The Charles Wilkes Pacific Expedition

California’s connection to the Pacific Basin and U. S. interest in the province were both demonstrated in the U. S. Exploring (or Wilkes) Expedition, of 1838-42. Since the epic Pacific voyages of Englishman James Cook in the late 1760s and the 1770s, Europe’s leading powers had conducted similar explorations of that ocean, which increasingly became a contested maritime frontier. With an ever-growing commercial stake in Asian and Pacific commerce, the U. S. government commissioned naval Lieutenant Charles Wilkes to lead an expedition of six ships into the Pacific for the purpose of gathering commercial and scientific information. Specifically, Wilkes was to map that ocean basin, locating uncharted islands and anchorages, to help Yankee whalers. Also, he was to gather information about

The geology, zoology, botany, and other natural features of the Pacific waterscape as well as report on the various human cultures encountered.

During the course of the globe-circling expedition, Wilkes’s squadron rounded Cape Horn and surveyed various Polynesian archipelagos before reaching Oahu, whose coastline and possible harbors were charted. From there, the flotilla sailed to the western coast of North America, mapping potential anchorages. At Vancouver (in today’s Washington), the expedition split in two: Lieutenant George F. Emmons led an overland reconnaissance, which included Canadian and other HBC trappers, to California; Wilkes and others sailed to Yerba Buena, entering the Golden Gate on August 14, 1841, and beginning a six-week stay in the province. Emmons and his men encountered rugged terrain, grizzly attacks, and some unfriendly Indians before reaching Sutter’s Fort, from where they received aid before rejoining Wilkes in San Francisco Bay.

The expedition’s activities in the area varied. From his ship, the Vincennes, Wilkes sent a land party out to explore and map the interior region between San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento River. The men saw lynx, herds of elk, and foxes whose pelts were said to fetch $20 each in China. When they camped at night wolves and grizzlies remained a constant menace. They returned to the Vincennes exhausted, and some suffered from poison oak. The commander personally visited the nearby mission of Santa Clara and pueblo of San Jose. Most important, the huge bay was surveyed, along with the adjoining San Pablo Bay, and part of the San Joaquin River. All was not work, however; the expedition’s officers and crew socialized on board the Vincennes with Yerba Buena’s Mexican officials and other notables in the area. Sutter was among them, as was the Russian head of the settlement at Bodega, and several padres.

On October 31 the expedition’s ships weighed anchor to depart California. Just outside the entrance to the Golden Gate, where the flotilla had assembled in the darkness of the next morning, a sandbar posed a risk. An incoming tide was accompanied by towering 30 foot breakers that for five hours crashed over the decks of the vessels causing them, in Wilkes’s words, “to tremble throughout.” A watchman aboard one of the ships was killed by a blow to his abdomen from a piece of equipment loosened by the giant waves. Limping away from San Francisco Bay, the squadron recrossed the Pacific, making stops in Hawai’i, Manila, Singapore, and Cape Town, surveying and mapping along the route. Entering the Atlantic, the expedition returned to New York in June 1842.

What was significant about this maritime expedition? The crew surveyed 280 islands and prepared 180 charts, one of which was the first to trace global whaling grounds. By mapping 1,600 miles of Antarctica’s coastline, the voyage determined that the huge frozen landmass was a continent. The expedition brought back thousands of species of plants and seeds, which were turned over to the U. S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D. C. So extensive was the new knowledge gained that it took 30 years to publish all the atlases, charts, and reports that followed in its wake. One of the written works resulting from this venture was Wilkes’s own five-volume account, The Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1845).

Wilkes recorded in his journal the impressions he had of California under Mexican rule and the maritime value that the province had should it be acquired by the United States. The presidio at Yerba Buena had “fallen into decay, [and] the guns were dismounted.” No one seemed to be in charge. Moreover, at that same pueblo, “there was a similar absence

Figure 3.4 A photographic image of a map of Upper California's coast prepared by a scientist participating in the U. S. Exploring (or Wilkes) Expedition, 1838-42. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D. C.

Of authority” and “anarchy and confusion” reigned. In other words, California was ripe for the taking. What did the province offer the United States? Plenty. “It is very probable that this country [California],” he wrote, “will become united with Oregon, with which it will perhaps form a state that is destined to control the destinies of the Pacific. . . . [The straits of Juan de Fuca and San Francisco] have. . . within themselves every thing to make them increase, and keep up an intercourse with the whole of Polynesia, as well as the countries of South America on the one side, and China, the Philippines, New Holland, and New Zealand, on the other.”

Wilkes’s comments on California and North America’s western coastline fueled a growing interest in Washington, D. C., about the future of Mexico’s province and the U. S. presence in the Pacific Basin. Great changes loomed for the Far West and beyond.

SUMMARY

Under unstable Mexican rule from 1821 to 1846, California became more globally connected and Pacific-oriented. The secularization of the missions had the unintended consequence of linking the province to the Pacific Basin and America’s Atlantic seaboard through the hide-and-tallow trade, which grew rapidly as former Church lands were acquired by rancheros, who dominated a patriarchal society.

Throughout the Mexican period, Americans began arriving in California by sea and via overland trails blazed by fur trappers and followed by immigrant parties. Miscalculations in timing a Sierra crossing could have horrific results, as seen in the Donner party tragedy that included incidents of cannibalism.

