David S. Brose This paper will not be is a long list of "scientific" people or their discoveries. Instead I will try to put Wilkes' Expedition, its causes and its subsequent studies, on a broader national stage. For the purpose of this paper, the American Age of Sail begins in 1776 with recognition of an independent United States (called America by nearly everyone then and now). And while both sides in the Civil War used sailing ships for slow cargos, and many steam-ships still carried sails, the Age of Sail ended with the steam-powered U.S.S. Monitor, launched in 1861 with never a yard or sail (Bradford n.d.). Between these years (largely during the life of Charles Wilkes: 1798 - 1877), America and science both changed profoundly (Poole 1999; Pursell 1995). It is true that much of the science done in America during the 18th and early 19th centuries was done by Europeans (Catesby, Kalm, the Bartrams, et al.). Transactions of the Royal Philosophical Society and the learned journals of Paris, Berlin, Geneva, Edinburgh and Stockholm are filled with their reports. But while few American colonial scientists would have called themselves scientist, many did think of themselves as Americans as soon as the 1770s, such as Benjamin Franklin, who conducted his experiments, made inventions and wrote most of his "scientific" papers just before the American Revolution (www.si.edu). So American science too, begins ca. 1776. THE ECONOMIC BACKROUND OF AMERICAN SCIENCE: 1776-1861 From the mid-18th century, agriculture and commerce were the sources of economic growth in the 13 (of 16) English North American colonies that would form the United States (Kornblith 1998). By the middle of the 19th century the northern United States was developing a national market economy marked by inter-regional dependence. Between 1815 and 1825 canals opened the trans-Appalachian region. Population west of the Appalachians in 1815 was barely 1,000,000; by 1845 it exceeded 15 million. After 1830 canals gave way to railroads: in 1830 there were only 130 miles of iron railroad line in the country and by the Civil War there were over 30,000 miles, and over 75% were in the north (Licht 1995; Poole 1999). By contrast, the South remained predominantly agricultural. Most southern farms continued to resemble small, self-sufficient frontier settlements but with less sexual division of labor and southern women often ran large plantations (DeCunzo and Herman 1996)). And as Charles Wilkes would write in his Autobiography, southern society welcomed fewer, and less diverse immigrants and offered less opportunity for the social mobility that promoted independent thought in the north. Planters' sons might dabble in science beyond the techniques of agronomy but knowledge of science was foreign to most middle class overseers, farmers or merchants; was ignored by almost all small yeoman or tenant farmers; and was forbidden to slaves (Scott n.d). In 1810 the southern states engaged in about the same amount of domestic manufacturing as did the northern states, but by 1860 less than a sixth of the nation's manufactured goods came from the southern two-thirds of the country. From the 1820s through the late 1850s southern economic reformers argued for increasing agricultural diversity and diverting profits from staple agricultural trade into commerce and industry. But cotton became King after Whitney invented the Cotton Gin in 1793. In 1812 the south had exported 150,000 bales of cotton; in1860 it exported 3.8 million bales. Cotton spread westward just as the 1808 non-importation act took effect. As the price of slaves increased, only the wealthy could afford to buy them. By 1860, fewer than a quarter of southern families owned any slaves, but an increasing proportion of southern assets were tied up in slaves, leaving little capital to be invested in manufacturing (Wright 1980; Kornblith 1998). In summary, before the Civil War the development of American industry, primarily in the north, encouraged technological invention and the application of science. But neither before the Civil War nor during the bitter days of Reconstruction did science flourish as an acceptable profession, an academic subject or (saving "agricultural improvements") as an industrial application in the south. Naturally, this would effect how well Charles Wilkes, beginning in the late 1840s, would be able to promote American science on an international stage while trying to succeed as a North Carolina entrepreneur. THE SOCIAL CONTEXTS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE Before 1850 nearly all non-commercial endeavors of any scope were undertaken by the Federal government (Daniels 1968). Exploration and survey by land or sea, wars and treaties and even trade with American