Sea of Glory

meantime all they could do was wait and hope that the little schooner and her fifteen-man crew would be soon sighted sailing into the harbor.
    Before he headed for Callao and had it out with Lieutenant Long, Wilkes had other matters to attend to in Valparaiso. On May 20, the day after the arrival of the Flying Fish, a naval court of inquiry commenced aboard the Peacock. For the next week, Hudson, who was appointed president of the court, presided over a painstaking reexamination of the actions of Lieutenant Dale at Good Success Bay. After close to a dozen witnesses had been called to testify, it was established that Dale had done everything he could to get his boat-crew off the beach but had been thwarted by the rising surf of an approaching gale. Wilkes, who had insisted on the court of inquiry, would later issue a public reprimand accusing Dale of incompetence and cowardice that was completely at odds with the court’s findings.
    The Dale incident would prove to be a kind of watershed in the Expedition, establishing a pattern that would be repeated over and over again for the next three years. Just as he had done earlier with Lieutenants Craven and Lee, Wilkes had felt compelled to pounce on and attack a seemingly innocent and well-meaning officer. No matter how many times this would happen in the years ahead, Wilkes’s officers and men remained at a loss to explain their commander’s behavior.
    Some leaders have the ability to step back from even the most volatile situation and assess, as best they can, what really happened. Wilkes, on the other hand, epitomized what has been called the “emotional mind.” He responded to situations quickly and passionately. Even if subsequent events proved that his initial response was unwarranted, he clung like a bulldog to his first impression. The dismissal of Craven at Rio Negro and Lee at Orange Bay resulted from knee-jerk reactions that a more careful and rational weighing of the evidence would have shown to be completely unjustified. But this is not how the emotional mind works. “Actions that spring from the emotional mind carry a particularly strong sense of certainty,” writes Daniel Goleman, “a by-product of a streamlined, simplified way of looking at things that can be absolutely bewildering to the rational mind.” Substitute “his officers” for “the rational mind,” and you have an excellent description of how the squadron’s lieutenants and passed midshipmen responded to these early examples of Wilkes’s style of command.
    The case of Lieutenant Dale was just as perplexing. Wilkes had watched events unfold on the wave-hammered shore of Good Success Bay from the deck of the Porpoise. He had had no direct contact with Dale, and except for a few days of anxious waiting, there had been no long term repercussions from the incident. But Wilkes had been infuriated by Dale’s inability to return to the Porpoise. From his perspective, Dale’s actions amounted to a personal insult—a flagrant crime that required a swift and crushing response. Instead of a commanding officer, Wilkes was behaving much like an indignant child on a playground, and his officers were shocked by his callous bullying of a blameless lieutenant.
    “Such a villainous attempt to ruin an unoffending man,” William Reynolds later wrote, “opened the eyes of the staunchest admirers of Lieutenant Wilkes to the glaring faults of his character, and to borrow a phrase of his own, [the case of Lieutenant Dale] may be considered as the ‘turning point’ of the feelings of the officers, towards their commander. Here forward, there was no affection for his person, and consideration, humanity or justice was no longer hoped for at his hand.”
    Underlying Wilkes’s actions was the conviction that the officers whom he had inherited from Commodore Jones, and who represented the one aspect of the Expedition’s organization over which he had had no control, were incompetent. “It is astonishing,” he wrote Jane, “that all Commdr Jones men and officers with one or two exceptions are good for nothing.” What he did not take into account was that over the course of the last year his inner circle of officers had inevitably gotten to know and respect many of the officers from the previous regime. Reynolds and his friends were becoming less and less willing to stand idly by as Wilkes ran roughshod over their compatriots.
    Wilkes, who had not even a smattering of empathetic understanding,