Sea of Glory

vessels intended for other stations. He took particular delight in securing the plushly appointed Vanderbilt. “This is the vessel for me,” he wrote his wife. “She has speed and all the appliances for comforts I am entitled to.”
    He also repeatedly violated the neutrality of ports throughout the Caribbean, and soon Washington was swamped with protests from Spain, France, Denmark, Mexico, and Britain. The final straw, as far as Welles was concerned, was Wilkes’s apparent greed. Instead of searching out raiders, he spent most of his time taking blockade-runners. Since each captured vessel earned him a significant amount of prize money, he was, he boasted to his wife, “filling my pockets” even as he served his country. But on June 1, 1863, Welles chose to recall him. In his annual report, the secretary chastised the former hero for detaining the Vanderbilt when she might have otherwise succeeded in taking the Alabama. Furious at this public censure, Wilkes wrote Welles a scathing letter of protest. When Wilkes sent the letter to The New York Times, the secretary ordered an inquiry and eventually a court-martial. Wilkes was found guilty on all counts and suspended for three years from the navy. Lincoln commuted his sentence to one year, but Wilkes would never again see active duty.
     
    When the war broke out, William Reynolds returned as quickly as he could to Washington. His health was still poor, but he desperately wanted to serve his country. He spent much of 1862 in a frantic search for a cure, visiting doctors in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Newport. In October he was made a commander on the reserve list and assigned to the storeship Vermont at Port Royal. In the summer of 1863, he learned that his brother John, now a general, had been killed during the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. About this time, Reynolds’s health miraculously began to improve. By the end of the war, his weight had climbed from a low of just 123 pounds to 188. He was put back on the active list, and in the next ten years he would more than make up for the time he had lost to tuberculosis.
    Promoted to captain, he was put in command of the Lackawanna and ordered to set sail for the Pacific. On August 28, 1867, 1,134 miles to the west of Hawaii, he claimed the Midway Islands—discovered just eight years before by American mariners—for the United States. With the advent of steam power, coaling stations became a priority for a nation with global ambitions. It was the first time, Reynolds proudly pointed out, that his country had “added to the domain of the United States beyond our own shores, and I sincerely hope that this instance will by no means be the last of our insular annexations.”
    Once back in Washington in 1869, he would be named president of ordnance; in 1873 he was promoted to rear admiral; twice he would serve as acting secretary of the navy. His meteoric rise to the top of his profession was capped by his being named commander of the Asiatic Station. His flagship, the 3,281-ton Tennessee, displaced more than the entire squadron of the U.S. Ex. Ex.
    At some point, Reynolds was moved to return to the journals he had kept during the Exploring Expedition. At the end of his private journal, he made a list of the officers with whom he had served. His friend William May, he noted, had died in 1861; Henry Eld, with whom he had first sighted Antarctica, had died of yellow fever in 1850, as had the surgeon John Whittle; his friend James Alden had been named a commodore in 1866. Reynolds did not have the space to note that Alden had served with Farragut at the battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. Alden was leading the fleet in the attack when he saw a ship ahead of him hit a mine (then known as a torpedo) and begin to sink. Instead of continuing on, Alden—as he had done on the beach at Malolo—hesitated. In command of the ship behind him was Admiral Farragut, who shouted out, according to legend, “Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead!”
    Reynolds noted that Overton Carr had been “Disgraced during the war 1864.” The conchologist Joseph Couthouy was “killed 1863 in the Service.” A host of others, including Robert Pinkney and George Sinclair, had become “Rebels.” His friend Charles Guillou had eventually settled down as a pharmacist in New York City. In addition to himself, a significant number of the officers would reach the rank of admiral—Alden, Emmons, Case, Craven, and Lee. Then, of course, there was