By the mid-1820s, the South Shetlands had been stripped of seals, and commercial interest in the region waned. The question of whether a continent or a group of islands existed to the south would be left unresolved for decades to come. In the meantime, the sails of American whalemen and bêche-de-mer traders continued to whiten the waters of the Great South Sea. As the need for reliable charts grew stronger, communities up and down the Atlantic seaboard began to insist that it was time for the U.S. government to catch up to the achievements of its mariners. In 1828 the citizens of Nantucket drafted a memorial to the U.S. Congress: “Your petitioners consider it a matter of earnest importance that those seas should be explored; that they should be surveyed in an accurate and authentic manner, and the position of new islands, and reefs, and shoals, definitely ascertained.”
In the tradition of Cook, it was time America launched an exploring expedition of its own.
CHAPTER 2
The Deplorable Expedition
WITH THE THREE VOYAGES of James Cook, Great Britain had set the pattern for future global exploration: two sturdy and seaworthy ships led by a captain with extensive surveying experience. By 1804, the exploratory efforts of the world’s leading maritime power were coordinated by one man—John Barrow, the second secretary of the Admiralty. Safely ensconced in his office at Whitehall, where he remained insulated from the disruptions of political change, Barrow was free to send out a seemingly continuous stream of wondrously equipped expeditions. Barrow would remain at the Admiralty for the next forty-four years, and over that span of time he would dispatch voyages to just about every corner of the world in a deliberate campaign to extend the bounds of British scientific knowledge and influence.
The United States, on the other hand, was starting from scratch. Government-sponsored exploration in America began with Lewis and Clark in 1803. Although the expedition succeeded in alerting the American people to the promise of the West, no provision was made to do anything with its results. The journals would remain unpublished for more than a decade; the botanical collection eventually ended up in England, while other specimens and artifacts were scattered among scientific societies throughout America. From an institutional and policy point of view, it was as if the expedition had never happened.
In the years after the War of 1812, there were too many distractions to allow a young, raw-boned nation like the United States to focus on a project as esoteric as a voyage of discovery in the name of science. There were roads, canals, and railroads to be built, while the obvious sponsor of an expedition—the U.S. Navy—was as conservative an institution as the country possessed. Not founded until 1794, the young navy was reluctant to implement any kind of reform—whether it involved corporal punishment, education, or technology. Even though the United States owed its very existence to the discoveries of Columbus and others, its navy would show a curious and at times infuriating scorn for the concept of exploration.
In 1825 it appeared as if the newly elected president, John Quincy Adams, might goad the nation to action. In his inaugural address he proposed that the United States embark on an innovative program to further the cause of education and science. In addition to a national university and an observatory (which he poetically referred to as a “light-house in the sky”), he advocated a voyage of discovery to explore the Pacific Northwest. Congress, unfortunately, refused to fund any of Adams’s proposals. If America was ever to follow in the wake of Cook, the impetus would have to come from somewhere beyond the nation’s capital.
In 1818, John Cleves Symmes was a thirty-eight-year-old retired army captain living with his wife and ten children in the frontier town of St. Louis. He was a trading agent with the Fox Indians, but his mind was not on his work. Instead, his dreamy blue eyes were often lost in abstraction as he pondered his own theory of the world, a theory that put him at odds with such scientific luminaries as Sir Isaac Newton. But what the largely self-educated Symmes lacked in intellectual credentials, he more than made up for in audacity and pluck.
Symmes had read somewhere that arctic species such as reindeer and foxes migrated north each winter and returned south in the spring, unaccountably well fed and healthy despite having wintered in what most considered an uninhabitable region of frigid temperatures. Where did these creatures go? After many years of contemplation, Symmes announced his answer in a single-page circular dated April 10, 1818: “TO ALL THE WORLD! I declare the earth is hollow . . . , containing a number of solid concentrick spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.”
