Sea of Glory

leisure with time to dabble in their favorite disciplines. This meant that someone such as Thomas Jefferson could not only be president of the United States, he could also be one of the foremost scientists in America. No American college offered what we would call today a proper, specialized scientific education. Someone seeking instruction sought out an expert in his field of interest—like Jane’s older brother James Renwick, a professor at Columbia College. One of the premier engineers in the United States, Renwick played a large role in Wilkes’s education, offering instruction in topics such as astronomy and magnetism as well as introducing him to America’s most passionate practitioner of geodesy (the study of the size and shape of the earth), Ferdinand Hassler.
    Prior to the War of 1812, the Swiss-born Hassler had been appointed to head the survey of the Atlantic coast—a monumental undertaking for which there was an acute and immediate need. There were no updated charts of the thousands of miles of bays, inlets, and beaches extending from Maine to Florida. In many regions, mariners were still relying on charts created by the British navy prior to the Revolution. But Hassler was much more than a surveyor; he was a proud geodesist who insisted on using the finest instruments from Europe and the latest trigonometric principles to create a survey that would not only be of immense practical benefit but would also represent an important contribution to science.
    Such an approach took an enormous amount of time and money relative to the slapdash and often inaccurate chronometric surveys that the nation had, up until this point, relied upon. Hassler’s system was based on the creation of a series of huge triangles extending along the entire coastline of the United States. Within these triangles, with sides of approximately thirty miles in length, smaller triangles would be determined, creating the network of reference points required to survey the coast. Before this could be accomplished, however, two baselines of almost nine miles in length had to be established with an accuracy never before achieved in America.
    After several years of labor, Hassler had laid the groundwork for a first-rate survey of the coast but had not yet produced a chart. Members of Congress began to insist on tangible results. Hassler’s imperious and condescending attitude toward anyone who dared question his methods meant that it was only a matter of time before Congress voted to withdraw its support of the Coast Survey, at least as Hassler had conceived of it, in 1818.
    When Wilkes met him in the 1820s, Hassler was struggling to support his large family. With the assistance of Renwick, he had been able to secure some surveying work in the New York area; he also relied on Wilkes’s uncle, the banker, to secure emergency loans, using his vast scientific library as collateral. “His forehead was high and his whole expression intellectual,” Wilkes remembered. “He was very slovenly in his attire, very old fashioned.” Long before there was a national university system to support what would become known as the “mad professor,” there was Ferdinand Hassler, and for a number of years he became Wilkes’s most influential role model.
    In Hassler, Wilkes found a man who refused to succumb to America’s long-standing suspicion of the intellectual. “[H]e had a peculiar tone of voice, crackling and Sarcastic, and with a conceit in his knowledge over those who were ignorant of Scientific principles.” Although Wilkes saw himself as the rational one in his dealings with the irascible Hassler, the young naval officer seems to have internalized his master’s uncompromising arrogance and almost frantic excitability. Just as the strong-willed Hassler had a tendency to create controversy everywhere he went, so would Wilkes develop a similar reputation for inciting turmoil.
     
    Wilkes wanted desperately to be a member of Jeremiah Reynolds’s proposed exploring expedition. His unusual naval career was, he felt, ideally suited to such a voyage. In addition to his proven navigational skills and surveying lessons with Hassler, his brother-in-law James Renwick had instructed him in the secrets of the pendulum, a finely tuned instrument used on previous European expeditions to help determine the force of gravity. The fact of the matter remained, however, that Wilkes had not yet established any kind of scientific or, for that matter, naval