Sea of Glory

space in the newly built Patent Office Building. He then hired a curator and staff to begin the job of unpacking the Expedition’s crates and preparing the specimens for display. But as soon as Wilkes arrived in Washington, he realized that the Institute had made a mess of the collections. Prior to being shipped to the United States, each crate of specimens had been carefully catalogued using a color-coded number and letter system that keyed the objects to the scientists’ field notes. Since the Institute’s curator was without the catalogue lists, he had no way of determining what was in each crate unless he opened it up and looked inside. Soon the Expedition’s collections were in chaos. Titian Peale was horrified to find that a taxidermist had combined the skins of a male and female bird of the same species into a single bird. James Dana discovered that some of the more delicate marine organisms he had collected had been taken out of their bottles of preservative, dried, and then stuck with pins.
    Even though the Institute’s curator was fired in September and Charles Pickering was brought on to supervise the collection, Wilkes and the scientists remained leery. For his part, Senator Tappan believed that the Expedition’s collection should remain a government-subsidized entity unto itself, and he secured the necessary funding from Congress for that. Pickering began to reassemble the Expedition’s scientists in Washington. Soon they were unpacking the collections and preparing the objects for exhibition in the Patent Office’s huge, 265-foot-long Great Hall.
    Pickering provided an early and much-needed rallying point for the Expedition’s scientists, but he had little interest in being the head of what was rapidly becoming the country’s first national museum. Pickering was a scientist, not a curator. It wasn’t the objects themselves that were important, he insisted, it was the knowledge that could be derived from those objects. In Pickering’s view, the Expedition’s greatest achievements were yet to come since a scientist’s true role was not simply to collect and exhibit objects, but to study them. In July, Pickering resigned as superintendent of the collection so that he could continue researching the book he was planning to write about the races of man.
    Tappan immediately replaced Pickering with Wilkes. As his conduct on the voyage amply demonstrated, Wilkes had no apparent fear of overcommitting himself. In addition to writing the narrative, he was also directing the production of the Expedition’s charts—yet another enormous task for which he had assembled a team of officers that included Expedition veterans Thomas Budd, Overton Carr, Joseph Totten, Frederick Stewart, the artist Joseph Drayton, and eventually Henry Eld. Undaunted by his already considerable responsibilities, Wilkes took charge of the exhibition in the Great Hall of the Patent Office.
    One of Wilkes’s first acts was the installation of a sign over the hall’s entrance that read COLLECTION OF THE EXPLORING EXPEDITION in large gold letters. He then went about overhauling the exhibits—moving the cases into areas of the hall with better light and posting signs that helped visitors find their way around this huge room of specimens and artifacts. Accustomed to the immaculate condition of a man-of-war, Wilkes showed little tolerance for visitors who insisted on using chewing tobacco in this hall of wonders. When the placement of spittoons at the base of columns did little to keep the tobacco juice off the floor, he hired a man, equipped him with a bowl of water and a large sponge, and directed him to follow anyone who dared chew “the weed.” “No party could withstand the operation of the man with the sponge,” Wilkes proudly reported, “and the custom was greatly abated if not wholly abolished and the Hall kept clean.”
    The Collection of the Exploring Expedition became wildly popular. Over the course of the next decade, more than a hundred thousand people made their way each year to the Patent Office. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was in town on a speaking engagement, judged the exhibit to be, with the sole exception of the Capitol building, “the best sight in Washington.”
    In the back of the Patent Office Building was a greenhouse, where William Brackenridge presided over hundreds of living plants. Many influential Washingtonians, including President Tyler’s wife, assumed that these tropical seedlings would be made