Sea of Glory

of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas, in which he quotes Wilkes’s reference to “one of the most important days in my naval life,” p. 22, as well as the Boston mayor’s praise of Wilkes and Wilkes’s humble response, p. 27, and the New York Historical Society president’s commemoration, p. 31. In a November 19, 1861, letter to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., writes from Boston that the Trent Affair “created quite a stir and immense delight, though at first every one thought it must be a violation of national law; but [Richard Henry] Dana crowed with delight and declared that if Lord John made an issue on that, you could blow him out of water,” in A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861- 1865, edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford, p. 71. On Wilkes’s subsequent activities during the war, I have relied on William Jeffries’s “The Civil War Career of Charles Wilkes.” Jeffries quotes Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’s diary entries about Wilkes, p. 327, as well as Wilkes’s letters to his wife about the “comforts” of the Vanderbilt, p. 331, and “filling my pockets” with prize money, p. 335.
    My account of William Reynolds’s career during and after the Civil War is based on Viola’s epilogue in Voyage to the Southern Ocean, pp. 296-98. The epilogue in ACW tells of Wilkes’s last years after the war, pp. 927—30. Wilkes’s son John recorded that the unpublished Physics report “was thought by the Admiral to be more valuable than any of the Scientific volumes of the U.S. Ex. Ex.,” in Haskell, p. 110. According to Victor Lenzen and Robert Multhauf in “Development of Gravity Pendulums in the 19th Century,” Francis Baily “appears to have found [Wilkes’s pendulum results] defective because of insufficient attention to the maintenance of temperature constancy and to certain alterations made to the pendulums,” p. 318. For information on Louis Agassiz’s unpublished report on fishes, see Watson in MV, p. 66. Stanton speaks of some of the absurdities contained in Wilkes’s Hydrography report, p. 362; he also refers to the many obituaries that made no reference to Wilkes’s involvement with the Ex. Ex., p. 363. The obituary describing Reynolds’s funeral is from the archives at FMC. For information on Charles Erskine, I am grateful to Daniel Finamore at the Peabody-Essex Museum, who provided me with a copy of Erskine’s calling card and a list of the artifacts that were donated to the museum, apparently by his son in the early twentieth century. I am also grateful to Jane Walsh at the Smithsonian Institution, who brought to my attention a November 11, 1859, memo describing the artifacts “Sent by order of Prof. Henry to Charles Erskine care W. Elliot Woodward, Roxbury, Mass,” in the Office of Distribution File, Record Unit 120, 1st Series, Volume 3:96, Smithsonian Institution Archives. William Reynolds expressed his fervent support for flogging in a manuscript titled “Response to the circular on naval punishment” at FMC. For an account of the attempt to abolish flogging in the 1840s, and Herman Melville’s role in it, see Robert Chapel’s “The Word Against the Cat: Melville’s Influence on Seamen’s Rights.” Charlie’s reference to the anonymity of the common sailor is from his Twenty Years Before the Mast, p. 310.

EPILOGUE
    Ralph Ehrenberg, et al., discuss the use of Wilkes charts as late as the invasion of Tarawa during World War II in “Surveying and Charting the Pacific Basin,” MV, p. 187. James Ross undercuts Wilkes’s Antarctic claims in A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, p. 298. Kenneth Bertrand evaluates Wilkes’s discovery of Antarctica in great detail in Americans in Antarctica, 1775-1948, pp. 184-90, in which he refers to the difficulty of judging distances in Antarctica. In addition to his words about the “the greatness of his achievement,” Bertrand writes, “Time and subsequent exploration have substantiated Wilkes’s claim of an Antarctic continent and confirmed his landfalls,” p. 190. William Hobbs in “Wilkes Land Rediscovered” tells of the errors Douglas Mawson found in his own mapping efforts of the Antarctic coast, p. 634. He also cites Shackleton’s account of his firsthand experience with the phenomenon of polar looming when he sighted Wilkes’s Cape Hudson: “This is most weird. All hands saw the headland to the southwest, and some of us sketched it. Now