Sea of Glory

shall cherish for its author.”
    But for Charlie Erskine and his fellow sailors aboard the Vincennes, these were happy times. “All life and gayety on board,” he wrote, “and bright visions of home were before us. The weather was fine, the wind fair, and our gallant ship had all the sail on her that she could possibly carry. She made thirteen and a half knots for five days in succession.” One afternoon Charlie noticed that three older seamen were enjoying a nap on the deck and using Wilkes’s dog Sydney as a pillow. “I hunted up a bone and placed it about a foot from the dog’s nose,” he wrote. “As soon as Sydney got a smell of the bone he suddenly sprang up, and the sleepers’ heads came down on deck with a thump. . . . [ I ]f they had known who the culprit was, I verily believe they would have thrown me overboard.” But if life aboard the Vincennes was now better than it had ever been, Charlie would never forget the shocking brutality that had become commonplace under Wilkes’s command. “I had seen as good men as ever trod a ship’s deck, lashed to the rigging—made spread eagles of—and flogged.” He resolved that he would never again sail on a naval vessel. “I had had enough of the navy during [the last four years] to last me a lifetime.”
    On March 2, tragedy struck the Vincennes. George Porter, the same sailor who had narrowly escaped death three and a half years ago when a rope wrapped around his neck, succumbed to a fever he had caught in Singapore. “He belonged in Bangor, Maine,” Charlie remembered, “and how eagerly he looked forward to going home and seeing all the loved ones there! Poor George!”
    Three weeks later, Benjamin Vanderford, the Salem bêche-de-mer captain who had served as the Expedition’s pilot and interpreter in Fiji, also fell ill. Always a heavy drinker, he began to hallucinate, and after falling into horrifying convulsions, he quickly lost consciousness and died. For Veidovi, the Fijian chief, it was a shattering loss. Vanderford had promised to serve as his protector once they reached the United States. Veidovi retreated to his berth and from that day forward showed a “total disregard of everything that passed around him.”
     
    Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., Robert Pinkney, the latest officer to return from the Expedition under arrest, had recently arrived in town, and the newly appointed secretary of the navy Abel Upshur was shocked by the lieutenant’s account of a commander who proudly insisted that he was above the law. In his annual address Upshur had vowed to do everything he could to stop abuses on the part of the service’s superior officers. Wilkes sounded like just the kind of commander who needed to be made an example of. (That he was the leader of an expedition mounted by Jacksonian Democrats only encouraged Upshur, who was part of John Tyler’s Whig administration.) Given the seriousness of Pinkney’s accusations, Upshur decided that he could not put Wilkes on the promotion list for that spring.
    In March, Jane Wilkes received a letter from Dr. John S. Wily, a family friend and former navy surgeon. “You have no time to lose,” Wily urged. “Should your husband be left out of the new batch [of promotions], he is irretrievably injured. Take no denial. The principle on which the Secretary is acting is totally subversive of naval discipline and legally wrong. A man is innocent till found guilty, but here we see a death blow given to an officer when absent on duty by a discontented subaltern, whose charges may be trivial, malicious, or unfounded, and against which he has no means of defending himself. . . . Go to Senators, as many as possible. Say if Charles is to be tried, let him be tried; but not condemned now which is virtually the case. . . . I would almost rather he was dead, than so shamefully dishonored.”
    Jane would do exactly as Wily suggested, even writing a memorandum in which she detailed her efforts on her husband’s behalf. Twice Jane visited Secretary Upshur. By the second visit, Upshur had had enough of Jane’s passionate advocacy and told her, she later wrote, that “if I urged the matter any further I should ruin my husband.” Jane responded with a letter of apology for her “too urgent appeal,” stating, “I therefore will wait patiently until the decision of his peers shall (as it most assuredly will) restore my husband to his full standing in the service to which his whole life has been