Sea of Glory

unpublished material connected with the Expedition should consult Daniel C. Haskell’s indispensable The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 and Its Publications 1844- 1874, published by The New York Public Library in 1942. Most of the existing officers’ logs, letters, and courts-martial records are at the National Archives (NA) in Washington, D.C., although the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution also have much Ex. Ex. material. The twenty-three officer journals at the National Archives are available on microfilm as Records Relating to the United States Exploring Expedition Under the Command of Lt. Charles Wilkes, 1836-1842 (Microcopy 75), Rolls 7-25. A good number of the officers retrieved their journals at some point after the Expedition; as a result, many of the journals are now scattered among various repositories, the locations of which are listed in the bibliography; these journals are also available on microfilm. The courts-martial records related to the Expedition are also available on microfilm from the National Archives, Microcopy 75, Rolls 26 and 27.
    In 1978 an important cache of Wilkes material was donated to Duke University. Used here for the first time in a book-length examination of the Ex. Ex., the Wilkes Family Papers at Duke contain dozens of letters Wilkes wrote to his wife Jane during the Expedition, as well as letters from Jane, their children, Wilkes’s brother Henry, his brother-in-law James Renwick, and others. Other important collections of Wilkes papers are at the Kansas State Historical Society (KSHS), the Library of Congress (LOC), and the Wisconsin Historical Society.
PREFACE: YOUNG AMBITION
    My thanks to Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, for providing me with the total weight of the Expedition’s collections. I have inherited the concept of the sea as America’s first frontier from my father, Thomas Philbrick, whose James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction describes how the country’s fascination with the sea was reflected in the popular literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. See also my foreword to American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology, edited by Peter Neill, Library of America, 2000, pp. xiii-xvii. I am also indebted to Daniel Boorstin’s concept of “sea paths to everywhere” in The Discoverers, particularly the chapter “A World of Oceans,” pp. 256-66. As John Noble Wilford points out in The Mapmakers, Lewis and Clark were instructed to locate “the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the purpose of commerce,” p. 225. For my comparison of Cook’s second voyage to the voyages of earlier explorers, I am indebted to Boorstin’s The Discoverers, pp. 280- 89. For an account of British exploration before and immediately following Cook, see Glyndwr Williams’s “To Make Discoveries of Countries Hitherto Unknown: The Admiralty and Pacific Exploration in the Eighteenth Century,” in Pacific Empires, edited by Alan Frost and Jane Samson, pp. 13-31. William Goetzmann provides the statistics concerning the number of European expeditions to the Pacific in New Lands, New Men, p. 268.
    For an excellent overview of the many accomplishments of the U.S. Ex. Ex., see Herman Viola’s “The Story of the U.S. Exploring Expedition” in MV, pp. 9-23. In an 1841 report, Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur stated his ambitious goal to expand the U.S. Navy until it was at least “half the naval force of the strongest maritime power in the world.” At that time the American navy included eleven ships of the line, seventeen frigates, eighteen sloops, two brigs, nine schooners, three storeships, and three receiving ships in commission. See Claude Hall’s Abel Parker Upshur, p. 127. For information on China’s and Portugal’s exploratory efforts, see Boorstin’s The Discoverers, pp. 156-95. Gavin Menzies provides an intriguing, if perhaps overstated, account of Chinese exploration in 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2003).
    Secretary of the Navy James Paulding’s instructions outlining the intended destinations of the Ex. Ex. are in volume one of Charles Wilkes’s Narrative, pp. xiii-xxiii. According to Geoffrey Smith in “Charles Wilkes” in Makers of American Diplomacy, edited by Frank Merli et al., the Ex. Ex. was the “last global voyage wholly dependent upon sail,” p. 14.
    William Reynolds’s enthusiastic words about the Ex. Ex.