Sea of Glory

brought against the commander of the Ex. Ex. “Captain Wilkes has preferred charges against so many of his Officers (and they in return have done him the like favor),” he wrote his father, “that the difficulties can only be settled by a General Court Martial, after our return.” As far as he was concerned, there was no question which side was going to win: “The Evidence in every case will I am sure be dead in favor of the Officers.”
    On October 9, the Flying Fish crossed the Columbia bar for the last time. Wilkes had decided that the schooner would not be accompanying the Porpoise and the Oregon to San Francisco. Instead, Knox and Reynolds were to put the finishing touches on the survey of the outer edge of the bar, then survey a portion of the coast to the south before sailing to Oahu. After rendezvousing in Honolulu, the squadron would return to the United States via Singapore and the Cape of Good Hope, a voyage of some 22,000 miles. (Wilkes had hoped to stop at Japan, but now realized that there wasn’t sufficient time if they were to return by May 1842.)
    As Wilkes was being rowed from the schooner to the Porpoise, Knox asked if he might take the Flying Fish back to Astoria to refit. The last year of near-constant service had reduced her sails to rags; almost all her running rigging needed to be replaced. Having been so forcefully rebuffed by Reynolds, Wilkes was not about to assent to Knox’s request, no matter how legitimate it might be. “Refit at sea” was his lofty reply. “This was about as practicable,” Reynolds wrote, “as it would be for a half drowned man to mend his clothes in the water.” Reynolds seemed almost relieved by his commander’s return to his old despotic ways; it was so much easier to hate a man who was, as he recorded in his journal, “a headstrong, obstinate, ignorant fool.”
     
    Two weeks later the officers and men of the Flying Fish were, in Reynolds’s words, refitting “with a vengeance.” With no other vessels to help them, it had taken ten days to complete the survey of the bar. By then it was too late in the season to survey the Oregon coast. They had already decided to sail for Oahu when, in a furious gale on October 25, their forestay broke. Since the forestay held up both of the schooner’s masts, they were in imminent peril of becoming a dismasted wreck. “We did not think it too uncharitable,” Reynolds wrote, “to wish that ‘the man’ who told us ‘to refit at sea,’ had been lashed to the said stay, when it blew away.”
    Once they’d repaired the stay, the wind shifted to the west, transforming the rocky coast of Oregon into a lee shore. Over the next few days, a succession of gales would shred their already tattered sails to ribbons and push them terrifyingly close to the wave-battered rocks. Only after they’d patched together a makeshift mainsail were they finally able to put Oregon behind them for good.
    By that time, Wilkes had already arrived at Sausalito Bay. The town of Yerba Buena, now known as San Francisco, comprised just a few out-of-repair buildings that were, according to Wilkes, “not calculated to produce a favorable impression on a stranger.” But if the town wasn’t much, the harbor was “one of the most spacious, and at the same time safest ports in the world.” Wilkes predicted that if it did not become a part of the United States, the region would one day combine with the Oregon territory to become “a powerful maritime nation [that would] control the destinies of the Pacific.”
    By the end of October the overland party led by Emmons and Eld had arrived and the survey of San Francisco Bay had been completed. Wilkes had learned that recently elected president William Henry Harrison had died, putting John Tyler in office. “This is all the news we have,” he wrote Jane, “and amuse ourselves with wise and potent arguments as to what our fate will be under the newcomers into power.” Whatever the situation in Washington, Wilkes was convinced that he now had the Expedition firmly under control, ending a letter to his wife with these supremely confident, eerily impersonal words: “For myself, I am ready to meet all and everybody. . . . I am superior and master now of all & the storms are hushed. Few will venture to put themselves in array against me. The Expedition I go for and he who attempts to frustrate its actions or course must and shall rue the day he ever made the attempt.”
    On November 1, against