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

The city’s wealthiest merchant, John Jacob Astor, had made his fortune with these ships. For Astor, who became known as the Prince of the China Trade, it began, in large part, with sea otter skins procured in the Pacific Northwest – a trade made possible by Wilkes’s hero, James Cook. After discovering countless Pacific islands and plunging farther south than anyone else had ever gone, Cook headed out a third and final time in 1776 to find the proverbial Northwest Passage. Earlier mariners had unsuccessfully searched the east coast of North America for a waterway that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Cook, by now the most experienced and respected explorer in the world, would try the west coast. As the American Revolution raged on the continent’s opposite shore, Cook traded for sea otter skins with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. At the time, he had no other intention than to use the skins to manufacture some winter clothing for his crew. Later in the voyage, after Cook was killed by natives in Hawaii, his men sailed for China and were astounded to learn that an otter skin purchased for pennies in Nootka Sound sold for a hundred dollars in Canton.

Internal trade policies made it difficult for English merchants to capitalize on this discovery. Britain’s South Sea Company had a monopoly for trade on the west coast of America, while the East India Company controlled the Chinese market. For an English merchant to sell otter skins in China, he had to possess two expensive and hard-to-get licenses. Enter the Americans.

Soon after the secret of sea otter skins was revealed by the publication of the narrative of Cook’s final voyage in 1784, American China traders, many of them from Boston and Salem, set out around Cape Horn bound for the Pacific Northwest. In the decades to come, it would be Astor, the New Yorker, who established the first permanent white settlement in the region, known as Astoria on the Columbia River, not far from where Lewis and Clark had wintered in 1805–6. The outpost served as a gathering point for Astor’s fleet of ten vessels. One of these ships, the Tonquin , became part of the mythology of a frontier that for children of Wilkes’s age was what the Wild West would become for subsequent generations of Americans.

On June 5, 1811, the Tonquin , under the command of Captain Jonathan Thorn, sailed from Astoria in search of otter skins. Not until more than a year later would the Tonquin ’s native interpreter Lamayzie make his way to Astoria and tell the tale of what had happened to the missing ship. They had anchored somewhere in the vicinity of Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound. Captain Thorn quickly angered the local natives by offering an insultingly low price for their otter skins. The following day, as the Tonquin ’s crew began to weigh anchor and set the sails, the natives attacked. Almost all the sailors on deck, including Captain Thorn, were bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Some of the men in the rigging were able to lower themselves through an open hatchway down into the ship, where they secured some pistols and muskets and began firing at the natives. Soon they had cleared the decks.

The next morning several canoes made their way to the Tonquin . The night before a group of sailors had slipped away in the ship’s launch and headed for Astoria. They would never be heard from again. The only man left aboard was a severely injured sailor who did not have long to live. The sailor waited until the Tonquin ’s decks were thronged with Indians, then took a match to the ship’s magazine of gunpowder. The Tonquin and approximately a hundred natives were blown to smithereens.

With the outbreak of the War of 1812, when Charles Wilkes was fourteen, a different kind of violence threatened Astor’s commercial interests in the Northwest. A British naval vessel was dispatched to the region, and Astor had no choice but to sell his outpost to the English. Closer to home, however, the United States pulled off several stunning victories as the Constitution and United States bested British frigates in the waters off the East Coast. In the meantime, Captain David Porter rounded the Horn in the U.S. frigate Essex and proceeded to wage his own private war in the Pacific. Playing cat and mouse with the British navy, Porter and his men terrorized the enemy’s whaling fleet. Porter’s swashbuckling exploits climaxed in a bloody encounter with two British frigates off Valparaiso, Chile. Porter was ultimately defeated, but he and his men did much to proclaim America’s rambunctious presence in the Pacific.

For a teenager of Wilkes’s interests, it was a tremendously exciting time. Today it is difficult to appreciate the level of patriotism commonly felt by those of Wilkes’s generation, many of whose fathers were fighting in the War of 1812 and whose grandfathers had fought in the Revolution. Freshly minted naval heroes such as Stephen Decatur and Isaac Hull were regularly fêted in New York, and Wilkes became enamored with the glittering regalia of a captain’s dress uniform. Mammy Reed, the Welsh witch, foretold that Wilkes would one day become an admiral. When he pointed out that the U.S. Navy did not grant a rank higher than captain (although the complementary title of commodore was used when a captain commanded a squadron), Reed insisted that her prediction would come true.

As the war drew to a close, Wilkes, now sixteen years old, began to press his father to apply for a midshipman’s warrant. Under usual circumstances, the Wilkes family had all the social and political connections required to secure such an appointment. Wilkes’s mother had been the daughter of William Seton, a wealthy New York merchant; his father was the grandson of an even wealthier British distiller. His father’s uncle, John Wilkes, a member of Parliament, had gained international fame for his outspoken support of the American cause during the Revolution. Wilkes’s own father, whose middle name was de Pointhieu, had aristocratic relatives in Paris with close ties to the French navy.

But in 1815 not even this impressive pedigree could guarantee a midshipman’s appointment. With the end of the war, the navy found itself overloaded with officers. Prospects of peace meant that the number of naval vessels would only decrease. For decades to come the opportunities available to young naval officers would remain disappointingly meager. James Fenimore Cooper, the noted author and a former naval officer who would pen a history of the U.S. Navy, wrote Wilkes’s father that there was, Wilkes remembered, “no more likelihood of my being appointed than the heavens should fall to catch larks.”

The young Wilkes was receiving little help from his father, who wanted him to become a businessman like himself. By this time, Wilkes was enrolled as a day student at a preparatory school for Columbia College and was showing remarkable promise in mathematics and languages. But no matter how much his father attempted to convince his son that he should stay ashore, dangling before him the prospect of a promising job with his uncle at the Bank of New York, Wilkes’s “hankering after naval life & roving life still grew stronger & stronger.”

Wilkes began studying with Jonathan Garnett, the editor of the American Nautical Almanac . Garnett familiarized the boy with the various mathematical formulae, tables, and solutions associated with navigation; he taught him how to read nautical charts and how to use navigational instruments. He even gave Wilkes his own sextant, which the boy learned how to take apart and put back together. “[B]efore I put my foot on the deck of a vessel,” he wrote, “I felt capable of navigating & directing her course.” Thus was born an attitude toward the sea that Wilkes would subscribe to in the years ahead: book-learning, at least his version of book-learning, was more than a match for anyone else’s practical experience.