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

NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

The Epic South Seas Expedition

1838–1842

To my father ,

Thomas Philbrick

I have ventured … This many summers in a sea of glory , But far beyond my depth.…

– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Henry VIII 3.2

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

LIST OF MAPS

PREFACE: Young Ambition

Part One

CHAPTER 1. The Great South Sea

CHAPTER 2. The Deplorable Expedition

CHAPTER 3. Most Glorious Hopes

Part Two

CHAPTER 4. At Sea

CHAPTER 5. The Turning Point

CHAPTER 6. Commodore of the Pacific

CHAPTER 7. Antarctica

CHAPTER 8. A New Continent

Part Three

CHAPTER 9. The Cannibal Isles

CHAPTER 10. Massacre at Malolo

CHAPTER 11. Mauna Loa

CHAPTER 12. The Wreck of the Peacock

CHAPTER 13. Homeward Bound

Part Four

CHAPTER 14. Reckoning

CHAPTER 15. This Thing Called Science

CHAPTER 16. Legacy

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTERVIEW WITH NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

LIFE AT A GLANCE

TOP TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS

ABOUT THE BOOK

A CRITICAL EYE

CAPTAIN COOK: A LESSON IGNORED

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HAVE YOU READ?

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IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU’LL LIKE …

EPILOGUE

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Track of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842

First Sail South

The Great South Sea

Antarctica

Wilkes Land

Fiji Islands

Hawaiian Islands

Oregon Territory

HE WAS NOT YET FORTY-FIVE, but he looked much older, his health broken by four years of hardship and danger. But he had done it. He had successfully completed the voyage of a lifetime – the kind of voyage that had made heroes of Christopher Columbus and James Cook.

The odds had been against him from the start. When his squadron of six sailing vessels set out from the Norfolk Navy Yard in 1838, most of the world’s oceans had already been thoroughly explored. That had not prevented the United States from sending him on a bold, some said foolhardy mission: to scour the Southern Hemisphere of the earth for new lands.

Miraculously, he had made discoveries that would redraw the map of the world. He and his officers had surveyed dozens of uncharted Pacific islands. They had completed America’s first survey of what would one day become the states of Oregon and Washington. His team of scientists had brought back forty tons of specimens and artifacts, including two thousand never-before-identified species. Most impressive of all, he had established the existence of a new continent. Battling icebergs and gale-force winds in his fragile wooden ships, he had charted a 1,500-mile section of Antarctic coast that still bears his name: Wilkes Land.

But on that September day in 1842, just a few months after his return to the United States, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes was anything but a hero. Instead of being honored with speeches and parades, he had been put on trial in the crowded cabin of the USS North Carolina anchored in New York Harbor. Beside him sat his attorney; across from them were the judges-thirteen naval officers who were about to decide whether he was guilty of illegally whipping his men, massacring the inhabitants of a tiny Fijian island, lying about the discovery of Antarctica, and other outrages. Sitting in the gallery were many of his own officers. They whispered among themselves and smiled, confident that their hated commander would soon get his due.

He was a slight man with brown hair and a sharp blade of a nose, his cheeks pitted from smallpox and burned red by the sun and wind. Despite his haggard appearance, there was a fierceness in his eyes. After almost three weeks of testimony, it was now time for him to deliver his defense. He cleared his throat, and in a quavering, indignant voice, he began to tell his side of the story.

America’s first frontier was not the West; it was the sea. The United States began as a string of coastal communities dominated by the Atlantic Ocean – a storm-wracked wilderness that made the forests of the interior look like a beckoning refuge. But travel by road was slow and difficult in the early years of the nation, while the sea was a highway that led to just about anywhere in the world. By the late eighteenth century, American mariners had ventured around Cape Horn to the Pacific. In 1792, a sea otter trader from Boston discovered Oregon’s Columbia River-thirteen years before the arrival of Lewis and Clark. When the United States did finally send an overland expedition beyond the Rockies in 1803, it was to find a navigable waterway to the Pacific. That was why the Lewis and Clark Expedition was called a voyage of discovery. Until the Gold Rush turned the nation’s attention to the winning of the West in 1848, America’s predominant frontier was still the sea.

A decade earlier, this young nation of sea wanderers became part of an international effort to discover and explore the last unknown portions of the planet. It had begun in 1768, with the voyages of the legendary British navigator James Cook. Earlier explorers such as Columbus and Magellan had been in search of new ways of getting to old, already well-known places-in particular, the spice-rich islands of the East Indies. Their discoveries had been accidental. There had been nothing accidental about Cook’s explorations of the South Pacific. When he returned with reports of palm-fringed islands teeming with people, plants, and animals unlike anything ever seen before, the scientists of Europe clamored for more. In the decades to come, England sent out twenty-eight exploring expeditions to the Pacific; France followed with seventeen, while Spain, Russia, and Holland mounted a total of thirteen voyages among them.

In spite of all these efforts to probe the islands of the Pacific, there remained a region that had so far resisted scientific inquiry: the ice-studded mystery at the bottom of the world. Cook had ventured below the Antarctic Circle and found nothing but snow and ice. Given the dangerous conditions and the slender prospect of significant results, further exploration hardly seemed warranted. But by 1838 there was renewed interest in the high southern latitudes. What had once been regarded as a forbidding wasteland was now one of the few places left where a discovery of Cook-like proportions might still be possible. Seventy years after the English explorer’s inaugural voyage, the icy waters of Antarctica were just one of the many destinations planned for America’s first oceangoing voyage of discovery.

They called it the U.S. Ex. Ex., or simply the Ex. Ex., shorthand for the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition of 1838. It was an unprecedented naval operation, especially for a nation with a navy that was less than half the size of Great Britain’s. Whereas most European exploring expeditions comprised two modest-sized ships, the American squadron consisted of six sailing vessels and 346 men, including a team of nine scientists and artists, making it one of the largest voyages of discovery in the history of Western exploration.