Sea of Glory

realize was that ever since the Expedition’s departure from Norfolk, Craven had become the object of his commander’s intense and increasingly vindictive envy. Wilkes was suffering under a deep sense of insecurity. As so many navy captains had already pointed out, he had precious little experience at sea, while Craven was recognized as one of the best seamen in the squadron. If Wilkes hadn’t been so insecure about his own nautical ability, he might have recognized how lucky he was to have Craven for a first lieutenant. Instead, he felt threatened by him. Even as Wilkes strove to present an urbane and judicious face to Reynolds and his friends, he covertly worked to undermine Craven. By October, Wilkes’s constant harassment and fault-finding had pushed his first lieutenant to take out his frustrations on Reynolds, whom all recognized as one of the commander’s favorites.
    Reynolds decided he must report the incident to Wilkes. “I understand you, Mr. Reynolds,” Wilkes assured him, “& depend upon it, such things shall not happen again.” Reynolds felt confident that his troubles with Craven were now over, adding, “Had I not known Captain Wilkes well and been fully aware that he was free from all petty notions such as that my rank will permit [Craven] to inflict insult without fear . . . , I never would have gone to him with my complaint against his First Lieutenant.”
    “Bah!” Reynolds would later write in the margins of his journal, “he hated Craven & this was the reason he took my part—cove that I was, not to have seen through him then.”
     
    As the squadron made its way south and west across the middle of the Atlantic, Wilkes directed a daily search for shoals, islands, and even a volcano that had been reported but had never been independently verified. Spreading out all five vessels from north to south, so that an estimated twenty miles of latitude could be continuously scanned on a clear day, they sailed over the coordinates of these “vigias,” or doubtful shoals. Invariably they found no sign of any hazard, and Wilkes would later send a list of these phantom shoals to the secretary of the navy. As the Ex. Ex. was proving, exploration was as much about discovering what did not exist as it was about finding something new.
    At night during the passage to Rio de Janeiro, the sea seemed to catch fire. Bursts of light sparkled at the vessels’ bows while glowing contrails curled in their wakes—a phenomenon known as “the phosphorescence.” Referred to today as “bioluminescence,” this greenish-yellow light is believed to be caused by tiny dinoflagellates, single-celled marine organisms that undergo a light-producing oxidation process when disturbed. “Every drop that was tossed up shone from its own light,” Reynolds recorded, “and as it fell again into the ocean, diffused around rings & circles of the same intense glow, the night being black as Erebus.”
    On other nights, it was the sky that demanded their attention. As they approached the latitude of Rio de Janeiro, they saw what were known as Magellanic Clouds. The explorer Magellan and his men had recorded sighting these “shiny white clouds here and there among the stars” on the first leg of their voyage around the world. Similar in appearance to the Milky Way, and most easily seen in the Southern Hemisphere, Magellanic Clouds remained a mystery well into the twentieth century—although that did not stop John Cleves Symmes from speculating that they had something to do with his hole at the South Pole. Now known to be galaxies external to our own Milky Way, some as many as 195,000 light-years away, Magellanic Clouds were just one of several spectacular celestial phenomena observed by the Exploring Expedition during the passage to South America. One night, dozens of falling stars lit up the sky. “[A]h! these evenings defy slumber,” Reynolds wrote, “and long after the usual hour of rest the upper deck is thronged with ardent gazers, who glow with rapture as they look.”
    Some of the more ardent gazers in the squadron were the Expedition’s two artists, Alfred Agate and James Drayton. In an era before photography, artists were a crucial part of any expedition, providing drawings and paintings that were later used to create illustrations for the published scientific reports and narrative. Although both accomplished artists, Agate and Drayton had the benefit of a relatively new invention, the camera lucida—an