Some of the more ardent gazers in the squadron were the Expedition’s two artists, Alfred Agate and James Drayton. In an era before photography, artists were a crucial part of any expedition, providing drawings and paintings that were later used to create illustrations for the published scientific reports and narrative. Although both accomplished artists, Agate and Drayton had the benefit of a relatively new invention, the camera lucida – an optical device that projected the virtual image of an object onto a piece of paper for tracing. In the months ahead, the two artists, as well as the naturalist Titian Peale, would use the camera lucida to create images of hundreds of specimens and artifacts, as well as portraits of the many different peoples they encountered. They also created drawings and paintings depicting important scenes and events during the voyage, often basing their work on sketches provided by the squadron’s officers.
On the afternoon of November 23, under full sail, the Vincennes stood in for Rio. Soon she had entered a circular bay almost one hundred miles in circumference surrounded by the spurs of a low mountain range. Ships from all over the world were anchored in groups around the bay. As the Vincennes sailed up the harbor, she passed the USS Independence, the flagship of the Brazil squadron, and Commodore John Nicholson’s band struck up “Hail Columbia.” Under normal circumstances, naval ceremony required that Wilkes fire a salute in recognition of his superior officer, but because of the delicacy of the chronometers aboard the Vincennes, Wilkes decided to forgo this custom. He sent an officer to the Independence to explain the reason behind the apparent slight, but Nicholson “appeared somewhat put out,” Wilkes remembered, “and it was industriously circulated that I had intentionally treated him with disrespect.”
The Peacock had preceded the Vincennes by three days and was already undergoing repairs, but the Relief, which had been sent ahead soon after leaving Norfolk, was nowhere to be seen. Not until four days later, one hundred days after leaving Norfolk, did the storeship arrive, making it one of the longest passages to Rio on record. Instead of following the prevailing breezes east before heading south and west for South America, Lieutenant Long had sailed a more direct, but very slow course. Wilkes already had little confidence in Long (he had been, after all, one of the officers he had inherited from Jones’s original expedition), and he took the opportunity to berate him in the presence of the Peacock’s Captain Hudson.
Wilkes planned to stay in Rio for at least a month. While the squadron underwent repairs, he would conduct his initial gravity and magnetic experiments. He made arrangements with the Brazilian authorities to create a base at an old convent on Enxadas Island at the mouth of Gunabara Bay facing Rio. Here Wilkes created the same hive of activity that had existed at his Capitol Hill home the previous summer. “[T]he tents are spread,” Reynolds recorded, “and the portable houses for the Instruments are put up, and the Instruments are fixed in their stands …, and there is a hum and a life and a stirring spirit pervading the usually quiet island.”
In addition to supervising his own experiments, Wilkes was responsible for coordinating the scientists’ journeys into the Brazilian interior, where they would collect no less than five thousand specimens for shipment back to the United States. Wilkes also supervised the repair of the Peacock and the fumigation of the Porpoise, and he quickly found himself spread too thin. “I have too much anxiety or rather too many persons depending upon me,” he wrote Jane. He knew that his own observations must meet exacting standards since they were to be later integrated with observations being made by Lieutenant Gilliss at the Depot and Professor William Bond at Harvard.
Particularly torturous were the pendulum experiments. Wilkes had procured a sixty-eight-inch-long nonadjustable, or “invariable,” free-swinging pendulum from Francis Baily. After suspending the pendulum from an iron tripod, he set up a pendulum clock behind the tripod. Both the clock and the invariable pendulum were swung, and since the two pendulums were different lengths, they swung at different rates. Every so often, however, they would coincide. Observing the two pendulums through a telescope set up on the opposite side of the room, he would record the exact time of the coincidence, repeating the observation over and over again for days on end. Eventually, enough data was accumulated to determine the precise duration of a single swing of the pendulum. With this time and the length of the pendulum, it was then possible to calculate the force of gravity.
As the experiments wore on, Wilkes started to experience terrible headaches. He demanded complete quiet, and when a man mending a sail in an adjacent room of the convent building accidentally made a noise, Wilkes “went off in a minute,” according to an officer assisting him in the experiment. “Where is he?” Wilkes screamed. “The son of a bitch.… I’ll pound him! Where is he? By God, I’ll throttle him!” For the officers who had worked with him prior to the voyage’s departure, it was a startling change in behavior. “These little outbreaks,” Reynolds wrote, “were rather ominous for the future harmony of the squadron.”
Wilkes was exhibiting the symptoms of a man who had been stretched beyond his capabilities. The less in control he felt, the more he became fixated on the issue of rank. At one point Commodore John Nicholson, commander of the Independence on station at Rio, addressed him as “Mister,” instead of “Captain,” Wilkes. When Wilkes expressed his outrage in a letter, Nicholson coolly responded, “To call you a Captain or Commander would not make you one.” It was a statement that appears to have cut Wilkes to the quick.
Late one night, as he sat alone beside his “wagging pendulum,” he burst into tears. “I had a good cry,” he admitted to Jane (from whom he would withhold nothing throughout the voyage), “which relieves me not a little. How few, my dear Janie, would believe that the Commdr. Of the Expg Expedn. could be so easily brought to the sinking mood against all the duties that he is surrounded with.”
In late December, Wilkes finally finished his pendulum experiments. By then, Lieutenant Long and the Relief were already on their way south. It was time, he decided, for some relaxation. With his flag lieutenant, Overton Carr, and a servant, he went ashore to enjoy a heated bath. But when he emerged from the warm water, he collapsed into his servant’s arms. “I was conscious,” he remembered, “but could not speak.” Carr immediately took him to a nearby hotel and put him to bed. When news spread that the commander had fainted and was now catatonic, it “produced a sensation throughout the fleet,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “and officers came [running from] all directions.” Just three months into the voyage, he was physically and emotionally depleted. Although the surgeon Edward Gilchrist pronounced “the case a very serious one” and suggested a regimen of “restoratives,” Wilkes opted for nothing more than a good night’s sleep. The next morning he was up and back at work, “to the great surprise of everybody.” The fact remained, however, that the commander of the Ex. Ex. was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
On January 6, the squadron departed from Rio de Janeiro, but not before Wilkes and Nicholson exchanged a final, acrimonious flurry of correspondence. Wilkes accused the commodore of “endeavoring to decry [the Expedition’s] National character and destroy its efficiency by not extending to the Commanding Officers the courtesy and etiquette that their situation … commands.” It all came down to Nicholson’s having called him Mr. Wilkes. Baffled and irked by Wilkes’s tormented rage, Nicholson asked him a very good question: Rather than pretend to be something he