Books
There were great discoveries, but no 'Sea of Glory' for Wilkes

By Eric Sorensen
Special to The Seattle Times

	Charles Wilkes
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He prayed — and I paraphrase — "Dear Lord, please don't let me screw up."

In 1838, American explorer Charles Wilkes might have said the same thing on a mission that, dollar for dollar, adventure for adventure, was just as great as the first space missions. With six ships that cost a good chunk of his young nation's treasury, Wilkes set out on an incredibly bold scientific mission, charting the Southern Hemisphere, a wide swath of the Pacific Ocean and the coasts of what would one day be Oregon and Washington, including Puget Sound and the Columbia River.

But for all his good intentions, Wilkes found a way to screw up.

Author appearance Nathaniel Philbrick will read from "Sea of Glory," 7:30 p.m., Monday, Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., Seattle; $5 tickets available at Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600, www.elliottbaybook.com).

Just how he managed this is told in exquisite detail by Nathaniel Philbrick, who won the National Book Award three years ago for "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex," a riveting account of yet another nautical tragedy of errors. That was a tidier, more compact and more intense book — it's hard to beat a whale ship downed by a whale, or cannibal-fearing men who end up eating each other.

But "Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842" (Viking, $27.95) is more deftly done. It's a study of science and ego and the mystery of a man whose accomplishments were, at times, sizable in spite of himself. It lets Philbrick come full circle, too. In "Heart of the Sea" he dealt with the wreck that inspired Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." In Wilkes he has a model for Melville's Captain Ahab.

Wilkes was the head of the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition of 1838 ("Ex. Ex." for short). It was America's first attempt to make a name for itself in the annals of exploration and science. And with 346 men, including nine scientists and artists, notes Philbrick, it was among the largest scientific odysseys in the history of Western exploration.

A short list of Ex. Ex. accomplishments: 87,000 miles covered over four years; 180 charts drawn, some in use up to World War II; the realization that Antarctica is a continent, with 1,500 charted miles to back the claim; the harvesting of nearly 10 times as many specimens new to science as were collected by Lewis and Clark, creating the foundation for the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.

And of local interest, what HistoryLink calls "America's first formal entry into Puget Sound waters." Elliott Bay is named for one of the crew.

So why do Lewis and Clark get a bicentennial celebration, and how does James Cook rate a best-seller like Tony Horwitz's "Blue Latitudes," while the Ex. Ex., until now, has mostly eaten history's dust?

"Charles Wilkes was no James Cook," Philbrick writes. "Insecure and egotistical rather than self-effacing and confident, Wilkes had a talent for creating discord and conflict."

He showed a lot of early promise, drawing charts from memory, sharing mess with officers during a brilliantly executed survey of Georges Bank.

But he was mostly a desk jockey, and only a lieutenant at that. The low rank both chafed him and cost him before his crew. At sea, he promoted himself to captain, which was just one of countless temperamental acts that after a while make Johnny Depp's over-the-top swashbuckling in "Pirates of the Caribbean" seem by the manual. He lost his cool in foul weather, stopped talking to his officers and at times could barely control a ship. His return was tainted by a court martial for flogging sailors and Marines.

He was in over his head, a notion that Philbrick drives home in rich detail, starting with an exquisite epigram from Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII":

I have ventured
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth

That makes it all the more astounding how far Wilkes managed to go. His Antarctic journey, says Philbrick, "has to be one of the most extraordinary feats of seamanship of all time. Braving several gales and countless icebergs, he had sailed his ill-equipped wooden man-of-war 1,500 miles along the windiest, least-accessible coast in the world. And he had done it without losing a single man. Today this stretch of the Antarctic coast is known as Wilkes Land."

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