Sea of Glory

1838.
    Wilkes knew that his book constituted just a small part of the work that lay ahead. No one had anticipated that one voyage could have possibly generated such a massive amount of material. The number of ethnographic objects alone was staggering: four thousand pieces, a third more than the total number of artifacts collected during all three of Cook’s voyages. Indeed, the ethnographic collection of the U.S. Ex. Ex.—including war clubs from Fiji, feathered baskets from California, exquisitely carved rattles from the Northwest Coast, fishhooks from Samoa, and flax baskets from New Zealand—is now thought to be, according to anthropologist Adrienne Kaeppler, the largest ever made by a single sailing expedition.
    Even larger than the ethnographic collection was the number of pressed plants accumulated by the botanist William Rich, the horticulturalist William Brackenridge, and the naturalist Charles Pickering: 50,000 specimens of 10,000 species. There were also more than a thousand living plants, plus seeds for an additional 648 species. Titian Peale had brought back a total of 2,150 birds, their skins ready to be mounted for display, along with 134 mammals and 588 species of fish. The geologist James Dana, who had also taken over the department of the conchologist Joseph Couthouy, had collected 300 fossil species, 400 species of coral, and 1,000 species of crustacea, along with what was described as an “immense” number of duplicates. There were 208 “spirit jars” of insects and zoological specimens, along with 895 envelopes containing 5,100 larger specimens.
    In addition to all the stuff brought back by the Expedition, there was an equally awe-inspiring amount of data. The Expedition’s linguist Horatio Hale had amassed notebooks of observations that were unprecedented in their scope and thoroughness, while the naturalist Charles Pickering’s voluminous and wide-ranging journal stood as a monument to the incredible diversity of the peoples and places visited over the last four years. Then there were the charts—a total of 241 of them, outdoing the achievements of any previous surveying expedition. Laid down in these charts, with a precision rarely before seen, were 280 Pacific islands, including the first complete chart of the Fiji Group; 800 miles of the Oregon coast; a 100-mile stretch of the Columbia River; the overland route from Oregon to San Francisco; and 1,500 miles of the Antarctic coast. But Wilkes and his officers had also assembled mountains of meteorological, astronomical, magnetic, and oceanographic information. “The results of the expedition were larger and more complex than anyone could have imagined,” writes William Goetzmann, the foremost historian of American exploration, “and they outran the intellectual resources of the country.”
    In 1842, the United States lacked the national institutions required to store, analyze, interpret, and display a collection of this magnitude. In truth, even the most scientifically advanced nations in the world, Germany, France, and England, would have been hard-pressed to handle the returns of the U.S. Ex. Ex. But there was reason for hope. In 1838 an emissary had arrived in New York with the proceeds from the estate left by the Englishman James Smithson for the establishment of a new kind of institution. Beyond Smithson’s stipulation that his money—more than half a million dollars in gold coin (worth approximately eleven million in today’s dollars)—be used for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” no one was sure what this institution should be. Some argued that it should be a national observatory; others said it should be a university, a library, perhaps a museum. A stalemate ensued and the Smithson bequest lay idle. In an attempt to force Congress’s hand, former secretary of war Joel Poinsett created the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, the organization that hosted Wilkes’s first lecture about the voyage. Central to Poinsett’s ambitions for his fledgling institute were the collections of the U.S. Ex. Ex. If he could establish the Institute as the collections’ caretaker, he was hopeful that he could persuade Congress to assign the interest from the Smithson bequest to the Institute, which would then become, by default, the nation’s museum.
    Poinsett, with the help of outgoing secretary of the navy Paulding, arranged for the Expedition’s collections to be directed to Washington, where he secured