Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42. Nathaniel Philbrick
Just as the strong-willed Hassler had a tendency to create controversy everywhere he went, so would Wilkes develop a similar reputation for inciting turmoil.
Wilkes wanted desperately to be a member of Jeremiah Reynolds’s proposed exploring expedition. His unusual naval career was, he felt, ideally suited to such a voyage. In addition to his proven navigational skills and surveying lessons with Hassler, his brother-in-law James Renwick had instructed him in the secrets of the pendulum, a finely tuned instrument used on previous European expeditions to help determine the force of gravity. The fact of the matter remained, however, that Wilkes had not yet established any kind of scientific or, for that matter, naval reputation. And yet, true to his well-to-do background and schooling by Hassler, there was a sense of entitlement about the young naval officer.
Wilkes understood that he was too young to be even considered to command such an expedition. But there had been talk of adding a second vessel. Wilkes made a remarkable proposal to Samuel Southard, secretary of the navy, offering to fund the purchase of an additional vessel – as long as he was given its command and was appointed astronomer. “You [may be] unaware that I have commanded a Ship and Schooner towards the same direction the Expedition is to follow,” Wilkes wrote, “so I think I am able to take any charge you may assign to me.”
When Jeremiah Reynolds finally met Wilkes, he not unexpectedly found him to be “exceedingly vain and conceited.” He also complained to Southard that James Renwick had overstated the case for his brother-in-law as an astronomer. “[Wilkes] is [a] deserving young man, and no doubt an enterprising and ambitious officer,” he wrote, “but Professor Renwick is puffing him for much more than he is.… There is a spirit of dictation about Wilkes and Renwick, that I don’t like.”
But the expedition of 1828 was not to be. After being delayed into the new year, by which time John Quincy Adams had lost the presidential election to Andrew Jackson, the voyage met the opposition of Senator Robert Y. Hayne from South Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs. Hayne worried that the expedition might encourage the creation of a distant colony, “which could only be defended at an expense not to be estimated.” He also pointed out that since the federal government had not yet produced reliable charts of America’s own coastline, it was unlikely that an expedition with a handful of men was capable of surveying the entire Pacific. As Lewis and Clark had shown, the country’s exploring efforts were best directed toward its own hinterlands. Hayne’s views were in keeping with the isolationist sentiment that had brought Jackson to the White House, and the expedition was quickly killed.
That spring Wilkes, by now the father of both a son, Jack, and an infant daughter, Janey, was ordered to join a naval ship sailing for the Mediterranean. In the meantime, Jeremiah Reynolds did his best to put back together the pieces of his shattered dream. If the government would not sponsor a voyage, he would do it through private enterprise. With the assistance and financial backing of Edmund Fanning and some other sealers from Stonington, he formed the South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition. In October 1829, the Seraph, Annawan, and Penguin set out with Jeremiah, the artist John F. Watson, and the geologist James Eights. Although Eights would eventually publish several important articles based on what he’d observed at the South Shetland Islands, overall, the expedition was a disaster. The seals that were to finance the voyage were few and far between, meaning that the crews, with no prospect of remuneration, had little patience with exploring the frigid waters of the Antarctic Circle. When the men threatened to desert in Chile, the voyage was abandoned.
Wilkes’s tour in the Mediterranean proved mercifully brief. Soon after his return to New York, however, he contracted smallpox. Delirious for days at a time, his face a mass of ulcerous lesions, Wilkes, who was confined to his bedroom due to the contagiousness of the disease, “became almost beside myself that I was deprived of the pleasure of my little ones.” In December 1831, he was ordered to serve as first lieutenant aboard the Boxer, a schooner then at Boston. His poor health made it impossible for him to report for duty, delaying by six years his introduction to a midshipman who had also been ordered to the Boxer, sixteen-year-old William Reynolds.
After a convalescence of almost a year, Wilkes received an assignment that was, short of an exploring expedition, the duty he most desired. He was ordered to join a group of five officers working on a survey of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay Jane and the children were soon settled in a cottage in Newport. As Hassler’s student, Wilkes suggested to the survey’s leader, Captain Alexander Wadsworth, that they adopt his master’s methods. Before funding had been withdrawn for the proposed exploring expedition back in 1828, Wilkes had been ordered to purchase some surveying instruments. He had taken particular pride in overseeing the construction of a theodolite – a large leg-mounted surveying instrument used to measure horizontal and vertical angles with a telescope. The theodolite was sitting unused at the Depot of Charts and Instruments in Washington, and Wilkes arranged to have the instrument delivered to Newport.
Wadsworth, an officer from the old school, remained reluctant to attempt a survey of the kind Wilkes proposed. Tensions were mounting until Jane interceded on her husband’s behalf. Jane was, according to Wilkes, “well posted on the subject,” and she soon convinced Wadsworth that her husband actually knew what he was talking about. The couple then offered Wadsworth the use of a room in their cottage as an office for the survey, allowing Wilkes to work up his calculations and draw the charts amid the cheerful bedlam of his young family.
It was during this pleasant interlude in Newport that he responded to a navy circular requesting his ideas on the rehiring of Hassler as director of the Coast Survey. Although praising Hassler’s science, Wilkes was highly critical of his teacher’s organizational abilities and urged that Hassler be required to report to a board of navy and army officers. When presented with this plan, Hassler refused to work under any supervision. After much discussion, he was eventually hired on his own terms. The reinstated director of the Coast Survey soon learned of Wilkes’s disloyalty and let it be known that, in Wilkes’s words, “he was not altogether anxious for my services.”
Wilkes claimed that he could not have worked with Hassler in any event, but his betrayal of his old friend and mentor would trouble him more than he cared to admit. It also robbed him of a career path that was one of the few in the navy that agreed with his talents and personality. But it was also an object lesson. If the Coast Survey could be resuscitated after a hiatus of more than a decade, then why not the exploring expedition?
In the spring of 1833, just a few months after the birth of his third child, Edmund, Wilkes was ordered to Washington to take over the three-year-old Depot of Charts and Instruments. The Depot was where the navy’s fifty or so chronometers were tested and maintained. A chronometer is an exceptionally precise timepiece built to withstand the hostile environment of a ship at sea. Set to Greenwich Mean Time, the chronometer enables a navigator to compare the time of the noon sight with the time in Greenwich and then quickly calculate the ship’s longitude. Even the most accurate chronometers were not perfect. The trick was to determine how much an individual instrument lost or gained per day, which was known as its “rate,” and adjust accordingly. Calculating the rate of a chronometer required several noon sightings at a known location, with the average difference between the chronometer’s time and the mean time producing the error of the chronometer. In addition to an office and a room to store the instruments and charts, the Depot included a tiny observatory where the staff could perform the celestial observations for rating chronometers.
Compared to the bustling intimacy of their native New York, Jane and Charles found Washington a virtual ghost town. “There was not an individual stirring,” Wilkes remembered, “and the Capitol arose before us in all its blankness, a most uninteresting object it then appeared, lifeless and deserted.… The Whole impressed us with the most gloomy foreboding.” He and Jane set out to create their own island of happiness within a city that was in 1833 little more than a vast swamp, criss-crossed with dusty dirt roads that became quagmires whenever it rained. Instead of living in the fashionable part of town near the White House, they purchased two large connected brick buildings on windswept Capitol Hill. Built in 1799 with funds provided by George Washington to serve as boardinghouses, the structures possessed more than enough room for a family of five and their servants. Just 1,200 feet from the Capitol, it was the perfect home for