Sea of Glory

the advice of the harbor pilot, who warned of the possibility of seas breaking at the bar, Wilkes ordered the squadron to depart with the ebbing tide. Around sunset, the already light wind deserted completely. As the tide began to change, the squadron anchored, with the Porpoise and the Oregon just beyond the bar and, as it would turn out, with the Vincennes, which was once again flying Wilkes’s commodore’s pennant, coming to rest almost precisely over it. The seas remained quiet until ten P.M., when “without any apparent cause,” according to Wilkes, the swell began to increase ominously. By midnight, the Vincennes was in the midst of her own private tempest: huge rollers pitched the ship so violently that when she swung broadside to the swell, Wilkes feared for the masts. By two A.M. waves of over thirty feet were battering the ship, bursting over the bow and threatening to tear loose the anchor chain. At 3:30 A.M. an immense breaker flooded the spar deck, stoving in boats and hurling spare spars in every direction. Just at that moment a marine named Joseph Allshouse was climbing up a ladder to the deck. A spar slammed into him, and three hours later he died of internal injuries.
    Not until eight A.M. did it become possible to raise the anchor. A few miles away, the Porpoise and the Oregon had been blessed with a quiet night, and both crews were amazed to learn of the Vincennes ’s ordeal. Allshouse was quickly buried at sea, and Wilkes, the Stormy Petrel, ordered the squadron to begin the first leg of the long sail home.

CHAPTER 13
    Homeward Bound
    AFTER MORE THAN THREE YEARS at sea, Wilkes was finding it difficult to conceive of a reality beyond the taut discipline of the four vessels under his command. From his perspective, the Expedition was already an unqualified triumph. Having successfully neutralized a possible French threat, he could now claim to have discovered a new continent. Although his survey of Fiji had come at a terrible price, it would surely be recognized as a wondrous and valuable achievement. His climb up Mauna Loa was the stuff of legend, but, as he well knew, what the American people would be most interested in were his surveys of the Pacific Northwest and California.
    The nation that had once looked to the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains as its natural western boundaries was becoming increasingly convinced that its dominion should extend all the way to the Pacific. A group of American settlers had arrived in Oregon in 1841; by the spring of 1842 another group would be headed west. What the American people wanted more than anything else was information about this new, untapped territory, and no one currently possessed more charts, maps, sketches, and detailed writings about the west coast of North America than the commander of the Ex. Ex. This, he decided, would be his trump card. If, for some reason, the naval and political leaders in Washington, D.C., refused to provide him with the accolades he deserved, he would withhold “this desired information until I see how they are about to reward me.” It was extortion, pure and simple, not to mention a shocking and unlawful abuse of his government’s trust, but this was how the egocentric mind of Charles Wilkes worked. Warning Jane that his plan was “entre nous,” he asserted that “there is nothing like having the whip in my own hands.”
    In Honolulu, where the squadron stopped briefly for provisions and repairs before continuing on to Manila, Singapore, and eventually home, Wilkes received unsettling indications that his control over the Expedition’s legacy was not as total as he had assumed. His archenemy John Aulick, captain of the USS Yorktown, had just left Honolulu ten days before. According to Aulick, it was widely reported back in the United States that Wilkes had lost his grip on both the Expedition and himself. Fearing that Wilkes had gone “crazy,” a friend of Aulick’s even called on Jane “to ask if such was not the fact.” For Wilkes this was distressing and humiliating news, but it got worse.
    In New Zealand, Aulick encountered the British explorer James Ross, just back from his own southern cruise. With a copy of Wilkes’s chart spread out before them, Ross had asserted that his two ships had sailed over an area where the Americans had claimed there was land. Heading east, Ross had sailed into what is known today as the Ross Sea, eventually establishing a new southern record of 78°04’. Instead of a