Sea of Glory

about to be launched against him in ACW, p. 519. For my account of the political situation in which Wilkes found himself upon his return to Washington, I have looked to John Wickman’s dissertation “Political Aspects of Charles Wilkes’s Work and Testimony, 1842-1849,” pp. 29-41. Secretary of the Navy Upshur’s approach to officer relations is described in Claude Hall’s Abel Parker Upshur, pp. 161-62. Wickman mentions the fact that Wilkes attended a meeting of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science on the same day of his arrival in Washington, p. 31. James Renwick’s advice about how Wilkes should gain political support is in a June 19, 1842, letter to Jane at DU. Renwick, along with two of his sons, was involved in the survey on which the eventual Maine-Canada border would be based and therefore had much personal experience with the workings of the Tyler administration. Wilkes tells of his meetings with Upshur and President Tyler in ACW, pp. 520- 22. In a June 21, 1842, letter to Wilkes, Upshur refers to Wilkes’s June 16, 1842, letter in which he requested a court of inquiry; in Wilkes’s Court-Martial records at NA. John Quincy Adams details his meeting with Wilkes in a June 15, 1842, diary entry, in Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol. 11, p. 177. In addition to Wilkes’s account of his speech before the National Institute in ACW, pp. 525-26, I have relied on a story in the June 25, 1842, National Intelligencer and Wickman, pp. 36-37.
    Upshur’s June 21, 1842, letter to Wilkes denying his request for a court of inquiry is in Wilkes’s Court-Martial records. Wickman discusses Wilkes’s report on Oregon and his “nationalistic remarks concerning the necessity of the 54-40 boundary line,” p. 38; he also describes Upshur’s “plan of suppression” when it came to the report, pp. 39-41. Upshur’s letter to Guillou ordering him to report to the Navy Department was produced during Wilkes’s court-martial; Guillou testified that he had made two trips to Washington—during the spring and at the end of June—to assemble materials for the case against Wilkes. Wilkes’s July 5, 1842, letter to Upshur complaining of the delay of his trial is in his court-martial records, as is Upshur’s July 8, 1842, letter to Wilkes informing him of the date of his trial and the July 15, 1842, letter to Wilkes ordering him to turn over documents relating to the Expedition. Wilkes tells of how he boxed the “most important papers & documents” of the Expedition before leaving the Vincennes in ACW, p. 515. Wilkes recounts his conversation with Senator Wright about Upshur’s order in ACW, p. 522. John Quincy Adams tells of his visit to Wilkes’s house in a July 9, 1842, entry in his Memoirs, vol. 11, p. 202.
    My account of the courts-martial of William May, Robert Johnson, Charles Guillou, Robert Pinkney, and Charles Wilkes is based primarily on the courts-martial records at NA; the reports in the New York Herald, beginning on July 26, 1842, and continuing on an almost daily basis until September 10, 1842; and letters written by Samuel Francis Du Pont on July 25, 27, 29, August 25, 31, September 22, October 6 and 14, 1842, at the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. For information on Du Pont’s problems with Commodore Hull, I have consulted James Merrill’s Du Pont: The Making of an Admiral, pp. 128-32, and Linda Maloney’s “Isaac Hull: Bulwark of the Sailing Navy” in Command Under Sail: Makers of the American Naval Tradition, 1775-1850, edited by James Bradford, pp. 268-69; Maloney also speaks in general terms of the problems that the issue of rank had brought to the U.S. Navy in the 1840s, and specifically refers to the Cyane, p. 269.
    An August 20, 1842, issue of the Niles Register refers to the uproar caused by the reading of Paulding’s letter at Johnson’s court-martial: “These instructions have been criticized by some with considerable severity.” Wilkes’s August 7, 1842, letter to Upshur, informing him that he cannot deliver the Ex. Ex. documents in his possession because of the “ominous and responsible situation in which I am placed,” is in Wilkes’s Court-Martial records. Reynolds praises Pinkney’s defence in an August 21, 1842, letter to his father. Herman Viola’s epilogue in Voyage to the Southern Ocean offers a chronology of the events leading up to Reynolds’s marriage to Rebecca Krug and quotes from his August 14, 1842, letter to his father, p. 288;