Sea of Glory

of the Columbia’s lower reaches. “For more than three weeks we toiled on, solitary and alone . . . ,” Reynolds wrote. “[W]e were sick & tired of the Mouth of the Columbia, as well we might be. Besides the duty was very dangerous. Once we came within an ace of having to abandon the Schooner & take to the boats, and in fact almost every moment was attended with infinite risk.”
    They had a brief respite when they took the schooner up to Astoria for provisions. Previous to the arrival of the squadron, Astoria had been the somewhat lonely residence of the Birnie family. In recent days the Birnies’ many young children had become closely attached to the surgeon Charles Guillou and the Expedition’s newest outcast Robert Johnson, who renamed the collection of temporary shacks “Bobville.” In early October, with the arrival of Wilkes and the rest of the squadron, Bobville came to a sudden end. Now that the survey of the upper part of the river was complete, it was time to sail for San Francisco.
    Once the Porpoise and the Oregon had been safely taken across the bar, Wilkes ordered that they wait until he finished the survey of the inner portion of the river mouth in the Flying Fish. Over the course of the next few days Wilkes continued to make unmistakable overtures to Reynolds. “He seemed at this time,” Reynolds wrote, “to manifest great consideration towards me, as if desirous to obliterate the remembrance of the past. We had no intercourse together, since he hurried me out of the Vincennes, and now as the cruise [w]as near its end, he imagined that a few smooth words, false & hollow though they be, will be sufficient to wipe away all sense of the thousand outrages, we have groaned under during his tyrannical reign.”
    One morning Wilkes sent out Knox and Midshipman Blair to record soundings, leaving Reynolds in command of the schooner. “Now, the duty on which he sent Knox,” Reynolds wrote, “belonged to me, and it was evident to all, that he was trusting the Schooner to me, to flatter me up to the top of his bent. I thank my stars, that I am not of so gullible a nature, as to be so easily duped.” Reynolds, as passionate as the man he had come to loathe, would never forgive Wilkes for not being the ideal leader he had naively believed him to be at the beginning of the voyage. Even though Wilkes had proven himself as capable as Hudson was ineffectual during the survey of the Columbia, Reynolds refused to alter his opinion of his commander.
    Reynolds’s feelings were surely encouraged by the surgeon Charles Guillou, who had become one of his closest friends in the squadron and who was already preparing to bring charges against Wilkes at the end of the voyage. But there were others, such as Henry Eld and the geologist James Dana, who would come to recognize that Wilkes, despite his obvious faults, was a remarkably resilient and resourceful survivor. “The more I see of him,” Eld would later write his father, “the more I am impressed with his indomitable perseverance & tenacity[,] ‘like a cork he cannot be sunk.’”
    Why then did Wilkes attempt to win over Reynolds—a lowly and still very angry passed midshipman? There is always the possibility that Wilkes honestly regretted that relations between the two of them had become so embittered, especially in light of his deteriorating relationship with his former confidant William Hudson. But there is also the possibility that, as Reynolds suspected, Wilkes had belatedly come to realize that for political reasons he now needed all the friends he could get—particularly if they were as articulate and popular as William Reynolds.
    Events were unfolding back in Washington that did not bode well for Wilkes’s return to the United States. A packet of mail had recently arrived at Fort Vancouver containing letters from several of the officers whom Wilkes had dismissed. They gleefully reported to their friends in the squadron that the secretary of the navy was lending a sympathetic ear to their tales of Wilkes’s outrages. In recounting this unsettling development to Jane, Wilkes insisted that “my conscience . . . acquits me of having done anything that would cause even a tinge to my cheek.” Still, if there should be charges brought against him, no matter how frivolous, “I should be rather inclined to court a full investigation of all my acts [if] it became necessary.”
    For his part, Reynolds already took for granted that charges would be