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

Failing to secure an outright commission, Wilkes made an application for a midshipman’s warrant contingent on his first gaining relevant sea experience in the merchant marine. Reluctantly, Wilkes’s father agreed to let him go, hopeful that the contrast between New York society and the forecastle of a merchant vessel would bring the boy to his senses. “I shall never forget the first time I dressed in my Sailors Jacket & trousers,” Wilkes wrote, “the vanity and pride I felt.” When he showed the outfit to his father, he was “greatly astonished to see the tears starting from his eyes.”

Just a few days into his first voyage aboard the Hibernia , one of hundreds of vessels carrying goods and passengers between America and Europe, Wilkes understood why his father had been moved to tears. “A more ignorant and brutal set of fellows could scarcely have been collected together,” he remembered. His hands were continually bleeding; his bowels were reacting cataclysmically to the harsh shipboard fare; and even worse, the jacket and trousers he had taken such pride in were smeared with tar. “[C]ould I have set my foot on shore,” he wrote, “I never would have again consented to be again afloat.”

Despite his suffering, Wilkes could not help but be fascinated by the spectacle of a fully rigged ship under sail. “I had from my reading become acquainted with many of the maneuvers,” he wrote, “and took great delight in watching how things were done practically.” The captain heard that Wilkes knew how to perform a lunar – a complicated series of observations to determine a ship’s longitude that required as many as three hours of calculations and was beyond the abilities of many captains in the merchant service. “[A]lthough I had little practice at sea,” Wilkes wrote, “I readily came to take good & satisfactory observations.” The captain then proceeded to take credit for the young man’s abilities, assuring the paying passengers that he would, in Wilkes’s words, “make me a good navigator.” Wilkes was infuriated by the captain’s deception, but his time would come.

Not long into the voyage, the captain revealed to Wilkes that, incredibly, he had forgotten to bring his charts. He asked the boy if he might be able to draw a chart of the English Channel from memory. Revealing an early willingness to take on a seemingly hopeless task, Wilkes agreed to give it a try. “The next day I was called into the cabin and sheets of letter paper handed me.” He hurriedly sketched out a fairly detailed representation of the English Channel – and stunningly, with Wilkes’s map in hand, the captain was able to guide the Hibernia to Le Havre, France, without incident.

On his return to New York, Wilkes was still angry at the treatment he’d received during the voyage, especially from the captain. He’d been horrified by the ignorance and brutality of his fellow sailors, feeling “great disgust when I looked back on the troubles I had gone through and the low company I was thrown with.” For the young Wilkes, it was now a matter of pride. In spite of, or perhaps because of the adversity he had encountered, he would continue on until he received his commission. Years later he would write, “I have little doubt now that if the treatment I had received had been opposite to what it had been I would have abandoned the idea of following the sea life. I should have seen all its bad features and my tastes were not in unison with it.” This was as close as Wilkes would ever come to admitting that his character – at once scholarly, aloof, and condescending – was ill suited to a life at sea.

Not until three years later, after several more merchant voyages, did Wilkes finally receive his appointment in the navy as a midshipman, primarily through the intervention of his father’s friend Monsieur Hyde de Neuville, the French minister. After a brief visit to Washington, D.C., to thank de Neuville for his help, Wilkes returned to New York to discover that his father had died. “I never saw him after I entered the Navy,” Wilkes wrote, adding, “I shall not attempt to describe the feelings I experienced … and the desolation which home seemed to have undergone.” A few weeks later, Wilkes was in Boston reporting to Commodore William Bainbridge and the USS Independence .

In Bainbridge, Wilkes found the embodiment of the ideal naval officer. More than six feet tall, Bainbridge radiated an undeniable sense of authority. “His presence was commanding,” Wilkes remembered, “and when in full uniform he gave as well as he commanded respect.” He was also an officer who was not shy about picking favorites. “He was very decided in his prejudices,” Wilkes wrote; “while he encouraged those of whose characters he entertained a high opinion, he was a bitter enemy to the low and vulgar, and no officer could, if he lost his good opinion, expect to regain it.” It was a model of command Wilkes would look to for the rest of his life.

Soon after being transferred to the Guerriere for a cruise of the Mediterranean, Wilkes discovered that not all naval officers carried themselves with the dignity of Commodore Bainbridge. “Debauchery and drunkenness in a Commander was the order of the day,” he later remembered. “[W]hen in port conviviality turned to drunken frolics.” In the boisterous camaraderie of steerage, where the midshipmen socialized in “messes,” Wilkes – ambitious, solemn, and hardworking – was the odd man out. “I may have had but few friends,” he remembered, “but I had no enemies or any that I was not in the best of terms among the officers.”

After a nearly fatal bout with what was described as “African fever,” Wilkes returned home to New York in 1821. He had been away for more than three years and discovered that since his father’s death, “my family had been broken up.” His older sister had married and moved to Albany, while two of his brothers, both lawyers, were living in New York A twenty-three-year-old orphan in search of a home, Wilkes, who as a child had tended to socialize with girls instead of boys, began seeing a woman he had known since he was a child. Jane Renwick, “though not handsome,” according to Wilkes, “showed great intelligence … and [was] ever open to administer to the wants of others.” The Renwicks had been close family friends of the Wilkeses, and there had been many times while growing up that young Charles had come to blows with Jane’s brother James over his unmerciful teasing of his sister. For Wilkes, Jane Renwick was the love of his life.

The evenings Wilkes spent over the next few months with Jane and her mother turned out to be some of the happiest times he had ever known. “We had a never ending source of amusement,” Wilkes remembered. “I often read aloud, and while they read I drew, and the hilarity and fun was charming.” When he received orders to report to the Franklin for a cruise to the Pacific, Wilkes found it “hard indeed for me to return to duty and at the same time forego all the delights of the Society of those I was deeply in love with.”

The Franklin proved to be just the ship for an officer of Wilkes’s interests. On the gun deck there was a library, and Wilkes, with the help of an assistant, became the librarian. But perhaps the best part of the cruise was its destination: the newly established Pacific Station along the west coast of South America. Wilkes was about to encounter the ocean he had been dreaming about since he was a young boy.

When the Franklin reached Quilca, Peru, Wilkes was assigned to the schooner Waterwitch with dispatches for General Bolívar in Guayaquil, Ecuador. They were off the port of Paita when they encountered the Two Brothers , a whaleship from Nantucket. In most instances naval officers took a dim view of whalemen. Their crews were often as inexperienced as they were undisciplined; the ships smelled of putrid blubber, smoke, and grease; loaded down with massive brick tryworks, a whaler presented a most unseamanlike sight as it slogged slowly over the waves.