Sea of Glory

there was another hearty cheer!”
    With the help of Old George, a one-eyed Chinook Indian whom Reynolds described as “the queerest looking pilot I ever put my eyes on,” the Flying Fish soon crossed the bar and joined the castaways at Bakers Bay. John Dean had presented Hudson with the orders Wilkes had prepared weeks before, instructing him to begin the survey of the river. It was an opportunity for Hudson to redeem himself, in some measure, for the loss of the ship. Instead, he chose to take the majority of his crew up the river to Astoria, where they would wait in idleness until Wilkes’s arrival. “If Captain Hudson possessed the gumption to conduct a survey,” Reynolds wrote, “his place would have been on board this Schooner, at once, driving on with all the boats & finishing [the survey of the] bar, while the weather was fine.” Instead, Reynolds and Knox were left alone at Bakers Bay.
     
    Ever since the Fourth of July, Wilkes had been in seemingly ceaseless motion. With his observations at Nisqually completed, he took over the leadership of the surveys of Puget Sound. As each day brought no word of the Peacock, he drove himself and his men harder and harder since it now looked as if they would have to perform the survey of the Columbia on their own. “In this state of feeling,” Wilkes wrote, “the officers of the Vincennes showed a highly commendable spirit, and aware that additional labors were thus to be thrown upon them, strained every nerve to avoid any further loss of time.”
    Although Vancouver had surveyed much of the region forty-nine years earlier, Wilkes would leave his own indelible, if largely unappreciated, stamp upon the land. Almost three hundred Washington place names can be attributed to the Ex. Ex. For example, Elliott Bay along the eastern shore of Puget Sound was named for Midshipman Samuel Elliott and is the site of modern-day Seattle. Even Veidovi (whom Wilkes called “Vendovi”) would have an island named for him. Despite Wilkes’s reputation for self-glorification, not a single island, cove, or strait is named for the commander of the Ex. Ex.
    By July 27, the squadron had made its way to the San Juan Islands, the labyrinth of more than 450 islands and reefs that lay scattered over the international water boundary between British Columbia and the United States. The forty-ninth parallel had already been discussed as a possible boundary between the two countries, and Wilkes quite rightly realized that if this did become the case, these islands would be of special interest. That afternoon Passed Midshipman William May arrived from Nisqually with a letter informing Wilkes of the loss of the Peacock. “This news, although bad,” Wilkes wrote, “was a great relief to me; for I had feared not only the loss of the vessels, but had apprehensions for the lives of the persons on board. A heavy load that had long hung over my mind was removed.”
    Wilkes spent the next day finishing up the survey of the San Juans and deciding how the squadron should spend the rest of its time in the Pacific Northwest. He had once hoped to send an overland party as far east as the headwaters of the Yellowstone River on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. This would have allowed him to connect the Expedition’s surveys with previous surveys of the interior. He now realized it was too late in the season to attempt such a journey. Lieutenant Johnson had returned from a trip across the Cascade Mountains. Prior to leaving on another overland expedition, this time to Grays Harbor on the coast, Johnson fell into an altercation with Wilkes similar to what used to happen on an almost continual basis in the early days of the Expedition. Johnson had given a Bowie knife pistol belonging to the naturalist Charles Pickering to an HBC employee as a gift. When Pickering complained, Wilkes insisted that Johnson clear all subsequent gift-giving with Passed Midshipman Eld. Since this would require him to defer to a subordinate officer, Johnson refused to embark on the expedition to Grays Harbor, and Wilkes had him arrested.
    Johnson was now confined to quarters and Eld was on his way to Grays Harbor, but there was yet another, much more important expedition to organize: a more than eight-hundred-mile-long overland journey from the Columbia River to San Francisco Bay. Wilkes decided that Lieutenant George Emmons was the man to lead this expedition, and as the Vincennes and the Porpoise made their way out of the