Sea of Glory

forty-two letters he received from Jane at Singapore in a February 20, 1842, letter. In a November 27, 1841, letter written at Oahu, he mentions his concerns about his sister Eliza: “I am well aware [it] will be a great trial meeting me yet I hope it may do her good. I have often been intending to write to her but could never yet bring myself to the trial.” He also writes about Eliza in his letter from Singapore. Henry Wilkes writes about the “deplorable loss” of Wilkes Henry in a February 17, 1840, letter that was sent to Singapore (at DU).
    Wilkes tells of his decision to sell the Flying Fish in his Narrative, vol. 5, pp. 409-10. Charles Erskine describes his emotions on seeing the schooner for the last time in Twenty Years Before the Mast, p. 257. William Reynolds provides a statistical analysis of those who served on the Ex. Ex. in his Manuscript, p. 70; he also speaks of how Wilkes found it necessary “to concoct some scheme by which he could divert the other vessels from their homeward course and secure to the Vincennes a sufficient start,” p. 68. Erskine writes of the “gayety” aboard the Vincennes in Twenty Years, p. 258, in which he also tells of his trick using the dog Sydney and his decision not to reenter the navy, p. 263, and the death of George Porter, p. 258. Stanton describes the Fijian chief Veidovi as “the most spectacular of the specimens collected,” p. 281. Erskine in Twenty Years claims that quartermaster Tom Piner’s attempts to Christianize Veidovi were so successful that the men started referring to the chief as “The old Christian cannibal, man-eater,” p. 194. Wilkes tells of the bond between Veidovi and the interpreter Benjamin Vanderford in his Narrative, vol. 5, p. 418. William Briscoe recounts the details of Vanderford’s death in his March 23, 1842, journal entry.
    For information about Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur and his general attitude toward abuses by naval officers and by Wilkes in particular, I have depended on Wickman’s “Political Aspects of Charles Wilkes’s Work and Testimony,” p. 23, and Claude Hall’s Abel Parker Upshur, pp. 161-62. John S. Wily’s March 10, 1842, letter to Jane Wilkes, urging her to do everything possible to win her husband a promotion, is at DU, as is Jane’s memorandum, written in March 1842, describing her interviews with Upshur and President Tyler. Wilkes writes Jane of his hope of returning before the adjournment of Congress in a February 20, 1842, letter. He tells of seeing the map of Ross’s and d’Urville’s voyages to Antarctica at the Cape Town Observatory in an April 15, 1842, journal entry; he tells of the stop at St. Helena in his Narrative, vol. 5, pp. 440-41; he writes of ordering the officers to turn over their personal collections in ACW, p. 515, where he also refers to the rumors concerning his having kept a collection for himself, p. 513. George Emmons tells of having to hand over the Fijian bow and arrow in May 16, 1842, journal entry. Wilkes recounts his confrontation with William May over his marked box of shells in a May 23, 1842, journal entry; he speaks of “The state of excitement I now feel” in a June 2, 1842, entry. Emmons describes his final run-in with Wilkes in a June 1, 1842, entry.
    Wilkes recounts the Vincennes ’s return to New York in his Narrative, vol. 5, pp. 452-53. Reynolds speaks of the officers’ curiosity about how Wilkes would resolve the commodore pennant issue in his Manuscript, p. 69. Although Reynolds doesn’t mention it, Wilkes’s son Jack was a brand-new midshipman aboard the Delaware when Reynolds visited her officers at Rio de Janeiro; see ACW, p. 519. Reynolds refers to his dramatic weight loss during the Expedition as “enough to have satisfied a dozen Shylocks” in a November 7, 1841, letter to Lydia. Anne Hoffman Cleaver and E. Jeffrey Stann in Voyage to the Southern Ocean cite a reference Reynolds made in a letter eight years earlier to his having reached five feet ten and a half inches in height, p. 250. Veidovi’s death and mutilation are recounted in the New York Herald, June 11, 17, 26, 1842. Veidovi’s skull subsequently became part of the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. See T. D. Stewart’s “The Skull of Vendovi: A Contribution of the Wilkes Expedition to the Physical Anthropology of Fiji.”

CHAPTER 14: RECKONING
    Wilkes describes his return to his house on Capitol Hill and Jane’s knowledge of the “onslaught” that was