Symmes was, by no means, the first to invest the unknown portions of the globe with miraculous properties in the name of science. As late as the midpoint of the eighteenth century, French and English geographers had speculated that an immense and temperate continent known as Terra Australis Incognita (The Unknown Southern Land) must exist in the high southern latitudes so as to offset the landmasses to the north and thereby “balance” the earth. But in 1774, when Cook voyaged beyond the Antarctic Circle and found only icebergs and whales, the figment of Terra Australis Incognita appeared to have vanished forever.
Symmes believed that beyond the region of ice surrounding each of the poles lay a mild and navigable sea that flowed into a large portal leading to the interior of the earth. He claimed that the crew of a ship sailing to the edge, or “verge,” of one of these holes would not even be aware that they had begun to sail down into the earth. On either side of the central hole would be successive layers of land, flourishing with wildlife and, perhaps, people. Because of the earth’s tilt, this miraculous new land would be flooded with sunlight. It was up to that former New World, America, to launch the voyage of discovery that would outdo Columbus, Magellan, and Cook.
He was not a particularly good speaker or writer, but Symmes’s theory of the “Holes in the Poles” began to find a following. He lectured tirelessly, traveling by horse and wagon across the states of Kentucky and Ohio. There were even some prominent men of science who gave Symmes their cautious approval. Dr. Samuel Mitchell, an astronomer in Cincinnati, Ohio, spoke in support of the theory. A globe patterned on Symmes’s ideas became part of the collection at the prestigious Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia. John J. Audubon sketched Symmes’s portrait in 1820, helping to establish his reputation as the “Newton of the West.”
In March 1822, Symmes wrote a petition that was presented to Congress by the state of Kentucky. In addition to pronouncing “his belief of the existence of an inhabited concave to this globe,” the petition, which was ultimately tabled, called for “two vessels of 250 or 300 tons for the expedition.” Thus was born the concept of a voyage that would take another sixteen years to fulfill.
In 1824, during a string of speaking engagements in his native Ohio, Symmes gained the support of an energetic acolyte by the name of Jeremiah N. Reynolds (no relation to Passed Midshipman William Reynolds). Just twenty-four years old, Jeremiah had attended Ohio University before becoming editor of the Wilmington Spectator. Soon after meeting Symmes, he decided to scrap his promising newspaper career in favor of a life on the road promoting the notion of a hollow earth. An articulate and charismatic speaker, Jeremiah also had a flair for making influential friends. Symmes’s theory began to catch hold as never before, and this improbable duo spoke in sold-out lecture halls all across the United States.
Over time, Jeremiah began to develop a different perspective on his master’s theory. Whereas Symmes advocated an expedition north, Jeremiah became increasingly intrigued with the prospect of a voyage south. In 1823, the English sealer James Weddell had sailed farther south than even Cook. Instead of ice he reported to have found open water as far as the eye could see and surprisingly warm temperatures. While Symmes clung to his belief in a hole at the pole, Jeremiah was now willing to entertain the possibility that an American exploring ship might drop anchor at ?
??the very axis of the earth”—an unforgivable heresy as far as Symmes was concerned. In Philadelphia the two visionaries went their separate ways.
Jeremiah continued to broaden his original concept of a voyage of discovery. In addition to searching out the South Pole, the expedition would survey and chart the islands of the South Pacific. This was the voyage that maritime communities in New England and beyond had been pleading for, and Jeremiah soon saw his base of support swell until it had become a force that Washington could no longer ignore. At Jeremiah’s urging, marine and scientific societies began to bombard Congress with memorials, and in May 1828, the House passed a resolution requesting President Adams to send a naval vessel to the Pacific. In addition to collecting information helpful to American commercial interests, the expedition was to have a small scientific corps similar to what had accompanied previous European ventures. Jeremiah was designated a special agent to the navy, and in September he filed a report describing more than two hundred uncharted islands and shoals that should be investigated by the expedition. A few weeks later, the 118-foot sloop-of-war Peacock, almost completely rebuilt for a voyage of exploration, was launched at the New York Navy Yard.
