For both Wilkes and Reynolds, the Exploring Expedition would be as much a voyage into the private sea described by Thoreau as it would be a voyage around the world. With their help, perhaps we can gain a new appreciation of an undertaking that should be a recognized and valued part of our nation’s heritage. The frontier of Lewis and Clark has long since been civilized out of existence. But as Wilkes and Reynolds came to discover, no one will ever civilize the sea.
MOST SAILORS did not refer to it as the Pacific Ocean. They called it the South Sea, a name that dated back to 1513 when Vasco Núñez de Balboa ventured across the sliver of mountainous, jungle-choked terrain known as the Isthmus of Panama. The isthmus runs west to east so that when Balboa first glimpsed water, it appeared to extend to the south. Quite sensibly, he dubbed his discovery the Great South Sea.
Seven years later, Ferdinand Magellan and his men, on their way to the first circumnavigation of the world, penetrated the mazelike strait at the craggy bottom of South America. After weathering the terrible gales typical of one of the most inhospitable places on earth, they found themselves in a quiet, vast ocean that Magellan called, with tearful thanks to God, the Pacific – a name that would not catch hold until the mid-nineteenth century.
Balboa found it, Magellan named it, but for any young boy taken with tales of the South Sea – like the young Charles Wilkes – the central figure had to be James Cook. It had been Cook who had first criss-crossed the Pacific, discovering islands at almost every turn. Cook had been a product of the Enlightenment’s search for knowledge through the empirical observation of nature. Although not trained as a scientist, he was one of the most expert nautical surveyors in the British navy, a skill that served him well in his voyages to distant lands. First and foremost, however, Cook had been an explorer, and the Pacific had served as his route to glory. For the young Wilkes, the South Sea came to represent not only a means of escape from an unhappy childhood but, even more important, a way to win the praise and adulation he had been craving for as long as he could remember.
Wilkes was born to well-to-do parents in New York City in 1798. When his mother died just two years later, he was placed in the care of an aunt, Elizabeth Ann Seton, who would later convert to Catholicism, become an abbess, and eventually be canonized as America’s first native-born saint. Wilkes’s exposure to sainthood proved short-lived, however. At just four years old, he was sent away to boarding school. When he realized he was about to be abandoned at the school, Wilkes clung to his father’s leg and refused to let go. “Young as I was,” he wrote, “the impression is still on me & it is the first event of my life that I have any distinct recollection of.”
For the next ten years, Wilkes was, in his own words, “a poor castaway boy,” attending a series of boarding schools that he hated, always yearning to be at home with the father he loved. The one maternal figure in Wilkes’s life was a nanny named Mammy Reed – a fat, dark-eyed Welsh woman who, in stark contrast to his earlier caretaker, had a reputation as a witch. Reed’s gaze was so intense that Wilkes claimed, “It was impossible to meet her stare.” Reed doted on her “Charley boy,” a youngster with a black hole of loneliness at the center of his being. “I had no other companions than my books and teachers,” he remembered.
But there was always the sea. Manhattan was surrounded by water, and hull to hull along the waterfront was a restless wooden exoskeleton of ships, their long bowsprits nuzzling over the busy streets, the eyes of even the most jaundiced New Yorker irresistibly drawn skyward into a complex forest of spars and rigging. This was where a boy might turn his back on all that he had once known and step into an exotic dream of adventure, freedom, opportunity, and risk.
The city’s wealthiest merchant, John Jacob Astor, had made his fortune with these ships. For Astor, who became known as the Prince of the China Trade, it began, in large part, with sea otter skins procured in the Pacific Northwest – a trade made possible by Wilkes’s hero, James Cook. After discovering countless Pacific islands and plunging farther south than anyone else had ever gone, Cook headed out a third and final time in 1776 to find the proverbial Northwest Passage. Earlier mariners had unsuccessfully searched the east coast of North America for a waterway that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Cook, by now the most experienced and respected explorer in the world, would try the west coast. As the American Revolution raged on the continent’s opposite shore, Cook traded for sea otter skins with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. At the time, he had no other intention than to use the skins to manufacture some winter clothing for his crew. Later in the voyage, after Cook was killed by natives in Hawaii, his men sailed for China and were astounded to learn that an otter skin purchased for pennies in Nootka Sound sold for a hundred dollars in Canton.
Internal trade policies made it difficult for English merchants to capitalize on this discovery. Britain’s South Sea Company had a monopoly for trade on the west coast of America, while the East India Company controlled the Chinese market. For an English merchant to sell otter skins in China, he had to possess two expensive and hard-to-get licenses. Enter the Americans.
Soon after the secret of sea otter skins was revealed by the publication of the narrative of Cook’s final voyage in 1784, American China traders, many of them from Boston and Salem, set out around Cape Horn bound for the Pacific Northwest. In the decades to come, it would be Astor, the New Yorker, who established the first permanent white settlement in the region, known as Astoria on the Columbia River, not far from where Lewis and Clark had wintered in 1805–6. The outpost served as a gathering point for Astor’s fleet of ten vessels. One of these ships, the Tonquin, became part of the mythology of a frontier that for children of Wilkes’s age was what the Wild West would become for subsequent generations of Americans.
On June 5, 1811, the Tonquin, under the command of Captain Jonathan Thorn, sailed from Astoria in search of otter skins. Not until more than a year later would the Tonquin’s native interpreter Lamayzie make his way to Astoria and tell the tale of what had happened to the missing ship. They had anchored somewhere in the vicinity of Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound. Captain Thorn quickly angered the local natives by offering an insultingly low price for their otter skins. The following day, as the Tonquin’s crew began to weigh anchor and set the sails, the natives attacked. Almost all the sailors on deck, including Captain Thorn, were bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Some of the men in the rigging were able to lower themselves through an open hatchway down into the ship, where they secured some pistols and muskets and began firing at the natives. Soon they had cleared the decks.
The next morning several canoes made their way to the Tonquin. The night before a group of sailors had slipped away in the ship’s launch and headed for Astoria. They would never be heard from again. The only man left aboard was a severely injured sailor who did not have long to live. The sailor waited until the Tonquin’s decks were thronged with Indians, then took a match to the ship’s magazine of gunpowder. The Tonquin and approximately a hundred natives were blown to smithereens.
With the outbreak of the War of 1812, when Charles Wilkes was fourteen, a different kind of violence threatened Astor’s commercial interests in the Northwest. A British naval vessel was dispatched to the region, and Astor had no choice but to sell his outpost to the English. Closer to home, however, the United States pulled off several stunning victories as the Constitution and United States bested British frigates in the waters off the East Coast. In the meantime, Captain David Porter rounded the Horn in the U.S. frigate Essex and proceeded to wage his own private war in the Pacific. Playing cat and mouse with the British navy, Porter and his men terrorized the enemy’s whaling fleet. Porter’s swashbuckling exploits climaxed in a bloody encounter with two British frigates off Valparaiso, Chile. Porter was ultimately defeated, but he and his men did much