Sea of Glory

establishing diplomatic relations with Japan in 1853, the navy, with the assistance of the Smithsonian and the Coast Survey, sent out an exploring expedition to the North Pacific, led by Wilkes’s former lieutenant Cadwalader Ringgold. In many ways it was the Ex. Ex. redux. Included in the squadron of five vessels were the Vincennes and the Porpoise . There was a botanist named Charles Wright. And like its great predecessor, the North Pacific Expedition would be controversial. Once in China, Ringgold began to act strangely. Instead of pushing on to the north, he remained in port, ceaselessly repairing his vessels. Finally, Commodore Perry, just back from Japan, interceded and, declaring Ringgold “insane,” relieved him of command.
    Wilkes’s beloved Porpoise would be lost with all hands in a typhoon, but Charles Wright eventually returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Asa Gray was given the opportunity to examine the botanist’s notes. Gray recognized similarities between several Japanese plants described by Wright and those from the East Coast of the United States. The evidence seemed clear that these species of plants—from opposite sides of the earth—had at some point in the distant past come from a common ancestor. Several years later, in 1858, when Darwin sent Gray advance proofs of On the Origin of Species , Gray recognized that his own observations validated Darwin’s work, and he would become America’s foremost promoter of the theory of evolution.
     
    Cadwalader Ringgold was not the only Ex. Ex. officer who would lead a major naval operation in the years preceding the Civil War. Soon after the discovery of gold in California, James Alden returned to his old haunts in California and the Pacific Northwest and expanded on the Expedition’s original surveying efforts, this time under the aegis of the Coast Survey. In 1857-58, William Hudson commanded the steamer Niagara in an unsuccessful attempt to lay the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean.
    During the 1850s America became involved in an English obsession: the hunt for the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin, who had sailed in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage and never returned. In the years after Franklin’s disappearance, many English explorers, including Wilkes’s old rivals James Ross and Edward Belcher, led expeditions into the Arctic, their efforts encouraged by Franklin’s widow and the offer of prize money. It had been briefly rumored that Wilkes would lead an American voyage to find Franklin, but his health and personal situation precluded it. Instead, Lieutenant Edwin DeHaven, the same man whose inclusion in the Ex. Ex. at Callao had so angered Wilkes’s junior officers, led a privately financed two-vessel expedition north. In a conscious evocation of America’s first Exploring Expedition, DeHaven was given an ensign from the Peacock. Whether or not the flag of the wrecked exploring vessel proved a curse, this and the next four U.S. voyages to the Arctic—all of which took along the Peacock ’s flag—would be, in varying degrees, unsuccessful.
    DeHaven’s surgeon was a dashing, physically frail aristocrat from Philadelphia named Elisha Kent Kane. Even though the expedition accomplished little, Kane wrote a narrative of his experiences amid the arctic ice that became a best-seller. In the tradition of Frémont (or at least of Frémont’s wife), Kane’s book made real the weird and frightening world of a wilderness. He also wrote quickly, and he was soon on his way back into the northern ice in 1853, this time as the expedition’s commander. Kane proved to be a far worse leader of men than even Wilkes, but he did not have to suffer the indignity of a court-martial. After being saved by a rescue ship commanded by yet another Ex. Ex. veteran, Lieutenant H. J. Hartstene (sent home by Wilkes aboard the Relief ), Kane set to work on Arctic Explorations in the Years 1853, 54, 55. The public was enthralled, and Arctic Explorations became one of the biggest selling travel books of all time.
    Once again, Wilkes watched as another explorer received the accolades that had been denied him. At least he could take some consolation in knowing that the U.S. Exploring Expedition was now almost universally referred to (when, of course, it was referred to at all) as the Wilkes Expedition. Still, deep down he knew that he had never achieved the fame he had originally envisioned for himself as a boy in New York. Then, in