Sea of Glory

well. As was to be expected, word of her son’s death had been a devastating blow. Wilkes had sent her a miniature of Wilkes Henry from Honolulu, but he had not been able to bring himself to write her about the boy’s passing, and he worried what her reaction to him would be when he saw her for the first time since the tragedy. Wilkes’s brother Henry offered some comfort, writing that Eliza was “gradually reviving from the deplorable loss.” “God bless you my dear C.,” he continued. “May the wound you have received experience the healing effect of time before this [letter] comes to hand. And may you also have the good fortune to find someone who will in some degree supply the place of dear W.”
    But for Wilkes, there would be no possibility of compensation. For the last three years he had been looking forward to the day when he would be reunited with Jane and their four children. In Singapore, he learned that at least one of them would not be there when he returned. His eldest son Jack, just fourteen, had decided that he wanted to follow in his absent father’s footsteps; with Jane’s permission, he had secured a midshipman’s appointment and would soon be on his way to Brazil. For Wilkes, who had come to see the navy as a thankless, even malicious employer, it was terrible news. “You cannot look upon this as I do . . . ,” he wrote. “I could write you much more my dear dear Jane upon this subject, but it would give you pain and me too. . . . I cannot [conceal] from you it has given me great pain.”
    At Singapore, the Expedition lost one of its most trusted and stalwart members: the Flying Fish. A survey determined that the schooner was suffering from structural problems that made a passage around the Cape of Good Hope a dangerous proposition, and no one wanted the beloved schooner to follow the Sea Gull to the bottom of the ocean. Since Knox was preoccupied with Wilkes’s court of inquiry, Reynolds was left with supervising the transfer of the vessel to her new owner—an Englishman who claimed she would make a “beautiful yacht” but who secretly planned to use her, it was rumored, as an opium smuggler. After cleaning her out, Reynolds lowered the American ensign from the Flying Fish ’s masthead. “I had the same sort of regard for her that a man must entertain for a gallant horse that has carried him safely through the fight, & I almost repented that the poor old craft had been so rudely bartered away.”
    On February 26, the squadron weighed anchor and began to thread its way through the mass of Chinese junks thronging the waters of Singapore. From the maintop of the Vincennes, Charlie Erskine caught a final glimpse of the Flying Fish: “As we passed her with a strange commander and crew on board, and a foreign flag at her mast-head floating to the balmy breeze, every bosom was filled with sadness.” Of the original six-vessel squadron, only the Vincennes and the Porpoise were now left; of the original 346 men, a little over half remained, with the losses to desertion, death, and dismissal having been made up by recruitments in Sydney, Honolulu, and other ports. By the end of the voyage, a total of 524 men would have served on the Ex. Ex.
    The crew of the Flying Fish was dispersed among the Vincennes, the Porpoise, and the Oregon, which was now commanded by Wilkes’s former first lieutenant Overton Carr. Much to his relief, Reynolds had been reassigned to the Porpoise. “I should have got the Hydrophobia on board the Vincennes, with C. W.,” he wrote. Not until March 1 did Wilkes officially recognize Reynolds’s promotion. He also issued orders to the commanders of the Porpoise and the Oregon. While the Vincennes sailed directly for New York, with brief stops at Cape Town and the island of St. Helena, the two brigs were to take a three-thousand-mile detour to Rio de Janeiro, where they were to perform some trivial observations and pick up a small number of additional specimens. Reynolds branded this “a diabolical arrangement.” Just as he had done prior to the squadron’s final assault on Antarctica, Wilkes had scripted it so that his flagship would be the first on the scene. After a voyage of almost four years, Reynolds and his compatriots would be forced to arrive in New York at least a month after the Vincennes. “[ W ]e never shall be reconciled to it,” he wrote. “[A] disagreeable remembrance of it will haunt me for ever, along with the feeling of hatred which I