Sea of Glory

be Captain Aulick. In a letter to Jane, Wilkes claimed to be unconcerned about the possible threat. “I should rejoice to meet him with my broad Pendt. Flying,” he insisted. “Before I get home I shall be fairly set down as Comdr.” As of the end of March, however, Wilkes’s promotion had not yet come through, and he apparently thought it best to postpone, if not avoid altogether, a meeting with his nemesis. On April 5, the Vincennes and the Porpoise escaped safely from Honolulu and were on their way to the Columbia River, where they were to meet the Peacock and the Flying Fish at the end of the month.

    After a passage of just twenty-two days, Wilkes sighted the fog-shrouded fist of basalt known as Cape Disappointment on April 28. Stretching for six miles to the south was a continuous line of breakers, where the milky waters of the Columbia River collided with the blue swell of the Pacific. “Mere description can give little idea of the terrors of the bar of the Columbia,” Wilkes wrote. “[A]ll who have seen it have spoken of the wildness of the scene, and the incessant roar of the waters, representing it as one of the most fearful sights that can possibly meet the eye of the sailor.”
    Even today, now that a series of dams has done much to tame the fury of the Columbia, the waters between Cape Disappointment and Point Adams are a war zone. The river might be compared to a colossal 1,243-mile-long water cannon firing, on average, 150 billion gallons of water a day into the ocean surge of the Pacific. The resulting impact is stupendous. A modern-day Columbia River pilot likens it to “two giant hammers smashing into each other.” It is the only river in the United States where incoming vessels are required to use a river-bar pilot. Navigational guides rank it as the third most dangerous river entrance in the world, and the Coast Guard station at Cape Disappointment today averages one rescue mission a day. Since Captain Gray first discovered the river, the chaotic waters stretching across its mouth have claimed more than two thousand shipwrecks; at least seven hundred people have drowned.

    In 1841, before dams, jetties, channel buoys, and motor power had begun to domesticate the river, mariners regarded the Columbia as nothing less than a malevolent monster. Waves at the bar were known to reach a hundred feet, and ships had waited as many as eleven weeks before conditions moderated to the extent that their captains dared to risk crossing the bar. Even then, things could go terribly wrong. Two of the thirty-five ships supplying the Hudson’s Bay Company had been lost and twenty-six sailors drowned. “Perhaps there have been more lives lost here, in proportion to the number of those who have entered this river,” a traveler wrote in the 1830s, “than in entering almost any harbor in the world.”
    Wilkes had brought along a man from Honolulu who claimed to be a Columbia River pilot. He also had sailing directions that had come to him indirectly through Captain Belcher. On Cape Disappointment and Adams Point, the Hudson’s Bay Company had trimmed the branches of several tall, conspicuously situated trees to help mariners locate the elusive channel across the bar. Unfortunately, the high seas raging across the river mouth when Wilkes arrived made it impossible to attempt a crossing.
    That night, as the Vincennes and the Porpoise wallowed in the turbulence outside the bar, Wilkes decided on a change of plan. Too impatient to wait for conditions to moderate at the bar, he would head north up the coast. Even though his orders limited him to the Columbia River and San Francisco Bay, he would sail to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and, heading east and then south, survey the inland coastline all the way to Puget Sound. It was an audacious, typically impulsive decision on Wilkes’s part. But before he could begin to survey the region that would one day contain the cities of Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, Wilkes nearly lost it all on the appropriately named Destruction Isle.
    At night in a dense fog, both the Vincennes and the Porpoise were sailing up the coast with their studdingsails set. When sailing along a dangerous shore, it was common practice to ready the anchor cables in case of emergencies. Wilkes, who judged the coast to be at least forty miles to the east, ordered that the hawse holes (through which the anchor cables were led) be closed; it would make the deck drier in the high seas. That night Wilkes