Today, Wilkes' journey. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
After Lewis and Clark, then
what? America's appetite for geographical knowledge
had only been whetted. Other expeditions went west,
but our imagination craved more. We finally began
converging on another such adventure in 1822.
An eccentric named John Symmes began claiming that
Earth was hollow, and its open interior was
habitable. We just needed to find the entrances,
which lay at each pole. Soon Symmes' supporters
were pressing the Senate to send expeditions to
locate those portals into Earth's interior.
Symme's prophet was Ohio journalist Jeremiah
Reynolds. For a while, Reynolds beat Symmes' drum.
But he obviously heard the steps of the fool
killer. He dropped the hollow Earth theory and
pressed instead for a major American Naval
expedition.
As the campaign mutated from fantasy into reality,
the Senate was finally convinced. In 1838, the
United States Exploring Expedition (as it
was named) set sail under the command of a vain and
fractious New York aristocrat named Charles Wilkes.
Its three ships, and additional resupply vessels,
were charged with an enormous journey.
They were to sail south, exploring the Atlantic,
pass through Cape Horn, explore Antarctica, visit
the Sandwich Islands and the American Northwest,
cross the Pacific and Indian Oceans, round the Cape
of Good Hope and return at last to New York. All
this took five years to complete.
But Wilkes lacked the one quality that'd made Lewis
and Clark so wonderfully successful. He played the
role, not of first among
peers, but of leader. He was in
constant trouble. Flogging his men, destroying
morale, and pushing his officers to near-mutiny.
When Fiji Islanders killed two midshipmen, Wilkes
razed two villages and killed eighty-seven people.
Later, one of his ships was lost with all hands.
And, no sooner was he back in New York, than he and
his officers raised court martial charges against
one another. Now it was the trial -- not the voyage
-- that seized America's interest. Still, Wilkes
was probably the reason that America claimed the
Oregon Territory for its own.
He spent nineteen years writing up the material
collected on the trip. Then, the Civil War: Wilkes
once more served boldly and dangerously. He very
nearly brought Great Britain into the conflict when
he shot at a British vessel in the Caribbean. Once
again, he faced court martial and suspension.
This morning Wilkes became real for me when I
stumbled across his first published account of the
voyage. Turn pages in this very beautiful, very
old, five-volume set. Look at steel engravings of
landscapes, of natives, of their songs, of fruits
and animals.
All the harm Wilkes brought on himself and others
evaporates into the sheer beauty of discovery. But,
Oh, the restlessness! A.E. Housman could've been
talking about Wilkes when he wrote,
The tree of man is never quiet;
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
C. Wilkes, Narrative of the United States
Exploring Expedition, During the Years 1838, 1839,
1840, 1841, 1842. Vol. I-V, Philadelphia: 1849.
(This set first came out in 1845.)
For some online history of Wilke's voyage, see
this Columbia Magazine article.
For more on Charles Wilkes' biography, see:
http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/w8/wilkes-iii.htm
Drawing of Mount Shasta made on the Wilkes
expedition
Drawing of a Tierra del Fuego canoe made on the
Wilkes expedition
In the episode, I quoted from the poem On
Wenlock Edge, which is part of A. E.
Housman's, A Shropshire Lad. You might be
interested in the entire context of those two
lines:
On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double, And thick
on Severn snow the leaves.
'Twould blow like this through holt and hangar
When Uricon the city stood;
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare;
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet-
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double;
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone.
Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.
Lienhard.
