Sea of Glory

had not seen an Explorer in full bloom.”
    They left Rio de Janeiro on May 22. The Porpoise passed close to the Delaware ’s stern and Reynolds was delighted to hear her band playing “‘Sweet Home’ as loud as they could blow.” Frequent calms and headwinds prolonged the return to New York. Not until early July did they reach the navy yard, and to Reynolds’s considerable anguish he was required to keep watch aboard the Porpoise for several more days. He soon learned that Veidovi had died the day after the Vincennes ’s arrival, “in consequence,” the New York Herald explained, “of having no human flesh to eat.” A few days later the Herald reported that the surgeons at the navy hospital where Veidovi had died had “already cut off his head, and it has been laying in pickle for several days.” Soon after, the Fijian’s fleshless skull became a permanent part of the Expedition’s collection.
    On the morning of the Fourth of July, two young men came aboard the Porpoise, both of them looking for Lieutenant William Reynolds. It wasn’t until one of them asked, “Which of you, is it?” that Reynolds knew the man’s voice to be that of his older brother Sam. After four long years, the two brothers didn’t recognize each other.
    Sam and his friend took William ashore to see some of the holiday celebration in New York. By July 6, he had been granted a leave of absence and spent the night at the American Hotel. Then it was on to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “The return home!,” he recorded on the last page of his journal, “cannot be written here.”

Part Four

CHAPTER 14
    Reckoning
    WILKES ARRIVED in Washington on June 13, 1842. His house on the hill was “almost as I had left it.” His wife and children—including Janey, Edmund, and Eliza—could not have been more pleased to see him. But the absence of his eldest son Jack “made a void in my little flock,” he noted sadly.
    He had once dared to assume that if he should successfully complete his mission, a grateful nation would shower him with praise and recognition. He had fashioned out of disaster one of the largest, most sophisticated scientific and surveying enterprises the world had ever seen. He had found a new continent, charted hundreds of Pacific islands, collected tons of artifacts and specimens, and explored the Pacific Northwest and the Sulu Sea. And he had now returned to find that nobody in New York, Washington, or, it seemed, the entire nation apparently cared.
    Jane could not conceal her concern for her husband. He had left a youthful, ambitious forty-year-old man. He had been gone four years but had aged at least ten. His eyes had sunk deep into his skull; he had a cough that wouldn’t go away; but as she knew better than anyone, his travails had not yet ended. “She was aware,” Wilkes wrote, “that an onslaught would be made upon me and an endeavor made to cast all my service into the Shade.”
    Washington had changed dramatically in the last four years. When Wilkes had left in August 1838, the Jacksonian Democrats had been in power. Now with the Whig John Tyler as president, Wilkes’s former allies had been thrust to the sidelines. At a time when political differences were at their height, Tyler was not about to dwell on the achievements of an expedition mounted by the previous administration. But there was more than party politics at work. Tyler’s secretary of state, Daniel Webster, was in the midst of delicate negotiations with the British government concerning the boundary between Maine and Canada. It had been briefly feared that the two countries might even go to war over the border dispute. Tyler had hopes that Webster might be able to expand his negotiations to include the border in the Pacific Northwest, and the last thing he wanted in the summer of 1842 was for Wilkes to call attention to the importance of that region to the American people. As a result, Tyler and his secretary of the navy, Abel Upshur, had instituted a news blackout when it came to the results of the Expedition. Whereas President Van Buren and his secretary of the navy, James Paulding, had regularly published Wilkes’s reports, with Van Buren proudly announcing the discovery of Antarctica in his annual address in 1840, no official mention of the Expedition had been made in almost a year. To Wilkes’s considerable dismay and indignation, the administration had no interest in the findings he had earlier assumed would win him every concession