Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42. Nathaniel Philbrick
were no sailors, and it was taking these studious landlubbers some time to adapt to the cramped quarters of a tossing ship. In spite of all, they created their own wonderfully weird worlds within their staterooms, stuffed till nearly bursting with specimens and artifacts. Reynolds marveled at the “dead & living lizards, & fish floating in alcohol, and sharks jaws, & stuffed Turtles, and vertebrates and Animalculae frisking in jars of salt water, and old shells, and many other equally interesting pieces of furniture hanging about their beds, & around their state rooms.” For his part, Reynolds enjoyed slightly more sumptuous quarters. His and roommate William May’s stateroom had become the talk of the Vincennes. White and crimson curtains now hung from the bulkhead; silver candlesticks and a mirror adorned the bureau; a Brussels carpet lay across the deck while a cutlass and one of the new Bowie knife pistols gave the room a “man of war finish.”
Reynolds and May were part of Wilkes’s inner circle of half a dozen or so acting lieutenants and passed midshipmen, who had either served with him on the Porpoise or assisted at the Depot of Charts and Instruments. During the early days of the voyage, this core group of officers, whom Wilkes referred to as “our Washington folks” since they had spent considerable time that summer making observations on the grounds of his Capitol Hill home, served as a kind of surrogate family for the Expedition’s commander. In a letter to Jane he recounted the time when Reynolds and May, who shared a watch together, had breakfast with him in his cabin. The two handsome and dark-haired officers, who looked so much alike that they could have been brothers, insisted that “it was not possible for them to be more comfortable and contented.”
In addition to Reynolds, May, Flag Lieutenant Overton Carr, and Wilkes’s second-in-command William Hudson, his trusted circle of officers included Lieutenants Robert Johnson, William Walker, and James Alden, along with Passed Midshipmen Samuel Knox, who commanded the schooner Flying Fish, and Henry Eld, serving under Hudson in the Peacock. Wilkes’s most intimate associate on the Vincennes was the purser (the naval equivalent of a comptroller), Robert Waldron. Waldron had been with Wilkes on the Porpoise and spent an hour of just about every evening in Wilkes’s cabin, gossiping about the latest goings on among the officers and men. Also part of this group was the commander’s teenage nephew, Wilkes Henry, the eldest son of his widowed sister Eliza. Henry had been his personal clerk aboard the Porpoise, and Wilkes had secured a midshipman’s appointment for the boy so that he could accompany him on the voyage. Overall, Wilkes was pleased with the group of officers he had assembled. “[Y]ou will be glad to learn,” he wrote Jane, “that we have got along very smoothly thus far, and that they one and all exhibit the greatest desire to do their duty.”
Charlie Erskine couldn’t believe it. Almost a year after being whipped by Charles Wilkes, the boy was once again under his command. That summer Charlie had been reassigned to the Porpoise, then at New York and being outfitted for the Expedition. As long as he could stay on the Porpoise and have nothing to do with the squadron’s leader, he figured he would be safe. But on the morning of August 17, as the squadron prepared to set out from Norfolk, Wilkes’s gig came alongside the Porpoise with orders for Erskine to join the Vincennes. Unaware of his former cabin boy’s feelings toward him, Wilkes wanted Charlie to serve on the flagship. “I felt more like jumping overboard than sailing with my worst enemy,” Charlie remembered. He begged Lieutenant Ringgold to let him remain on the Porpoise, but Ringgold told him he had no choice but to get into the gig.
Once on board the Vincennes, Charlie was promoted to mizzen-top man. “I liked my station, the ship’s officers, and the crew,” he remembered. But at Sunday service the next day he found himself staring across the quarterdeck at Charles Wilkes. “[W]hen I saw him, it made me revengeful,” he wrote, “and I felt as if the evil one had taken possession of me.”
