Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42. Nathaniel Philbrick
the voyage of discovery that would outdo Columbus, Magellan, and Cook.
He was not a particularly good speaker or writer, but Symmes’s theory of the “Holes in the Poles” began to find a following. He lectured tirelessly, traveling by horse and wagon across the states of Kentucky and Ohio. There were even some prominent men of science who gave Symmes their cautious approval. Dr. Samuel Mitchell, an astronomer in Cincinnati, Ohio, spoke in support of the theory. A globe patterned on Symmes’s ideas became part of the collection at the prestigious Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia. John J. Audubon sketched Symmes’s portrait in 1820, helping to establish his reputation as the “Newton of the West.”
In March 1822, Symmes wrote a petition that was presented to Congress by the state of Kentucky. In addition to pronouncing “his belief of the existence of an inhabited concave to this globe,” the petition, which was ultimately tabled, called for “two vessels of 250 or 300 tons for the expedition.” Thus was born the concept of a voyage that would take another sixteen years to fulfill.
In 1824, during a string of speaking engagements in his native Ohio, Symmes gained the support of an energetic acolyte by the name of Jeremiah N. Reynolds (no relation to Passed Midshipman William Reynolds). Just twenty-four years old, Jeremiah had attended Ohio University before becoming editor of the Wilmington Spectator. Soon after meeting Symmes, he decided to scrap his promising newspaper career in favor of a life on the road promoting the notion of a hollow earth. An articulate and charismatic speaker, Jeremiah also had a flair for making influential friends. Symmes’s theory began to catch hold as never before, and this improbable duo spoke in sold-out lecture halls all across the United States.
Over time, Jeremiah began to develop a different perspective on his master’s theory. Whereas Symmes advocated an expedition north, Jeremiah became increasingly intrigued with the prospect of a voyage south. In 1823, the English sealer James Weddell had sailed farther south than even Cook. Instead of ice he reported to have found open water as far as the eye could see and surprisingly warm temperatures. While Symmes clung to his belief in a hole at the pole, Jeremiah was now willing to entertain the possibility that an American exploring ship might drop anchor at “the very axis of the earth” – an unforgivable heresy as far as Symmes was concerned. In Philadelphia the two visionaries went their separate ways.
Jeremiah continued to broaden his original concept of a voyage of discovery. In addition to searching out the South Pole, the expedition would survey and chart the islands of the South Pacific. This was the voyage that maritime communities in New England and beyond had been pleading for, and Jeremiah soon saw his base of support swell until it had become a force that Washington could no longer ignore. At Jeremiah’s urging, marine and scientific societies began to bombard Congress with memorials, and in May 1828, the House passed a resolution requesting President Adams to send a naval vessel to the Pacific. In addition to collecting information helpful to American commercial interests, the expedition was to have a small scientific corps similar to what had accompanied previous European ventures. Jeremiah was designated a special agent to the navy, and in September he filed a report describing more than two hundred uncharted islands and shoals that should be investigated by the expedition. A few weeks later, the 118-foot sloop-of-war Peacock, almost completely rebuilt for a voyage of exploration, was launched at the New York Navy Yard.
Despite his earlier connection with the pseudoscientist Symmes (who would die the following year in Ohio, a hollow globe attached to his gravestone), Jeremiah was put in charge of finding a qualified naturalist and astronomer for the voyage. That fall he met with a steady stream of scientists and naval officers interested in joining the expedition. One of the applicants was a thirty-year-old lieutenant named Charles Wilkes.
By the fall of 1828, Charles and Jane Wilkes had been married for two and a half years, their wedding date delayed until Wilkes’s promotion to lieutenant in April 1826. Soon after his return from the Pacific in 1823, he attended a public lecture in chemistry. Halfway through the talk, he was startled to see Jane and her mother arriving at the back of the hall. Wilkes sprang to his feet and gallantly offered them his chair and the one next to it. Jane’s mother insisted that Wilkes sit with them. “She afterwards told me,” he remembered, “that she could no longer endure keeping us apart – our attachment was mutual and of very long standing and had undergone the fullest test.”
Wilkes was in no hurry to return to sea. Instead, he was quite content to spend as much time as possible with Jane and her mother while he took in mathematics, languages, drawing, and science. Unlike Cook, Wilkes’s pursuit of scientific expertise would keep him on shore. Except for a year-long cruise to the Mediterranean, his voyage to the Pacific as a midshipman would mark his last significant sea experience for the next fifteen years. Instead of the ocean, Wilkes devoted himself to learning how to navigate what was, given the realties of the peacetime navy, the more significant sea: the swirling riptides and shoals of federal politics.
At this time, science in America was largely practiced by amateurs, many of them men of leisure with time to dabble in their favorite disciplines. This meant that someone such as Thomas Jefferson could not only be president of the United States, he could also be one of the foremost scientists in America. No American college offered what we would call today a proper, specialized scientific education. Someone seeking instruction sought out an expert in his field of interest – like Jane’s older brother James Renwick, a professor at Columbia College. One of the premier engineers in the United States, Renwick played a large role in Wilkes’s education, offering instruction in topics such as astronomy and magnetism as well as introducing him to America’s most passionate practitioner of geodesy (the study of the size and shape of the earth), Ferdinand Hassler.
Prior to the War of 1812, the Swiss-born Hassler had been appointed to head the survey of the Atlantic coast – a monumental undertaking for which there was an acute and immediate need. There were no updated charts of the thousands of miles of bays, inlets, and beaches extending from Maine to Florida. In many regions, mariners were still relying on charts created by the British navy prior to the Revolution. But Hassler was much more than a surveyor; he was a proud geodesist who insisted on using the finest instruments from Europe and the latest trigonometric principles to create a survey that would not only be of immense practical benefit but would also represent an important contribution to science.
Such an approach took an enormous amount of time and money relative to the slapdash and often inaccurate chronometric surveys that the nation had, up until this point, relied upon. Hassler’s system was based on the creation of a series of huge triangles extending along the entire coastline of the United States. Within these triangles, with sides of approximately thirty miles in length, smaller triangles would be determined, creating the network of reference points required to survey the coast. Before this could be accomplished, however, two baselines of almost nine miles in length had to be established with an accuracy never before achieved in America.
After several years of labor, Hassler had laid the groundwork for a first-rate survey of the coast but had not yet produced a chart. Members of Congress began to insist on tangible results. Hassler’s imperious and condescending attitude toward anyone who dared question his methods meant that it was only a matter of time before Congress voted to withdraw its support of the Coast Survey, at least as Hassler had conceived of it, in 1818.
When Wilkes met him in the 1820s, Hassler was struggling to support his large family. With the assistance of Renwick, he had been able to secure some surveying work in the New York area; he also relied on Wilkes’s uncle, the banker, to secure emergency loans, using his vast scientific library as collateral. “His forehead was high and his whole expression intellectual,” Wilkes remembered. “He was very slovenly in his attire, very old fashioned.” Long before there was a national university system to support what would become known as the “mad professor,” there was Ferdinand Hassler, and for a number of years he became Wilkes’s most influential role model.
In Hassler, Wilkes found a man who refused to succumb to America’s long-standing suspicion of the intellectual. “[H]e had a peculiar tone of voice, crackling and Sarcastic, and with a conceit in his knowledge over those who were ignorant of Scientific principles.” Although Wilkes saw himself as the rational one in his dealings with the irascible Hassler, the young naval officer