Indians, banking, road and canal building, and inland or coastal navigational improvements, were relegated to government agents. Discoveries in what would later be called the natural, astronomical and social sciences resulted from these efforts, although some observations and most of the important syntheses were performed by scholarly gentlemen of independent means (as was much of the experimental "science" in physics). But increasingly, the years from 1822 to 1860 saw such gentlemen first housed in and later given teaching positions at academies and colleges and later technical institutes (Licht 1995; Poole 1999). After the Civil War, America adopted the Germanic model of industrial funding for technological and physical studies, and by the late 1870s industrial technology was thoroughly incorporated into the academic curriculum (E. Brose 1998). The re-introduction of the federal government to create today's complex American system was to wait until the Great 1931 Depression and World War II. To a large extent, the career of Charles Wilkes and the vicissitudes of the collections made on the Exploring Expedition of 1838 -1842, are illustrative of American science during and following the Age of Sail. The role of the national government in stimulating science and geography had centuries-old roots in British and French military and diplomatic reports of strategic places and their native occupants' political and economic relationships. The exploratory science of the new United States began with the 1787 surveys of the present states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the 1795 surveys of military roads through the present states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and eastern Mississippi to Spanish settlements at Nachitoches and French settlements at New Orleans (Brose 2004). Cass and Schoolcraft were studying the Indians and the geology of the Upper Great Lakes for the government when the Louisiana purchase was made; and within 3 years Lewis and Clark had started to the Pacific on the first of many U.S. Exploring Expeditions that would study the Great Plains and Front Ranges (Pike in 1810), formerly Spanish Florida (Gaines in 1811); the sources of the Mississippi River (Long in 1822); the Santa Fe Trail and the southern plains (Carson in 1824); the Rocky Mountains and California (Fremont from 1841-45), the South Pacific and Northwest Coast (Wilkes from 1838-1842); and through the Davis Straits to find the lost Franklin Expedition at the North Pole (Kane in 1856). In a stroke of irony, the U.S. Navy recognized the need for a national foundry and in 1857 ordered then Captain Charles Wilkes to survey the mineral and fuel reserves of his current home region in southwestern North Carolina (Ponko 1974; Wilkes 1859). But the growing sectionalism engendered by the question of extending slavery into the newly acquired territories (and increasing American Indian resistance to removal), initiated nearly a century in which American science was no longer a normal task of the U.S. military. Indeed, Elisha Kent Kane had to fund much of his 1855 journey into the Greenland Ice Cap through subscriptions of his privately published 3-volume report (Bolles 1999). By that date such shameless promotion was an accepted strategy for funding scientific research (e.g. John Audubon) although it had been considered somewhat ungentlemanly when Wilkes had done in it 1847. THE PROFESSION OF SCIENCE From his study of journals and letters, Clark Elliott (1970) called the antebellum period critical in the development of American science. He recognized that any real study of 19th century American science would have to be an exercise in sociology. It needs to be an exercise in political economy, as well (Brose 1998; Licht 1995; www.si.edu). Elliot estimated that fewer than 300 Americans were involved in any way with science in 1790 while by 1850 more than 4500 had made science their vocation or avocation. Antebellum science, where it was not mechanics' tinkering, was considered a literary activity, as it was in Europe, although even in the colleges and societies it concentrated in the generalized "Natural" rather in the increasingly technological "Physical" sciences. To the extent it had a philosophy, 19th century American science looked to 17th century England's Royal Society and Philosophical Transactions. Yet despite Bacon's 16th century proclamation that experimental science was to serve the improvement of humanity, not until the mid-19th century was there any systematic attempt to derive new technologies from scientific knowledge (Brose: 1998:2-29). Many prominent practitioners believed that Americans supported science not merely from patriotism but because they believed that science could improve their lives. Among