Sea of Glory

annoying creatures. When some of the officers began to grow facial hair, he concocted elaborate schemes to convince them of the inappropriateness of the practice without directly forbidding it. When the ringleader, Lieutenant Johnson, finally shaved off his mustache, Wilkes “rejoiced with others that this speck of discord had vanished,” adding in a letter to Jane that “I shall be quite adept in studying characters before I get back.” It was a petty but telling incident that indicated the lengths to which Wilkes was willing to go to avoid even the hint of conflict with his officers—at least for now.
     
    At this early stage in the voyage, William Reynolds and his compatriots were too enthralled with the grandeur of the undertaking to regard Wilkes as anything but the dashing and inspirational leader of the youngest naval squadron any of them had ever known. “It is so strange to me to look around and find none but youthful faces among the officers,” Reynolds wrote Lydia, “a young Captain, with boys for his subordinates—no gray hairs, no veterans among us.” Since they were all so young, they were given responsibilities that would have normally been at least three, even four years away. Reynolds was appointed an officer of the deck, an honor usually reserved for a lieutenant. With a speaking trumpet held to his lips, he issued the orders that kept the twenty sails of the Vincennes drawing to maximum advantage. “I cannot explain to you the feeling,” he enthused to Lydia, “for though we only take advantage of or oppose the wind and waves, it seems as if we directed them. . . . To handle the [sails’] fabric with exquisite skill, to have hundreds move at your bidding, to run in rivalry and successfully with the Squadron and passing vessels, to laugh at the wind and bid defiance to the waves, ah! The excitement is good and glorious. . . . My proffession, above any other in the world. Hurrah! For the Exploring Expedition!”
    Reynolds also took great interest in the scientists assigned to the Vincennes: the bespectacled naturalist Charles Pickering, the broad-shouldered Scottish gardener William Brackenridge, and the bearded collector of mollusks Joseph Couthouy. Although Couthouy had once been a merchant captain, the others were no sailors, and it was taking these studious landlubbers some time to adapt to the cramped quarters of a tossing ship. In spite of all, they created their own wonderfully weird worlds within their staterooms, stuffed till nearly bursting with specimens and artifacts. Reynolds marveled at the “dead & living lizards, & fish floating in alcohol, and sharks jaws, & stuffed Turtles, and vertebrates and Animalculae frisking in jars of salt water, and old shells, and many other equally interesting pieces of furniture hanging about their beds, & around their state rooms.” For his part, Reynolds enjoyed slightly more sumptuous quarters. His and roommate William May’s stateroom had become the talk of the Vincennes. White and crimson curtains now hung from the bulkhead; silver candlesticks and a mirror adorned the bureau; a Brussels carpet lay across the deck while a cutlass and one of the new Bowie knife pistols gave the room a “man of war finish.”
    Reynolds and May were part of Wilkes’s inner circle of half a dozen or so acting lieutenants and passed midshipmen, who had either served with him on the Porpoise or assisted at the Depot of Charts and Instruments. During the early days of the voyage, this core group of officers, whom Wilkes referred to as “our Washington folks” since they had spent considerable time that summer making observations on the grounds of his Capitol Hill home, served as a kind of surrogate family for the Expedition’s commander. In a letter to Jane he recounted the time when Reynolds and May, who shared a watch together, had breakfast with him in his cabin. The two handsome and dark-haired officers, who looked so much alike that they could have been brothers, insisted that “it was not possible for them to be more comfortable and contented.”
    In addition to Reynolds, May, Flag Lieutenant Overton Carr, and Wilkes’s second-in-command William Hudson, his trusted circle of officers included Lieutenants Robert Johnson, William Walker, and James Alden, along with Passed Midshipmen Samuel Knox, who commanded the schooner Flying Fish, and Henry Eld, serving under Hudson in the Peacock. Wilkes’s most intimate associate on the Vincennes was the