Sea of Glory

the gun deck, Wilkes asked for the name of the officer who had borrowed it. Reynolds indignantly refused to tell him, and the interview was soon ended. Ten minutes later Reynolds was informed that he had been transferred to the Peacock.
    It was as if a dagger had been planted in his heart. For almost a year and a half, the Vincennes and his stateroom had been his home. The members of his mess had become his family. “My mind was utterly distraught!” he wrote. “I never felt leaving Home, with half the force of grief, that oppressed me, at being thus torn from my happy mess!”
    A ship is a total environment—self-contained, isolated from the outside world. The bonds formed within the wooden walls of a ship are as strong, if not stronger, than anything known on land. For more than a year, Reynolds had been a proud member of the Expedition’s flagship—his connection to his messmates made all the more resilient by their shared hatred of their commander. But Wilkes had found a way to hurt him and his friends where it would hurt most. Reynolds was one of the Ex. Ex.’s most popular officers, and his absence would be keenly felt throughout the ship; he had also made no secret of his changed feelings for Wilkes. It was time to get this sensitive and articulate officer off the Vincennes.
    News of Reynolds’s transfer created “a great hubbub.” The surgeon John Whittle was disconsolate. “Nothing which has occurred since we left home has given me so much grief as this,” he wrote. “He is a fellow of noble soul & has one of the most admirable tempers imaginable. Never have I become more attached to a man after so short an acquaintance.” Jim Gibson, the sailor who had been Reynolds’s boyhood friend back in Lancaster, came to help him pack. “[He was] in not much better plight than I was myself,” Reynolds wrote. “Poor fellow, I was sorry to leave him.”
    But it was his roommate William May who was the most devastated by the news. “May & I made perfect babes of ourselves,” Reynolds wrote. “Twas like the parting of man & wife: like the dissolution of a household!” May vowed that he would not stay aboard the ship with Reynolds gone. All attempts to calm him failed, and he stormed into Wilkes’s cabin. “Sir,” he shouted, “you have treated my friend, Mr. Reynolds, with great injustice. I am surprised! I am shocked! I am disgusted, Sir & I wish to quit the Ship; I cannot stay in her any longer!”
    Wilkes ordered May to leave the cabin. May’s father was a prominent member of Washington society, and Wilkes appears to have been extremely reluctant to see him go. Soon Robert Waldron, the purser, appeared in steerage to deliver a message from the commander: May had clearly been “very much excited & if he wished to remain in the Ship, he had only to say so”—otherwise, he would be ordered to the Flying Fish. “Anywhere!” May exclaimed. In a few minutes his orders were in his hands. The ship was hove to, and the two friends went their separate ways.
    Reynolds was received kindly by the officers of the Peacock but had some trouble fitting in. For almost a week, he had no assigned duty, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. Finally, when one of the officers became ill, he was given charge of the deck. “[W]henever we came within hail of the Vincennes during my watch,” he wrote, “I took great delight in shaking my trumpet & displaying myself in a most conspicuous manner. Sent away as a convict, banished for punishment, I was well pleased to show that in my new Ship I occupied a post of honor!”
     
    Eighteen days after the transfers of Reynolds and May, at sundown on November 29, the Vincennes and the Peacock were between thirty and forty miles from Sydney. The shore was not yet in sight. “[W]e gave up all hope of getting in until the next day,” Reynolds wrote, “and were sorrowed to think of the breakfast we should miss.” Much to everyone’s surprise, the Vincennes crowded sail, and Lieutenant Hudson ordered his men to follow suit. At eight o’clock, they sighted the Port Jackson light-house.
    The wind was with them, and with time being of the essence, Wilkes decided to push on even though they were without a pilot. “[O]n, on we went,” Reynolds wrote, “& undertaking rather a critical chance, Captn Wilkes ran his Ship clear up into the Harbor & we followed, anchoring off the Town at 11.” The next morning the citizens of Sydney were flabbergasted to see two