Sea of Glory

Wilkes speaks of the death of his father in ACW, p. 37. Wilkes relates his impressions of Commodore William Bainbridge in ACW, pp. 41-42. Bainbridge may have been an unfortunate role model for Wilkes. Although an acknowledged hero of the War of 1812, Bainbridge had also suffered his share of defeats and was known as “Hard Luck Bill.” See Craig Symonds’s “William S. Bainbridge: Bad Luck or Fatal Flaw?” in Makers of the American Naval Tradition, edited by James Bradford, pp. 97-99. Wilkes’s statement concerning the “debauchery” typical of a naval vessel is in ACW, p. 45. His confession that he “had but few friends” among the officers of the vessels on which he served early on in his career is in ACW, p. 104. He speaks of his long-standing love of Jane Renwick in ACW, pp. 106-7.
    Wilkes describes his cruise to the Pacific aboard the Franklin in ACW, pp. 109-43. He tells of meeting Captain Pollard in ACW, pp. 168-70. For another account of the Wilkes-Pollard meeting, see my In the Heart of the Sea, pp. 207-10. William Cary’s narrative Wrecked on the Feejees was found in manuscript in an attic in the town of Siasconset on Nantucket and published a few years later in 1887. Walter Whitehall’s The East India Marine Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem speaks about the sandalwood trade and also includes the memorial written in 1834, pp. 12-13. Amasa Delano describes the killing of seals in his Narrative of Voyages and Travels, pp. 306-7. My information on Nathaniel Palmer’s encounter with Bellingshausen is based largely on the chapter “Lands Below the Horn” by Robert Morsberger and W. Patrick Strauss in America Spreads Her Sails, edited by Clayton Barrow, Jr., pp. 21-40. Davis’s and Burdick’s sealing voyages to the Antarctic Peninsula are analyzed in Kenneth Bertrand’s Americans in Antarctica, 1775-1948, pp. 89-101. The 1828 memorial from the citizens of Nantucket is included in J. N. Reynolds’s Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition, pp. 165-66.

CHAPTER 2: THE DEPLORABLE EXPEDITION
    For information about John Barrow, see Fergus Fleming’s Barrow’s Boys: The Original Extreme Adventurers, pp. 1-12. A. Hunter Dupree writes about the disappointing aftermath of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in Science and the Federal Government, pp. 27-28. In his 1825 Inaugural Address, John Quincy Adams speaks of how European voyages of discovery have not only brought glory to their nations but contributed to “the improvement of human knowledge.” He continues, “We have been partakers of that improvement and owe for it a sacred debt, not only of gratitude, but of equal or proportional exertion in the same common cause,” in Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, volume II, edited by James Richardson, p. 312.
    As early as 1811, President James Madison had selected the sealer Edmund Fanning to lead a small exploring expedition to the Pacific. Unfortunately, the outbreak of the War of 1812 meant that what would have been known as the Fanning Expedition never left port. Prior to that, in 1790, a Maryland surveyor named John Churchman unsuccessfully attempted to convince Congress to fund a voyage to Baffin Bay off the west coast of Greenland to conduct magnetic experiments; see Dupree’s Science and the Federal Government, pp. 9-11.
    Elmore Symmes speaks of John Symmes’s stint in St. Louis in “John Cleves Symmes, The Theorist” in Southern Bivouac, p. 558. For an account of Terra Australis Incognita, see Jacques Brosse’s Great Voyages of Discovery, pp. 14- 16. As Reginald Horsman relates in “Captain Symmes’s Journey to the Center of the Earth” in Timeline, Symmes read Cook’s Voyages when he was just eleven years old; Horsman also describes what it would have been like for a ship to sail into the “great verges,” p. 8. As Horsman also relates, a novel entitled Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery, purportedly based on a sea captain’s journal of a voyage into the interior of the earth, was published in 1820. E. F. Madden provides a brief overview of the holes in the poles in “Symmes and His Theory,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, pp. 740-49. The Symmes petition was presented by R. M. Johnson of Kentucky and appears in Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 17th Congress, 1st Session, p. 278. A second petition from an Ohio delegation was presented to Congress on February 7, 1823, in Debates and Proceedings, 17th