Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42. Nathaniel Philbrick
Janeiro, survey the mouth of the Rio Negro in Patagonia, then, after establishing a base of operations at Cape Horn, lead a portion of the squadron on the first of two assaults on the Antarctic regions to the south. To avoid being frozen in for the winter, he was instructed to return to Cape Horn no later than early March 1839.
Then it was on to the Pacific. The squadron would provision in Valparaiso, Chile, then proceed to the Navigator, Society, and Fiji groups – surveying islands all the way – before assembling at Sydney, Australia, in the late fall of 1839 to prepare for yet another push south. By March they would be on their way back north. After provisioning at the Hawaiian Islands, they would continue on to the northwest coast of America in the summer of 1840, where they were to pay particular attention to the Columbia River and San Francisco Bay. But even if they had reached their native continent, they would be farther away from home than at any time during the Expedition since their instructions required them to proceed west to the United States – a voyage of at least 22,000 miles. After stops at Japan and the Philippines, it was on to Singapore, the Cape of Good Hope, and, finally, New York City, which Wilkes hoped to reach by the summer of 1841, almost exactly three years after leaving Norfolk.
As was customary on previous European exploring expeditions, Wilkes kept his instructions a secret throughout the voyage. If circumstances required that he depart from the original plan, he did not want his officers second-guessing him; so he gave them a minimum of information. Even now, with the coast of Virginia rapidly receding behind them, no one except himself and Jane back home in Washington knew where the squadron was headed.
The direction of the prevailing winds required them to sail a zigzag course to Brazil, heading east and south toward Africa, before sailing west and south across the equator to Rio de Janeiro. Wilkes determined to sail first for the island of Madeira, about four hundred miles off Morocco. There the squadron would gather at Funchal Roads before continuing south to the Cape Verde Islands and then on to Brazil.
Wilkes was well aware that if they were to reach Cape Horn by December, time was already running out. Over the next few days it became clear that a fast passage south would be virtually impossible. The Peacock was in much worse condition than he and Hudson had originally suspected. Once the squadron had entered the swell of the open ocean, the Peacock’s seams began to leak so severely that Hudson was forced to chop a hole in the berth deck to drain it of water. It would require several weeks of repairs at Rio de Janeiro to make the vessel seaworthy. Then there was the matter of the Relief. The sluggish storeship soon proved to be a virtual sea anchor, slowing the squadron’s progress to a crawl. Just four days out from Norfolk, Wilkes ordered Lieutenant Long to bypass Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands and proceed directly to Rio.
After pushing himself so hard all spring and summer, Wilkes found these new and unexpected problems particularly difficult to bear. The squadron was barely out of sight of land, and already he was exhausted. “[T]he fatigues of all are now and then too much for me,” he admitted in a letter to Jane.
Still uppermost in his thoughts was Poinsett’s refusal to make Hudson and himself captains. It cast a pall over everything. Wilkes decided that they needed to do something to distinguish them from the other lieutenants in the squadron. If they couldn’t wear their captain uniforms (with an epaulet on each shoulder), then they would modify their lieutenant uniforms. Instead of epaulets on their left shoulders, both Wilkes and Hudson would do without epaulets altogether. But if their uniforms were without visible indications of rank, Wilkes insisted that his officers refer to them not as Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Hudson – the way you addressed a lieutenant – but as Captain Wilkes and Captain Hudson.
He then decided he should have a flag lieutenant, an executive secretary who would be responsible for everything from carrying sensitive messages to making dinner arrangements. Overton Carr had been with him at the Depot even before the survey of Georges Bank. Short, boyish, and unfailingly loyal, Carr was the perfect yes-man, and he became Wilkes’s flag lieutenant. If the politicians in Washington wouldn’t do it, Wilkes would provide himself with the necessary trappings of command.
He soon discovered what so many new captains had learned before him: life was very different in the aft cabin of a man-of-war. For one thing it was lonely. As the leader, he was expected to establish a certain distance between himself and his officers. When he appeared on the quarterdeck, his officers were expected to tip their caps and leave him to the solitude of the weather rail. Except for the occasional nights he invited a few officers to dine with him, he ate alone in his cabin. Most captains had learned how to adjust to the isolation and responsibility of command through years of experience at sea, but Wilkes had seized this position of authority almost overnight. He had not had the time and opportunity to establish a style of command appropriate to a voyage around the world.
There was no right or wrong way to lead a ship and a squadron – every captain had his own approach, depending on his talents and temperament. Some, with Nelson being the most famous example, used the power of their personalities, as well as their considerable skills and physical courage, to inspire their officers and men to do their bidding. Some relied on the threat of the lash; others might employ a well-timed joke. Cook, though he carefully monitored his crew’s health, was also renowned for his “paroxysms of passion.” A seemingly insignificant incident could cause him to curse, flap his arms wildly about, and stamp repeatedly on the deck. Whatever the command style, consistency was essential to successful leadership. As long as the officers and men knew what to expect, they could adapt to just about anything. But if the officers’ and crews’ expectations should go unfulfilled in any significant or even insignificant way, the complex interpersonal chemistry of a crowded ship could be quickly and irrevocably altered, transforming a vessel that had once operated like a well-oiled machine into a pressure cooker about to explode.
In the beginning, Wilkes seems to have employed the only command style with which he had any recent experience – the genial approach he had used during the survey of Georges Bank. Just as he had once messed with his officers aboard the Porpoise, he frequently left his cabin to socialize in the vincennes’s wardroom. As if to distract himself from the immensity of the challenges ahead, he directed his attention to the more easily managed details of shipboard life. He embarked on a personal campaign to rid the officers’ pantries of spiders. Every day the leader of the U.S. Ex. Ex. would venture into his officers’ quarters to search out and squish these annoying creatures. When some of the officers began to grow facial hair, he concocted elaborate schemes to convince them of the inappropriateness of the practice without directly forbidding it. When the ringleader, Lieutenant Johnson, finally shaved off his mustache, Wilkes “rejoiced with others that this speck of discord had vanished,” adding in a letter to Jane that “I shall be quite adept in studying characters before I get back.” It was a petty but telling incident that indicated the lengths to which Wilkes was willing to go to avoid even the hint of conflict with his officers – at least for now.
At this early stage in the voyage, William Reynolds and his compatriots were too enthralled with the grandeur of the undertaking to regard Wilkes as anything but the dashing and inspirational leader of the youngest naval squadron any of them had ever known. “It is so strange to me to look around and find none but youthful faces among the officers,” Reynolds wrote Lydia, “a young Captain, with boys for his subordinates – no gray hairs, no veterans among us.” Since they were all so young, they were given responsibilities that would have normally been at least three, even four years away. Reynolds was appointed an officer of the deck, an honor usually reserved for a lieutenant. With a speaking trumpet held to his lips, he issued the orders that kept the twenty sails of the Vincennes drawing to maximum advantage. “I cannot explain to you the feeling,” he enthused to Lydia, “for though we only take advantage of or oppose the wind and waves, it seems as if we directed them.… To handle the [sails’] fabric with exquisite skill, to have hundreds move at your bidding, to run in rivalry and successfully with the Squadron and passing vessels, to laugh at the wind and bid defiance to the waves, ah! The excitement is good and glorious.… My proffession, above any other in the world. Hurrah! For the Exploring Expedition!”
Reynolds also took great interest in the scientists assigned to the Vincennes: the bespectacled naturalist Charles Pickering, the broad-shouldered Scottish gardener William Brackenridge,