Sea of Glory

purser (the naval equivalent of a comptroller), Robert Waldron. Waldron had been with Wilkes on the Porpoise and spent an hour of just about every evening in Wilkes’s cabin, gossiping about the latest goings on among the officers and men. Also part of this group was the commander’s teenage nephew, Wilkes Henry, the eldest son of his widowed sister Eliza. Henry had been his personal clerk aboard the Porpoise, and Wilkes had secured a midshipman’s appointment for the boy so that he could accompany him on the voyage. Overall, Wilkes was pleased with the group of officers he had assembled. “[Y]ou will be glad to learn,” he wrote Jane, “that we have got along very smoothly thus far, and that they one and all exhibit the greatest desire to do their duty.”
     
    Charlie Erskine couldn’t believe it. Almost a year after being whipped by Charles Wilkes, the boy was once again under his command. That summer Charlie had been reassigned to the Porpoise, then at New York and being outfitted for the Expedition. As long as he could stay on the Porpoise and have nothing to do with the squadron’s leader, he figured he would be safe. But on the morning of August 17, as the squadron prepared to set out from Norfolk, Wilkes’s gig came alongside the Porpoise with orders for Erskine to join the Vincennes. Unaware of his former cabin boy’s feelings toward him, Wilkes wanted Charlie to serve on the flagship. “I felt more like jumping overboard than sailing with my worst enemy,” Charlie remembered. He begged Lieutenant Ringgold to let him remain on the Porpoise, but Ringgold told him he had no choice but to get into the gig.
    Once on board the Vincennes, Charlie was promoted to mizzen-top man. “I liked my station, the ship’s officers, and the crew,” he remembered. But at Sunday service the next day he found himself staring across the quarterdeck at Charles Wilkes. “[W]hen I saw him, it made me revengeful,” he wrote, “and I felt as if the evil one had taken possession of me.”
    It was Charlie’s first experience aboard a full-rigged ship. Unlike the sloops, schooners, and brigs on which he had previously served, the Vincennes possessed three masts and three decks—the spar, gun, and berth decks. The crew of two hundred men was divided into sixteen messes, twelve men in a mess. While the officers ate on tables set with plates, forks, knives, and spoons and employed servants to attend to their personal needs, Charlie and his messmates sat on a piece of canvas spread out on the deck and ate their salt beef out of two wooden tubs known as kids. When not eating or on watch, Charlie slung his hammock from a beam that was just four and a half feet above the deck, with only twenty-eight inches between the sailors on either side of him. As he and the rest of his watch rocked to the creaking sounds of a wooden ship at sea, Charlie found himself reliving the punishment he had suffered at the hands of Wilkes. “I only wish I could forget the past,” he wrote, “and that it might not so constantly haunt me.”
    Eleven days after leaving Norfolk, at midnight on August 29, Charlie came on deck to relieve the lookout on the lee quarter. There was a slight swell, but little wind. While walking the Vincennes ’s deck, Charlie paused to look down the cabin skylight. Sitting at the table was “the man who had ordered me to be flogged.” Even at this late hour, Wilkes was awake, studying a chart. Charlie remembered the sting of the colt as if he had been punished yesterday.
    The officer of the deck began to walk forward, leaving Charlie alone beside the skylight. Stacked on a nearby rack were some belaying pins—iron cylinders to which were fastened the ropes of the ship’s running rigging. As if in a trance, he found himself reaching for one of the belaying pins and holding it over the skylight. If he waited another second, the roll of the ship would bring Wilkes’s head directly beneath the heavy iron pin. But just as he was about to drop the pin through the pane of glass, Charlie was transfixed by a vision of his mother. “My God!” he gasped. “What does this mean?” Greatly shaken, he returned the belaying pin to the rack, unable at first to disengage his fingers. The officer of the deck sang out through his speaking trumpet, “A bright lookout fore and aft!” Charlie blurted, “Ay, ay, sir,” and the Vincennes sailed on for Madeira, her officers and men oblivious to how close they had come to losing