Despite his earlier connection with the pseudoscientist Symmes (who would die the following year in Ohio, a hollow globe attached to his gravestone), Jeremiah was put in charge of finding a qualified naturalist and astronomer for the voyage. That fall he met with a steady stream of scientists and naval officers interested in joining the expedition. One of the applicants was a thirty-year-old lieutenant named Charles Wilkes.
By the fall of 1828, Charles and Jane Wilkes had been married for two and a half years, their wedding date delayed until Wilkes’s promotion to lieutenant in April 1826. Soon after his return from the Pacific in 1823, he attended a public lecture in chemistry. Halfway through the talk, he was startled to see Jane and her mother arriving at the back of the hall. Wilkes sprang to his feet and gallantly offered them his chair and the one next to it. Jane’s mother insisted that Wilkes sit with them. “She afterwards told me,” he remembered, “that she could no longer endure keeping us apart—our attachment was mutual and of very long standing and had undergone the fullest test.”
Wilkes was in no hurry to return to sea. Instead, he was quite content to spend as much time as possible with Jane and her mother while he took in mathematics, languages, drawing, and science. Unlike Cook, Wilkes’s pursuit of scientific expertise would keep him on shore. Except for a year-long cruise to the Mediterranean, his voyage to the Pacific as a midshipman would mark his last significant sea experience for the next fifteen years. Instead of the ocean, Wilkes devoted himself to learning how to navigate what was, given the realties of the peacetime navy, the more significant sea: the swirling riptides and shoals of federal politics.
At this time, science in America was largely practiced by amateurs, many of them men of leisure with time to dabble in their favorite disciplines. This meant that someone such as Thomas Jefferson could not only be president of the United States, he could also be one of the foremost scientists in America. No American college offered what we would call today a proper, specialized scientific education. Someone seeking instruction sought out an expert in his field of interest—like Jane’s older brother James Renwick, a professor at Columbia College. One of the premier engineers in the United States, Renwick played a large role in Wilkes’s education, offering instruction in topics such as astronomy and magnetism as well as introducing him to America’s most passionate practitioner of geodesy (the study of the size and shape of the earth), Ferdinand Hassler.
Prior to the War of 1812, the Swiss-born Hassler had been appointed to head the survey of the Atlantic coast—a monumental undertaking for which there was an acute and immediate need. There were no updated charts of the thousands of miles of bays, inlets, and beaches extending from Maine to Florida. In many regions, mariners were still relying on charts created by the British navy prior to the Revolution. But Hassler was much more than a surveyor; he was a proud geodesist who insisted on using the finest instruments from Europe and the latest trigonometric principles to create a survey that would not only be of immense practical benefit but would also represent an important contribution to science.
Such an approach took an enormous amount of time and money relative to the slapdash and often inaccurate chronometric surveys that the nation had, up until this point, relied upon. Hassler’s system was based on the creation of a series of huge triangles extending along the entire coastline of the United States. Within these triangles, with sides of approximately thirty miles in length, smaller triangles would be determined, creating the network of reference points required to survey the coast. Before this could be accomplished, however, two baselines of almost nine miles in length had to be established with an accuracy never before achieved in America.
After several years of labor, Hassler had laid the groundwork for a first-rate survey of the coast but had not yet produced a chart. Members of Congress began to insist on tangible results. Hassler’s imperious and condescending attitude toward anyone who dared question his methods meant that it was only a matter of time before Congress voted to withdraw its support of the Coast Survey, at least as Hassler had conceived of it, in 1818.
