Sea of Glory

information about the Depot of Charts and Instruments and Wilkes’s role in creating what became known as the Capitol Hill Observatory, I have relied on Steven Dick’s “Centralizing Navigational Technology in America: The U.S. Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, 1830-1842” in Technology and Culture and “How the U.S. Naval Observatory Began, 1830-65” in Sky and Telescope. Wilkes describes his family’s introduction to Washington, D.C., in ACW, pp. 300-303. Harold Langley speaks of the importance of politics to a successful navy career in Social Reform in the United States Navy, 1798-1862, p. 23. My discussion of Andrew Jackson’s relationship with the U.S. Navy owes much to John Schroeder’s Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829-1861, pp. 22-28. Jackson’s words of praise concerning the incident at Quallah Batoo are quoted in Schroeder, p. 28.
    Jeremiah Reynolds was not only a proponent of science; he was also possessed with a Jacksonian sense of the United States’ imperialist destiny: “Our flag should be borne to every portion of the globe, to give to civilized and savage man a just impression of the power we possess, and in what manner we can exercise it when justice demands reparation for insulted dignity”; in Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac, p. ii. For the influence of Reynolds’s “Mocha Dick, the White Whale of the Pacific” on Melville, see Perry Miller’s The Raven and the Whale, pp. 20-22. My references to Reynolds’s 1836 “Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition” are from the edition published by Harpers in 1836; pp. 31, 72-73, 90, 98. My thanks to Susan Beegel and Wes Tiffney for their comments concerning scientific collecting in the nineteenth century. John Schroeder in Shaping a Maritime Empire cites Ohioan Thomas Hamer’s defense of an exploring expedition, p. 34. Southard’s motion to fund “an exploring expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas” was approved by a vote of 44-1 on April 27, 1836; in Register of Debates in Congress, 24th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 1298-99; see also pp. 3470-73 for the debates that occurred on May 5, 1836.
    For information on Mahlon Dickerson’s tenure as secretary of the navy, see W. Patrick Strauss’s “Mahlon Dickerson” in American Secretaries of the Navy, vol. 1, edited by Paolo Coletta, pp. 155-63. Strauss’s “Preparing the Wilkes Expedition: A Study in Disorganization” in Pacific Historical Review provides a good, blow-by-blow account of the many missteps associated with the beginnings of the Expedition. Jackson’s letters to Dickerson about his interest in the Expedition are in the Letters Relating to the Wilkes Exploring Expedition (LRWEE), National Archives (NA). For an analysis of Commodore Jones’s involvement in the Ex. Ex., see Gene Smith’s Thomas Ap Catesby Jones: Commodore of Manifest Destiny, pp. 70-92.
    Wilkes’s letters to Dickerson concerning the purchase of instruments in Europe appear in LRWEE. Wilkes’s trip to Europe to purchase instruments for the Expedition is chronicled in the dozens of letters he wrote his wife Jane in the Wilkes Family Papers at the Library of Congress; see also Doris Esch Borthwick’s “Outfitting the United States Exploring Expedition: Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s European Assignment, August-November, 1836” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, which quotes from the November 4, 1836, letter to Jane in which Wilkes refers to “these giants,” p. 171. For information on James Ross and his discovery of the magnetic North Pole, see Fergus Fleming’s Barrow’s Boys, pp. 291-92; 334-35. On what was referred to as the “Magnetic Crusade,” see John Cawood’s “Terrestrial Magnetism and the Development of International Collaboration in the Early Nineteenth Century,” pp. 585-86.
    The scientist Walter Johnson’s February 14, 1837, letter describing the insufficiencies of Wilkes’s collection of instruments as well as Charles Pickering’s February 15, 1839, letter about the lack of microscopes and Wilkes’s March 18, 1837, letter withdrawing his name from consideration as astronomer are in LRWEE.
    In April 1837 the Expedition’s newly constructed vessels participated in sea trials. According to Daniel Ammen, who witnessed the trials, “had the object been to build vessels of exceptional slowness the success would have been undoubted”; in The Old Navy and