Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  But it was the icebergs that most impressed all of them. “[W]e met with some large Islands of ice fifty times as large as the Capitol and much whiter,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “and a great deal higher. . . . [S]oon we were literally surrounded with them, and a most magnificent sight it was too.” On March 1 they sighted several of the South Shetland Islands—volcanic, snow-topped outcroppings that had prompted one sealer to wonder if “Madame Nature had been drinking too much when she form’d this place.”

  Wilkes had hopes of landing on one of the islands to collect some specimens, but the conditions remained too rough. By March 3, they’d sailed to within sight of the eastern tip of Palmer’s Land. By now the icebergs were so numerous that navigation was extremely difficult. Johnson in the Sea Gull judged the conditions to be “utterly impassible.” But Wilkes remained undaunted. “[M]y little favorite the Porpoise showed herself worthy of the affection I have for her,” he wrote Jane. With the schooner following in her wake, the brig continued south, the helmsmen of both vessels forced to “put starboard and port every instant to avoid running into [ice].”

  Instead of the danger, Wilkes was transfixed by the view. “I have rarely seen a finer sight,” he wrote. “The sea was literally studded with these beautiful masses, some of pure white, others showing all the shades of opal, others emerald green and occasionally here and there some of a deep black, forming a strong contrast to the pure white.” At one point, with no fewer than two hundred icebergs in sight, Lieutenant Ringgold turned to Wilkes and proclaimed, “This is adventuring with boldness.” The two of them laughed, and Wilkes decided to name the three small islands ahead of them the Adventure Islets.

  At eight P.M. the fog socked in, forcing them to lay to till daylight. With both the air and water temperature at close to 28°F (the freezing point of salt water), it made for a miserable night, especially since the special cold-weather clothing provided by the government proved next to useless. When on March 5 the wind increased to a heavy gale as the temperature dropped to 25°F, Wilkes realized that it was time to retreat north. Both vessels were coated with snow and ice, but conditions were particularly bad aboard the Sea Gull. Every five minutes or so a large wave would break over the little schooner and drench the men. Icicles, “forming with the direction of the wind,” hung from the rigging; her fore sheets were so caked with ice that they were “the size of a sloop of war’s cable.” Wilkes ordered Johnson to return to Orange Bay after first stopping at Deception Island (one of the South Shetlands), where he was to attempt to retrieve a self-registering thermometer left by an earlier British expedition. Although he had no regrets about turning back, Johnson suspected that Wilkes was planning to continue on without him. After beating the ice from the rigging, the crew of the Sea Gull made sail for Deception Island.

  Wilkes had no illusions about the terrible conditions. To continue south would have been madness given the time of year. While Johnson headed west, Wilkes ordered the helmsman of the Porpoise to steer north, along the eastern edge of the South Shetland Islands. Instead of being shaken and dispirited by his brief bout with the Antarctic ice, Wilkes remained jubilant. “[T]hus far,” he later reported to Jane, “I may say the Expedition has proved as successful as I could have hoped or expected. . . . I never felt myself so full of energy in my life as I do now.” “Adventuring with boldness” apparently agreed with the commander of the Ex. Ex.

  To be sure, Wilkes had no reason to apologize for not pushing any farther south. Nine years before, Jeremiah Reynolds and some of the most experienced sealers in America (including the redoubtable Nathaniel Palmer) had not made it beyond the South Shetland Islands, even though the privately funded expedition had left Cape Horn more than a month earlier in the season than Wilkes. Just the year before, the veteran French explorer Dumont d’Urville, whose king had offered each member of his expedition a bonus of a hundred francs if they reached latitude 75° south and an extra twenty francs for every additional degree south, had met with disappointing results. Despite having started in early January, d’Urville had been unable to get beyond 65° south. By the time he sailed for South America, more than half his men had succumbed to scurvy.

