him “three hearty cheers,” to which Sweeney responded with three angry cheers of his own. A fife and drum struck up “The Rogue’s March,” and the dinghy was towed stern-first around the harbor. The boat was eventually taken to shore; Sweeney was cut free; and, with his bag and hammock in hand, the English sailor staggered across the beach before disappearing into the crowd.
    Taking a special interest in the proceedings was a boy who had firsthand experience with Wilkes and the lash. “This example was set before a half-civilized people,” Charlie Erskine wrote, “who were just emerging from heathen darkness into Christian light! Well might it have been asked, ‘Where is our Christianity? Where is our civilization?’”
     
    By November, the squadron had succeeded in surveying most of the islands in the group. Near Honolulu, they surveyed the Pearl River, which Wilkes predicted would one day be “the best and most capacious harbor in the Pacific.” Today it is known as Pearl Harbor. In the months ahead, Wilkes planned to send the Peacock and the Flying Fish to the islands to the west, including the Gilbert, Marshall, and Caroline groups. The Porpoise, on the other hand, was to sail to the southeast, back to the Tuamotu and Society Islands, where Ringgold was to survey islands that the squadron had not been able to visit during its first swing through the region.
    While Hudson and Ringgold spent the winter sailing hither and yon across the Pacific, Wilkes would remain in the Hawaiian Islands. He planned to sail the Vincennes to Hawaii, the largest island in the group, where he hoped to “swing the pendulum” atop the huge volcano of Mauna Loa. In March, he would return to Honolulu to meet up with the Porpoise before departing for the Columbia River, where they would rendezvous with the Peacock and the Flying Fish in May.
    In anticipation of the Peacock ’s five-month cruise to the Central Pacific, Reynolds spent much of November purchasing provisions. “I had crammed every stow hole full,” he wrote, “& felt that I had no more to do, when on the last day of November, I was thrown into despair.” A day before Reynolds was to depart, Wilkes transferred him to the Flying Fish. In contrast to the Peacock, the schooner, now under the command of Passed Midshipman Samuel Knox, had been poorly provisioned. “I regarded with a sad stomach,” Reynolds wrote, “the very scanty supply upon which I was to depend while others [aboard the Peacock ] were feasting on the bountiful store, which I had taken so much trouble to procure.” Gone were the days of falling in love with a schooner’s fine lines.
     
    By December 3, Wilkes and the Vincennes were on their way to Hilo Bay on the eastern shore of Hawaii. Larger than the other seven islands of the group combined, Hawaii is also the youngest island of the group, having come into existence approximately a million years ago (a blink of the eye in geological time) and is made up of five distinct volcanoes. Of these volcanoes, Mauna Loa is by far the biggest. Its summit is 13,677 feet above sea level—over two and a half miles high—but this statistic does not do justice to the volcano’s proportions. Measured from the seafloor, Mauna Loa is more than five and a half miles high, higher than even Mount