Sea of Glory

Knox Coast and Piner Bay, his chart had been dead on. What impressed the Australians was the accuracy of Wilkes’s estimate of longitude—an extremely difficult thing to calculate at high latitude, not to mention aboard a storm-tossed sailing vessel. The photographic evidence also indicated that Wilkes had faithfully distinguished between what he took to be the overall contours of a continent and where he had actually seen land. Contrary to Ross’s insistence that his chart was nothing more than a fabrication, Wilkes was found to have “adhered to high standards of cartographic integrity.”
    “After more than a century,” writes Antarctic expert Kenneth Bertrand, “during which disparagement was most often his reward, there can now no longer be any doubt of the greatness of his achievement.”
     
    Wilkes had been his own worst enemy. His aching need for praise and control drove him to some astounding accomplishments but had also led him to commit acts that earned him almost universal censure and scorn. Wilkes needed, more than anything else, someone to rein him in, to be, as he described his wife Jane, “my moderation.” Once the Expedition left Norfolk, Wilkes found himself alone with the torment and compulsions that had seethed within him since childhood. Without Jane to domesticate his demons, he could no longer play the part of the talented, passionate man of good feeling—the role that had won him the affection and loyalty of Reynolds and his fellow officers. He must be who he actually was—a scared and needy lieutenant of very limited experience and nautical ability and yet who yearned to be a hero. If he had any hope of seeing the Expedition to its conclusion, he must reinvent himself. The leader who emerged from the breakdown in Rio de Janeiro was almost unrecognizable to his officers: a haughty, unfeeling tyrant who abused and mocked the very men he had once treated as his friends.
    But would the Expedition have been more successful if it had been led by a cooler, more capable captain? Probably not. The scientist James Dana was in a unique position to judge such things. Prior to the Expedition, he had served as a teacher to midshipmen in the Mediterranean and was therefore highly knowledgeable when it came to the workings of the U.S Navy. He had had four years to observe Wilkes as a leader and several more to see how he supervised the publication of the Expedition’s reports when he answered his friend Asa Gray’s queries about his former commander: “Wilkes although overbearing with his officers, and conceited, exhibited through the cruise a wonderful degree of energy and was bold even to rashness in many of his explorations. I know so well what Naval officers very generally are, that I much doubt if with any commander that could have been selected, we should have fared better, or lived together more harmoniously and I am confident that the navy does not contain a more daring explorer, or driving officer.”
    It wasn’t the Expedition or its long and fruitful aftermath that went wrong; it was what happened immediately following its return to the United States. If Wilkes had been able to handle the return in a more calculated and tactful manner, everything might have worked out differently. Even at that late hour, even after all the outrages he had committed, it would have still been possible for him to save the Expedition’s reputation. But for Wilkes to have accomplished this late-inning rescue, he would have needed the right kind of advice—especially in the last critical months prior to the Vincennes ’s arrival in New York. There are strong indications that as the survey of the Columbia River drew to a close, Wilkes began to realize that he needed just this kind of assistance, and the person he turned to was William Reynolds.
    Reynolds possessed all the sensitivity, charm, and discretion that Wilkes lacked. He was also a talented writer. With Reynolds acting as Wilkes’s partner rather than foe, the Expedition might have had the reception and the narrative it deserved. But it was not to be. If it was not too late to save the Expedition, it was too late to reclaim Wilkes’s and Reynolds’s friendship. And so, on a rainy summer night on the Columbia River, as Wilkes and a jacketless Reynolds stood side-by-side on the deck of the Flying Fish, the United States Exploring Expedition began its long, sure slide into obscurity.

NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
    ACW Autobiography of Rear Admiral