Sea of Glory

Charles Wilkes, Department of the Navy, 1978
    DU Duke University
    FMC Franklin and Marshall College
    KSHS Kansas State Historical Society
    LOC Library of Congress
    LRWEE Letters Relating to the Wilkes Exploring Expedition, Rolls 1-7 of the National Archives microfilm, Records Relating to the United States Exploring Expedition Under the Command of Lt. Charles Wilkes, 1836- 1842 (Microcopy 75)
    MV Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985
    NA National Archives
     
    For anyone wanting to know more about the U.S. Exploring Expedition, the best place to start is William Stanton’s The Great United States Exploring Expedition. Wonderfully written and researched, Stanton’s book approaches the Expedition in terms of its contribution to the rise of science in America. Magnificent Voyagers, an illustrated catalogue of a 1985 exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution edited by Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, is much more than a catalogue, containing articles that analyze the Expedition from a multitude of perspectives. An earlier book, David B. Tyler’s The Wilkes Expedition, is also useful, as is the important group of essays about the Expedition published by the American Philosophical Society in Centenary Celebration: The Wilkes Exploring Expedition of the United States Navy, 1838-1842. Daniel Henderson’s biography of Wilkes, Hidden Coasts, makes good use of Wilkes’s own writings but seems reluctant to criticize or evaluate its subject. William H. Goetzmann’s New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery investigates the impulse to explore by sea and land that culminated in the Expedition and the many U.S. expeditions to the West that followed. Echoing observations made by William Stanton in The Great United States Exploring Expedition as well as Stanton’s earlier and seminal investigation of science and race in nineteenth-century America, The Leopard’s Spots, Barry Alan Joyce assesses a portion of the scientific legacy of the Expedition in The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. Alan Gurney’s The Race to the White Continent: Voyages to the Antarctic examines the Exploring Expedition in the context of the other European voyages to Antarctica, while Kenneth Bertrand’s Americans in Antarctica and Philip Mitterling’s America in the Antarctic to 1840 are also essential reading. Frances Barkan’s The Wilkes Expedition: Puget Sound and the Oregon Country provides an excellent account of the Expedition’s accomplishments in the Pacific Northwest.
    Only a hundred copies of the fifteen published scientific reports of the Exploring Expedition were printed by the U.S. government. The Smithsonian Institution Libraries has recently digitized all these publications, a mammoth undertaking that makes these exceedingly rare works available to a general audience for the first time. To view these fascinating, stunningly illustrated reports, as well as the original edition of Wilkes’s Narrative, go to http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/usexex/ .
    Wilkes’s five-volume narrative of the Expedition is a padded, uneven read, but parts of it, particularly his description of the assault on Antarctica, are exhilarating. Wilkes’s personality is best revealed in his not always reliable, but always self-serving Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes (ACW). William Reynolds is well served by Voyage to the Southern Ocean, a collection of the letters he wrote home during the Expedition edited by Anne Hoffman Cleaver, a Reynolds descendant, and E. Jeffrey Stann. Reynolds’s public and private notebooks from the Expedition, as well as his letters written during the Expedition, are at Franklin and Marshall College (FMC). An edition of Reynolds’s private journal, edited by myself and Thomas Philbrick, will be published by Penguin in 2004.
    The scientist and artist Titian Peale’s journal has been published in a magnificently illustrated volume edited by Jessie Poesch, while the officer George Colvocoresses and the sailors Joseph Clark and Charles Erskine each published accounts during their lifetimes. Just a year after the return of the Expedition, the surgeon James Palmer published a narrative poem titled Thulia: A Tale of the Antarctic, about the exploits of the schooner Flying Fish, which also includes a prose account of the cruise.
    Anyone interested in braving the massive amount of