Sea of Glory

Wilkes requested that he be given the opportunity to respond to the Herald ’s account of the previous day’s testimony. The president of the court, Commodore Stewart, reminded Wilkes that what was printed in a newspaper had nothing to do with the testimony allowed by the court. Wilkes blurted out that it was the Herald ’s statement concerning his not having turned over the Expedition’s journals that he wished to counter. Stewart repeated his earlier statement, to which Wilkes replied that “he cared little about what the newspapers said, he was thickskinned so far as they were concerned. ” The following day, the Herald would report that Wilkes subsequently used testimony that had appeared in the newspaper to assist him in examining a witness, “thus acknowledging the correctness of the reports which the reporter understood him to impugn at the commencement of the proceedings.” Wilkes had managed to anger not only the judge advocate and the judges, but also the popular press, and his own trial had not yet begun.
    On Saturday, August 13, Pinkney’s counsel, the Expedition’s assistant surgeon James Palmer, read his defence. The trial had shown that Wilkes was willing to go to any length and pursue just about any course if it would strengthen his case against the lieutenant, a perfectly competent officer against whom Wilkes had taken a violent and inexplicable dislike. Over and over again during the Expedition, Pinkney claimed, Wilkes “tried to goad me into rebellion.” But why? Pinkney had a theory, and it involved the issue of rank.
    From the very beginning, the officers of the Ex. Ex. had recognized that the schooners were “of all vessels, most likely to distinguish themselves on the Exploring Expedition.” “The history of the Flying Fish ’s first Antarctic cruise,” Pinkney continued, “and the subsequent survey of the mouth of the Columbia by Lieutenant Knox, justify all the hopes which were entertained of those admirable schooners.” But instead of putting the Flying Fish and the Sea Gull under the command of his senior lieutenants, Wilkes had assigned them to passed midshipmen. “[T]he obstinacy with which he maintained a decision so injurious to the Lieutenants,” Pinkney insisted, “and so little in accordance with his own solemn assurances, to be guided, in all appointments, by rank alone, at once annihilated confidence.” Pinkney claimed that when the Sea Gull was lost off Cape Horn, it made even Wilkes aware of the injustice of his actions, and he placed Pinkney, a senior lieutenant, in command of the remaining schooner. “[B]y this act, Lieutenant Wilkes tacitly acknowledged his former error,” Pinkney maintained. “The mortification which he seemed to suffer from this circumstance, is the sole cause to which I can trace his strange animosity to me during my subsequent service in the Squadron.” It was a difficult theory to sell to a military tribunal, but it came as close as anyone had so far to unlocking the motivations of the Expedition’s commander. Reynolds would subsequently send a copy of Pinkney’s defence to his father back in Pennsylvania. “It is certainly an able one,” he wrote, “& must have hit Wilkes very hard. Even thro’ his ‘thick skin.’ ”
    What Pinkney and Reynolds had no way of knowing was that prior to the Expedition’s departure, Wilkes had also been denied what he perceived to be his due—an acting appointment to captain. Although many of Wilkes’s subsequent actions were indefensible, the truth was that Paulding and Secretary of War Poinsett had failed to give him a rank commensurate with his responsibilities as leader of the Expedition. It was inevitable that a man of Wilkes’s temperament would turn his hurt and frustration on his senior lieutenants, and it was with the dismissal of Craven and Lee that the unraveling of his relationship with his officers began. One can only wonder how differently the voyage might have turned out if the Expedition’s young and insecure commander had been given the rank he deserved at the outset.
     
    Wilkes’s court-martial was scheduled to begin on August 17, just four days after the conclusion of Pinkney’s. In the interim, William Reynolds intended to get married. “I do not expect this announcement to surprise you much,” he wrote his father on August 14, “as I mentioned to you that if I could make such an arrangement, I should adopt it, without delay.” Two days later, Reynolds and