  D’Urville’s experience below the Antarctic Convergence had been so demoralizing that he had chosen to spend the current Antarctic summer months in Polynesia, gathering his men’s strength for one last sail south. This meant that even though the French had departed a year ahead of the U.S. Ex. Ex., they had lost their initial advantage. When it came to the race to being the first to identify what lay to the south, it was now a dead heat between the French and the Americans.

  But, in actuality, both Wilkes and d’Urville, along with a slew of sealers in the early 1820s, had already glimpsed the Antarctic Continent. What Wilkes called Palmer’s Land is now known as the Antarctic Peninsula and has become the primary destination for tourists looking to visit the southernmost continent.

  But all that was in the distant future. As far as Wilkes and d’Urville were concerned, the search was still on. And besides, there was always the chance that Lieutenant Hudson had met with unexpected success to the west.

  It hadn’t started well. Soon after leaving Orange Bay on the morning of February 25, the Peacock and the Flying Fish had been blasted by a squall that sent them scurrying back for the protection of the bay’s outer anchorage. The next morning they were under way in a strong northerly breeze, but an unexpected current from the south of more than eight knots meant that they were barely making any real progress south.

  The next day, in a blinding gale, the Peacock and the Flying Fish were separated. As agreed upon, the Peacock waited for twelve hours, but after seeing no sign of the schooner, Hudson ordered that they head to the southwest.

  Like any sloop-of-war, the sides of the Peacock had been pierced to accommodate her guns; unfortunately, this did not make her a particularly good exploring vessel since the gun ports, which had begun to warp, leaked alarming amounts of the frigid Southern Ocean. Even Hudson’s cabin was frequently awash. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “most of us will have to submit to the tortures of Rheumatism as a set off to our curiosity and love of adventure.”

  Two stoves were set up belowdecks, and hot coffee was served to the men at midnight. In the early predawn hours of March 9, it began to snow, prompting Lieutenant Oliver Hazard Perry Jr. (the son of the War of 1812 hero) to awaken the naturalist Titian Peale, the only member of the scientific corps to have been included in this first voyage south, and show him an unusual artifact: the snowball he had made while on deck.

  A heavy cross-sea made for an uncomfortable ride, particularly for the men up in the ship’s rigging, who were ordered to let out the reefs in the topsails for the first time since leaving Orange Bay. Normally the sailors worked barefooted, but given the cold conditions, they’d been given government-issue “exploring boots” that proved to be as leaky as they were cumbersome. That day tragedy struck when William Stewart, captain of the maintop and one of the best seamen aboard the ship, fell from the maintopsail yard, bouncing off the main rigging before plunging into the sea. Sticking out of the water were his two exploring boots. Given the dangerous seas, it would have been impossible to send out a boat for him, but a quick-thinking sailor threw out a bowline and lassoed Stewart’s big boots, and he was soon hauled aboard. The surgeon determined that he’d suffered internal injuries during his fall, and two days later Stewart was buried at sea.

  On March 11, they saw their first iceberg. “[E]ven the sailors left their breakfast to have a look at it,” Peale wrote. Peale busied himself shooting birds—including two albatrosses (“ash colored with sooty heads”), a blue petrel, and a cape pigeon. He hoped the birds would be blown back onto the deck of the Peacock, but the winds never seemed to cooperate, and the potential specimens were lost.

  On Sunday, March 17, Hudson conducted a religious service on the half-deck. The sea was so high that the men had to lie down on the deck and, according to Peale, “hold on by whatever was near.
” Hudson thought that this might have been the first time a sermon had been read “within the South Antarctic Circle,” adding, “I should indeed rejoice to extend the requirements of the Gospel . . . from Pole to Pole.”

  The weather was miserable—a wet cold fog that often made it impossible to see the icebergs that loomed ahead until they “popp[ed] up suddenly in your face to bid you defiance.” Unlike Wilkes, who seemed to flourish amid the terrors of an iceberg-infested sea, Hudson quickly grew weary of the strain. “This fancy kind of sailing,” he confided in his journal, “is not all that it is cracked up to be.” But there was one advantage to the steadily falling temperatures. By March 18, the Peacock was coated in a thick layer of ice. “Our Antarctic Caulker has so thoroughly performed his duty,” Hudson wrote, “that we shall be comparatively dry below.”

