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.
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