Sea of Glory

did not have the sea experience or the personality to negotiate a ship in close quarters. His passionate nature made it impossible for him to issue orders in a composed and careful manner, and he was without the natural, ingrained sensitivity to the movements of a sailing vessel that is essential to being an effective seaman.
    It didn’t help matters that the officer he had chosen as his first lieutenant, Overton Carr, was equally lacking in seamanship skills. But to Wilkes’s mind, whatever difficulties he encountered were always the fault of others. He claimed that the incident with the Flying Fish had caused the officers aboard the schooner to be “almost beside themselves and nonplused as ignorance is always in such situations.” But it had been Wilkes, not the officers of the Flying Fish, who had lost control of his emotions, and for the duration of the voyage, he would do everything in his power to persecute the schooner’s commander, Robert Pinkney.
     
    Reynolds began to wonder if Wilkes was suffering from some kind of mental imbalance. “We find ourselves entirely at a loss to account for his motives,” he wrote Lydia, “or to imagine how any man in a sane mind could be guilty of such wrong headed measures.” As far as Reynolds could tell, Wilkes was no longer the same person he had come to admire in Washington. “The nature of the man has become changed,” he wrote, “he is as one possessed by a demon.”
    Wilkes had changed, but less so than Reynolds, who had only known him for a few brief months prior to the Ex. Ex., might have thought. All his life, Wilkes had cast himself as the righteous outsider who must battle against the forces of ignorance and ineptitude to achieve what others thought could never be done. He was the antithesis of the “team player,” and as he had proven with Ferdinand Hassler more than a decade before, he was capable of turning on the people closest to him if he thought it served his best interests. For a few brief months, his original corps of passed midshipmen had been an integral part of Wilkes’s campaign to prove to Washington, if not the navy, that he was the natural choice to lead the Expedition. Little did Reynolds and the others realize that once they had served Wilkes’s initial purposes, all bets were off.
    Wilkes’s interpersonal skills had always been next to nonexistent, but for much of his professional life he had benefited from the advice of Jane, whom he referred to as “my moderation.” Reynolds and his compatriots had become part of Wilkes’s world at a time when Jane’s influence was at its height; indeed, she seems to have scripted many of the moves that won him command of the Ex. Ex. But now Wilkes was without Jane’s steadying hand. On occasion he would consult Hudson, but his good-natured second-in-command was not about to tell him anything he did not want to hear. Without restraint, Wilkes’s fanatical and outspoken personality inevitably began to raise havoc with the officers of the squadron.
    A year into the Expedition, Wilkes had essentially re-created the environment in which he had always operated: it was he, and he alone, against the rest of the world. It was a turbulent, hurtful, and ultimately wasteful way to conduct one’s life, but it was the only way he knew how to do it. Except for his first lieutenant Overton Carr, the purser Robert Waldron, and the surgeon John Fox, there were no officers aboard the Vincennes he could trust. This meant that despite being the leader of a nonmilitary expedition, Wilkes conducted himself as if he were in the midst of a war—not with icebergs and uncharted reefs, but with his own officers.
    At some point, Wilkes became known as the Stormy Petrel, a nickname that would stay with him for the rest of his life, and as any sailor knows, the appearance of a stormy petrel means that rough weather is ahead. The squadron as a whole, but the Vincennes in particular, became a nonstop whirlwind of activity. In addition to their daily surveying duties, the officers and men were constantly harassed by the cry, “All Hands on Deck!”—an order Wilkes issued as many as fifteen times a day. Under these conditions, it was impossible to count on more than an hour’s undisturbed sleep a night. But if Wilkes drove his men hard, he drove himself even harder. Every night, he worked well past midnight on his charts. Surgeon John Fox later reported that Wilkes averaged no more than five hours sleep a night