Sea of Glory

the island but with, Reynolds noted, “deliberate dignity.”
    Now that he had cleared the beach, Wilkes declared that it was safe to land. It was late in the day, but he had some observations he wanted to make, and the scientists would have their first, long-awaited opportunity to collect some specimens. After a mere half hour on the beach, it was time to return to the ships.
    Wilkes felt he had provided the natives with “abundant proof of our prowess and superiority.” Many of his officers begged to disagree. “I consider the plan of policy pursued here as miserable,” wrote the assistant surgeon John Whittle. “[W]e have no doubt left these people in such a state of mind that if a ship should be unfortunately wrecked here, the crew will be murdered.”
     
    In the weeks ahead, as the squadron weaved its way among the Tuamotus toward Tahiti, eventually surveying a total of seventeen islands, the frustrations of the scientists only increased. Even when the natives proved friendly or the island uninhabited, Wilkes was reluctant to let them go ashore until after the survey was already well in hand. When no scientists were permitted to land on the island of Raraka, Titian Peale wrote out in bold letters across the page of his journal, “WHAT WAS A SCIENTIFIC CORP SENT FOR?” A few days later, Couthouy finally got the opportunity to collect some sizeable specimens of coral. But when he left them to dry outside his cabin door, Wilkes complained of the smell and ordered that no more coral could be dried below the spar deck. Couthouy insisted that European expeditions “had experienced no difficulty in the preservation of large and numerous specimens.” Wilkes replied that “he did not care a damn for what had been done in previous expeditions . . . , and that he should take the responsibility of deciding all matters relative to our collections according to his own views.” Like it or not, this was going to be the Wilkes Expedition.
    If his relations with the scientists had reached a new low, it was even worse with his officers, many of whom had once considered themselves the commander’s friends. Like Charlie Erskine before them—the cabin boy who had become so infuriated with Wilkes that he had contemplated murder—they had swung from ardent adoration to an equally passionate hate. “[W]e would have given ourselves to him entirely,” Reynolds wrote Lydia, “but he [did] not [know] how to use the men who were so much attached to him and by his own doings he has turned his warmest friends into deathly foes.”
    As was true on any naval vessel, the officers of the Vincennes ate their meals in two different groups or messes, with the lieutenants in the wardroom and the passed midshipmen and midshipmen in steerage. As was also true on any naval vessel, it was common for members of both messes to socialize in their cabins, with Reynolds’s and May’s carpeted stateroom serving as an especially popular gathering spot. But as relations between the commander and his officers deteriorated, Wilkes began to resent what he saw as an excessive fraternization among his junior and senior officers. On August 20, he issued an order: “The commander has observed with regret, not only a tendency to familiarity among officers of different grades, but that the apartments of all grades of officers have been converted into a lounge by the juniors, which must in the nature of things produce a familiarity having a tendency to destroy . . . discipline.”
    Reynolds responded with what might be described as the steerage’s declaration of independence. “In regard to the Selection of friends, or the privilege of enjoying their Society,” he wrote, “so long as we do not impinge on the martial law of the quarter deck, or assemble for seditious purposes, we are strongly & firmly of the belief, that the delicacy of the question should forbid all interference, & must beg to be allowed to follow the sacred bent of our own inclinations.” There was no longer any doubt as to how matters stood between the commander and his officers. “From this time forward,” Reynolds wrote, “there was ‘war to the knife’ between Captn. Wilkes & most of his officers.”
    By mutual agreement, all social contact between Wilkes and his officers ceased. “I have given up inviting the officers to my table,” he wrote Jane, “as I found it incompatible with my duties and I was desirous to widen the dividing line between us.” Wilkes would