Sea of Glory

an officer’s “power resides alone in the prompt & certain application of the lash.”
    Charlie, needless to say, had a very different attitude toward the lash, and Twenty Years Before the Mast stands as a testament to the countless sailors who suffered in anonymity. “As the sailor lives, so he dies,” he wrote in the final chapter. “There is no audience but those who share his dangers. He lies down afar from home and friends, with no one to tell to the world the story of his battles, so bravely fought, though lost; no one to witness his suffering, or note the courage with which he faced his last moment.”
    With the publication of his book, Charlie had ensured that at least one sailor’s story would not be forgotten. Fifty-three years after Wilkes had callously whipped this handsome and trusting boy, a kind of justice had at last been served.

Epilogue
    FOR YEARS TO COME mariners around the world would rely on the charts of the U.S. Exploring Expedition. The British and French governments incorporated Wilkes surveys into the charts issued by their hydrographic offices. As late as the 1920s, the U.S. Navy was still using Wilkes charts of the Pacific. During World War II, when battle plans were being drawn up for the invasion of a speck of coral known as Tarawa, it was discovered that the only available chart of the island was made by the Ex. Ex. more than a hundred years before.
    And yet, when it came to what Wilkes considered “the greatest discovery of the century,” his efforts were almost universally dismissed well into the 1900s. In truth, Wilkes hadn’t technically discovered Antarctica since British and American sealers had glimpsed, and even ventured on, the Antarctic Peninsula as early as the 1820s, if not before. What Wilkes had done was much more difficult. By mapping a 1,500-mile section of coastline, he became the first to provide compelling evidence that a continent existed.
    Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding Wilkes’s court-martial made it impossible for his own country to take any pride in his accomplishment. Then, in 1847, Wilkes’s British rival James Ross published a narrative of his own voyage south. Taking up where the doubts raised by the court-martial had left off, Ross questioned whether Wilkes had really found a continent. “I feel myself quite unable to determine in a satisfactory manner,” he wrote, “how much of the land was really seen by him with the degree of certainty that gives indisputable authority to discovery.” Ross was willing to credit Dumont d’Urville (who died in a tragic train accident soon after his return to Paris) with having set foot on land (whether it was a continent or an island remained to be seen), but he refused to acknowledge any of Wilkes’s claims.
    With the exception of the Expedition’s own charts, no British or American maps referred to Wilkes’s findings throughout the 1860s. If it hadn’t been for German mapmakers, who were the only ones to record the American claims and adopted the name of Wilkes Land, all trace of Wilkes’s achievement might have been lost. Even as a series of British and Australian explorers—including Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Douglas Mawson—walked across the continent that Ross had thought did not exist, Wilkes received no credit for his discoveries. What these explorers only gradually came to appreciate was the difficulty of judging distances in the clear, dust-free atmosphere of Antarctica. Objects that look just three to four miles away can be as many as thirty to forty miles distant. There is also the phenomenon of “looming,” in which a temporary refraction of light makes it possible to see objects that are far below the horizon—sometimes as many as two hundred miles away. When in 1929 Mawson returned to a section of Wilkes Land that he had charted the year before, he was dismayed to discover that he had been off by as many as seventy miles in latitude. By this time the coordinates of many of Ross’s land-sightings had also proved in error, and Mawson would begrudgingly acknowledge that Wilkes “had come in for an undue amount of censure.”
    Finally, in 1958-59, the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition made an aerial reconnaissance of a portion of Wilkes Land. As was to be expected, it was found that Wilkes had consistently underestimated the distance between the Vincennes and the coast. However, where he had been able to get close to land, in the case of the