Sea of Glory

the following season. When he had first met Ross in England during the fall of 1836, Wilkes had been the wide-eyed American without any polar experience. Now he was the one who had discovered a continent. It was too good an opportunity to miss. He must write Ross a letter, purporting to offer useful information, but also providing Wilkes the chance to rub in the fact that he had beaten the Englishman to the punch. It made no difference that he was under orders to keep his discoveries a secret. “[A]lthough my instructions are binding upon me relative to discoveries,” he wrote Ross, “I am nevertheless aware that I am acting as my govt. would order, if they could have anticipated the case.” In this fulsome, at times incoherent letter, Wilkes offers his best guess on the position of the magnetic South Pole; he tells about Piner Bay; about how he secured water from the top of an iceberg; and the weather he encountered. But most remarkable of all, Wilkes chose to include a detailed chart of his discoveries.
    It was a letter he would come to regret.

Part Three

CHAPTER 9
    The Cannibal Isles
    ONCE THE EXHILARATION of having discovered the world’s seventh continent had begun to wear off, Wilkes was left with a sobering realization. He had less than a year to perform the two most important surveys of the Ex. Ex.: the Fiji Islands and the Columbia River. If he was to complete the Expedition in the allotted three years, he would have to finish the Fiji survey in under two months, then get the squadron to the Pacific Northwest, a voyage of some six thousand miles, with enough time to survey the Columbia before winter set in. Any delay, no matter how minor, would require him to add another year to the Expedition. In the event of an extended voyage, the sailors’ and marines’ terms of duty would expire before the squadron returned to the United States. This meant that Wilkes might find himself without a crew if a significant number of the men insisted, as was their right, on quitting the Expedition when their time was up.
    Adding to Wilkes’s sense of embattled isolation was the lack of news from home. As incredible as it might seem, Wilkes, the leader of the U.S. Ex. Ex., had not received a single letter from his wife and children since the squadron left Rio de Janeiro, almost a year and a half ago. (To make matters worse, Hudson had gotten a letter in Sydney that was just seven months old.) “Don’t think for one moment my dear wife [that] I blame you,” he wrote Jane. “I am ever aware you have done every thing you ought and I impute it all to mishap.” Wilkes could not help but slip into an ever-deepening despair. “[Y]ou must not expect to see the same person that left you,” he warned Jane, “but a careworn and broken down old voyager who is and feels that he is doing his duty to his country most faithfully.”
    His one consolation, besides his faithful dog Sydney, was his nineteen-year-old nephew, Wilkes Henry. Ever since the dueling incident at Valparaiso, the boy had done everything in his power to please his uncle. In addition to fulfilling his day-to-day duties with an alacrity and good humor that endeared him to his fellow officers, he had shown a genuine interest in surveying and cartography. Although Wilkes insisted on treating him as just another officer, he did manage to find a few hours in the week to speak to the boy during his watch, a conversation that inevitably brought Wilkes “great pleasure.” “I almost chide myself for suffering the distance to exist between us,” he wrote Jane, but given his commitment to playing the part of the martinet, there was nothing else he could do.
     
    As had been true with the race for Antarctica, the United States was locked in a closely contested rivalry with Britain and France when it came to exploiting the economic opportunities available in the Fiji Islands. Although the group’s once considerable stands of sandalwood had long since been extirpated, the Fijis continued to offer bounteous quantities of bêche-de-mer, sea slugs that, when properly cured, brought excellent prices in China. Just the year before, Dumont d’Urville’s expedition had visited the group and had even burned a village in punishment for the killing of a French captain and the taking of his vessel. Unbeknownst to Wilkes, a British expedition, led by Edward Belcher, was also headed to Fiji.
    Over the past decade, captains from Salem, Massachusetts, had dominated the