Sea of Glory

which an unfortunate importance has been so often attached but by the communication of facts,” p. 297.
    Wilkes describes his moves to improve the Ex. Ex. exhibit at the Patent Office in ACW, pp. 528-29. Tyler describes the team Wilkes put together to produce the charts, p. 391. Stanton cites Ralph Waldo Emerson’s praise of the exhibit at the Patent Office, p. 301. Wilkes tells of the first lady’s unsuccessful attempt to secure plants from the Expedition’s greenhouse in ACW, pp. 529-30.
    William Reynolds describes his visit to Washington, D.C., in a January 22, 1843, letter to Henry Eld. Wilkes claims to have been amused rather than angered by the “many misstatements and malicious remarks” in his officer’s journal in ACW, p. 541, in which he also claims his own Narrative was “free from all vituperation,” p. 532. James Renwick refers to Jane Wilkes as Wilkes’s “amanuensis” in a January 8, 1843, letter to Jane, in which he also speaks of his progress in reading Wilkes’s manuscript. Eliza Henry (Wilkes’s sister) worries about Wilkes’s working too late at night on his book in an April 3, 1843, letter to Wilkes (at DU). Wilkes claims his manuscript reached three thousand pages in ACW, p. 532, where he also describes his book as “a monument to my exertions,” p. 533. His description of the explosion aboard the Princeton and the death of Upshur is in ACW, pp. 525, 584-87. I have also relied on Claude Hall’s description of the incident in Abel Upshur, pp. 210-12.
    Wilkes attributes “the style and beauty” of the published narrative to Joseph Drayton in ACW, p. 542; Daniel Haskell in The United States Exploring Expedition and Its Publications describes what the volumes looked like, pp. 33- 34. Wickman claims that the Expedition’s publications are “some of the most expensive books in the history of American printing,” p. 92; he also discusses Wilkes’s insistence on keeping the copyright to the Narrative, pp. 90-91. Wilkes tells of the challenge of seeing his big book through the press in ACW, pp. 535-37. Charles Davis’s reference to the “oppressive dimensions” of the Narrative is in the North American Review, vol. LXI, 1845, p. 100; he also refers to the “variety of styles” that are apparent throughout the book. Wickman provides a synopsis of the many, largely positive reviews of the Narrative, p. 97. For James Fenimore Cooper’s debt to Wilkes’s Narrative, see W. B. Gates’s “Cooper’s The Sea Lions and Wilkes’s Narrative” and “Cooper’s The Crater and Two Explorers.” David Jaffé in The Stormy Petrel and the Whale discusses Herman Melville’s use of the Narrative in Moby-Dick; he also points to Ko-Towatowa as the “prototype for Queequeg,” p. 43. Melville had a personal connection to the Expedition; before being detached from the squadron at Callao, his cousin Henry Gansevoort had been a passed midshipman on the Peacock. During the winter of 1858-59, Melville traveled around the Northeast delivering a lecture about the South Pacific that, as at least one newspaper reporter recognized, contained a veiled criticism of the Ex. Ex.’s attack on the Fijian village of Malolo. Melville termed it an “indiscriminate massacre upon some poor little village on the seaside—splattering the town’s bamboo huts with blood and brains of women and children, defenseless and innocent,” in “The South Sea” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, pp. 415-16. David Roberts in A Newer World describes how Frémont’s wife ghostwrote his books and cites Bernard De Voto’s statement that Frémont’s reports “were far more important than his travels,” p. 127; he also tells of how the spring of 1845 marked the height of Frémont’s celebrity, p. 138. According to Goetzmann, Frémont was “the explorer as propagandist par excellence, ” p. 172. See also Tom Chaffin’s The Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire.
    The decision in the marines’ suit against Wilkes is reported in the May 31, 1845, Niles Register; the suit is first mentioned almost three years earlier in the September 17, 1842, Niles Register. “Memorial of Officers of the Exploring Expedition” dated January 11, 1847, is in 29th Congress, 2nd Session, Senate, No. 47; the memorialists are William Walker, Robert Johnson, James Alden, John Dale, Edwin DeHaven, A. S. Baldwin, George Sinclair, William Reynolds, Simon Blunt, William May, Joseph Sanford,