Sea of Glory

the Expedition’s commander.
     
    Soon after the war, Wilkes bought fourteen thousand acres of land in Gaston County, North Carolina, that contained an ironworks. It proved to be a bad investment, and in January 1874 the property was sold at auction. During this period, he took up, once again, the cause of the Expedition’s reports. He was able to secure a small amount of funding to publish his own Hydrography and a botany report, but when in 1876 the Library Committee requested that it “be removed from its responsibility for the work,” the publications of the U.S. Ex. Ex. came to an official halt.
    Left unpublished was a huge report on fishes, to which the noted Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz had devoted the last years of his life. For the most part, however, the unfinished reports represented no great loss to science, even if Wilkes told his son Jack that his Physics volume would have been the most important of the Expedition’s publications. This seems to have been yet another one of his hollow boasts. His Hydrography report had contained several misguided theories about winds and current, and soon after the Expedition’s return, the British pendulum expert Francis Baily had informed Wilkes that based on the data he had sent him, he could only conclude that Wilkes had made some modification to his pendulum that had ruined his results. This meant that his heroic climb up Mauna Loa had been all for nothing. No wonder Wilkes had taken so long to finish his report on Physics.
    Instead of science, Wilkes devoted most of his energies after the war to his own legacy. For four years he would write obsessively about his past. His Autobiography is a fascinating document in which his paranoia, vanity, and vindictiveness are given full play. To the very end, Wilkes remained incapable of controlling his worst impulses, and the big book that was to redeem his reputation stands as a monument of an altogether different sort, ending, in typical fashion, with a tirade against Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. On February 8, 1877, at the age seventy-eight, Wilkes died at his home on Lafayette Square. Many obituaries referred to him as the hero of the Trent Affair but made no mention of his having led the U.S. Exploring Expedition.
     
    In the same year that Charles Wilkes died, William Reynolds suffered a seizure at Yokohama, Japan. He and Rebecca returned to their house on H Street in Washington, just three blocks from his former commander’s residence on Lafayette Square. Reynolds died two years later at the age of sixty-three.
    Unlike Wilkes, the Stormy Petrel who was always in some kind of trouble with his superiors, Reynolds ended his career as the consummate insider. The Navy Department appointed a committee of admirals, who, accompanied by a marine band, transported Reynolds’s coffin to the Washington train station, where it began the long journey home. Once in Lancaster, his body lay in state in the full dress uniform of an admiral, with the ensign from the Tennessee draped over the coffin. A long line of carriages followed the hearse to the cemetery, where Reynolds was laid to rest beside his brother John. Like Wilkes before him, his obituary would speak of all that he had done during the Civil War and after, but make no mention of the voyage that had meant so much to him.
     
    It was left to Charlie Erskine, the cabin boy who had almost dropped a belaying pin on Wilkes’s head, to have the last word. In 1890, he published a book, Twenty Years Before the Mast —quite an accomplishment for a retired sailor who had been unable to read or write when the Expedition began. Charlie had a series of cards printed up, in which he described himself as “one of two survivors of the U.S. Exploring Expedition around the world, 1838-42, under Com. Charles Wilkes.” He also had his own personal collection of Expedition artifacts that included nine war clubs from Fiji that he had procured from the Smithsonian back in 1859.
    Charlie’s book revealed a side of the Expedition that would have otherwise been lost. For Wilkes and Reynolds, the Ex. Ex. had been about the officers who led it, not the lowly sailors who did most of the work. Reynolds was made livid with rage when Wilkes refused to treat him like a gentleman, but showed no concern for the sailors who were whipped on an almost daily basis. When a reform movement threatened to do away with corporal punishment in the 1840s, Reynolds wrote the Navy Department, insisting that