Sea of Glory

pride in overseeing the construction of a theodolite—a large leg-mounted surveying instrument used to measure horizontal and vertical angles with a telescope. The theodolite was sitting unused at the Depot of Charts and Instruments in Washington, and Wilkes arranged to have the instrument delivered to Newport.
    Wadsworth, an officer from the old school, remained reluctant to attempt a survey of the kind Wilkes proposed. Tensions were mounting until Jane interceded on her husband’s behalf. Jane was, according to Wilkes, “well posted on the subject,” and she soon convinced Wadsworth that her husband actually knew what he was talking about. The couple then offered Wadsworth the use of a room in their cottage as an office for the survey, allowing Wilkes to work up his calculations and draw the charts amid the cheerful bedlam of his young family.
    It was during this pleasant interlude in Newport that he responded to a navy circular requesting his ideas on the rehiring of Hassler as director of the Coast Survey. Although praising Hassler’s science, Wilkes was highly critical of his teacher’s organizational abilities and urged that Hassler be required to report to a board of navy and army officers. When presented with this plan, Hassler refused to work under any supervision. After much discussion, he was eventually hired on his own terms. The reinstated director of the Coast Survey soon learned of Wilkes’s disloyalty and let it be known that, in Wilkes’s words, “he was not altogether anxious for my services.”
    Wilkes claimed that he could not have worked with Hassler in any event, but his betrayal of his old friend and mentor would trouble him more than he cared to admit. It also robbed him of a career path that was one of the few in the navy that agreed with his talents and personality. But it was also an object lesson. If the Coast Survey could be resuscitated after a hiatus of more than a decade, then why not the exploring expedition?
    In the spring of 1833, just a few months after the birth of his third child, Edmund, Wilkes was ordered to Washington to take over the three-year-old Depot of Charts and Instruments. The Depot was where the navy’s fifty or so chronometers were tested and maintained. A chronometer is an exceptionally precise timepiece built to withstand the hostile environment of a ship at sea. Set to Greenwich Mean Time, the chronometer enables a navigator to compare the time of the noon sight with the time in Greenwich and then quickly calculate the ship’s longitude. Even the most accurate chronometers were not perfect. The trick was to determine how much an individual instrument lost or gained per day, which was known as its “rate,” and adjust accordingly. Calculating the rate of a chronometer required several noon sightings at a known location, with the average difference between the chronometer’s time and the mean time producing the error of the chronometer. In addition to an office and a room to store the instruments and charts, the Depot included a tiny observatory where the staff could perform the celestial observations for rating chronometers.
    Compared to the bustling intimacy of their native New York, Jane and Charles found Washington a virtual ghost town. “There was not an individual stirring,” Wilkes remembered, “and the Capitol arose before us in all its blankness, a most uninteresting object it then appeared, lifeless and deserted. . . . The Whole impressed us with the most gloomy foreboding.” He and Jane set out to create their own island of happiness within a city that was in 1833 little more than a vast swamp, criss-crossed with dusty dirt roads that became quagmires whenever it rained. Instead of living in the fashionable part of town near the White House, they purchased two large connected brick buildings on wind-swept Capitol Hill. Built in 1799 with funds provided by George Washington to serve as boardinghouses, the structures possessed more than enough room for a family of five and their servants. Just 1,200 feet from the Capitol, it was the perfect home for a naval officer intent on increasing his influence with the nation’s power brokers, and in April, Wilkes moved the entire Depot to his house on the Hill.
    At his own expense, he built a new observatory—just a small box, fourteen by thirteen feet and only ten feet high, with two-foot-wide doors on the roof that could be opened to the sky with a system of pulleys. Mounted on granite piers