Free Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick Page A

interest in the boy that for a time aboard the Porpoise he became the father figure Charlie had never known.
    The falling out came in Boston, Charlie’s hometown. They were at the navy yard completing the chart of Georges Bank. Wilkes was anxiously awaiting orders from Washington, and Charlie was directed to make a quick trip to the post office on the other side of the Charles River. On his way back, Charlie decided to stop by his mother’s house for a surprise visit. “I shall never forget her fond embrace,” he later wrote, “and the ‘God bless you, my darling boy!’ when I left her.” While he waited to cross the river to the navy yard in Charlestown, his hat, along with the letters he had carefully placed inside it, was knocked into the water by a schooner passing through the drawbridge. By the time he’d recovered his hat, the letters were wet but still readable.
    When Charlie reached the Porpoise, Wilkes was waiting for him, with “a look as dark as a thunder-cloud.” Wilkes asked what had taken him so long. Charlie explained that his hat and the letters had been knocked into the river. Wilkes suspected that Charlie had taken the opportunity to enjoy himself in Boston and decided to teach the boy a lesson. Before Charlie knew what was happening, the boatswain’s mate had laid him across the breech of a cannon and begun whipping his backside with the colt—a three-foot length of half-inch rope. “[W]e were lying not more than a quarter of a mile in a straight line from where my mother lived,” he remembered, “and if she had been at an open window at the front of the house she could have heard my piercing cries.” Charlie would not be able to sit for three weeks. His white duck trousers had been cut through by the colt, and threads of cloth were stuck to his ripped and bleeding flesh. “When I shipped [on the Porpoise ] I had made up my mind to try to be somebody and to get ahead in the world,” he wrote, “but now my hopes were blasted. My ambition was gone, yes, whipped out of me—and for nothing.”
    By the brutal standards of the U.S. Navy, there had been nothing unusual in Wilkes’s treatment of Charlie. Many a ship’s boy had been whipped for far less. But Wilkes had not consistently operated by the usual standards of the navy. As had been true with the passed midshipmen aboard the Porpoise, he had been more of a friend and mentor than a commander to Charlie. When all was going well, this approach made for what was known as a “happy ship.” But when a sailor needed to be disciplined, it could all fall apart. Since he considered himself the commander’s friend, the sailor tended to resent any attempt to curb his conduct. Long after Charlie had been reassigned to another vessel, he continued to harbor a deep and obsessive hatred for the commander to whom he had once been so close. If he ever got the chance, Charlie vowed he would have his revenge.
     
    Against all odds, the Exploring Expedition seemed about to depart in the fall of 1837. The squadron was now in New York, with more than five hundred officers, sailors, marines, and scientists awaiting orders to sail. The necessary modifications to the overbuilt vessels had been made. The flagship Macedonian had been outfitted with an innovative forced hot-water heating system in anticipation of the Antarctic cold. A new kind of foul weather clothing coated with India rubber had been delivered. There was also a new kind of firearm—a pistol equipped with a Bowie knife that could be used both as a form of defense against hostile natives and for hacking through underbrush. For a city suddenly gripped by economic depression, the Expedition was, at least for a time, a welcome distraction. When some of its naval officers made an appearance at a play, the actors stopped the performance to give “the Lions of the day” three cheers.
    But no matter how desperately Commodore Jones might labor to bring the Expedition to fruition, a new problem