Sea of Glory

months from the date of the sentence.” Pinkney would also be found guilty and suspended from duty for six months. For Reynolds, the wait for word of Wilkes’s sentence was agonizing. “I shall be in a perfect fever, until I know the result of his sentence,” he wrote his father, “and I shall be like to die if the sentence be not a severe one.”
    On September 22, Upshur issued the verdict. Wilkes was found not guilty on all charges except for illegally flogging the sailors and marines. For that, his only punishment was a public reprimand. “The sentence will astonish you,” Du Pont had written a friend, “but it will be no assessment of the way the man is estimated as a man. ” Reynolds and his friends were thunderstruck, but Wilkes was not about to celebrate. “Wilkes’s extreme arrogance,” Du Pont wrote, “& conviction that he would not only be acquitted, but it would [be] accomplished with a flourish of trumpets & a swipe at his accusers, has thus rendered his sentence doubly severe to himself.”
    Du Pont carefully studied Wilkes’s reaction as the exhausted, sickly, and proud explorer listened to Upshur’s reprimand: “The country which honored you with a command far above the just claims of your rank in the navy, had a right to expect that you would, at least, pay a scrupulous respect to her laws. The rebuke, which by the judgment and advice of your associates in the service, she now gives you, for having violated those laws in an important particular, involving the rights of others of her citizens, will be regarded by all as the mildest form in which she could express her displeasure.”
    “Wilkes was cut to the very soul by his sentence & the wording of the reprimand,” Du Pont wrote. “He writhed severely under it & swears vengeance against Upshur.”
    The voyage had ended; five courts-martial had been heard; but as the Expedition’s scientists and artists were well aware, there was still much work to be done. There were collections to be analyzed, reports to be published, but first and foremost, there was a narrative to be written. The battle for control of the Expedition’s legacy was about to begin. For Charles Wilkes, it would be the battle of his life.

CHAPTER 15
    This Thing Called Science
    IN EUROPE there was a long-standing tradition by which the expedition’s commander penned his own narrative. But Secretary Abel Upshur had other ideas. He had decided that a literary friend of his from Virginia named Robert Greenhow should chronicle the voyage. By this point, Wilkes had gained the support of a new and powerful ally in Senator Benjamin Tappan, a Democrat from Ohio and an amateur conchologist. During a dinner party back in March 1840, Tappan had fallen into conversation with then Secretary of the Navy James Paulding, who had promised some of the Expedition’s shells for the senator’s collection. Whether or not Wilkes ever provided him with the shells, Tappan took up the lieutenant’s cause soon after his arrival in Washington. As chairman of the Senate’s Joint Library Committee, Tappan was in a position to thwart Upshur’s attempts to appoint Greenhow as author of the Expedition’s narrative. With Tappan’s help, Wilkes maintained possession of the officers’ journals and was able to begin work on his book that fall.
    But Upshur wasn’t through with Wilkes yet. At the beginning of the Expedition, Wilkes had instructed his purser to pay him as if he were the captain of a squadron. Soon after his court-martial, he was informed by a naval auditor that he should have been paid as a lieutenant-commandant and that he owed the government more than twelve thousand dollars. “I was well aware it was done with a view of harassing me,” Wilkes wrote. Not until years later, long after Upshur was no longer secretary, was the matter finally settled in Wilkes’s favor.
    Then there was the issue of his promotion. Shortly after his trial had ended, Wilkes mounted an effort to gain his long-anticipated captaincy. Arguing that it was general practice in Europe to reward the commander of a successful expedition, Wilkes pressed hard for the promotion. But Upshur remained unmoved. That fall, Hudson was promoted to commander. But not Wilkes. Not until the following July would Wilkes become a commander. He would have to wait another thirteen years, until September 14, 1855, before he was finally awarded the rank that he had felt was his due when the squadron first sailed in