It was Charlie’s first experience aboard a full-rigged ship. Unlike the sloops, schooners, and brigs on which he had previously served, the Vincennes possessed three masts and three decks – the spar, gun, and berth decks. The crew of two hundred men was divided into sixteen messes, twelve men in a mess. While the officers ate on tables set with plates, forks, knives, and spoons and employed servants to attend to their personal needs, Charlie and his messmates sat on a piece of canvas spread out on the deck and ate their salt beef out of two wooden tubs known as kids. When not eating or on watch, Charlie slung his hammock from a beam that was just four and a half feet above the deck, with only twenty-eight inches between the sailors on either side of him. As he and the rest of his watch rocked to the creaking sounds of a wooden ship at sea, Charlie found himself reliving the punishment he had suffered at the hands of Wilkes. “I only wish I could forget the past,” he wrote, “and that it might not so constantly haunt me.”
Eleven days after leaving Norfolk, at midnight on August 29, Charlie came on deck to relieve the lookout on the lee quarter. There was a slight swell, but little wind. While walking the vincennes’s deck, Charlie paused to look down the cabin skylight. Sitting at the table was “the man who had ordered me to be flogged.” Even at this late hour, Wilkes was awake, studying a chart. Charlie remembered the sting of the colt as if he had been punished yesterday.
The officer of the deck began to walk forward, leaving Charlie alone beside the skylight. Stacked on a nearby rack were some belaying pins – iron cylinders to which were fastened the ropes of the ship’s running rigging. As if in a trance, he found himself reaching for one of the belaying pins and holding it over the skylight. If he waited another second, the roll of the ship would bring Wilkes’s head directly beneath the heavy iron pin. But just as he was about to drop the pin through the pane of glass, Charlie was transfixed by a vision of his mother. “My God!” he gasped. “What does this mean?” Greatly shaken, he returned the belaying pin to the rack, unable at first to disengage his fingers. The officer of the deck sang out through his speaking trumpet, “A bright lookout fore and aft!” Charlie blurted, “Ay, ay, sir,” and the Vincennes sailed on for Madeira, her officers and men oblivious to how close they had come to losing their commander.
On September 6, a low, dark object appeared on the horizon. Word quickly spread through the Vincennes that a wreck had been sighted, and soon all hands were on deck. Spyglasses were traded among the officers, each one reporting on what he saw. One claimed he saw a bare mast extending above the waterlogged hull; another said he saw people standing on the deck, waving in distress.
But as the Vincennes bore down on the distant object, it was realized to be a huge tree, its sun-bleached branches raised high in the air. It was a cottonwood that had drifted on the Gulf Stream all the way from the Mississippi River. Two boats were dispatched to investigate, and soon the entire squadron had assembled around the tree. The men in the boats discovered a large school of fish hovering among the tree’s submerged, barnacle-encrusted branches, and as they harpooned specimens for the scientists, the nimble Sea Gull tacked and jibed amid the fleet with what Reynolds called “a graceful beauty in her motion and appearance that is indescribable, but which to the eye of a Sailor is lovely to behold.”
The two schooners had come to be regarded as, in the words of another officer, “the pets of the squadron.” Their refined fore-and-aft rigs not only made them lovely to look at, they enabled them to sail closer to the wind than any other vessel in the fleet. Being a distinctly American type of craft developed in the eighteenth century to negotiate the convoluted coastline of the Atlantic seaboard, the schooners also appealed to the officers’ patriotism, and Reynolds predicted that “the English will look upon [them] with jealous eyes.” Though the vessels were comparatively small, every lieutenant in the squadron yearned to command one of the schooners, and when Wilkes, at the last minute, had put two lowly passed midshipmen in charge of the vessels, it had caused more than a little grumbling. In answer to queries, Wilkes claimed that the schooners were nothing more than tenders to the Vincennes and as a consequence did not constitute independent commands. Given time, he insisted, all the officers would have ample opportunity for glory.
To be sure, Wilkes maintained a tight leash on the schooners. Every morning the Sea Gull and the Flying Fish were ordered to take up positions on each quarter of the Vincennes. As the little vessels wallowed in the man-of-war’s wake, the fifteen-man crew of each schooner toed a seam