others, Elliott (1970; Kornblith 1998) noted the utility of science (including technology, agriculture, and invention) was an ideal of the early American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; John Adams was reported to have said that he studied war and politics so his children could study agriculture and mechanics so his grandchildren could study art and poetry. The provisional nature of modern scientific hypotheses was largely unknown to America in the age of sail. Elliott also noted that in America a distinctive and relatively non-Baconian democratic role for science had been established by the early botanical, zoological, antiquarian and meteorological studies which relied on widely scattered amateur reporters. And throughout the 1820s American science saw the development and growth of dozens of new amateur and increasingly professional societies, most with their accompanying scientific journal (some of which are still in publication) (Elliott 1970). Through the antebellum period individual gentlemen of leisure were the most common scientific practitioners and few paying roles for those soon to be named "scientists" existed outside of the government or the academy. That was true of Charles Wilkes' brother-in-law, James Renwick, a Columbia University Professor who from 1825 to 1848 taught Natural Philosophy and Natural Theology intimately bound up in the Transcendental philosophy then sweeping New England. (At Yale, Timothy Dwight, (after whom his father named James Dwight Dana who succeeded him), was another clergyman who brought science to academic respectability before 1825. West Point added technology and science between 1817 and 1833 and Rennsaeler Polytechnic offered the first engineering degree in 1824. Generally, agronomy was widely taught (even in the south) and organic chemistry was the science that supported it although the chemistry of metallurgy, glass and ceramics were frequently treated as industrial secrets (Brose 1999). Nonetheless, before the Civil War, very few professors were fully paid for teaching science and none were paid to conduct research. Even the eminent professor and scientific editor Benjamin Silliman had to support his family and his work by entrepreneurial weekend work (patenting and marketing various types of "soda pop") while teaching at Yale (Brown 2002). CHARLES WILKES AND AMERICAN SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF SAIL England was the benchmark for nearly every aspect of nineteenth century America. So two years after Charles Darwin's four-year voyage in the British ship, Beagle, the U.S. Navy commissioned an international Exploring Expedition (Ex Ex) to increase American prestige by discovering and describing unknown plants and animals in remote parts of the world. From 1838 to 1842 Lt. Charles Wilkes commanded the U.S. Navy around-the-world diplomatic, survey and scientific Exploring Expedition. A final accounting in 1842 showed the expedition cost more than $900,000 (over $18,800,000 in 2004 dollars http://www.eh.net/hmit/ppowerusd/ ) but the belief in America's manifest destiny justified the expedition's expenses. Charles Wilkes, the commander of the Ex Ex entered the U.S. Navy in 1822. An autodidact who trained himself to become an expert navigator and surveyor, Wilkes had been commissioned to buy the scientific instruments for what was to be first Exploring Expedition (and when that was deferred for ten years, the instruments went to the U. S. Naval Observatory for which Wilkes served as its second commander through 1837. Wilkes also spent these years charting and surveying New England's fishing grounds and the South Carolina and Georgia islands and sounds. With his background and skills (and his persistent requests), Wilkes was chosen over more senior officers such as William Hudson, to command the 1838 Ex Ex. Wilkes' 1838 orders read, "Although the primary object of the Expedition is the promotion of the great interests of commerce and navigation, yet you will take all occasions not incompatible with the great purposes of your undertaking to extend the bounds of science and promote the acquisition of knowledge." While preparing charts of oceans, and maps of islands and coasts of interest to the government, as a dedicated scientist Wilkes planned to carry out the kinds of studies of oceanography and meteorological studies for which the Swiss scholar, Alexander von Humbolt, had been praised by the world of science. And Humboldt was clearly Wilkes' model: throughout the voyage measurements of ocean temperature and salinity, of the speed and direction of the winds, and of the barometric pressure and gravitational pull of every mountain and volcano were made and recorded by Wilkes and the midshipmen under his command. The Ex