Sea of Glory

my decision and impartiality for it makes no matter with me who the individual is that offends, I give him the necessary rebuke.” But Otty Carr was the exception. “He is so much in my confidence,” he wrote Jane, “from having been my flag Lieutenant and so long with me that it gives me pleasure to aide him in his duties,” adding that Carr “has risen further than your dear husband by holding on to my coat.”
    There was another Wilkes intimate, however, who was giving him no such pleasure. While in Valparaiso, his teenage nephew, Midshipman Wilkes Henry, had been a principal in a duel. Dueling had a long and undistinguished history in the U.S. Navy. One historian has claimed that between 1798 and 1848, thirty-six naval officers were killed in eighty-two duels, approximately two-thirds as many as died in combat during that same period. For a young man whose sense of self-worth was defined by his willingness to die in a noble cause, the dark and romantic tradition of dueling was difficult to resist. Put a steerage full of teenage naval officers together with too much time on their hands, and some sort of trouble was bound to occur. When someone felt his sense of dignity had been slighted, a formal challenge was sure to follow.
    When it came to the Ex. Ex., young Wilkes Henry did not have the best of role models. Reynolds’s friend William May had fought several duels, including a bloodless square-off four years earlier against another Expedition lieutenant, A. S. Baldwin. (As was often true after a duel, the two former opponents were now good friends.) Wilkes Henry’s duel dated back to what Wilkes described as a “foolish quarrel” with Passed Midshipman George Harrison in Rio de Janeiro. Unable to arrange the duel in Rio, they were forced to wait until the squadron’s arrival in Valparaiso, where Henry took along fellow midshipman James Blair as his second. Luckily, no one was hurt. “[T]hey took two shots at each other,” Wilkes told Jane, “to little effect.” Wilkes felt he had no alternative but to dismiss all four officers (the two principals and their seconds) from the squadron, calling them “a pack of young boobies.” But it was Wilkes Henry in whom he was most disappointed. “Oh how I do regret I ever consented to his coming in the Expedition,” he wrote Jane.
    Knowing that dismissal would ruin his nephew’s naval career, Wilkes continued to agonize over the decision. He consulted Hudson, the one man in the squadron whom he felt he could talk to about such matters. “I told him that I should never forgive myself if any accident happened to [Wilkes],” he told Jane. Hudson’s own son was a midshipman in the squadron. “[H]e said he could readily enter into my feelings.”
    On June 22, Wilkes received a letter signed by most of the officers in the Expedition requesting that he not dismiss the duelists and their seconds. The officers promised that they would not allow a similar incident to occur. Wilkes gladly took the opportunity to reevaluate his original decision, especially since it was clear that the officers were most concerned not about Harrison but about his nephew. “[W]hen you know that their fondness for Wilkes has induced them to take this interest for them all,” he wrote Jane, “I am sure you will feel as much gratification as I do about it.” “[A]ll my troubles about Wilkes are at an end,” he happily declared.
    The officers’ collective plea of June 22 provided an opportunity of another sort for the commander of the Expedition. The letter represented a surprising gesture of support from the officers, especially given Wilkes’s most recent actions. He might have used the incident as a rallying point—a way to start to rebuild his officers’ morale. He had pared the officer corps down to the extent that it was now dominated by his inner circle. A few nicely timed compliments and promotions would have instilled a renewed sense of purpose and loyalty in a group of men who were yearning for some sign of approval from their commander. Instead, Wilkes listened to Captain Isaac McKeever.
     
    Wilkes had first met McKeever, the commander of the USS Falmouth, at Valparaiso and had been immediately seduced by him. Unlike the hated Commodore Nicholson back in Rio de Janeiro (who would later direct the unsuccessful search for the crew of the Sea Gull ), McKeever immediately referred to him as Captain Wilkes. He also had nothing but praise for Wilkes and the Expedition.