Nathaniel Philbrick - Sea of Glory - The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42

At the center of Reynolds’s account is his changing relationship with Wilkes, a relationship that would come to dramatize the tangled legacy of the Expedition. Largely because of its arrogant and uncompromising commander, the Ex. Ex. was never able to shake free of the personal animosities and political intrigue that had plagued it from the start. Even though his journal provides a remarkable window on the Expedition, Reynolds was unable, in the end, to fathom the seemingly inexplicable motivations of his commander. Indeed, for more than a century, Wilkes has stood astride the legacy of the Ex. Ex. like an inscrutable colossus, a forbidding impediment to all who would want to know more.

But there is a way to see past Wilkes’s rigid professional demeanor. The dozens of letters he wrote to his wife Jane during the long four years of the Ex. Ex. are full of startling revelations. Just a few months into the voyage, Wilkes almost cracked under the pressures of command. What happened to him over the course of the Expedition is part passion play, part object lesson in how the demands of leadership can at once confirm and transform a person’s character.

By all rights, the Ex. Ex. should have become an enduring source of national pride. But Charles Wilkes was no James Cook. Insecure and egotistical rather than self-effacing and confident, Wilkes had a talent for creating discord and conflict. And yet, there was something quintessentially American about Wilkes and the brash, boisterous, and overreaching expedition that he managed to forge in his own makeshift image.

Late in life, Mark Twain would remember the excitement he felt when he learned that Wilkes had discovered Antarctica. “When I was a boy of ten, in that village on the Mississippi River which at that time was so incalculably far from any place and is now so near to all places, the name of Wilkes, the explorer, was in everybody’s mouth.… What a noise it made, and how wonderful the glory! Wilkes had discovered a new world and was another Columbus.…[He] had gone wandering about the globe in his ships and had looked with his own eyes upon its furthest corners, its dreamlands – names and places which existed rather as shadows and rumors than as realities.”

Henry David Thoreau was also fascinated by the Ex. Ex. “What was the meaning of that South Sea Exploring Expedition,” he wrote in the final chapter of Walden , published in 1854, “with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans of one’s being alone.”

In 1851, Herman Melville published Moby-Dick , a novel that includes several references to the U.S. Ex. Ex. More than a decade before, Melville had set out on his own personal voyage of discovery aboard a New Bedford whaleship bound for the very same waters then being plied by the Exploring Expedition. Later, while researching his whaling masterpiece, Melville read Wilkes’s narrative of the voyage with great interest. There he learned how Wilkes mercilessly drove his men beyond the edge of their endurance in search of the icy coast of Antarctica. One literary critic has even argued that Melville based his description of Captain Ahab’s mythic pursuit of the white whale on Wilkes’s search for the white continent.

Every generation has its great men and women, people who, for whatever reason, feel compelled to push themselves to achieve what others might feel is impossible or not worth the effort. Judged by those standards, Wilkes was a great man. But he was also vain, impulsive, and often cruel. Do his personal flaws negate his greatness? As Melville recognized, they were one and the same. “For all men tragically great,” Melville writes in Moby-Dick , “are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.”

For both Wilkes and Reynolds, the Exploring Expedition would be as much a voyage into the private sea described by Thoreau as it would be a voyage around the world. With their help, perhaps we can gain a new appreciation of an undertaking that should be a recognized and valued part of our nation’s heritage. The frontier of Lewis and Clark has long since been civilized out of existence. But as Wilkes and Reynolds came to discover, no one will ever civilize the sea.

MOST SAILORS did not refer to it as the Pacific Ocean. They called it the South Sea, a name that dated back to 1513 when Vasco Núñez de Balboa ventured across the sliver of mountainous, jungle-choked terrain known as the Isthmus of Panama. The isthmus runs west to east so that when Balboa first glimpsed water, it appeared to extend to the south. Quite sensibly, he dubbed his discovery the Great South Sea.

Seven years later, Ferdinand Magellan and his men, on their way to the first circumnavigation of the world, penetrated the mazelike strait at the craggy bottom of South America. After weathering the terrible gales typical of one of the most inhospitable places on earth, they found themselves in a quiet, vast ocean that Magellan called, with tearful thanks to God, the Pacific – a name that would not catch hold until the mid-nineteenth century.

Balboa found it, Magellan named it, but for any young boy taken with tales of the South Sea – like the young Charles Wilkes – the central figure had to be James Cook. It had been Cook who had first criss-crossed the Pacific, discovering islands at almost every turn. Cook had been a product of the Enlightenment’s search for knowledge through the empirical observation of nature. Although not trained as a scientist, he was one of the most expert nautical surveyors in the British navy, a skill that served him well in his voyages to distant lands. First and foremost, however, Cook had been an explorer , and the Pacific had served as his route to glory. For the young Wilkes, the South Sea came to represent not only a means of escape from an unhappy childhood but, even more important, a way to win the praise and adulation he had been craving for as long as he could remember.

Wilkes was born to well-to-do parents in New York City in 1798. When his mother died just two years later, he was placed in the care of an aunt, Elizabeth Ann Seton, who would later convert to Catholicism, become an abbess, and eventually be canonized as America’s first native-born saint. Wilkes’s exposure to sainthood proved short-lived, however. At just four years old, he was sent away to boarding school. When he realized he was about to be abandoned at the school, Wilkes clung to his father’s leg and refused to let go. “Young as I was,” he wrote, “the impression is still on me & it is the first event of my life that I have any distinct recollection of.”

For the next ten years, Wilkes was, in his own words, “a poor castaway boy,” attending a series of boarding schools that he hated, always yearning to be at home with the father he loved. The one maternal figure in Wilkes’s life was a nanny named Mammy Reed – a fat, dark-eyed Welsh woman who, in stark contrast to his earlier caretaker, had a reputation as a witch. Reed’s gaze was so intense that Wilkes claimed, “It was impossible to meet her stare.” Reed doted on her “Charley boy,” a youngster with a black hole of loneliness at the center of his being. “I had no other companions than my books and teachers,” he remembered.

But there was always the sea. Manhattan was surrounded by water, and hull to hull along the waterfront was a restless wooden exoskeleton of ships, their long bowsprits nuzzling over the busy streets, the eyes of even the most jaundiced New Yorker irresistibly drawn skyward into a complex forest of spars and rigging. This was where a boy might turn his back on all that he had once known and step into an exotic dream of adventure, freedom, opportunity, and risk.