Sea of Glory

choice but to put the helm up and begin to reduce sail. Wilkes erupted from his cabin, appearing on deck “very much excited, &” according to Emmons, “immediately commenced giving his orders in a manner that put all order & system of carrying on duty out of the question. . . . I, however, did not partake of his excitement and continued to repeat his orders—that he might not accuse me of disrespect—and at the same time see what a mess he had got every thing in, until he finally ordered me below & sent for the 1 st Lieut.” Of course, First Lieutenant Walker did exactly what Emmons had attempted to do—shortening sail and replacing the bobstay before bringing the ship back on course under reduced sail.
    By the morning of June 9, the Vincennes was approaching the foggy coast of the United States. At noon of the next day, she anchored off Sandy Hook, where a steamer came alongside and began towing the ship into New York Harbor. The question that concerned all aboard the flagship was what Wilkes would do with his broad pennant. Reynolds was not on hand to witness the scene, but others would later tell him about Wilkes’s final act as Commodore of the U.S. Ex. Ex. “Curiosity was now on tip toe among the officers of the Vincennes to see how this bravado would terminate,” he wrote. Would Wilkes dare anchor at the navy yard with the pennant flying or would he replace it with the coach whip of a lieutenant commander? “He did neither,” Reynolds wrote. “His impudence—great as it was—could not carry him through the first alternative. His bloated pride would not allow him to adopt the other.” As the ship approached the Battery, Wilkes called the crew to muster and “expressed to them my thanks for the manner in which they had conducted themselves during the cruise.” A salute was fired, his pennant was hauled down, and Wilkes turned over the ship to Hudson. Hitching a ride with the pilot, Wilkes was able to slip ashore without having to confront the officer whom Reynolds termed “the real Commodore of the Station.”
    Wilkes might call himself the discoverer of Antarctica, as well as the surveyor of Fiji and the Columbia River, but for many of his officers, none of these accomplishments seemed to matter anymore. Of the disaffected, no one was more embittered than William Reynolds. By the time he reached Rio de Janeiro, his feelings for his commander had become a dark obsession that threatened to permanently disfigure his once balanced, sensitive, and ebullient personality. “[Wilkes] has done wrongs that he can never repair,” he wrote. “He has in the gratification of his personal prejudices, his own venom & spite, inflicted injuries on men whose shoes he is unworthy to unloose, that can never be wiped away . . . ! There is not a dissembler in existence more vile or more depraved than the same Mr. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, whom I once thought was every thing pure and honorable.”
    Reynolds’s anger made it impossible for him to recognize the magnitude of what the Expedition had accomplished. He thought only of the odious Wilkes. “Not one hope has been realized,” he insisted. It was only in the context of the suffering he and his fellow officers had endured that Reynolds could compare the Expedition to anything else in American history: “I look upon the hardships, dangers & servitude that we have undergone in this Expedition as parallel in their extent to the worst years of the ‘Revolutionary War’ & if its operations had been protracted for 48 months longer, every one of us would have been expended, from a wearing out of the system.” Although he had since gained some of the weight back, Reynolds, almost six feet tall and already rail thin at 147 pounds when the cruise began, had dropped to just 135 pounds—“enough to have satisfied a dozen Shylocks,” he wrote his family. “I am thin as a shadow, and ugly as thin. My general title of ‘ Old Reynolds,’ is no misnomer. I look old & feel accordingly.”
    And yet despite everything, the fact of the matter was that they had experienced the adventure of their lives. Rio de Janeiro marked their complete circumnavigation of the world. They had literally gone where no man had gone before, and while Reynolds might not appreciate it, others could not help but be in awe of what he and his shipmates had achieved. Reynolds reported that the officers of the Delaware stationed at Rio “looked at me as if I were a natural curiosity. They