As more Americans arrived, California’s Pacific Basin ties increased. Yankee coastal shippers, mainly headquartered in San Diego and Santa Barbara, carried hides and tallow that they exchanged for trade goods at ports along the Oregon coast and across the Pacific in Peru and Chile. From Latin America their vessels often sailed to Honolulu, where sandalwood and other products were acquired for trade in porcelains, silks, and teas in Canton, China. The heavily laden ships then completed the Pacific circuit, returning to California ports. Among others, Santa Barbara China trader Alpheus B. Thompson prospered greatly from this commerce. Meanwhile New England merchant shippers carried manufactures aboard cargo vessels - virtual floating department stores - around Cape Horn for sale in California and Oregon. As the hide-and-tallow trade declined in the 1840s, San Francisco began its ascent into the leading whaling port in the Pacific and later in the world.

The famed Charles Wilkes maritime expedition of 1838-42 demonstrated the growing interest of the U. S. government in California and the Pacific Basin. An American takeover of the province was in the making.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

How would you characterize Mexican governance in California from 1821 to 1846?

In what ways was California connected to the Pacific Basin in the Mexican period? Who was Alpheus B. Thompson?

Why were the missions secularized, and what were the results of the policy for the neophytes? How did secularization impact the province’s economy?

What was California’s role in the Pacific whaling enterprise?

What was the Charles Wilkes Pacific Expedition and what was its significance for California and the United States?

FURTHER READINGS

Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, eds., Testimo-nios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 18151848 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006). Women in early California speak for themselves in this work, that is based on interviews conducted in the late nineteenth century by historian Hubert Howe Bancroft.

D. Mackenzie Brown, ed., China Trade Days in California: Selected Letters from the Thompson Papers, 1832-1863 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947). The 25 letters to and from Alpheus B. Thompson presented in this volume provide rich details about California’s midnineteenth-century China trade.

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2004). The author examines the ways in which Indian and Mexican women maneuvered within the bounds of a patriarchal society to maximize their agency, at times challenging male control from the 1770s to the 1880s.

Robert Glass Cleland, The Cattle on a Thousand Hills: Southern California, 1850-80 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1990). Focusing heavily on the gold rush period, the economic and social development of southern California is traced in this volume.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast & Other Voyages (New York: Library of America, 2005). This remains the unsurpassed first-hand account of Mexican California’s Pacific-oriented hide-and-taUow trade and the society revolving around that commerce.

Auguste Duhaut-Cilly, translated by August Fruge and Neal Harlow, A Voyage to California, the Sandwich Islands, & Around the World in the Years 1826-1829 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). California’s Pacific and international connections during the Mexican period are highlighted in the record left by this French sea captain.

Arrell Morgan Gibson and John S. Whitehead, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). The authors treat America’s growing Pacific presence after the Revolution of 1776 as an extension of the frontier movement across the Republic’s interior landmass.

Lloyd C. M. Hare, Salted Tories: The Story of the Whaling Fleets of San Francisco (Mystic, CT: Marine Historical Association, 1960). Though dated and short on documentation, this is one of the few studies of San Francisco’s rise to the top of global whaling ports in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Albert L. Hurtado, John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006). The volume provides a detailed and fully internationalized treatment of Sutter and the California of his times.

David Igler, The Great Ocean: The Transformation of the Eastern Pacific, 1770s-1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). This is a major study connecting prestatehood California with China, Hawai’i, Peru, Mexico, and the Northwest Coast up to Alaska.

Robert Kirsch and William S. Murphy, eds., West of the West: The Story of California from the Conquistadores to the Great Earthquake, as Described by the Men and Women Who Were There (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967). This is one of the few anthologies of eyewitness writings that situate California within the larger spatial context of international and Pacific Basin happenings.

W. Michael Mathes, The Russian-Mexican Frontier: Mexican Documents Regarding the Russian Establishments in California, 1808-1842 (Jenner, CA: Fort Ross Interpretive Association, 2008). The complex and important story of Russian-Mexican relations in California in the first half of the nineteenth century is told in the annotated documents appearing in this volume.

Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., ed., The Journal of a Sea Captain’s Wife, 1841-1845: During a Passage and Sojourn in Hawaii, and of a Trading Voyage to Oregon and California (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 2004). Lydia Rider Nye’s journal provides a rare glimpse at how an observant, articulate New England woman, sailing the Pacific with her hide-trading husband, viewed the people and circumstances she encountered in Hawai’i, Oregon, and California.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The U. S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003). The human drama of the Wilkes expedition is brought to light in this poignant, fair-minded, and detailed account.

Louise Pubols, The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). In addition to tracing the social connections and political influence of a prominent Santa Barbara family, the author highlights Jose de la Guerra’s lucrative Pacific trade ties to Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines.

Alfred Robinson, Life in California during a Residence of Several Years in that Territory, with an introduction by Andrew RoUe (Santa Barbara, CA: Peregrine, 1970). First published in 1846, Robinson’s account details his trafficking in the lucrative transpacific hide trade, while sketching the lifestyles of prominent Californio families.

Nancy J. Taniguchi, “Jed Smith, U. S. Trade, and Global Connections,” Southern California Quarterly, 88

(Winter 2006-7), 389-407. This article appropriately and effectively views the full international reach of Jed-ediah Smith’s activities in California.

David B. Tyler, The Wilkes Expedition: The First United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1841) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968). The author provides a fully documented, comprehensive history of arguably the most important maritime exploring expedition in America’s past, with attention paid to California.

David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1982). The Mexican frontiers of Texas, New Mexico, and California are described and analyzed in this major study.

John Whitehead, “Hawai’i: The First and Last West?,” The Western Historical Quarterly, 23 (May 1992), 153-77. The author argues for including Hawai’i as part of America’s frontier movement into the Far West.