In 1836, Dickerson, a former governor and senator from New Jersey, was sixty-six years old and in bad health. An amateur botanist and member of the American Philosophical Society, Dickerson did not let his personal interest in science interfere with his commitment to a minimalist navy. In addition to the proposed Exploring Expedition, he successfully fended off efforts to create a much-needed naval academy while offering as little assistance as possible to Captain Matthew C. Perry’s nearly singlehanded efforts to demonstate the importance of steam power to the future of the navy.
The Expedition already had a commander, Jackson’s old comrade-in-arms Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones. A little man who had been permanently disabled by the musket ball he had taken in the shoulder during the Battle of New Orleans, Jones was given sweeping powers by Jackson to assemble the projected squadron, including the flagship Macedonian. In a directive that Dickerson would do his best to subvert, Jackson insisted that the secretary not assign any officers to the Expedition to whom Jones had “well-founded objections.” Jackson also insisted that Jeremiah Reynolds be included in the Expedition, writing, “this the public expect.” Since Jeremiah was a good friend of Dickerson’s primary political foe back in New Jersey, former navy secretary Samuel Southard, Jeremiah was a man whom Dickerson was predisposed to loathe. From the beginning, Dickerson did everything in his power to exclude him from the planning of the Expedition.
Dickerson had already asked Lieutenant Charles Wilkes at the Depot to assemble a list of the instruments the Expedition would require. Wilkes, who had been through this once before eight years earlier, quickly drew up the requested list. By the middle of July, he had decided that since the Expedition had taken on a “more enlarged scale than I at first conceived,” it would be necessary to go to Europe to procure the necessary instruments. He added that the trip would also provide the opportunity “to obtain a full knowledge of everything that had been already accomplished and attempted in the way of discovery in the Pacific Ocean.”
Given that the Expedition was due to leave that fall, a trip to Europe might have seemed out of the question. But Wilkes, who had spent the last four years as the undisputed master of his own private domain at the Depot, was accustomed to getting his way. He also knew that if he could persuade Dickerson to send him to Europe, he – not Jeremiah Reynolds – would become the public face of the Expedition – at least when it came to the European scientific community. On top of that, Wilkes was an ardent Jacksonian Democrat who had carefully cultivated his relationship with the secretary of the navy. Despite Jackson’s clearly worded instructions that the voyage must depart soon, Dickerson told Wilkes to sail for England.
When he returned five months later in January 1837, the Expedition was still far from ready. Three vessels had been built, but the large timbers used to strengthen them against collisions with icebergs and coral reefs had made them dreadfully slow and difficult to handle. The selection of officers for the Expedition was going just as badly. Dickerson, in a rare instance of taking the initiative, had recommended two lieutenants – one of whom was Charles Wilkes – to command two of the vessels, but Jones felt that both candidates lacked the necessary sea experience. Although Dickerson finally withdrew his suggestions, in the months ahead he and Jones would continue to squabble over virtually every aspect of the Expedition.
For his part, Wilkes felt that his tour of Europe had been an unqualified triumph. In addition to assembling a first-rate collection of navigational and astronomical instruments from the finest makers in England, France, and Germany, he had become personally acquainted with the scientific greats of Europe, culminating in his being an honored guest at a Royal Astronomical Society dinner. Besides “the great magnetic man,” Peter Barlow, known for his pioneering work with compasses, he met Francis Baily, vice president of the Royal Astronomical Society. Baily provided him with two state-of-the-art pendulums and spent several days instructing him in the difficult and painstaking experiments by which the pendulum measures the force of gravity.
Wilkes also met several British naval officers who had led exploring voyages similar to what the United States was contemplating. Robert Fitzroy had recently returned from an expedition to the Pacific that had included a vessel named the Beagle and a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. Arctic explorer James Ross, just thirty-five years old, was already known as the discoverer of the earth’s magnetic North Pole. In 1831, he had located the place at the edge of the Boothia Peninsula in northern Canada where his dipping needle, a sensitive instrument used to measure the vertical angle of the earth’s magnetic field, pointed straight down, and he had planted his country’s flag at the magnetic North Pole. Although no one had yet managed to reach the geographical pole, approximately one thousand miles farther north, interest was mounting to find the earth’s second magnetic pole, and many felt that Ross was the natural choice to lead a British expedition south.
For an aspiring American scientist and explorer, it was a heady four months among the world’s scientific elite. “I feel myself more at ease with these giants,” Wilkes wrote Jane. He was also convinced he had put together an impeccable collection of scientific instruments. But when he returned to the United States in January, he received little of the praise he had anticipated.
By the winter of 1837, more than a dozen scientists had been chosen for the Expedition. Instead of showering Wilkes with compliments, they were quick to point out that he had neglected to purchase a single microscope, as well as many other instruments required in fields outside the area of his own expertise. After being lionized by the intelligentsia of Europe, it was more than the fiercely proud and sensitive lieutenant could tolerate. When Dickerson finally offered him a position as the Expedition’s astronomer, it was under the condition that he report to a civilian scientist who had been a particularly vocal critic of his efforts in Europe. He had been dreaming about sailing on a voyage of discovery for decades, but Wilkes decided he wanted no part of the Expedition as it was presently organized. If he could not go on his own terms, he would not go at all.
The spring of 1837 was not good to the Exploring Expedition. In June, Jeremiah Reynolds decided to make public his grievances against the secretary of the navy. In a series of scathing letters published in The New York Times, he excoriated Dickerson, eventually forcing the secretary to respond with two letters of his own. This war of words did neither man credit, serving only to further tarnish the image of what one wag renamed “the Deplorable Expedition.” In the meantime, the Expedition was denied the services of one of the most talented writers in the country when political infighting made it impossible for the friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne to secure him a position as the voyage’s historiographer.
In May, the Panic of 1837 struck the nation’s economy. For the last six years, state governments had been piling up huge debts to finance the construction of canals and railroads. Land speculation was rife all over the nation, and imports were outpacing exports. Much of America’s economic expansion had been made possible by English capital, and when a financial crisis rocked Europe, many British creditors called in their loans. On May 10, banks in New York suspended the payment of coined money. Soon banks across the country were closing their doors. Just a few months into the presidency of Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, the American economy was in chaos. In this climate of frightening loss and uncertainty, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, a tenuous enterprise in the best of economic times, struggled to become a reality.
Wilkes decided it was time to embark on a new endeavor. That spring he proposed that the Depot of Charts and Instruments sponsor a survey of Georges Bank, a 10,000-square-mile section of tumultuous shoal water approximately a hundred miles off Cape Cod. A prime fishing ground, the Banks were notoriously dangerous. To provide an accurate chart of this serpentine-shaped shoal would be an immense service to mariners throughout the region. For a thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant who had not commanded a ship in fourteen years, it was a challenging test. It also happened to be an assignment that would demonstrate whether he had the ability to coordinate a survey of the kind that would make up the primary mission of the Exploring Expedition, and on June 14, Dickerson granted his request.
Saying