Ex's 35 new maps and naval charts were to prove useful for military and commercial ventures for more than a century. Wilkes' own contributions to meteorology and oceanography earned him contemporary scientific praise, but the great volume he planned to write on [geo]physics was never completed and published. (Although his hand-colored map of ocean surface water temperatures in the Library of Congress is probably the earliest depiction of the phenomenon today called El Nino). James Cook in 1786 had reported sea ice south of Australia, but no one knew if it shrouded a continent or floated on an empty ocean. Wilkes sailed south from Chile in March, 1839, but in heavy seas the Sea Gull was lost with all hands. The remaining Ex Ex ships crossed the Pacific to study Polynesia and map Australia, then once more sailed south. On January 16th, 1841, midshipmen in the Peacock sighted mountains beyond the southern ice and two days later land was also sighted from the Vincennes. Wilkes spent the next six weeks charting 1500 miles of the coast of the new continent he named Antarctica. Wilkes' claim was disputed by d'Urville, whose French ship recorded a different coastline on January 20, and months later Captain James Ross of the Royal Navy claimed to sail through seas where Wilkes mapped a continent. But d'Urville acknowledged America's earlier discovery and in 1848, after review of Ross' questionable assertion, the Royal Geographic Society awarded a medal to Charles Wilkes for first discovering and mapping Antarctica (Jenkins 1850). Wilkes' "gentlemen of the scientific corps" were given a nearly free hand to collect and describe thousands of species, many new to science. These "scientifics" brought home hundreds of new and undescribed minerals, plants, and animals. There were also weapons, tools, ornaments, costumes and carvings from California and the Northwest Coast, from South America, Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa, New Zealand and Australia. Journals, sketches, drawings, and paintings documented the voyage, recorded perishable specimens and helped produce engraved plates to accompany the scientific reports. Expedition members even annotated the music of ethnic groups they encountered across the Pacific. But throughout the expedition's travels, Wilkes' cartographic and diplomatic demands cut into scientific desire. And, during the cruise and at its end, Wilkes reminded everyone that all collections belonged to the U.S. government and nothing could be published without governmental permission. Most of the "scientifics" disobeyed the first order, and Wilkes, himself, felt forced to ignore the second. After returning to the United States in 1842 the work of preserving and displaying the artifacts and specimens began and then came the long period of scientific study. When the studies were done, the new descriptions and the carefully engraved plates for the final reports had to be inspected to be certain no mistake had been made. The process could take years and disaster could strike at any time: a Philadelphia warehouse fire in 1845 burned many original drawings; another in 1853 destroyed dozens of engraved plates all of which had to be redone. Charles Wilkes was the champion of this scientific endeavor, but as it turned out, reasonably well-paid scientific postings were no longer a government monopoly and few members of the scientific corps were anxious to study the ExEx collections for the government upon their return. The novel specimens and curious artifacts collected by the Ex Ex were made public in an 1848 - 1858 exposition at the U.S. Patent Building. That first public exhibit of these objects was designed by Titian Ramsey Peale to satisfy many aspects of late Victorian sense and sensibility in an American setting. Among its first systematic collections, the Ex Ex objects were for decades thereafter exhibited in the new Smithsonian Institution Building designed by James Renwick, Jr., Charles Wilkes' nephew (Viola and Margolis 1985). Thus, many of the specimens were mounted for museum display rather than being prepared for scientific study and some unknown number were distributed as political favors. When not preparing a for his first Court-Martial for conduct unbecoming an officer, Wilkes spent 1844 and 1845 turning ships' logs and officers' journals into a five volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. A review in the 1845 Southern Register noted that Wilkes wrote in an engaging style, but the U.S. Government had only printed and had quickly distributed 200 copies of the five folio-sized Narrative volumes and the one-volume Atlas of maps. Wilkes, himself, commissioned the extensive publication of a second, smaller-sized Narrative edition, earning him public praise and