Sea of Glory

in a short while “I shall have gained [the officers’] affections and will be enabled to do most anything with them.” Charles Erskine describes his contemplated murder of Wilkes in Twenty Years Before the Mast, pp. 14-20.
    Reynolds refers to the “graceful beauty” of the schooners in a September 6 entry of a letter to Lydia begun on August 30, 1838. George Emmons refers to the schooners as “the pets of the squadron” in the February 5, 1838, entry of his journal (at Yale). In an October 21, 1838, letter to Jane, Wilkes tells of both Craven’s and Lee’s pleas to Hudson that they be given command of the schooners. Reynolds describes Wilkes’s daily inspection of the schooners in his Manuscript, pp. 4-5. Wilkes’s September 13, 1838, order concerning journals is included in the appendix to volume 1 of the Narrative, pp. 367-68. Reynolds speaks of the George Porter incident in both his journal and a September 15, 1838, entry in his August letter to Lydia.
    For a brief history of Madeira, see Jean Ludtke’s Atlantic Peeks: An Ethnographic Guide to the Portuguese-Speaking Islands, pp. 233-34. Samuel Eliot Morison discusses Christopher Columbus’s relationship to Madeira in Admiral of the Ocean Sea, pp. 517-19. The amount of Madeira taken by Cook in 1768 is noted in The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768-1771, edited by J. C. Beaglehole, p. 8; my thanks to John Hattendorf for bringing this to my attention. Wilkes tells of the wine he purchased in ACW, p. 388. In a revealing passage in ACW, Wilkes states, “It was surmised that when I had got through my Scientific duties and preparations & was to take command of my own ship and the Squadron, I would be embarrassed and prove a failure, but I felt myself completely at home and gave my attention to all parts essential to the Service,” p. 374. As he makes clear in the subsequent description of how he proceeded to frustrate First Lieutenant Craven’s attempts to make crew assignments, Wilkes was anything but “at home” on the deck of the Vincennes.
    Wilkes describes how the squadron searched out doubtful shoals in his Narrative, vol. 1, p. 28. For information on bioluminescence, I have depended on Richard Ellis’s Encyclopedia of the Sea, pp. 36, 95, 255. For information on Magellanic Clouds, I consulted the Web site www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/orbit/ 2. For information on the artists James Drayton and especially Alfred Agate, I have looked to Philip Lundeberg’s “Legacy of an Artist Explorer,” pp. 1-5. Bernard Smith in European Vision and the South Pacific writes about the camera lucida, p. 255. William Reynolds tells of the busy scene on Enxadas Island in a December 4, 1838, letter to Lydia. Wilkes refers to the anxiety he was feeling in Rio in a December 22, 1838, letter to Jane. Doris Esch Borthwick’s “Outfitting the U.S. Exploring Expedition” contains a good description of how a pendulum experiment was conducted in the nineteenth century. The description of Wilkes’s outburst while performing experiments in Rio is contained in a small daybook kept by William Reynolds, in which he appears to have recorded testimony from the court of inquiry Wilkes later called in Valparaiso, Chile, to investigate the actions of Lieutenant John Dale. Reynolds speaks of the ominous nature of these “little outbreaks” in his Manuscript, p. 6.
    In a November 25, 1838, letter to Jane, Wilkes writes, “[Nicholson] calls us all Mr. Hudson, Mr. Wilkes and I spoke to him yesterday about it & told him that if I had a disposition to retaliate, I should call him only Capn Nicolson.” Commodore Nicholson’s correspondence with Wilkes while the Expedition was at Rio is at KSHS; he makes the comments about Wilkes not being a captain in a January 4, 1839, letter. Wilkes tells of crying during a pendulum experiment in a December 9, 1838, letter to Jane; he tells of his physical collapse in a December 22, 1838, letter to Jane; he also describes the incident in ACW, p. 398.
    In a January 2, 1839, letter to Wilkes, Commodore Nicholson writes, “I most sincerely regret we have ever met, as since you have been in this Port, with every disposition on my part to serve and aid you, you have evinced nothing but dissatisfaction.” On a copy of Wilkes’s correspondence with Nicholson, Secretary of the Navy Paulding scribbled a March 13, 1839, note concerning Wilkes’s “tone of feeling which does not seem to be called for by the occasion” (KSHS). William