Sea of Glory

and often went for days at a time with no sleep at all. Sleep deprivation leads to a loss of emotional control as well as a failure to make complex social judgments—just the areas in which Wilkes’s personality was already lacking.
    Underlying Wilkes’s determination to push himself and his men “to the wall” was an unshakable sense of dread. “It is almost impossible to give the constant anxiety I was under,” he later wrote, “arising from the feelings I had of the incompetency of the officers.” The true source of this “constant anxiety” was not a lack of confidence in his officers, but in himself. Too controlling to adequately delegate his many responsibilities, turned rabid with exhaustion, paranoia, and loneliness even as he clung pathetically to the tattered notion of his infallibility, Wilkes was in danger of becoming a caricature of the enlightened explorer. Instead of his boyhood hero James Cook, the Stormy Petrel was acting more like that tyrant of legend William Bligh. Whether or not his officers would go the way of Fletcher Christian remained to be seen.
     
    On September 10, the island of Tahiti came within view. Compared to the low coral atolls of the Tuamotus, Tahiti’s high volcanic peaks were a wonderful contrast and reminded several of the officers of the Expedition’s first landfall, Madeira. But Tahiti was much more than a physical place for the officers and men of the Ex. Ex.; it represented the holy ground of Pacific exploration—the magical island where European civilization had first come in significant contact with the exotic world of Polynesia (a term coined in the eighteenth century by the Frenchman Charles De Brosses, meaning “many islands”).
    What is remarkable, in retrospect, is how long it took for the two cultures to meet. Magellan had been the first to sail across the Pacific in 1521-22. Except for two uninhabited atolls, he had not seen a single island until he’d come across Guam, almost nine thousand miles from South America. In the intervening years, Spanish galleons regularly sailed from South America to the Philippines, but the route they followed like a well-worn trail seldom brought them into contact with the islands and their people. A handful of European mariners had ventured to scattered portions of the Pacific, but for the most part the ocean remained almost completely unexplored through the middle of the eighteenth century, more than 250 years after Magellan.
    That all changed with the voyage of Samuel Wallis, the British naval officer who stumbled on the island of Tahiti in 1768, two years before it was visited by James Cook. The island seemed almost too good to be true. The lush hills and valleys were filled with fruit, vegetables, pigs, and birds; the surrounding waters abounded with fish. With everything they needed at their fingertips, the Tahitians, whose physical size and beauty stunned the Europeans, were free to live a life of apparent ease. Best of all, from the sailors’ perspective, the women, wearing little more than the flowers in their hair, were willing to fulfill the men’s every desire for the price of an iron nail. When the ready supply of nails ran out, Wallis became concerned that his ship might be pulled to pieces by his sailors’ frantic search for additional trade goods.
    Even before Wallis returned to England to tell Cook about his discovery, Tahiti was visited by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe. Bougainville’s report of a virtual Garden of Eden, which he dubbed “New Cythera,” was taken as proof of the Enlightenment’s belief in the innate goodness of natural man, uncorrupted by the evils of society. But by the time Cook arrived on the scene a year later, Tahiti was no longer the utopia it had once been. Venereal disease was now rampant on the island, and in a matter of weeks Cook’s surgeon reported thirty-three cases among the sailors and marines. In subsequent years a host of European-borne diseases would ravage the native population.
    Three decades after its discovery, Tahiti received a visitation of a different sort. Where the French had seen an Eden, the London Missionary Society saw an island of barbarous heathens in desperate need of the Word of God. Not until 1815, when King Pomare II embraced Christianity so as to help him defeat his tribal rivals, did the Society begin to make genuine inroads. Then, with the arrival of a young, charismatic reformed