Sea of Glory

mending a sail in an adjacent room of the convent building accidentally made a noise, Wilkes “went off in a minute,” according to an officer assisting him in the experiment. “Where is he?” Wilkes screamed. “The son of a bitch. . . . I’ll pound him! Where is he? By God, I’ll throttle him!” For the officers who had worked with him prior to the voyage’s departure, it was a startling change in behavior. “These little outbreaks,” Reynolds wrote, “were rather ominous for the future harmony of the squadron.”
    Wilkes was exhibiting the symptoms of a man who had been stretched beyond his capabilities. The less in control he felt, the more he became fixated on the issue of rank. At one point Commodore John Nicholson, commander of the Independence on station at Rio, addressed him as “Mister,” instead of “Captain,” Wilkes. When Wilkes expressed his outrage in a letter, Nicholson coolly responded, “To call you a Captain or Commander would not make you one.” It was a statement that appears to have cut Wilkes to the quick.
    Late one night, as he sat alone beside his “wagging pendulum,” he burst into tears. “I had a good cry,” he admitted to Jane (from whom he would withhold nothing throughout the voyage), “which relieves me not a little. How few, my dear Janie, would believe that the Commdr. Of the Expg Expedn. could be so easily brought to the sinking mood against all the duties that he is surrounded with.”
    In late December, Wilkes finally finished his pendulum experiments. By then, Lieutenant Long and the Relief were already on their way south. It was time, he decided, for some relaxation. With his flag lieutenant, Overton Carr, and a servant, he went ashore to enjoy a heated bath. But when he emerged from the warm water, he collapsed into his servant’s arms. “I was conscious,” he remembered, “but could not speak.” Carr immediately took him to a nearby hotel and put him to bed. When news spread that the commander had fainted and was now catatonic, it “produced a sensation throughout the fleet,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “and officers came [running from] all directions.” Just three months into the voyage, he was physically and emotionally depleted. Although the surgeon Edward Gilchrist pronounced “the case a very serious one” and suggested a regimen of “restoratives,” Wilkes opted for nothing more than a good night’s sleep. The next morning he was up and back at work, “to the great surprise of everybody.” The fact remained, however, that the commander of the Ex. Ex. was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
     
    On January 6, the squadron departed from Rio de Janeiro, but not before Wilkes and Nicholson exchanged a final, acrimonious flurry of correspondence. Wilkes accused the commodore of “endeavoring to decry [the Expedition’s] National character and destroy its efficiency by not extending to the Commanding Officers the courtesy and etiquette that their situation . . . commands.” It all came down to Nicholson’s having called him Mr. Wilkes. Baffled and irked by Wilkes’s tormented rage, Nicholson asked him a very good question: Rather than pretend to be something he wasn’t, why didn’t he instead choose to relish the fact that he, a young lieutenant, had been given such a prominent command? “You should feel more highly the honor which has been conferred upon you, as Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, . . . than all the empty and evanescent titles that could be given by either the people or officers of our own Country or any other.” Nicholson would ultimately send copies of his correspondence with Wilkes to Paulding at the Navy Department with a cover letter referring to “the wrong impressions he appears to entertain relative to his supposed rank.”
    Even before the squadron had departed from the United States, Wilkes knew that he would be hard-pressed to reach Cape Horn in time to launch a voyage south before the end of the Antarctic summer in late January. From the beginning, time was of the essence. But Wilkes had shown little inclination to hurry. The squadron had spent a leisurely ten days at Madeira and more than a month in Rio. It was true that the Peacock had needed major structural repairs, but Wilkes had chosen to focus on his feud with Commodore Nicholson and his interminable pendulum experiments rather than the pressing need to fix the Peacock and be off as soon as possible. Instead of boldly forging ahead, Wilkes had hung back,