Sea of Glory

the decks,” Reynolds wrote. By now all the officers and a considerable portion of the men were lined up along the leeward gangway, “looking fixedly on the foaming breakers that were so close.”
    Normally Wilkes’s “loud, meddling & abusive” voice was an omnipresent part of life aboard the Vincennes. But for the last few minutes, he hadn’t said a word. He was nowhere to be seen in the vicinity of the helm or along the leeward side of the deck. Then Reynolds saw him. He was off by himself on the weather gangway, leaning on the booms, his face buried in his hands. For the commander of a sloop-of-war, it was an alarming and shameful display of cowardice.
    All his life, the high-strung Wilkes had been prone to fainting spells. In his narrative he would claim to have had “no very precise recollection” of the incident. John Whittle, the assistant surgeon, described Wilkes during the episode at Pago Pago as showing “the strongest symptoms of confusion and alarm and was in fact incompetent for some time to his duties.” Whatever the case may be, Wilkes was living the worst nightmare a naval officer could ever dream of. With time slowed to a crawl and with almost the entire crew assembled on deck, his ship was drifting toward disaster, and he was powerless to do anything about it. What’s more, his handpicked first lieutenant had also proven a catastrophic failure.
    Stray puffs of wind brushed languorously across the Vincennes ’s sails. Under the pilot’s able direction, the ship continued to move ahead, inch by harrowing inch, but the rocks were now directly beneath them. Just then, the breeze freshened, and with a slight gurgle of water at the bow, the Vincennes slipped out to sea, with, Reynolds observed, “nothing to spare!”
    Once it was clear that the ship was no longer in danger, the pilot requested that Wilkes heave to so that he might return to the harbor in his whaleboat, which was tied to the Vincennes ’s stern. But Wilkes, burning with humiliation and indignation, refused. On and on they sailed in a building breeze, with the bow of the pilot’s whaleboat slapping against the big ship’s quarter wake. When the order was finally given to heave to, Fauxhall climbed into his boat with a quiet dignity that only infuriated Wilkes all the more. Waving his hand, the pilot mockingly called out, “You may fill away now, sir! Fill away, as soon as you like.”
    “Captn. W. could have eaten him,” Reynolds wrote.
     
    Soon after the pilot had been dismissed, Reynolds went below to bandage his feet; he had burned them in the sun a few days before, and they hurt so badly that he could barely get them into his shoes. But almost as soon as he began to attend to his feet, Wilkes called for “All Hands.” One of the Vincennes ’s whaleboats and a dinghy needed to be brought aboard, an operation that usually required only a few men and took, at the most, five minutes. But as was his wont, Wilkes demanded that the entire crew be on duty.
    Reynolds worked as quickly as he could to bandage his feet, but in a few minutes there was another cry for all hands. A few minutes after that, a sailor came below and informed Reynolds that the captain was waiting for him. Reynolds went up on deck and was shocked to see that all two hundred men were standing idly at their stations. Reynolds hobbled to his station and was told that he should consider himself suspended. Outraged by what he perceived to be a calculated effort to humiliate him, Reynolds, despite his blistered feet, paced furiously up and down the leeward gangway as Wilkes glowered at him from the quarterdeck. Then came the next order: “to confine myself to my apartment.”
    For the next six days, as the Vincennes sailed for the island of Upolu in western Samoa, Reynolds remained confined to his windowless, eighty-five-degree stateroom. When he asked Wilkes’s secretary when he would learn what the charges against him were, he was told “that it was Cap. Wilkes’s way ‘to punish first & inquire afterwards.’”
     
    One night, not long after the suspension of William Reynolds, Wilkes was alone on the quarterdeck, leaning against the rail, when he was approached by the Vincennes ’s quartermaster. Thomas Piner was one of the oldest sailors in the U.S. Navy and was generally recognized, Wilkes wrote, as “a very faithful and tried seaman.” Piner apologized for the interruption but said he had “something to tell me which he thought it was