  On March 22, the fog lifted for a moment to reveal an icy barrier similar to what Cook had encountered more than half a century before. Hudson made his way east, hoping for an opening. Heavy squalls battered them on the twenty-fourth, the conditions made all the more dangerous by the presence of dozens of icebergs, some extending as high as two hundred feet above the sea. The next day, the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in almost a week, allowing them to make a noon sight. They were at latitude 68° south, longitude 97°58’ west—just a few degrees from Cook.

  An hour later, “a strange sail” was sighted to the west. All hands rushed on deck; it was the first vessel they’d seen in almost a month. They hoisted their flag and fired a gun. To their great joy and relief, they soon realized it was the Flying Fish, and at three P.M. the schooner passed astern of the Peacock, both crews giving each other three hearty cheers. A boat was dispatched to the Flying Fish, and soon Lieutenant Walker, along with a sailor whose cracked ribs were in need of medical attention, were on the Peacock’s deck. Walker had brought his chart with him and seemed eager to tell his story. Hudson ushered the young lieutenant below to his cabin, and with the chart spread out before them, Walker recounted how the Flying Fish, the smallest vessel in the squadron, had just made history.

  William Walker had not been particularly happy about commanding the Flying Fish. He felt he should have been given the larger Sea Gull since he was ahead of Robert Johnson on the list. His friends consoled him with the assurance that the ninety-six-ton schooner “would at least make him an honourable coffin.”

  Just two days later, on the night of February 26, Walker and his fourteen-man crew began to wonder if that was indeed what the Flying Fish was about to become. As they lay to in the squall that had separated them from the Peacock, gigantic seas continually broke over the schooner’s deck. To continue without the company of the much larger ship seemed like madness. But when the gale moderated the next day, they pushed on to the south.

  On the night of March 2, another gale kicked up. The wind shifted direction, creating the same jumbled sea conditions that caused William Stewart’s fall aboard the Peacock. Aboard the schooner, it was part earthquake, part tsunami. “It was almost impossible to stand on deck without danger of being carried overboard,” wrote the surgeon James Palmer, “and below, everything was afloat. Books, clothes and cabin furniture chased each other from side to side; while the bulkheads creaked, and blocks thumped over-head, with a distracting din.”

  The storm lasted thirty-six hours. On March 6, they experienced their first sunny day of the cruise. Birds followed behind them; a porpoise leaped at their bow; but at midnight it began to blow. “A dreadful night succeeded,” Palmer wrote. Huge seas broke across the deck, crushing their two boats and ripping the binnacle, the wooden box containing the compass, off its fastenings and into the ocean. The companion-slide was then torn away by a mountainous wave that flooded the cabin and knocked both the helmsman and lookout off their feet. When a whale rubbed up against the beleaguered schooner and an albatross flapped its wings in the face of one of the men, Walker began to wonder if all of nature had somehow conspired against them.

  Three days later, they discovered a leak in the bread-room, requiring that they shift the stores aft. Most of the next day was spent at the pumps. The schooner was now leaking at every seam. Their clothes and bedding were completely soaked. Dispensing with their worthless exploring boots, they wrapped their feet in blankets in an attempt to stay warm. Then it began to sleet, covering the schooner’s deck, as well as the jackets of the men, in a glistening shell of ice. When the jib split, the icy conditions made it impossible to take in the sail, which hung over the side by a single hank on the forestay. Five of the men were now so debilitated by cold that they could barely stand. Yet all continued to do their duty without complaint.

  On March 14 they reached a prearranged rendezvous point with the Peacock at 105° west, just a few degrees of longitude from Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra. Once the weather began to ease, Walker and his men took the opportunity to repair their damaged boats and tend to a sailor who had fractured a rib. After waiting a day, with no sign of the Peacock, they headed south.