official government displeasure. Before and after the Civil War, Wilkes spent many long weeks in Washington, arguing before the Congressional Library Committee to continue paying for the publications. The first volumes were issued only 2 years after the Ex Ex returned, but the last official report was not published until 30 years later. And with Wilkes' death, in 1877, Congress stopped publishing scientific studies of the U.S. Exploring Expedition so many important reports were never published (Haskell 1942). THE COLLECTIONS The great contributions to oceanography and geology by James D. Dana were not based on returned collections, nor were the innovative linguistic studies by Horatio Hale. But those biological collections made by the Ex Ex suffered different fates (Viola and Margolis 1985). The fish were nearly all previously unknown but not until 1860 could Wilkes persuade Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, to report on them. Agassiz worked for a decade, wrote several short papers and produced 2000 pages of analysis and illustration --- but died in 1873 without having turned anything over to the Congressional Library Committee who waited to publish it. Rich and Brackenridge brought back pressed leaves, stems and flowers of plants from around the world for comparative identification, and Brackenridge returned with seeds and cuttings of 1300 plants, among which were over 600 new species. From these grew the U.S. Botanical Garden and the National Herbarium. After the Civil War, Wilkes wrote a particularly angry note when he discovered that many politicians in Washington had been given Norfolk Island Pines, grown from the seeds the Ex Ex brought back. Wilkes was equally frustrated when Rich proved to be taxonomically challenged. After years of effort Darlington, John Torrey and Asa Gray (who had turned down the Ex Ex for a Michigan Professorship) were convinced to study the plants but the bulk of their drawings and notes remained unpublished at Harvard for nearly a century. Peale had collected insects in the Pacific, but those he had mounted but not drawn were lost in 1841 when Captain Hudson wrecked the Peacock at the mouth of the Oregon [Columbia] River. And Peale's fine illustrations of birds and mammals were used to illustrate the report Wilkes asked Cassin write over Peale's objections. Wilkes then had to hire artist Augustus Gould to describe the more popular shells and, with the fine colored drawings Drayton and Agate made in the field, several dozen new species were documented. But while Dana had already produced the plates for two volumes on the collected crabs, lobsters, shrimp and other sea creatures, the detailed anatomical and field descriptions were lost when they, along with the undescribed bulk of the collection, were sent to a scholar in Chicago whose laboratory (along with most of the city) was destroyed in the great 1871 fire. Anthropology was not yet recognized as a science but the Ex Ex did far more than repeat the curious observations of mariners, merchants or missionaries. The scientifics and many of the officers and crew returned with thousands of cultural artifacts while they explored South America, the South Pacific, and the northwest coast of North America and east Africa, assembling the largest ethnographic collection ever made by a single expedition. Four still-respected volumes on American Indian languages, Polynesian migration, physical anthropology, and Pacific Island societies stand as disciplinary benchmarks which first lifted the horizon of American cultural studies beyond the country's shoreline, this would turn out to be the most important mid-19th ethnographic century collection that could have been made. WILKES IN TROUBLE ONCE MORE Given the circumstances described, no one reading Wilkes' Narrative or his Autobiography could ignore his focus on keeping the work, from field collection to formal publication, at the "cutting edge" of science. That some modern readers are unaware of the accomplishments of Wilkes' 1838-1842 Exploring Expedition is hardly surprising considering that many Americans believe Thomas Edison invented electricity; do not recognize the names of many 19th century explorers; are uncertain about the dates of the Civil War; and may not be able to identify Florida on an outline map of the U.S. As Wilkes' caustic autobiography and his flood of idiosyncratic journal entries and letters attest, he felt himself often wronged but seldom wrong. Yet any but a highly selective use of contemporary sources would show that Wilkes was as complex as many of his naval contemporaries. Thus it hardly seems credible that a popular recounting of the 1838-1842 U.S. Exploring Expedition (Philbrick 2003) places the blame for our current ignorance of