Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Lives of the Past Informing the Future | Page 15

sweet auburn | 2019 volume ii
The United States
Exploring Expedition
1838–1842
M e mor i a l t o Scientific
Exploration and Adventure
on the High Seas
By Meg L. Winslow
Curator of Historical Collections
and Melissa Banta
Historical Collections Consultant
T
ucked behind the Nathaniel Bowditch statue and a
stand of tall hemlock trees on Central Avenue, a
large marble obelisk commemorates one of the
nation’s greatest naval expeditions. On August 18, 1838, six
ships led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes left Virginia for South
America carrying 490 young sailors, officers, and a group of
civilian botanists, mineralogists, artists, and naturalists called
“scientifics.” Sponsored by the government, the United States
South Seas Exploring Expedition circumnavigated the globe,
exploring and surveying the “Southern Seas” as an important
area of commerce as well as to collect specimens to “extend
the bounds of science and promote acquisition of knowledge.”
“In less than four years,” writes historian Herman J. Viola,
“this gallant naval squadron of six small ships surveyed 280
islands and constructed 180 charts, some of which were still
being used as late as World War II. The expedition mapped
eight hundred miles of the coast of Oregon territory; it
explored some fifteen hundred miles of the Antarctic coast,
thereby proving the existence of the seventh continent.”
Equally important, Viola writes, “it led to the emergence of the
United States as a naval and scientific power with worldwide
interests.”
The men aboard the expedition’s vessels endured severe
weather, disease, and tensions between the strict, hard-driven
Wilkes and the ships’ officers, crews, and scientists. Only two
of the six ships returned. Nevertheless, the voyage contributed
a prodigious amount of scholarship, including nineteen
volumes and atlases. Specimens collected on the expedition
helped create the foundation of Smithsonian Museum of
Natural History in 1857 at a time when the fields of botany,
geology, and anthropology were just becoming established
scientific disciplines.
Mount Auburn Cemetery donated the land for the
purpose of commemorating the expedition, and in 1843 the
expedition’s officers and scientific corps erected a large
cenotaph at Mount Auburn to honor four of the young men
who lost their lives during the voyage. Lieutenant Joseph A.
Underwood, a mathematician and surveyor, and Midshipman
Wilkes Henry, the nephew of Charles Wilkes, were killed on
a surveying mission on the Fijian island of Malolo on July 24,
1840. The cenotaph also commemorates Midshipmen James W.
E. Reid and Frederick A. Bacon, who were lost at sea during a
heavy gale off of Cape Horn in May 1839.
The Boston Mercantile Journal reported at the time, “This
cenotaph is an Egyptian obelisk, twenty-two feet high, and
four feet at the base, erected at the cost of $2000. The design
is by Mr. Drayton, of the Scientific corps, and is in the finest
style of pure, simple, monumental beauty. The execution
of Struthers & Son of Philadelphia, is worthy of the design.”
Joseph Drayton had served as the artist for the Exploring
Expedition, and his drawings of artifacts, architecture, and
people appeared in the five-volume Narrative of the expedition
published by Wilkes.
The Journal wrote of the “chivalry of feeling, which
embalms the names and memory of brother officers. . .and
is touchingly displayed in this plain, but beautiful and
appropriate monument.”
The Naval Monument at Mount Auburn serves as
a permanent reminder of one of the earliest and most
remarkable of American naval expeditions.
For further reading:
Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842,
ed. Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis (Smithsonian, 1985).
Sea of Glory, by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking, 2003).
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