Sea of Glory

spray of metal fragments into the crowd. Wilkes ran forward to offer assistance and soon discovered that Upshur and seven others had been killed. “He went to his [grave] with all his Sins upon him,” Wilkes wrote, “and I admit I could not mourn his loss.”
     
    While Wilkes wrote the text, Joseph Drayton assembled the hundreds of illustrations that would grace the Expedition’s narrative—steel engravings and woodcuts based on paintings and drawings by the artist Alfred Agate, who often worked from sketches provided by the Expedition’s officers, as well as the naturalist Titian Peale. The Library Committee had decided that the five volumes of Wilkes’s narrative were to be volumes of the highest possible quality. Bound in dark green morocco, hand-sewn and gilt-edged, they were to be stamped in gold with the seal of the United States. The Committee insisted that only a hundred copies of the narrative be published, making them, according to the estimates of one historian, “some of the most expensive books in the history of American printing.”
    Recognizing an opportunity for personal gain, Wilkes insisted that the narrative be copyrighted in his name and that he be given free use of the illustrations in future editions. Since the government had paid for the Expedition, as well as for the writing and illustration of the book, many naval officers viewed this as an outrageous windfall for Wilkes, especially when his own commercial edition of the narrative appeared almost simultaneously with the publication of the government’s edition. However, when the matter was finally investigated by Congress, Wilkes was allowed to keep his copyright.
    Upon the publication of the Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition in the fall of 1844, many navy officers were shocked to discover that Wilkes had used an official publication of the government to excoriate some of the very same officers upon whom the success of the Expedition had depended. Lieutenant Alden, who had dared to deny seeing Antarctica on the morning of January 19, was a particular target. Wilkes even suggested that Alden was responsible for the death of Underwood and Henry. He also felt compelled to pad the book with information from secondary sources, much of it with little or no bearing on the voyage.
    And yet there were times when the narrative would take flight, especially when Wilkes quoted freely, but often without attribution, from the journals of his more articulate officers and scientists. Even his own prose could sometimes rise to the occasion. His description of the battle to survey the Antarctic coast is riveting. His description of the burial of Underwood and Henry is wonderfully sad. But these patches of clarity only made it all the more achingly obvious how good a book this could have been. “A work of oppressive dimensions has been constructed,” wrote the naval officer Charles Davis in the North American Review, “and the real narrative of the cruise, a story of surpassing interest, is crushed under a weight of irrelevant matter.”
    Despite its failings, Wilkes’s Narrative garnered plenty of positive reviews and sold surprisingly well; fourteen different editions would be published in the years prior to the Civil War. The book would also have an impact on some of America’s most important and influential writers. James Fenimore Cooper, an old family friend of the Wilkeses, would integrate information from the Narrative into at least two of his sea novels. Herman Melville would purchase his own set of Wilkes’s work, and scholars have found traces of the U.S. Exploring Expedition throughout his masterpiece Moby-Dick. Melville appears to have been most taken with the book’s illustrations. For example, his description of Ishmael’s Polynesian companion Queequeg has been attributed to an engraving of a tattooed Maori chief in volume two. In an age before the widespread use of photography, the pages of the Narrative provided a visual link with the exotic world of the South Pacific (as well as Antarctica and the Pacific Northwest) that no other American book could match.
    For many readers, it was Wilkes’s description of the Oregon territory and California that was of the greatest interest. James Polk had won the presidential election in 1844, partly on the basis of the expansionist slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight,” which as Wilkes had urged two years earlier in his repressed report to Congress, called for the