Wilkes' historical accomplishments on Wilkes' management style as the expedition's commander, and to blame that on Wilkes' alienated youthful years. This misleading effort seems an unfortunate example of what Oliver Sachs (2003) decried as "pathologizing historic personalities" in pursuit of simple explanations for complex people. Indeed, Charles Wilkes may well have been more complex that even his most recent biographer has recognized. As review of the voluminous collections of letters, documents, and memorabilia in Washington and North Carolina archives can attest, Wilkes was acutely aware of his family's illustrious history and he was painfully conscious of how he would be regarded by posterity. Under such circumstances the careful historian's obvious question should have been why would Wilkes so carefully have preserved the long and tortuous letters he sent to his wife, Jane Renwick, throughout the four years of the exploring expedition ... especially when those letters appeared to expose Wilkes' every emotional quirk and were later used by Philbrick to bolster every negative argument made by Wilkes' naval detractors (in a fashion unthinkable in the 19th century Navy). Perhaps the answer is that even these letters are more complex that they appear. Quite unlike Philbrick's (2003) suspicion, Wilkes' youth was not spent in a house of secret Oedipal rejection. That he was sent as a youth to a private boarding school merely places his urban family among those of the upper class in the Anglo-American world. Indeed, Wilkes' father led one of the more open and literary houses of ante-bellum New York: He was a patron of the young James Fenimore Cooper and his salon often held readings of new or yet-unpublished works (Morgan et al. 1978). And it is not unreasonable to expect that one of the new works he heard read in the Wilkes' family New York salon would have been Frankenstein or The modern Prometheus, which had been a serialized sensation on both sides of the Atlantic before its anonymous publication in 1818 (Miller 2000). In that gothic horror story, Mary Shelly has told Viktor Frankenstein's story through a series of long, emotional letters written to his beloved sister by Captain R. Walton as his ship plows ever further into the uncharted polar seas. In Walton's first four "letters" he expounds on his near-mystical dedication and determination to reach the [north] pole which leaves him at the same time half-fearful and trembling so that he feels impelled by his doubts and friendlessness to commit his emotions to these letters to his dearest soul-mate (Shelly 1824:1-8). With his literate background and his undisguised literary pretensions, I suggest that much of the exaggerated and anguished self-doubt Charles Wilkes interspersed among the exotic scenes and quotidian lists in the letters he wrote to Jane Renwick Wilkes were the stuff of just one more literary opus Wilkes never had time to write, not the unconscious documentation of his unbalanced mind as Philbrick implies. CHARLES WILKES' LEGACY Since the 18th century, art, religion and the earth and life sciences ("Natural Philosophy"), had regarded the world as a manifestation of God's creation. Revealing the amazing diversity creation contained was often undertaken with missionary-like zeal. The United States was rated behind other civilized nations in the scientific aspects of this glorious work. But Wilkes' Expedition collected more than 130,000 plants, animals and minerals, naming over 2000 new species. They studied hundreds of little known societies and cultures and brought their tools, weapons and ornaments back to amaze the people of the United States. Solomon P. Chase and Charles Wilkes recognized that these collections had value and should be preserved and so, throughout a period of military and familial stress, Wilkes' rigid guidance converted the specimens, artifacts and illustrations into the first federally supported museum (located in the National Gallery of the Patent Office), and guided development of what became the Smithsonian Institution. But, of course, no one involved in the expedition considered that its mandate for science or commercial diplomacy would dominate the needs for costal surveys or the customs of naval discipline (Viola 1985:11) ... no one except a few of the scientific and artistic corps and a few junior officers. The former frequently saw the scope of their investigations restricted by the needs of cartography and the standards of traditional naval discipline. The latter, jealous of promotion, felt that Wilkes' insistence on customary prerogatives of rank demeaned them. Upon the return of the Exploring Expedition in 1842, disaffected members of both groups enlisted their political allies to challenge Wilkes' authority on