Sea of Glory

been there.”
    That night, Wilkes began to feel a peculiar sensation, “as if cobwebs had passed over my face and eyes.” As the pain in his eyes grew progressively stronger, his sight began to dim. He soon realized he was suffering from snow blindness, a condition in which the surface of the eye has been sunburned. Wilkes was convinced he would never see again. “I felt forcibly the horror of probable blindness,” he wrote.
    He took some consolation in knowing that it had not afflicted him until after he had completed all his appointed tasks. Despite his sufferings, he insisted that they leave the next morning as scheduled, even if he had to be led down the mountain. Luckily, his condition began to improve, and he was able to put in a full day of hiking. By five P.M., they had descended all the way to Sunday Station at an altitude of six thousand feet, where they found “the soft and delightful temperature of spring.” “I cannot venture to describe,” Wilkes wrote, “the effect this produced on us after our three week’s sojourn on the cold, bleak, and barren summit.” Despite the improved weather, Wilkes was exhausted. Even after several natives had administered the “loomi-loomi,” described by Wilkes as “a gentle kneading of the limbs, which has a great tendency to restore the circulation, and relax the muscles and joints,” he remained “fairly broken down.”
    While Wilkes and his compatriots had been battling hurricanes and altitude sickness atop Mauna Loa, the officers and men left on the Vincennes had taken full advantage of their commander’s absence. “Nearly all day the Ship Has Been filled with yellow Hores, ” the taxidermist John Dyes wrote. A phonetic speller, the disapproving Dyes provided a graphic description of a typical day aboard the Vincennes at Hilo: “After [the Hawaiian women] Had Regaled themselves in the Wardroom & Paid their Respects to some of the Gentlemen Rooms in private tha Vissited the Steerage Where the Same Scene took place from those tha visited the men on the Birth Deck & the Black Cookes Wher the Same Biseness were carried on, tha then went back into the Wardroom & Steerage where the young Gentelmen as tha are termed gallivanted them around the Deck to the Laughter & Sneers of all hands.”
    Reynolds’s friend Passed Midshipman William May, supposedly conducting observations ashore, lived for three months “in a straw hut by the side of a purling stream,” where, he proudly wrote Reynolds, his nights were spent “resting in the arms of a delicious little Kanacca girl, who first gave up to me her Virgin Charms.” Even the ship’s chaplain Jared Elliott succumbed to the island’s temptations. Instead of a native girl, Elliott’s attentions were directed toward the wife of a missionary. “If anyone had behaved to you as he has behaved,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “I should certainly have kicked him out of doors.” Elliott, whom May described as “a wolf in sheep’s clothes,” was eventually dismissed from the squadron and sent home in disgrace.
    Although he was well aware of the chaplain’s transgressions, Wilkes appears to have remained oblivious to the illicit goings-on aboard his flagship. By the time he returned to the Vincennes in March, after completing yet another round of pendulum experiments, he was already looking ahead to what he considered to be the most ambitious and difficult part of the Expedition: the survey of the Columbia River.

CHAPTER 12
    The Wreck of the Peacock
    THE WEST COAST of North America was up for grabs in 1841. Al- though American citizens had begun to settle throughout the region, both California to the south and the Oregon territory to the north (extending well beyond the present border between Washington and British Columbia) were under the control of foreign powers. Mexico, which had won its independence from Spain in 1821, possessed California while Oregon, although officially under joint occupation by the United States and Great Britain, was in effect ruled by the powerful English conglomerate, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Given the HBC’s extensive system of trading posts, farms, and forts, the British had even had the audacity to suggest that their boundary should extend as far south as the Columbia River.
    The history of discovery in the region, particularly when it came to the Columbia, favored the United States. Cook had spent a considerable amount of time in the Pacific Northwest, but had not found the