When Wilkes met him in the 1820s, Hassler was struggling to support his large family. With the assistance of Renwick, he had been able to secure some surveying work in the New York area; he also relied on Wilkes’s uncle, the banker, to secure emergency loans, using his vast scientific library as collateral. “His forehead was high and his whole expression intellectual,” Wilkes remembered. “He was very slovenly in his attire, very old fashioned.” Long before there was a national university system to support what would become known as the “mad professor,” there was Ferdinand Hassler, and for a number of years he became Wilkes’s most influential role model.
In Hassler, Wilkes found a man who refused to succumb to America’s long-standing suspicion of the intellectual. “[H]e had a peculiar tone of voice, crackling and Sarcastic, and with a conceit in his knowledge over those who were ignorant of Scientific principles.” Although Wilkes saw himself as the rational one in his dealings with the irascible Hassler, the young naval officer seems to have internalized his master’s uncompromising arrogance and almost frantic excitability. Just as the strong-willed Hassler had a tendency to create controversy everywhere he went, so would Wilkes develop a similar reputation for inciting turmoil.
Wilkes wanted desperately to be a member of Jeremiah Reynolds’s proposed exploring expedition. His unusual naval career was, he felt, ideally suited to such a voyage. In addition to his proven navigational skills and surveying lessons with Hassler, his brother-in-law James Renwick had instructed him in the secrets of the pendulum, a finely tuned instrument used on previous European expeditions to help determine the force of gravity. The fact of the matter remained, however, that Wilkes had not yet established any kind of scientific or, for that matter, naval reputation. And yet, true to his well-to-do background and schooling by Hassler, there was a sense of entitlement about the young naval officer.
Wilkes understood that he was too young to be even considered to command such an expedition. But there had been talk of adding a second vessel. Wilkes made a remarkable proposal to Samuel Southard, secretary of the navy, offering to fund the purchase of an additional vessel—as long as he was given its command and was appointed astronomer. “You [may be] unaware that I have commanded a Ship and Schooner towards the same direction the Expedition is to follow,” Wilkes wrote, “so I think I am able to take any charge you may assign to me.”
When Jeremiah Reynolds finally met Wilkes, he not unexpectedly found him to be “exceedingly vain and conceited.” He also complained to Southard that James Renwick had overstated the case for his brother-in-law as an astronomer. “[Wilkes] is [a] deserving young man, and no doubt an enterprising and ambitious officer,” he wrote, “but Professor Renwick is puffing him for much more than he is. . . .
There is a spirit of dictation about Wilkes and Renwick, that I don’t like.”
But the expedition of 1828 was not to be. After being delayed into the new year, by which time John Quincy Adams had lost the presidential election to Andrew Jackson, the voyage met the opposition of Senator Robert Y. Hayne from South Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs. Hayne worried that the expedition might encourage the creation of a distant colony, “which could only be defended at an expense not to be estimated.” He also pointed out that since the federal government had not yet produced reliable charts of America’s own coastline, it was unlikely that an expedition with a handful of men was capable of surveying the entire Pacific. As Lewis and Clark had shown, the country’s exploring efforts were best directed toward its own hinterlands. Hayne’s views were in keeping with the isolationist sentiment that had brought Jackson to the White House, and the expedition was quickly killed.
That spring Wilkes, by now the father of both a son, Jack, and an infant daughter, Janey, was ordered to join a naval ship sailing for the Mediterranean. In the meantime, Jeremiah Reynolds did his best to put back together the pieces of his shattered dream. If the government would not sponsor a voyage, he would do it through private enterprise. With the assistance and financial backing of Edmund Fanning and some other sealers from Stonington, he formed the South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition. In October 1829, the Seraph, Annawan, and Penguin set out with Jeremiah, the artist John F. Watson, and the geologist James Eights. Although Eights would eventually publish several important articles based on what he’d observed at the South Shetland Islands, overall, the expedition was a disaster. The seals that were to finance the voyage were few and far between, meaning that the crews, with no prospect of remuneration, had little patience with exploring the frigid waters of the Antarctic Circle. When the men threatened to desert in Chile, the voyage was abandoned.