the expedition in a court martial. A generation beyond the Navy of 1812-1815, heavy drinking, dueling, autocratic ships' captains and corporeal punishment were no longer considered very acceptable (Tyng 1870). Nevertheless, all were still officially sanctioned (Dana 1843) and Wilkes was merely reprimanded, and even then, rather benignly, leaving his challengers bitter and frustrated. But as Austin M. Knight wrote in his 1910 introduction to A Picture History of the United States Navy, "... a picture in which the high lights stand out so brilliantly that little or nothing of the background is seen... may be in the highest degree dramatic without being in any marked degree important." Indeed, as Knight recounts, one of the most unique incidents in the history of the navy occurred in 1842 when a young midshipman, Philip Spencer, son of the then Secretary of War, was hanged on the high seas along with two fellow conspirators accused of attempting a mutiny on the brig Somers. When Commander Alexander Slidell MacKenzie reached home after inflicting this summary punishment he was made the target of great criticism, brought to court martial, but honorably acquitted. This incident revealed many of the weak points of the navy, notably its want of satisfactory means of instructing and training midshipmen. This incident demonstrated that there existed a need of greater strictness in the selection of candidates in the appointment of midshipmen, and it materially aided the 1845 founding of the Naval Academy at Annapolis as it brought many officers who had hitherto opposed the plan to agree to a training school on land. Among the first appointees to that Academy was John Wilkes, the oldest son of Charles Wilkes who had clearly seen the trouble an untrained midshipman could cause. Nor was Wilkes' court martial the only one to arise from the difficulties of indifferent seamanship on the Ex Ex: in the middle of the voyage Acting Master George Sinclair pressed charges against Passed Midshipman George M. Harrison for his "insulting tone" and "improper language" as the schooner Sea Gull and the brig Porpoise tried to leave the harbor at Pago Pago in poor weather (Harrison v Sinclair 1840). As Lloyd had noted (1947:13-15), during the early 19th century even the most successful young commander in the Royal Navy "...too tactless, too impatient of etiquette, too wise in his own conceit to get on with men he saw no reason to admire," could be brought before a court martial by a junior officer willing to ruin his commander's future career by accusing him of disrespect. So while Philbrick's reviewer (Harris 2004) might dramatically claim that "For more than a century, Wilkes has stood astride the legacy of the Ex Ex like a colossus, a forbidding impediment to all who would want to know more, " a careful reader might learn that the original colossus was a welcoming navigational aid, not an impediment. And a careful reader may also learn that while headstrong pride and acerbic manners clouded Wilkes' personal life and military reputation, neither these nor his court[s] martial affected his contemporary's appreciation for his diplomatic, cartographic and scientific accomplishments (and they do not affect a persistent appreciation by modern diplomats, cartographers and scientists). In fact, the contemporary public thoroughly approved of Wilkes' discoveries (Jenkins 1850: 274-286), his adventures (Brooks 1996) and even his literary talents (Southern Messenger 1845). And, of course, unbiased scholarship might well have considered that the far more troublesome relations between and the chief scientist aboard the coeval voyage of the Beagle (Darwin 1839) and Captain Ransom, the British Navy expedition's Commander, hardly diminished the legacy of its scientific discoveries (Darwin 1846, 1851, 1859). The published descriptions and illustrations of the United States Exploring Expedition and its collections stimulated the formation of many now great university departments in the sciences, while its catalogued collections formed the core of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (Viola and Margolis 1985). And pushing on through years of failing health and falling fortunes (B.H. Brose 2003; May and Brose 2004) Wilkes fought to have studies conducted by the too often indifferent experts of the day and to have Congress publish 23 illustrated scientific research volumes (including three by Charles Wilkes himself). Charles Wilkes had taken one of America's first giant steps to world recognition in the natural sciences. As James D. Dana would put it, "I very much doubt if anyone else could have done it as well". By any standard, Charles Wilkes remains an American hero. Archival Sources
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