Sea of Glory

tackle a collection as big as the Expedition’s. The botany reports would eventually be divided up among close to half a dozen different scientists, with the renowned Asa Gray taking the leading role.
    Gray had almost shipped out with the squadron in 1838, but the offer of a professorship at the University of Michigan had given him second thoughts. In the years since, he had moved to Harvard and established himself as America’s preeminent botanist. His high professional standing meant that he had little tolerance for what one scientist called Wilkes’s “quarter deck insolence.” As had been the case during the Expedition, Wilkes could be infuriatingly dictatorial and obtuse, but in just about every instance, the scientists finally succeeded in getting their way.
    There is no question that Wilkes’s unceasing advocacy of the Expedition’s publications contributed to a growing realization in Washington that scientific pursuits such as geology, botany, anthropology, and meteorology were crucial to the progress of the nation. Almost in spite of itself, Congress began to see the wisdom and necessity of paying for expeditions on a scale that would have been inconceivable in the era of Lewis and Clark. As the country’s population moved west, so did a succession of sophisticated surveying expeditions, all of which, in the tradition of America’s first exploring and surveying expedition, took along at least one scientist. Between 1840 and 1860, the federal government would publish sixty works associated with the exploration of the West while subsidizing fifteen naval expeditions around the world. The expenditure for these expeditions and other scientific publications would be enormous, representing somewhere between one-quarter to one-third of the annual federal budget. Not even the race to the moon in the 1960s generated a financial commitment to science that rivaled the decades after the U.S. Ex. Ex.
    Gradually, but inevitably, the Exploring Expedition would be eclipsed by the very historical forces that it had helped to set in motion. Foreshadowed by Frémont and made an accomplished fact by the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the interest of the American people shifted from the frontier of the sea to the frontier of the West. Instead of whalers, sealers, China traders, and Polynesian natives, it was now mountain men, pioneers, cowboys, and Indians who captured the American imagination. Even though the Ex. Ex. had had such an early and vital role in the exploration of the Oregon territory and California, the nation would quickly lose all memory of the fact that Wilkes and his men had been the first Americans to chart Puget Sound, the Columbia River, and San Francisco Bay. Turning from the oceans of the world, the American people looked to the interior of their own continent, and in the tales of western exploration and conquest that would soon become part of the nation’s mythology there was no place for Wilkes and the U.S. Ex. Ex.

CHAPTER 16
    Legacy
    AT THE OUTBREAK of the Mexican War in 1846, Wilkes was unable to secure a position that he thought commensurate with his standing in the navy and elected to remain in Washington. Reynolds was assigned to the Allegheny, a new steamship that would be plagued with mechanical problems. As he was forced to sit on the sidelines at the navy yard in Norfolk, his old shipmate James Alden took part in the capture of Vera Cruz and Tabasco; William May was wounded in action, while Reynolds’s younger brother John served gloriously at Monterrey and Buena Vista and ended the war as a major.
    After repairs were finally completed in the winter of 1848, the Allegheny steamed for South America. It was during this cruise that Reynolds’s health suddenly began to fail. The constitution that had withstood four years of abuse during the Ex. Ex. fell prey to the unmistakable symptoms of tuberculosis: chills, fever, and night-sweats. His wife Rebecca had recently lost her mother, sister, and brother to the disease. “Wonder if I am to get the Conzumption and die!” he wrote in his journal.
    In the years ahead, Reynolds’s condition would continue to deteriorate. After a winter at a sanatorium in Florida, he requested a year’s leave of absence from the navy, and in September 1851 he set sail for the place that he had called his “second home” during the Exploring Expedition—Hawaii. Rebecca followed a year later, and the couple, who would remain childless, spent the