Sea of Glory

permitted those aboard the Flying Fish to go ashore. In the last 180 days, Reynolds had spent exactly twelve hours and fifteen minutes on land. “This Schooner kills me,” he wrote. “No more exercise to be had, than a large bird might find in a small cage, and without this I cannot enjoy life. No society & no books. It worries my very soul, with nothing around us, but Sea & sky.”
    There was one member of the Expedition, however, for whom the last six months had provided plenty of food for thought: the geologist James Dana. Having seen what an extremely young volcanic island looked like in Hawaii, Dana could now identify the relative age of an island by the amount of erosion it exhibited. By the end of the cruise, he had begun to recognize an unmistakable pattern: each island chain possessed a distinct chronology, with the oldest island at one end of the chain and the youngest at the other. “There is a system in their arrangements,” he wrote, “as regular as in the mountain heights of the continent.” It is now believed that chains of volcanic islands are formed as the Pacific plate moves over what are called “hot spots”—stationary heat sources emanating from deep within the earth. Although the theory of plate tectonics would not be posited until the twentieth century, Dana’s recognition of the linear pattern of island chains was a first, crucial step toward formulating this revolutionary concept.
    Not until May did the lethargic Hudson finally order the Peacock and the Flying Fish to start sailing east. Contrary to Wilkes’s instructions, which insisted that he sail directly to the Pacific Northwest, Hudson decided to stop at Honolulu for provisions before continuing on to the Columbia River. On June 13, they spied the green island of Oahu. It was, Reynolds wrote, “as good a sight for our eyes, as ever the first glimpse of the New World, was to the vision of Columbus.” They were now almost two months behind schedule, with more than two thousand miles between them and the Columbia River.
     
    By the end of May, Wilkes decided to leave Purser Waldron at Astoria to wait for the Peacock while he and Drayton visited Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters at Fort Vancouver, approximately one hundred miles up the Columbia. There he met Dr. John McLoughlin, a tall, imposing figure who served as the company’s chief factor. Wilkes, traveling by canoe with just a handful of servants and an artist, met McLoughlin in a deceptive guise. Instead of the commodore of a four-vessel squadron, Wilkes looked more like a curious fact-gatherer intent on visiting American settlers in the Willamette River valley to the south. For McLoughlin, it was a most nonthreatening introduction to the Ex. Ex. By the time the survey of the Columbia River was under way in August—an undertaking that was hardly in the HBC’s best interests—enough goodwill existed between the company and the Expedition that the squadron was allowed to do as it pleased. All in all, it would prove to be a masterful, even if inadvertent, diplomatic performance on Wilkes’s part.
    As Drayton continued up the Columbia, Wilkes traveled south up the Willamette River, where he met with recently arrived American missionaries and farmers who complained of the HBC’s unchallenged authority in the region. By the middle of June, he was back at Fort Vancouver. There was still no word from the Peacock and the Flying Fish. Wilkes was becoming convinced that they had met with some kind of accident. As soon as he completed his survey of the Columbia, he would have to mount a massive search operation. For now, he would return to Fort Nisqually and finish his pendulum experiments.
    By the beginning of July, his experiments had been completed. Excellent progress had also been made on the survey of Puget Sound. It was time for a Fourth of July celebration. That morning, two brass howitzers were brought ashore to the observatory, where they were fired twenty-six times, once for each state of the union. “The reports of the guns not only astonished the natives,” Charlie Erskine remembered, “but waked up the red-coats in the fort, who came running up to the observatory with the Indians, nearly out of breath, to inquire the cause of the racket. We pointed to our country’s flag, which was so proudly waving in the breeze over the observatory. . . . They then called us a crew of crazy Americans.”
    Around nine o’clock, the officers and men of the Vincennes,