Sea of Glory

next few years on a one-hundred-acre farm on the island of Kauai.
    Reynolds would eventually try to return to active duty on a storeship in Valparaiso, but poor health once again required him to return to Hawaii, where he assumed the post of naval storekeeper at Honolulu. By now, both his parents were dead, and he had come into a modest inheritance. In Honolulu he met up with an old friend from the Exploring Expedition. In 1852 Charles Guillou resigned his commission to become head of Honolulu’s Marine Hospital, and the two former explorers would live out the decade together in the tropical setting they had first come to know with the U.S. Ex. Ex.
     
    By the summer of 1848, Charles and Jane Wilkes had become one of Washington’s more socially prominent couples. In December of 1845, they held a party to celebrate the publication of Wilkes’s Narrative that attracted some of the city’s most distinguished citizens. But it was just one of the many social engagements that had become a regular part of their lives together. As if to compensate for their four-year separation during the Expedition, Jane was almost always at her husband’s side. “[H]er gay & pleasant manner made her popular in the Society,” Wilkes wrote. “We really had a . . . delightful time.”
    That summer, however, they decided to spend a few months apart. Jack had recently enrolled in the new Naval Academy at Annapolis. Jane and the girls, now seventeen and ten, wanted to spend the summer in Newport, Rhode Island, while Wilkes determined to take his youngest boy, Edmund, on a trip to North Carolina. He and Jane had recently inherited a portion of a mining operation near Charlotte, and Wilkes and Edmund would use it as an excuse to tour the South. After inspecting the mine, they would head north and meet up with the rest of the family in Newport.
    For the trip, Wilkes purchased “a very nice traveling wagon” that he outfitted with shelves and boxes for provisions, clothes, and books. “Our intention was to travel from point to point,” he wrote, “and picnic the whole way.” After saying good-bye to Jane and the girls at the train station in Washington, they made their gradual way south, pulled along by two cream-colored horses. By August they had arrived in North Carolina.
    Unbeknownst to Wilkes, Jane had fallen while changing trains in Trenton, New Jersey, and badly hurt her leg. A doctor in New York insisted that it was only a bruise, but several weeks later in Newport, Jane began to feel ill. She took to her bed, and three days later was dead—the apparent victim of blood poisoning.
    Wilkes was at the mine when he saw his fifteen-year-old son coming toward him on horseback. “It was a damp muggy day,” he remembered, “calculated to depress the spirits of any one.” Edmund had picked up a packet of letters in Charlotte, and when Wilkes reached for them, he felt a sudden twinge of fear. “I broke the seals and my worst apprehensions were realized—she had died in New Port about a week before.” Unable to read any further, Wilkes gave the letters to his son, saying, “We have lost everything, our best and dearest object in Life.” Once back in their hotel room in Charlotte, Wilkes sat on his bed, unable to speak, as Edmund clung to him and wept. “My brain seemed on fire . . . ,” he wrote. “I felt shipwrecked indeed.”
    In 1852, four years after Jane’s death, Wilkes moved his family to a house on Lafayette Square that had once been owned by Dolley Madison. That same year he returned to Newport to tend to Jane’s grave, where he planted some of her favorite flowers. Back in Washington, he realized that he was in need of a change. “I was very dispirited . . . ,” he wrote. “My dear Girls were all in all to me, but they could not supply the want and prevent the desolation I felt, and it became evident to me that a new life was essential to my happiness.”
    Living nearby in Washington was a young widow named Mary Lynch Bolton, whose husband, Commodore William Bolton, had served on Wilkes’s court-martial board. Bolton had died about the same time Wilkes had lost Jane, and the widower now began to consider the widow as a possible bride. “I often trembled for my success,” he wrote, “and finally through my perseverance succeeded in being accepted. A new life at once opened to me.” Eliza took to her new mother immediately; Janey was initially less receptive, but soon all of them had settled into a contented