Sea of Glory

bêche-de-mer trade; in fact, one of Salem’s most experienced traders, Benjamin Vanderford, had signed on as a pilot for the Ex. Ex. Vanderford, who had spent ten months shipwrecked on the Fijis, knew better than anyone the challenges of navigating amid the more than 360 islands of this group. No reliable charts existed, and in the last twelve years, eight vessels, five of them from America, had been lost in the region. “[A]s we have so much of the Trade,” Reynolds wrote, “it was the duty of the Government to make the Survey; though even at the 11 th hour.”
    Wilkes had picked the island group of Tongatapu, to the south of Samoa and just a three-day sail from Fiji, for a rendezvous point. It wasn’t until early May that the newly repaired Peacock arrived at Tonga and joined the Vincennes, Porpoise, and Flying Fish for the first time since the start of the Antarctic cruise five months earlier. Reynolds and his shipmates soon learned of the most recent indignities Wilkes had inflicted on the officers of the Ex. Ex.—despite his recent triumphs.
    Reynolds’s good friend Edward Gilchrist, the highest-ranking surgeon in the Expedition, had been dismissed for writing a disrespectful letter and sent home to the United States. Lieutenant Alden, who had dared to insist that he had not seen Antarctica on January 19, had been turned out of his comfortable cabin in favor of the more tractable Dr. Fox. The long-suffering commander of the Flying Fish, Robert Pinkney, had been confined to quarters aboard the schooner and would soon be following Gilchrist on a vessel bound for home.
    Even though Reynolds and his former roommate William May were no longer assigned to the Vincennes, Wilkes had found a way to strike out at them too. During the passage from New Zealand to Tonga, he had ordered the carpenter to lay waste to Reynolds’s and May’s much-loved stateroom, ripping out the walls and furnishings and transforming it into a “stow hole.” Reynolds was already looking ahead to the squadron’s return to the United States, when Wilkes must face “the honest vengeance of those whom he has so trampled upon.” In his journal Reynolds made a solemn pledge: “I have forgotten nothing and nothing will I forgive.”
     
    While in Tonga, preparations were hurriedly made for the impending survey of Fiji. The squadron’s dozen or more gigs, cutters, and whaleboats were to be used among the coral reefs. Given the violent reputation of the natives, each boat was equipped with not only the necessary surveying equipment but a formidable selection of muskets, rifles, pistols, and gunwale-mounted blunderbusses—heavy shotguns that fired buckshot. Some of the vessels were even equipped with the frames to launch Congreve war rockets, made famous by Francis Scott Key’s reference to “the rockets’ red glare” during the British attack on Fort McHenry in 1814. When it came to the safety of his officers and men, Wilkes intended to leave nothing to chance. Unfortunately, even these extraordinary measures would not, in the end, prove sufficient.

    It had been in Tonga that James Cook had first heard of a land known as “Feejee” (the Tongan name for the island group), where there lived a people feared by the Tongans “on account of the savage practice to which they are addicted . . . of eating their enemies whom they kill in battle.” Whether or not the Fijians’ reputation for cannibalism had anything to do with it, Cook, like the Dutch explorer Tasman before him, was satisfied with only a fleeting glimpse of the Fijis before the combination of bad weather and a terrifying network of coral reefs persuaded him to move on to a more accessible group of islands.
    It wasn’t until 1789 that a European navigator made his way into the midst of Fiji, but it was under less than ideal circumstances. William Bligh had just suffered the mutiny on the Bounty when he and a handful of supporters, all of them jammed into a tiny ship’s launch, found themselves surrounded by unfamiliar islands. Even though they were at one point pursued by two large sailing canoes, Bligh, one of the most skilled surveyors of his generation, was able to sketch a chart of what he had seen. In the intervening decades, others added to Bligh’s hurried observations, but by 1840 only a small portion of the hundreds of Fijian islands had been laid down on any chart.
    In Tonga, Wilkes decided to construct his own chart of the group based on all available