Sea of Glory

annexation of the entire Oregon territory. But once again, events would transpire to distract the American people from a proper appreciation of the Expedition’s findings. Almost coincidental with the appearance of the Narrative was the publication of another account of a government expedition to the American West, this one led by the army officer John C. Frémont. Frémont’s narrative about his overland journey to the Columbia River and then on to California was everything Wilkes’s wasn’t. Ghostwritten by his wife, who had a gift for romantic, overwrought prose, Frémont’s tale involved his readers in a glorious quest to unlock the mysteries of the West, and in the spring of 1845 Frémont gained the kind of fame that Wilkes had been craving all his life.
    Just when he had hoped to command the country’s attention with the publication of his own great book, Wilkes was distressed to discover that his past was about to catch up with him. Not long after the conclusion of his court-martial back in the summer of 1842, the four marines he had confined and repeatedly flogged in Honolulu sued him for damages. Not until two and a half years later, in the spring of 1845, would their case be heard in U.S. Circuit Court in Washington. The trial attracted yet another crowd of Exploring Expedition veterans, but this time, in addition to the officers and scientists, there would be a significant number of marines and sailors in the gallery. After eight days, the jury found that Wilkes had been “justified in all his acts save that of imprisonment in a foreign port and neglect.” Two of the plaintiffs were awarded just $500 in damages.
    The marines were not the only ones who wanted Wilkes to suffer, in some way, for his sins. After a long cruise in the Mediterranean, William Reynolds returned home to discover that Wilkes had maligned him and his fellow officers in his Narrative. Reynolds, with the help of twelve others, would spend the next several months preparing a memorandum to Congress demanding that Wilkes retract the slurs from future editions of his book. The memorandum would eventually be published along with a rebuttal from Wilkes that enraged Reynolds all the more, especially when the Joint Library Committee voted not to alter Wilkes’s Narrative in any way. “[T]he only result of our appeal by Memorial to Congress,” Reynolds complained to James Alfred Pearce, Tappan’s replacement as head of the Library Committee, “has been to afford the person of whose slanders we complained, opportunity to repeat them, with additional grossness, under the sanction of a congressional document.” Reynolds would then embark on yet another refutation of Wilkes’s Narrative that would expand to seventy-eight single-spaced manuscript pages and never be published.
    In June 1846, the Oregon question was finally resolved with the signing of the Buchanan-Pakenham treaty, establishing the boundary between the U.S. and British Canada at the forty-ninth parallel. This compromise was supported by the influential senator Thomas Hart Benton, who happened to be the father-in-law of the explorer John Frémont. Benton took an active role in touting Frémont’s accomplishments and as part of this promotional campaign felt compelled to question and criticize the explorer he viewed as one of his son-in-law’s chief rivals—Charles Wilkes. In his Narrative, Wilkes had insisted that the mouth of the Columbia River was exceedingly dangerous. Benton, on the other hand, was convinced that the river provided a safe and accessible anchorage. In the summer of 1846 he put together a pamphlet attacking Wilkes’s claims, and since it offered an opportunity to malign Wilkes, Reynolds, along with the other two officers from the Flying Fish, gladly agreed to contribute to the publication.
    Reynolds knew better than anyone that the bar was a frightful piece of water, and yet for the purposes of the pamphlet he was willing to state that “By the erection of a few plain and conspicuous beacons, the sailing directions for the Columbia will be more simple, and may be more easily comprehended, than those for the principal seaports on our eastern coast.” That the entrance to the Columbia River is regarded to this day as one of the most dangerous in the world is a disturbing indication of how severely Reynolds’s judgment had been distorted by his feelings for the leader of the Ex. Ex. In response, Wilkes would publish a cool and devastating letter