New Haven's Henry Eld

By Jason W. Smith

All that remains of Lieutenant Henry Eld, one of New Haven’s most significant military figures, is a disembodied uniform. In two grey archival boxes at the New Haven Museum rest Eld’s cocked hat, the mark of an early nineteenth-century American naval officer, and a buckskin coat, the garb of an antebellum explorer. In his short life, Eld was both.

Born in New Haven on June 2, 1814 to the son of a prominent landowner in the Cedar Hill neighborhood and for whom New Haven’s Eld Street is named, young Henry, Jr. joined the Navy at seventeen in 1832, assigned to the 74-gun ship-of-the-line Delaware. Six years later, he departed as an officer on the United States Exploring Expedition, the nation’s most ambitious voyage of discovery to date. The Ex. Ex., as it was dubbed, circumnavigated the world, produced an extraordinary amount of cartographic knowledge of the South Pacific, explored the Oregon Territory, which at that time was jointly administered by the United States and Great Britain, and discovered the Antarctic Continent.

As surveyor, scientist, overland explorer, and naval officer, Eld played a significant role in all dimensions of the expedition, but it was his sighting from the crosstrees of USS Peacock on January 16, 1839 that won him immortality in the annals of navigation and exploration. There, high atop the ship with fellow officer Passed Midshipman William Reynolds, Eld spotted peaks in the distance. “Land!” he exclaimed. “So it is,” Reynolds responded. “We had no words,” Reynolds wrote in his journal. “To look over such a vast expanse of the frozen sea, upon which no human eye nor foot had ever rested, and which, formed from the Ocean, now resisted its waves and presented an impassable boundary to the mysterious regions beyond, filled us with feelings, which we were powerless to utter.” Reynolds and Eld quickly reported their discovery, but for reasons that remain unclear, Captain William Hudson commanding Peacock, did not record it in the ship’s log. Subsequently, when the expedition arrived in Sydney, the Americans were forced by skepticism on the part of their British and French contemporaries and rivals to retroactively recognize January 16 as the first sighting of land. Though a number of sealers had earlier spotted parts of the Antarctic continent, Eld and Reynolds were the first to sight a continuous breadth of land of continental proportions. Their claim to precedence has stood.

In his obituary in the American Journal of Science and Arts, the eminent Yale geologist James Dwight Dana, who was also a shipmate of Eld’s in the Ex. Ex., remembered him for his “skill and fidelity” and his “high character both as regards seamanship and general scientific attainments. His energy, decision, promptness and natural dignity,” Dana continued, “connected with the highest generosity and kindness of heart, had secured him universal esteem among his associates.”

Not only did Eld participate in explorations and scientific experiments and survey Pacific Islands, he produced a remarkable journal of the expedition archived at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and several volumes of sketches that render the exotic world of the Pacific Ocean in faithful and realistic ways at a time when very few Americans could claim to have laid eyes on those seas and high latitudes.        

Eld died in March 1850 after a prolonged battle with yellow fever aboard the ship-of-the-line Ohio soon after departing Rio de Janeiro bound for the United States. “Much had he suffered,” a memorialist recorded, “when the torrid sun his strength had withered, and oppressed his brain.” He was buried at sea somewhere near the equator “far from home he found an ocean grave, proud to engulf him in its billowy bed . . . with bitter grief was plunged the sheeted dead and o’er the waters boomed the solemn gun, that told their task was done,” his shipmate continued.

                           Long had he wandered far from scenes he lov’d
                            Amid deep Western wilds his footsteps lay,—
                            By many a broad and noble stream had roved,
                            And climb’d the rugged mountain’s dang’rous way,
                            New features on Columbia’s chart to trace
                            Of fair creation’s face.
 
                            And far across the Southern Sea, he sped
                            His careful way, where ne’er before the sail
                            Of venturous navigator dared to spread
                            Its waving whiteness to the frosty gale—
                            And, from afar his eye was first to view
                            A country broad and new!

Though Eld’s body was committed to the deep, his name was remembered not only by affectionate shipmates, but also set down in the expedition’s cartography—an Antarctic peak and an island in Puget Sound.

Closer to home, in New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery his family erected a memorial pedestal. Worn by sun, wind, and rain, only Eld’s name and a few additional words remain discernible to the eye against the weathered sandstone. The text memorializing Eld’s accomplishments is now nearly erased. It is up to us to recover and remember his story.

 

Portrait of Henry Eld by the painter George Henry Durrie, 1850 (Courtesy of the New Haven Museum)

Bibliography

“Affection’s Tribute to Lieutenant Henry Eld, Jr.” In Ocean Melodies and Seamen’s Companion

by Phineas Stowe. Boston: Phineas Stowe, 1854.

Buckskin Coat Belonging to Henry Eld, 2001.320, New Haven Museum.

Daily Morning Journal and Courier, September 2, 1907.

Henry Eld Papers, 1841-1858, WA MSS 161, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale

University

Macaluso, Laura A. Historic Treasures of New Haven: Celebrating 375 Years of the Elm City.

Charleston: The History Press, 2013.

Naval Register for 1835. 23^rd Congress. 2st Session, 1835.

Silliman, Benjamin and James D. Dana, eds. American Journal of Science and Arts. Vol. X

(1850).

Philbrick, Nathaniel. Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring

Expedition, 1838-1842. New York: Viking Press, 2003.

Stanton, William. The Great United States Exploring Expedition. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1975.

Townshend, Doris B. The Streets of New Haven: The Origin of Their Names. New Haven: New

Haven Colony Historical Society, 1998.