Sea of Glory

curious and admiring eyes.” To make sure he had an adequate record of his experiences, he purchased two large journals. “[I]f I fill them,” he told Lydia, “I trust I shall make a perusal interesting.”
    In a hasty addendum written the following evening, his enthusiasm was even greater than the day before. “I am perfectly charmed with everything on board,” he gushed, “& have the most glorious hopes of a most glorious cruise. [N]othing could tempt me to withdraw. I am wedded to the Expedition and its fate, sink or swim.”
     
    On August 10, it was time for Wilkes to head to Norfolk. “I will not soon forget the scene at the Breakfast table,” he wrote Jane the next day, “with your dear self and little Eliza at your breast & those other children around. It was enough to have halted any man [even] if his heart had been made of stone and [has] made me cry a dozen times since. How much comfort & happiness I have left behind.” He was leaving not only his wife, but his best and perhaps only true friend, a person with whom he had lived and worked for most of his adult life. Wilkes knew that when he returned in three to four years, his youngest daughter Eliza would have no memory of her father.
    By Sunday, August 12, he was in his freshly painted cabin aboard the Vincennes, awaiting the sailing orders he had already drafted but which needed to be formally issued by the secretary of the navy. Wilkes would not have been faulted if he had taken time that evening to bask in the glory of his achievement. He had done all that he had promised he would do. Despite almost every kind of opposition, Wilkes had assembled a squadron of six vessels and 346 men. Almost miraculously, he had succeeded in turning around the Expedition’s morale. Instead of the nest of intrigue and mistrust it had been just a few months before, the squadron was now characterized by an extraordinary eagerness and zeal. Years later, William Reynolds would remember the astonishing sense of promise he and his fellow officers felt at the voyage’s onset.
     
    The Commander of the Expedition was hailed by all his subordinates, with an éclat that must have touched his feelings. The impression in his favour was universal, and the most unlimited confidence as to his abilities as a leader, and his character as a man, was the deep and proper feeling of those who were to trust to him so much. Not a few were bound to him with a personal devotion that was almost chivalrous in its extent, and which had been created by a recent association with him on a perilous service, the survey of a bank in the open ocean. The fervour of these gentlemen, communicated itself to others, who with the ardour of youth, and the impulse of their nature, were ready to believe that the object of such generous promise must be the very beau ideal of a Captain for the hazardous enterprise in which they had embarked.
     
    But Wilkes was in no mood to enjoy the marvel he had created. He had heard nothing about his and Hudson’s acting appointments. In a final, now blighted gesture of optimism, they had brought with them new captain’s uniforms, each equipped with two epaulet straps instead of a lieutenant’s one and a round jacket with four buttons over each pocket flap. It was humiliating to have to tell Hudson that they could not yet put them on. It was not a matter of ceremony; the acting appointments were absolutely vital if he was to lead this squadron. With a hurt that still festered decades later, he remembered in his Autobiography that he needed the rank of captain “to give force to my position and surround me with, as it were, a shield of protection.”
    Desperately missing his wife and children, and without this crucial vote of confidence from the secretary of war, Wilkes was being abandoned to his fate, just as his own widowed father had done back when he was four years old. “I hope you will never feel the mortification that I do at this moment,” he wrote in a final letter to Poinsett, “at being left now to grapple with things that the Govt. might have put under my entire control by the one act of giving Mr. Hudson and myself temporary acting app[ointment]ts for this service and which I consider was fully pledged to us. . . . I have one consolation left that everything that we do earn by our exertions will be due entirely to ourselves.”
     
    By the morning of Sunday, August 18, the squadron had weighed anchor and made sufficient progress that it was time