Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42. Nathaniel Philbrick
brig Porpoise awaited him. He planned to employ what was, for the American navy, a new and revolutionary system of surveying known as the quincunx method. Dickerson had given him permission to borrow some of the instruments he had purchased in Europe. Using two schooners and a fleet of whaleboats, along with specially designed buoys equipped with flags, he and his officers would create a series of interlocking triangles with sides of between a half-mile and three miles in length. Their positions would be established by chronometer and later confirmed by the celestial observations of Professor William Bond at Harvard. The small open boats would be used to measure soundings on shoals that, in some cases, were only a few feet below the water’s surface.
It took longer than he had expected, but Wilkes was able to complete the survey in two months. Sometimes deploying all eleven whale-boats at one time, he insisted that his officers and men meticulously survey even the roughest portions of the bank. No one would improve on Wilkes’s work at Georges Bank until well into the twentieth century.
In September, he and his officers returned to the Boston Navy Yard to finish the necessary calculations and to work on the chart. Word of Wilkes’s survey quickly reached the acknowledged master of American navigation, Nathaniel Bowditch. As a young sailor, Bowditch had taught himself enough mathematics and astronomy to uncover more than eight thousand errors in the leading navigational guide of his day. In 1802 he came out with his own guide, The New American Practical Navigator, immediately recognized as the most accurate and comprehensive text on celestial navigation ever published. At sixty-four, he was revered in maritime circles as the paramount navigator in the world.
Wilkes was invited to Bowditch’s home in Boston, and once in the presence of his idol, the normally self-assured naval officer found himself “greatly abashed.” The two men went for a walk, and Bowditch questioned Wilkes about the survey. Placing his cane in the lieutenant’s hand, Bowditch asked Wilkes to draw a diagram in the dirt. “Oh, I see, I see,” he replied, nodding his head. “That will do.”
Several days later, Bowditch and a friend appeared unannounced at the navy yard to inspect Wilkes’s chart. Wilkes would later remember what followed as “one of the most gratifying incidents of my life”: “The large and rough chart was spread out on the table with each and every station occupied. He took out from his vest pocket a hand full of small change, five & ten cent pieces, and put them on each station on the chart; these were numerous. Then he explained the whole process [to his friend].… [A]fter fully examining all our work which was recorded in a large volume …, he passed a very complimentary speech as to the satisfaction he had derived from the whole.” Bowditch subsequently contacted several important government officials about Wilkes’s skill as a surveyor. “To him I think I owe, in part,” Wilkes later wrote, “my appointment to the Command of the Ex. Ex.”
In the months after completing the survey of Georges Bank, some of Wilkes’s staunchest advocates proved to be the passed midshipmen who had served under him. Instead of ruling over his officers in a manner that inspired fear and trembling, Wilkes had acted as if he were one of them. He had accompanied them in the whaleboats and had taken the lead when confronting the worst portions of the Bank. A commander usually dined alone in his cabin; Wilkes chose to mess with his officers in the wardroom. This appears to have fostered a remarkable sense of loyalty and enthusiasm, and most of Wilkes’s passed midshipmen would follow him to his next assignment – a survey of the waters in the vicinity of Savannah, Georgia.
There was one young sailor, however, who chose not to make the voyage south. Charles Erskine, sixteen, had served as Wilkes’s cabin boy. One of five children, whose father had abandoned the family when he was still an infant, Charlie was strikingly handsome, with bright blue eyes and an infectious smile. Late in life, Wilkes would remember him as “one of the most beautiful boys I ever beheld.… [T]hough lowly bred, he had a certain refinement of manner and look that drew all hearts towards him.” Wilkes took such a keen interest in the boy that for a time aboard the Porpoise he became the father figure Charlie had never known.
The falling out came in Boston, Charlie’s hometown. They were at the navy yard completing the chart of Georges Bank. Wilkes was anxiously awaiting orders from Washington, and Charlie was directed to make a quick trip to the post office on the other side of the Charles River. On his way back, Charlie decided to stop by his mother’s house for a surprise visit. “I shall never forget her fond embrace,” he later wrote, “and the ‘God bless you, my darling boy!’ when I left her.” While he waited to cross the river to the navy yard in Charlestown, his hat, along with the letters he had carefully placed inside it, was knocked into the water by a schooner passing through the drawbridge. By the time he’d recovered his hat, the letters were wet but still readable.
When Charlie reached the Porpoise, Wilkes was waiting for him, with “a look as dark as a thunder-cloud.” Wilkes asked what had taken him so long. Charlie explained that his hat and the letters had been knocked into the river. Wilkes suspected that Charlie had taken the opportunity to enjoy himself in Boston and decided to teach the boy a lesson. Before Charlie knew what was happening, the boatswain’s mate had laid him across the breech of a cannon and begun whipping his backside with the colt – a three-foot length of half-inch rope. “[W]e were lying not more than a quarter of a mile in a straight line from where my mother lived,” he remembered, “and if she had been at an open window at the front of the house she could have heard my piercing cries.” Charlie would not be able to sit for three weeks. His white duck trousers had been cut through by the colt, and threads of cloth were stuck to his ripped and bleeding flesh. “When I shipped [on the Porpoise] I had made up my mind to try to be somebody and to get ahead in the world,” he wrote, “but now my hopes were blasted. My ambition was gone, yes, whipped out of me – and for nothing.”
By the brutal standards of the U.S. Navy, there had been nothing unusual in Wilkes’s treatment of Charlie. Many a ship’s boy had been whipped for far less. But Wilkes had not consistently operated by the usual standards of the navy. As had been true with the passed midshipmen aboard the Porpoise, he had been more of a friend and mentor than a commander to Charlie. When all was going well, this approach made for what was known as a “happy ship.” But when a sailor needed to be disciplined, it could all fall apart. Since he considered himself the commander’s friend, the sailor tended to resent any attempt to curb his conduct. Long after Charlie had been reassigned to another vessel, he continued to harbor a deep and obsessive hatred for the commander to whom he had once been so close. If he ever got the chance, Charlie vowed he would have his revenge.
Against all odds, the Exploring Expedition seemed about to depart in the fall of 1837. The squadron was now in New York, with more than five hundred officers, sailors, marines, and scientists awaiting orders to sail. The necessary modifications to the overbuilt vessels had been made. The flagship Macedonian had been outfitted with an innovative forced hot-water heating system in anticipation of the Antarctic cold. A new kind of foul weather clothing coated with India rubber had been delivered. There was also a new kind of firearm – a pistol equipped with a Bowie knife that could be used both as a form of defense against hostile natives and for hacking through underbrush. For a city suddenly gripped by economic depression, the Expedition was, at least for a time, a welcome distraction. When some of its naval officers made an appearance at a play, the actors stopped the performance to give “the Lions of the day” three cheers.
But no matter how desperately Commodore Jones might labor to bring the Expedition to fruition, a new problem inevitably threatened its dissolution. Distracted by his feuding with Dickerson, he had failed to take note of an important fact. The instruments that Wilkes had assembled more than a year ago were spread out over three cities. Some of the chronometers were at the Depot in Washington. Other instruments were at Professor Renwick’s in New York, still others in Philadelphia, and then there were all the chronometers and sextants Wilkes had taken with him to survey Georges Bank. For Jones, this was the last straw. By mid-November his health had begun to suffer from what he called “the pain, expense, and mortification, to which I have been daily subjected for the last eighteen months.” He was now regularly coughing up blood. On November 21, he resigned his command.
Jones was the most conspicuous example of how “this great national enterprise” could destroy a person. In the