  The farther south they sailed, the more astonished they were by the amount of wildlife inhabiting this seemingly barren place. The water was filled with penguins; countless birds swarmed in the air; the many whale spouts reminded the men of smoke curling from the chimneys of a crowded city. At one point a huge right whale, longer than the Flying Fish, appeared in front of the schooner and refused to budge, forcing the men to push the creature off with boathooks.

  On March 19 they passed between two icebergs that they calculated to be 830 feet high. They hove to beside one of the massive bergs to fill their water casks with meltwater. “Encompassed by these icy walls,” Palmer wrote, “the schooner looked like a mere skiff in the moat of a giant’s castle.” The towering walls of ice and the cold dry Antarctic air created strange acoustics. “The voice had no resonance,” Palmer wrote, “words fell from the lip and seemed to freeze before they reached the ear.”

  Once they’d filled their casks, they continued on through the fog, the deck officer on watch always standing at the forecastle, listening for the roar of breakers. Several times they looked up to discover an iceberg’s frozen sides emerging from the mist. At twilight they narrowly averted slamming into a submerged tongue of ice that would have surely sunk them. Although the icebergs were a constant threat, there was yet another, far more insidious danger: becoming trapped in the ice as the temperature began to drop. By this point all their thermometers had been broken, so they mounted tin pots in the rigging and filled them with water. They would continue south until the water started to freeze.

  On March 20, the fog suddenly lifted. There, just a few yards ahead of them, was the wall of ice that had stopped both Hudson and Cook. Fifteen to twenty feet high, it extended to both the eastern and western horizons. To the south lay “a vast and seemingly boundless field,” wrote Walker, who proceeded to head west and then east, “luffing and bearing away alternately to avoid dangerous contact with large detached masses.”

  The next day, at four P.M., they found it—an opening to the south. With all sails set, they were doing eight knots, “flattering ourselves,” Walker remembered, “we should get beyond Cook.” But by noon of the next day, “our hopes were blasted in the bud.” They were hove to in another gale. All around them were icebergs, “whose pale masses just came in sight through the dim haze, like tombs in a vast cemetery.”

  The next day the skies cleared and the wind disappeared. To the south it seemed as if they could see all the way to the pole. “The eye ached for some limit to the space,” Palmer wrote, “which the mind could hardly grasp.” Behind them, several giant floes of ice collided, closing them in. The ice shifted again, opening up a sliver of space through which Walker attempted to squeeze his little schooner, sometimes forcing her into the ice. The carpenter ran aft, warning that the vessel was not built for this kind of abuse. “[B]ut there was no alternative except to buffet her through,” Palmer wrote, “or be carried to the south.” Finally at nine in the morning of March 22, they re
ached an area of relative safety. They were at latitude 70° south, longitude 101° west.

  Two days later, they found themselves once again in a diminishing breeze, with the temperature dropping. It was so quiet that they could hear the water freezing around them. Palmer described it as “a low crepitation, like the clicking of a death-watch” as the sea’s surface took on an oily appearance that quickly congealed into a thick, soupy slush known as grease ice. Walker knew that if they didn’t break free quickly, they might never break free at all. He headed the Flying Fish downwind until he’d established some headway. Then he “gave her the mainsheet,” yanking in the large aft sail as the headsails were released and the helm was brought down. The schooner veered into the wind and, amid the crackling of sea ice, shot through the barrier to windward.

  But they weren’t clear yet. For the next four hours they struggled to the north. The fearful sound of wood grinding against ice prompted the carpenter to attempt a modification to the bow. Borrowing planks from the cabin berths, he tried to reinforce the area of impact at the waterline, but with time running out, Walker refused to wait long enough for him to complete the job. They were constantly adjusting the helm, sometimes tacking, other times jibing, to avoid icebergs that towered over their two masts. Walker was convinced that it was the schooner’s small size that saved them. “I do not believe a ship could have passed these dangers,” he wrote. They finally reached open water at latitude 70°14’ south—less than one degree, or sixty miles, from Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra. Behind them to the south, the water had become “a firm field of ice.” It was time to head home.