Sea of Glory

that used testimony from the officers’ own journals against them.
    The continuing battle between Wilkes and his officers would take on another even more distressing dimension. Soon after the death of Underwood and Henry in Fiji, the officers had created a fund to build a monument to their fallen comrades. Wilkes’s family desperately wanted the monument to be located at a cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, so that Henry’s mother and sister might regularly view it. The officers, however, insisted that the twenty-foot-high white marble obelisk be constructed at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since it was closer to Underwood’s widow. This skirmish would go to the officers.
     
    With the publication of his narrative behind him, Wilkes turned his attention not only to writing his own scientific reports, which included his two-volume atlas of charts and the volumes on Meteorology, Hydrography, and Physics, but to overseeing the publication of the other fourteen reports. It would become a lifelong endeavor. When Senator Tappan retired as chairman of the Library Committee in 1846, congressional funding for the reports became harder and harder to find. “I had more trouble and difficulty in securing the appropriation annually,” Wilkes wrote, “than I experienced in the command of the Expedition.”
    A nation that had prided itself in its democratic scorn of book-learning was reluctant to acknowledge that publishing volumes about “bugs, reptiles, etc.” was a necessary expense. When asked to vote on yet another appropriation to pay for the seemingly never-ending publications of the Exploring Expedition, one vexed senator complained, “I am tired of all this thing called science here.” But for decade after decade, the U.S. Ex. Ex. would not go away. Wilkes’s relentless and combative personality was perfectly suited to being a nettle in the side of government. He would often be as much of an annoyance to the scientists he was supposedly championing as he would be to the congressmen he hounded for appropriations, but it is doubtful whether there was anyone else in America who could have accomplished so much.
    With the appearance of each new scientific report, the status of the United States in the international scientific community (once nearly nonexistent) would climb a little higher. In its reliance on fieldwork unhindered by the usual Victorian biases, Horatio Hale’s report on languages broke new ground in what would eventually become known as the field of ethnography. James Dwight Dana proved to be the “racer” of the scientists, publishing four comprehensive and essential reports over an eleven-year period. His report on Crustacea, in which he identified more than five hundred new species of lobsters, crabs, shrimps, and barnacles, would reinvent the field. Charles Darwin offered Dana his highest praise, insisting that if Dana had “done nothing else whatever, it would have been a magnum opus for life. . . . I am really lost in astonishment at what you have done in mental labor. And, then beside the labor, so much originality in all your works.” What makes this all the more remarkable is that Dana, who would eventually become a professor at Yale, was a geologist. When it came to his volume on geology, in which he offered evidence to support Darwin’s theory about the formation of coral atolls, the response was just as enthusiastic. The German Alexander von Humboldt, whose expedition to South America at the end of the eighteenth century had inspired generations of explorers and scientists, claimed that Dana’s work represented “the most splendid contribution to science of the present day.”
    Not all of the reports came as quickly or were as well received. Charles Pickering’s long-awaited The Races of Man was judged by Oliver Wendell Holmes to be “the oddest collection of fragments that was ever seen, . . . amorphous as a fog, unstratified as a dumpling and heterogeneous as a low priced sausage.” At Wilkes’s insistence, Titian Peale’s Zoology would be withdrawn prior to publication in 1848 due to its many taxonomical errors. Ten years later, once the volume had been overhauled by John Cassin of the Academy of Natural Science, the report was reissued as Mammology and Ornithology. It has since been called “a triumph of new science.” The biggest disappointment of the scientific corps would be the botanist William Rich, who lacked the erudition and analytical skills to