Sea of Glory

Wilkes would later remember that McKeever “gave me encouragement to go forward with resolution and confidence.”
    Other officers in the squadron took notice of McKeever’s attentiveness, particularly when the Falmouth followed the squadron to Callao. Once in Peru, McKeever continued his curious wooing of Wilkes, even offering him his ship’s launch and a cutter. “Capt. McKeever seems to feel great interest in the Expedition,” warily noted Lieutenant Johnson, formerly of the Sea Gull and now first lieutenant of the Porpoise. “I hope he has no sinister views.”
    Not until early July did it become generally known what McKeever expected as his part in what Johnson termed the “famous bargain.” The removal of so many senior lieutenants from the squadron had created an opening for a sailing master aboard the Vincennes. At the very beginning of the Expedition, Wilkes had promised his officers that all promotions would be made within the squadron’s own ranks. But it turned out that Captain McKeever had a nephew aboard the Falmouth, Lieutenant Edwin DeHaven, who wanted to join the Expedition. Wilkes agreed to make DeHaven his sailing master.
    For the junior officers of the Expedition eager for promotion, it was a crushing blow. Reynolds was at the head of the list for the promotion to sailing master, but now he would have to wait. “The Falmouth came in,” he bitterly recorded in his journal, “Cap McKeever, gave us his Launch, I st Cutter and his Nephew: which latter, was heartily wished at the d___l by us.” Wilkes would have never acknowledged it, but he was, in effect, continuing the cycle of abuse: just as he had been devastated by Poinsett’s refusal to grant him an acting appointment, now he was imposing the same injustice on Reynolds and his fellow officers. “[T]he wound that has been inflicted will rankle all the cruise,” Reynolds predicted. “I feel as if my very life had been taken away.” For Reynolds and his fellow officers, this was the true turning point of the Expedition.

CHAPTER 6
    Commodore of the Pacific
    ON JULY 15, 1839, just a day out of Callao, Wilkes did for himself and Hudson what the secretary of the navy had refused to do. He made the two of them captains. After leaving Norfolk almost a year before, Wilkes had removed the epaulet from his uniform, but on that mild clear morning, he appeared on the quarterdeck of the Vincennes wearing what Reynolds described as “an immense pair of Epaulettes.”
    There was more to come. As captain and commander of a squadron, Wilkes felt he was now entitled to the honorary rank of Commodore of the U.S. Exploring Expedition. So it was that at precisely 9:00 A.M. the narrow streamer, known as a “coach whip,” at the masthead of the Vincennes was replaced by the broad, blue, swallow-tailed pendant, or pennant, of a commodore.
    It was an audacious, even outrageous act, without precedent in the U.S. Navy. Wilkes would later admit that the move could have been considered “a bold and unwarranted stroke of policy on my part.” The timing was also suspect. Why now, rather than at the beginning of the Expedition? In a letter to Jane, Wilkes claimed that it was his “excessive modesty ” that had delayed his donning of the epaulets. “It will give [Hudson and me] much more respect,” he wrote, “and I think add to my influence over the officers and crew.” In his official journal, Wilkes dubiously asserted that he had “assumed the uniform in obedience to orders of the Secty. Of the Navy. . . . My reasons for not having done this heretofore [are] but known to myself.”
    As far as the officers of the U.S. Ex. Ex. were concerned, Wilkes’s reasons were quite obvious. The squadron was on the verge of a wilderness larger than all the world’s landmasses combined. Once amid the islands of the Pacific, it would take months, perhaps years, for official correspondence to catch up with them. Beyond the reach of the administration, with little chance of encountering another U.S. naval vessel, Wilkes—the self-crowned commodore of the Exploring Expedition—had made it unmistakably clear that he now felt free to do exactly as he pleased.
    But could he pull it off? Could he, in the words with which a captain commanded a lieutenant to implement an order, make it so?
     
    As Wilkes’s instructions made clear, one of the Expedition’s primary goals was to provide charts for the nation’s whalemen. America had, by far, the largest whaling