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Sea of Glory
America's Voyage of Discovery
Written by Nathaniel Philbrick
The vault in the Nantucket Historical Association's Research Library on Fair Street contains many wondrous things: some 50,000 original photographic images in various mediums; more than 400 logbooks chronicling whaling voyages, some successful, some not; hundreds of account books dating back to Mary Coffin Starbuck's so-called "Account Book with the Indians"; ancient maps and atlases, some from the sixteenth century; and a collection of rare books, among them the six-volume first (public) edition of Charles Wilkes's Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition: During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1841. The first set, printed for Congress, is virtually unobtainable.
Who, you might ask? What expedition? If there are ten people on Nantucket who know who Charles Wilkes was and what expedition that was, we'd be surprised. Mark Twain was thrilled by it; Thoreau read about it; Melville was inspired by it; but unlike the tale of the doomed whaleship Essex, the Ex. Ex., as contemporaries called it, is virtually unknown today. Now, those days, years, decades of ignominy are over, for Nat Philbrick has written another spellbinder.
Six U. S. naval vessels, 346 men including scientists and artists who would collect specimens and artifacts that contributed to the founding of the Smithsonian Institution, the U. S. Botanic Garden, and the Naval Observatory. Philbrick describes it as "one of the largest voyages of discovery in the history of Western exploration," and places its commander, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes (he would make himself a captain, and almost get shot for doing so), right up there with Magellan, Columbus, Prince Henry the Navigator, and James Cook. But we don't know that any of those intrepid Europeans were on the receiving end of the hatred and fear from their officers and crews as was the commander of the Ex.Ex.
Thanks to his reading of an unofficial, private journal kept by a literate and sensitive junior officer (he kept two journals, one to be surrendered to Wilkes at the end of the voyage), Philbrick has been able to recreate the diurnal activities of this fantastic voyage. The six ships set out from the Norfolk Navy Yard, sailed around the Horn and up the western coast of the Americas to the Pacific Northwest; then south again through Polynesia to the forbidding, newly discovered continent of Antarctica. All the while mapping and charting, discovering islands and civilizations, creating paths in the sea that the whalers and sealers of Nantucket would follow.
Four years, two ships lost, a voyage under the command of a man described by his officers and men as "an ignorant and nervous seaman." Then home, to New York, where he was born, Charles Wilkes was court martialed on charges of "illegally whipping his men, massacring the inhabitants of a tiny Fijian island, and lying about the discovery of Antarctica, and other outrages." Wilkes was let off with a reprimand.
If Charles Wilkes comes across as the merciless tyrant he was, he is also revealed as a loving husband and father. Much of the rich, evocative writing in this book is in the letters he wrote to his wife Jane. But it is Philbrick's own mastery of the language that weaves this extraordinary tapestry. Exploration by sea would end with the opening of the American West. This new "narrative of the Ex. Ex." pulls it out of obscurity and into the canon of maritime America.
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Summer People
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Sea of Glory
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the quiet season |
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