Sea of Glory

many other crucial papers, and brought them with him to Washington, where they remained in his sole possession. Not until the middle of July did Upshur realize that Wilkes had these important documents. “You will send to the Department as soon as practicable after the receipt of this letter,” Upshur wrote on July 15, “the Journals of all the officers and Scientific Corps.” When Wilkes showed the secretary’s letter to Senator Silas Wright, a Democrat from New York, Wright smiled and asked him when it would be “practicable” for him to turn over the journals. “Never” was Wilkes’s reply. Wright laughed “and said that was right.”
    When he wasn’t preparing for the impending courts-martial, Wilkes continued to promulgate, in the only way presently available to him, the accomplishments of the Expedition. That summer he transformed his house into a miniature museum, and on July 9, in between speeches on the House floor, John Quincy Adams stopped by for a look. “[A]t the earnest and repeated entreaties of Lieutenant Wilkes,” he recorded in his diary, “I went over to his house and inspected a great number of the drawings collected during the exploring expedition—portraits of men, women, and children, of the ocean, and Feejee Islands. Fishes, birds, plants, shells, and navigating charts are in great profusion, more than I had time to examine.”
     
    The courts-martial were scheduled to begin on July 25 aboard one of the finest ships of the line in the U.S. Navy, the North Carolina, lying off New York’s Castle Garden. The masts of the huge ship towered above the rest of the vessels in the harbor. “The morning was beautiful,” a reporter from the New York Herald wrote, “the sun shining in unclouded splendor, and the soft and gentle breezes producing the most pleasing and agreeable sensations as we were being conveyed to the vessel. The ship itself was in beautiful trim, the deck as white as snow, being covered with awnings to shelter those on board from the otherwise insupportable heat of the sun, and crowded with the seamen and marines pursuing their various occupations. . . . Anon the boatswain’s shrill whistle sounded, announcing the arrival of a boat with some of the officers detailed for the Court, when the guards and marines and the watch fell in, and gave them a salute as they made their appearance on deck.”
    There were thirteen officers of the court, including nine commodores, two commanders, and two lieutenants. Although Wilkes would later claim that it had been a “picked court,” there were several members who were disposed to look kindly on him. Commodore Charles Ridgely had assisted him during the preparation of the Ex. Ex., fitting out the Flying Fish and the Sea Gull with great dispatch at the New York Navy Yard. Commodore Jonathan Downes had been equally helpful at the Boston Navy Yard. Wilkes had asked that the officers against whom he had brought charges—William May, Robert Johnson, Charles Guillou, and Robert Pinkney—be tried before him; then his case would finally be called. “The evidence in the course of these trials,” the Herald reported, “is expected to bring to light many, if not all the proceedings of the celebrated exploring expedition, which have hitherto been like a sealed book to the citizens of these United States, who are deeply interested in all which occurred. . . . [T]he readers of the Herald will be furnished with a report of the proceedings day by day, which will be distributed all over the country.” For better or worse, the nation’s first significant exposure to the U.S. Ex. Ex. would be by way of the often vituperative testimony given during the five courts-martial, each held one after the other over the course of the next month and a half.
    Lieutenant Samuel Francis “Frank” Du Pont was the youngest member of the court and no stranger to the antagonisms that could develop between a commander and his officers. Two years earlier, while serving aboard the Ohio in the Mediterranean, Du Pont and three other lieutenants had been placed under arrest and sent home after running afoul of Commodore Isaac Hull, who accused them of disrespect. Secretary Paulding would later exonerate Du Pont and the other lieutenants, but the 1840s would become infamous as a decade in which outbreaks between captains and lieutenants became distressingly commonplace. When the Cyane returned after a three-year cruise in 1841, nearly every officer was