Sea of Glory

involved the scientific corps. He must eliminate twenty of the twenty-seven scientists. First to go was the head of physical sciences. Wilkes would take over that department, along with all subjects related to surveying, astronomy, meteorology, and nautical science. It was a tall order for one man, even without the extra burden of leading the Expedition. Wilkes’s choices for the rest of the corps proved to be quite good. The naturalist Titian Peale, son of the famous painter and museum founder Charles Willson Peale from Philadelphia, had already accompanied expeditions to Florida and the West. A capable artist and a crack shot, Peale was a collector par excellence. James Dwight Dana, the Expedition’s geologist, was just twenty-five and had already published his System of Mineralogy, the standard text on the subject. In the weeks before the squadron’s departure, he would undergo a sudden religious awakening and, at the urging of his evangelical parents, join the First Church of New Haven. Dana was destined to become a giant in his field, and while his Christian beliefs would sometimes lead his science astray, the strength of his conversion appears to have made possible the startling breakthroughs that awaited him, encouraging him to look beyond the myriad details of the natural world and seek out the bigger picture. “As a Christian,” the geologist James Natland has written, “Dana could now make bold his science.”
    Dana’s friend the botanist Asa Gray was also chosen for the civilian corps, and like Dana, would rise to the top of his field. Unfortunately, after changing his mind several times, Gray would back out of the Expedition at the last minute and be replaced by the lackluster William Rich from Washington. Rounding out the scientific corps was the young philologist, or linguist, Horatio Hale from Harvard; the naturalist Charles Pickering from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia; the conchologist (a collector of mollusks and shells) Joseph Couthouy from Boston; and the horticulturalist William Brackenridge, a Scotsman currently living in Philadelphia, who had once supervised Edinburgh’s famed botanical garden. It was a young, diverse group that, for the most part, represented the best American science had to offer in 1838.
     
    Over the next five months, Wilkes pushed to achieve what others had failed to accomplish in two years. Each vessel needed to undergo extensive modifications; equipment and provisions must be arranged for; commissioned and noncommissioned officers, as well as sailors and marines, had to be selected. Hundreds of men had already been recruited by Jones, but the months of turmoil and indecision had taken their toll as they bided their time at navy yards in Virginia and New York. But it was the Expedition’s officers who were the most disaffected. Indeed, from Wilkes’s perspective it sometimes seemed as if the entire U.S. Navy were in league against him. “At times I felt almost overwhelmed at the Situation and the responsibilities upon me,” he wrote, “but they were of short lived depressions.”
    It was in the fitting out of the Vincennes and the Peacock at Norfolk that Wilkes received the stiffest resistance. The commodore in charge of the navy yard made it clear that he and his officers did not approve of Wilkes’s appointment and would do as little as possible to assist in the preparation of the squadron. Appealing to friends at navy yards in New York and Boston, Wilkes was able to procure much of what was denied him at Norfolk. From Boston he received a fleet of whaleboats, while the two schooners were purchased and modified at the New York Navy Yard in just two weeks.
    Still, when it came to overhauling the Vincennes and the Peacock, which were to be equipped with additional spar decks built over the preexisting gun decks, Wilkes had no choice but to deal with the refractory officers in Norfolk. Making it all the more difficult was the temporary loss of his most stalwart advocate, Secretary of War Poinsett. In April, Poinsett was struck down by an illness that, it was feared, might kill him. This meant that Wilkes had no one to turn to when his request to replace some of the vessels’ iron water tanks with wooden casks was refused. (If one of the ships was wrecked on a reef, Wilkes argued, the wooden casks would provide more buoyancy than the tanks and could be more easily transferred to shore.) So Wilkes took his grievances to the president of the