Sea of Glory

devoted.”
    Back aboard the Vincennes, Wilkes was doing everything he could to return to the United States as quickly as possible. Although it looked as if he would not make the May 31 deadline, he still had hopes of returning before the Senate adjourned for the summer. “I shall push hard to get home . . . ,” he had written Jane from Singapore, “and I am in hopes [Congress] will sit late.”
    During a brief stop at Cape Town, Wilkes visited the observatory made famous by the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Here he came across a new British chart that showed the tracks of Ross’s and d’Urville’s voyages to Antarctica but made no reference to his own. Still worse, it was clear to Wilkes that Ross had used information from the chart he had sent him. “[T]he truth will come out one of these days,” he insisted in his journal. After another quick stop at St. Helena, where the officers dutifully visited the home where Napoleon had spent his last days in exile, they were off for the final sprint to New York.
     
    On May 16 Wilkes issued a general order requiring that a committee composed of Hudson, Emmons, and the naturalist Charles Pickering collect from each and every officer “all Journals, rough notes, writings, memorandums, drawings, sketches, paintings, as well as all specimens of every kind collected or prepared since leaving the United States.” Even though this had been the policy from the very beginning, it was not a popular order. To have spent four years of one’s life on a voyage round the world and to have nothing left to show for it seemed unnecessarily harsh, especially since there was already more than enough material in the Expedition’s collections. Emmons possessed a Fijian bow and arrow that had been taken during the bloody boat fight off Malolo. “But here they go,” he wrote bitterly, “and if the Government wants them I have not another word to say.” Adding to the resentment of Emmons and others was the rumor that Wilkes was harboring an extensive collection of his own in a cabinet given to him by the consul in Singapore.
    As the officers reluctantly turned over their specimens and artifacts, the gun deck of the Vincennes became crowded with crates and boxes. Reynolds’s volatile friend William May, whom Wilkes had recently named master of the ship, was loath to give up a box of shells he had procured at Fiji after the Vincennes ’s purser had declined to buy it. On the top of the box, May wrote out “Purchased at Public Sale after the Comdr of the Ex. Ex. had refused them.” When Wilkes saw the box, he immediately assumed May was attempting to mock his order. He called May into his cabin and demanded that he remove the words from the top of the box. May responded that “he would do no such thing,” and Wilkes ordered him to leave the cabin and consider himself under suspension. Even though Wilkes had made attempts to mend fences with May (just as he’d done with Reynolds at the Columbia River), he now determined to draw up formal charges against the passed midshipman.
    As the month of June approached, Wilkes’s tension level was reaching an almost unbearable pitch, and he pushed his ship and his men as hard as he had at any point during the voyage. Despite near gale-force winds, he insisted that no sails should be shortened without his approval. On June 1, the always reliable George Emmons was the officer of the deck. Of all the Expedition’s officers, no one had given more of himself than Emmons. In Fiji he had spent more days in an open boat than anyone else; at the Columbia bar he had supervised the successful rescue of the Peacock ’s crew; just a few weeks later, while suffering from malaria, he had braved hostile native tribes, grizzly bears, and uncooperative guides to complete a grueling overland expedition to San Francisco. If there was an officer who deserved Wilkes’s gratitude, it was George Emmons.
    But when Emmons sent an officer to Wilkes’s cabin “to inform him that I was fearful our spars or rigging might give away if we continued under the same sail,” the commander of the Ex. Ex. ridiculed the lieutenant’s concern by insisting that he make more sail. Emmons dutifully set the fore topgallant sail and the jib. Under the increased strain, the Vincennes parted her bobstay—the chain that led from the tip of the bowsprit down to the cutwater at the bow’s waterline. Without the bobstay, the Vincennes would quickly lose the bowsprit. Emmons had no