Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42. Nathaniel Philbrick
and in April, Wilkes moved the entire Depot to his house on the Hill.
At his own expense, he built a new observatory – just a small box, fourteen by thirteen feet and only ten feet high, with two-foot-wide doors on the roof that could be opened to the sky with a system of pulleys. Mounted on granite piers that extended six feet above the floor was a brass transit (an instrument similar to a theodolite that measures horizontal and vertical angles) that Hassler had originally purchased for the Coast Survey back in 1815. The entire building was surrounded by a ditch, five feet wide and deep, to prevent what were termed “the transmission of terrestrial vibrations” – many of them, no doubt, emanating from that big white building atop the hill. Although a meager and unimpressive structure compared to national observatories in England and France, what became known as the Capitol Hill Observatory marked a crucial first step in bringing science to the attention of the federal government.
Wilkes soon found that living on the less fashionable side of town had its advantages. He was able to study at the nearby Library of Congress whenever he wanted, and many members of Washington’s society took to stopping to chat with Jane during their morning carriage rides. Perhaps most important to the couple was that this unusual arrangement gave them the opportunity to be a regular part of their children’s upbringing. “[W]hat we most valued,” Wilkes remembered, “[was that] our Children were Removed from all contact with others, and their lessons & our teaching was Rarely interrupted. This was a great pleasure to us as well as service to them and, as our house was roomy & the garden large, we had the choice of the children to unite with them in their home amusements; at the same time they were under our own eye.”
For the next three years, Wilkes and Jane would also make their mark on Washington society, regularly attending parties given by a wide range of foreign dignitaries and government officials. It was commonly said in naval circles that “a cruise in Washington was worth two around Cape Horn,” and for Wilkes, this was time well spent.
When Andrew Jackson came to office in 1829 and oversaw the abandonment of John Quincy Adams’s exploring expedition, few would have predicted that he would eventually become a fervent advocate of his own voyage of discovery. The president who had railed against the aristocratic merchants of the Northeast, and who portrayed himself as the anti-intellectual advocate of farmers in the South and West, gradually began to see the importance of science and exploration to the United States. Much of his change of heart had to do with the reality of ruling a nation that, like it or not, already had a thriving overseas trade. But there were personal factors as well. Jackson could not help but respect a man like Ferdinand Hassler, who was as ornery and determined as himself Thus, contrary to all expectations, it was the Jackson administration that presided over the reinstatement of Hassler’s Coast Survey. On the diplomatic front, Jackson’s combative, highly nationalistic nature made it impossible for him to back away when American interests were challenged abroad, interceding with the firepower required to right any actual or perceived wrongs. It was what one historian has called “a frontier sense of honor” transferred from the backwoods of America to the oceans of the world. And it was the navy that must uphold the nation’s international reputation.
In 1831, at Quallah Batoo in Sumatra, a local rajah allowed Malay pirates to attack a Boston ship involved in the pepper trade. Several crewmembers were killed, and the ship was temporarily taken and plundered. In August 1831, Captain John Downes was sent in the frigate Potomac to investigate the incident. Instead of demanding restitution and indemnity, Downes chose to launch a full-scale attack. A force of 250 sailors and marines destroyed the fort, burned the town, and killed more than a hundred natives. Although it was clear Downes had exceeded his orders, Jackson publicly praised the mission for having “increased respect for our flag in those distant seas [while providing] additional security for our commerce.”
Beating the drum for the United States on this particular operation was none other than Jeremiah N. Reynolds. After the disappointing conclusion of his privately financed exploring expedition, Jeremiah jumped at the chance to serve as secretary to Captain Downes of the Potomac. His jingoistic account of the Potomac’s mission to Sumatra was published soon after his return to America in 1834. (He would also publish a short story based on a whaling legend he had heard in Chile titled “Mocha Dick, the White Whale of the Pacific,” which would later attract the attention of Herman Melville.)
Once back in the United States, Jeremiah seized the day. The nation was in the midst of a period of unparalleled prosperity, and his old friend former navy secretary Samuel Southard was now a senator from New Jersey and head of the Committee on Naval Affairs. The time was right for another attempt at an exploring expedition. As he had done eight years before, he encouraged marine and scientific societies to send petitions of support to Congress, and in March 1836 Senator Southard’s committee reported a bill recommending a naval expedition to the Pacific. Two weeks later, on the evening of April 3, Jeremiah addressed Congress in the Hall of Representatives on the subject of the proposed voyage. Fired to an awesome eloquence, he breathed new life into the arguments he had made back in the 1820s. Without once mentioning Symmes, he spoke of the mystery lurking to the south, as well as the continuing need for an expedition as an aid to navigation. But his most passionate plea was in the name of science. His vision of the expedition’s civilian corps had expanded well beyond the naturalist and astronomer who were to have sailed on the voyage in 1828.
At a time when a trip to the Pacific was equivalent to a modern-day trip to the moon, a voyage of this kind offered scientists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to investigate exotic habitats: rain forests, volcanoes, tropical lagoons, icebergs, and deserts. Before cameras and video equipment, the only way scientists could convey the scope and essence of what had been observed, besides field notes and sketches, was to bring the specimens back with them. Whether it involved shooting and skinning animals and birds, preserving delicate marine organisms in bottles of alcohol, pressing and drying plants, collecting seeds, or accumulating boxes of rocks, soil, fossils, shells, and coral, scientists in European expeditions had inevitably returned with staggering numbers of objects. At the end of the eighteenth century the great German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt had ventured to the interior of South America and proved that a scientist could base an entire career on studying the returns from a single expedition.
Jeremiah Reynolds proposed that America mount an expedition on a scale that had never before been attempted. In keeping with the giant size and boundless ambition of the young nation it represented, the U.S. expedition would “collect, preserve, and arrange every thing valuable in the whole range of natural history, from the minute madrapore to the huge spermaceti, and accurately describe that which cannot be preserved.” In addition, the expedition’s scientists would study the languages and customs of the many peoples they encountered, while also collecting data concerning weather, navigation, the earth’s magnetism, and other fields of interest.
Jeremiah’s stirring and patriotic call to science resonated with Congress, and an expenditure of $150,000 was approved in both houses. When a slight ripple of protest arose in the House, his ever-loyal Ohio delegation came to his defense. In response to those who claimed the expedition amounted to a “chimerical and hairbrained notion,” Thomas Hamer reminded Congress that the grain-growing states of the West had a “deep interest” in the voyage. America’s farmers needed new places to sell their surplus wheat, and the exploring expedition would help to identify potential foreign markets. Hamer’s remarks were an indication that all Americans, not just merchants from the Northeast, were beginning to appreciate the importance of the nation’s growing economic presence around the world, and it had been the prospect of an exploring expedition to the Pacific that had helped America recognize what its new role had come to be. With his second term ending in less than a year, President Jackson made a personal commitment to seeing that the expedition sailed in the next few months; as early as June 9 he wrote that he was “feeling a lively interest in the Exploring Expedition … [and] that it should be sent out as soon as possible.”
Jeremiah Reynolds had called for a scientific corps that amounted to a virtual university afloat, with more than twenty scientists engaged in almost as many disciplines. Instead of two ships, the American squadron would have to include at least half a dozen vessels. Assembling a specially equipped squadron of this size would require an immense amount of planning and