Sea of Glory

remained oblivious to this shift within the squadron. He was convinced that if he could only rid himself of Jones’s officers, all would be well. “[A]ll those I have brought into the Expedn. give me no trouble,” he assured Jane as late as June 16. “They are improving rapidly under my good tuition and I shall be able to make men of them I hope before I have done with them.”
    Before the squadron left Valparaiso for Callao in June, Wilkes implemented the first part of a plan “to get rid of many of my worthless officers.” Lieutenant Craven had made it clear that he wanted to command a schooner. Well, Wilkes would grant him his wish. He ordered Craven to remain in Valparaiso to take command of the Sea Gull when she finally arrived. More than a month overdue, the Sea Gull was assumed lost by most officers in the squadron, and Craven made it clear to Wilkes that he knew exactly what his commander was up to. Wilkes insisted, however, that he still held out hope. If, God forbid, the Sea Gull did not arrive, then, of course, Craven would be required to return to the United States. Wilkes could now turn his attention to Lieutenant Long.
     
    Once in Callao, Wilkes ordered that the storeship Relief be fumigated, a procedure that produced three barrels of dead rats. From Wilkes’s perspective, the rats were not the only vermin plaguing the squadron. Long was incompetent and worthy of a court-martial. In addition to Craven, now safely salted away in Valparaiso, and Lee, who had already sailed for the United States on the Henry Lee (a ship named for his uncle), there were Lieutenant Dale and an ever-growing list of lieutenants and surgeons whose chief sin was that they had formerly served under Jones. He wouldn’t be able to rid himself of all of them, but on June 21, Wilkes consigned a goodly portion to the Relief. The storeship, he announced, was too slow to be of use to the squadron. After dropping provisions at Sydney, Australia, and Honolulu, the ship was to return to the United States. “[A]fter I have rid myself of her,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “& her useless trash I shall be well off.” Long, who had won the respect of all who had served under him, did not take Wilkes’s decision well. “Much difficulty & diplomacy” were entailed, Reynolds wrote, “in quieting Captain Long.”
    It was while the Relief was being loaded with provisions for its final swing through the Pacific that some minor trouble erupted. Some of the squadron’s marines were ordered to supervise the transfer of whiskey into the storeship’s hold, but instead of maintaining proper discipline, the marines joined the sailors in sampling the wares. Wilkes was not amused by the drunken frolic that resulted. The next day, the offenders suffered twenty-four lashes each, even though twelve was the legal limit without the sanction of a court-martial. When three deserters were delivered to Wilkes a few days later, two received thirty-six lashes while the third got forty-one—once again without a court-martial. Wilkes claimed that there was not enough time for normal due process and that the punishments were not unreasonable considering the offenses. It was a judgment that would come back to haunt him several years later.
    By now almost all agreed that the Sea Gull —which had not been seen in several months—had been lost. Wilkes wrote that her officers, Passed Midshipmen James Reid and Frederick Bacon, “were among the most promising young officers in the squadron.” He speculated that the schooner might have tripped her foremast in the gale off Cape Horn, which would have ripped up her deck and caused her to founder. “Poor, poor fellows,” lamented Reynolds, who had grown so closely attached to the vessel and her crew at Tierra del Fuego, “what a terrible lot. The two officers were young men of my age, one if he be indeed gone, leaving a wife more youthful than himself and [a] child that [he] has never seen.”
    With Craven and many of the other senior lieutenants eliminated from the squadron, Wilkes began to reshuffle his officers. For a brief time Reynolds feared he might be transferred off the Vincennes to another vessel. Wilkes was now able to reappoint his special favorite Overton Carr (whom he referred to as “Otty” in his letters to Jane) as his first lieutenant. Wilkes liked to think of himself as coolly objective in his dealings with his officers, insisting to Jane that his lieutenants were “not a little astonished at