Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  They had entered a realm of perpetual daylight. “[W]hat a rooster would do here,” he wrote, “I cannot imagine.” During his watch from midnight to four A.M., some of the officers were reading Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. At 2:45 A.M., they watched the sun rise. “It is the funniest thing,” he commented, “this never-ending day.” Just as strange was the behavior of their compasses. Their proximity to the magnetic South Pole, where the earth’s magnetic force field flows in a nearly vertical direction, meant that their compass needles had been rendered virtually useless. An object as small as an iron button was enough to move the compass by as much as twenty degrees. One of Reynolds’s fellow officers rightly attributed this phenomenon to “the polar attraction acting in nearly a perpendicular direction upon a horizontal needle.” It was graphic evidence that they were approaching the very foundations of the earth.

  On the evening of January 15 at latitude 65°25’ south, Reynolds climbed to the masthead and saw not a single piece of ice ahead of them. “On the morrow,” he wrote, “we would be farther South than the Ship had reached last year. Soon we would pass 70 degrees—eclipse Cook & distance the pretender Weddell. No one hazarded an unfavorable opinion, & we were all in a perfect fever of excitement! I shall never forget that day!”

  Around four P.M., fog appeared at the edges of the horizon. Almost simultaneously they saw both the Porpoise and a solid barrier of ice looming out of the haze. For the time being they would have to lay aside their hopes of pushing farther south. “There was the low & continuous field of Ice,” Reynolds wrote, “running East & West, broken by many Bays & Islands, but effectually stopping any further progress. . . . Our dreams were at once destroyed!”

  Ringgold informed them that he had been sailing along the edge of the barrier for several days and had found no openings to the south. “We commenced working to windward,” Reynolds wrote, “in hope of finding a passage farther to the West, but our overflowing anticipations were checked, gone, broken entirely & we were humbled at the lesson we had received!”

  Around noon the next day, Reynolds went aloft with fellow passed midshipman Henry Eld from New Haven, Connecticut. By this point, the Peacock had separated again from the Porpoise. Reynolds and Eld were up on the crosstrees with the main topmast between them, more than a hundred feet above the surface of the sea, somewhere in the vicinity of 65° south, 160° east. Reynolds, who was nearsighted, had his spectacles on. He and Eld struggled to describe the beauty of what they saw spread out before them, but, as Reynolds wrote, “we had no words. To look over such a vast expanse of the frozen sea, upon which no human eye nor foot had ever rested, & which, formed from the Ocean, now resisted its waves & presented an impassable boundary to the mysterious regions beyond, filled us with feelings, which we were powerless to utter.” Then they saw something that suddenly restored their powers of speech. As if with one voice they cried out, “There is land!”

  Many miles in the distance, beyond the icy barrier, they saw three distinct peaks—one pointed, the other two more rounded. “They rose to an immense height,” Reynolds wrote. “We looked for half an hour at least, & procured a glass to satisfy ourselves that we were not mistaken. We were convinced that our judgment was correct & that we actually beheld the long sought for Terra Firma of the Antarctic continent.”

  They had come upon the massive, never-before-explored body of Antarctica. If the Antarctic Peninsula below Cape Horn is the continent’s panhandle, the wide rounded mass below Australia and extending west along the Antarctic Circle toward Africa is the pan. The Peacock was now at the eastern extreme of the pan’s northerly edge. The date was January 16.

  Both officers scrambled down the rigging to report the sighting. Eld went below to find Captain Hudson, and Reynolds sought out Lieutenant Thomas Budd, the officer of the deck. Although Reynolds could still see the mountaintops from the deck, they were not as clearly defined as they had been from aloft. When he pointed out the land, Budd expressed his doubts and chose not to send anyone to the masthead to confirm the sighting. Reynolds had no alternative but to wait for the appearance of Hudson on the quarterdeck. But Hudson never came.

  Reynolds later learned from Eld that Hudson had acted even more oddly than Budd. When told of the discovery, Hudson said that he had no doubt that Eld and Reynolds had seen land; in fact, he was convinced that the large icebergs near them were sitting on the bottom of the sea. But when Eld urged him to come see the mountaintops for himself, Hudson demonstrated an almost bovine lack of curiosity. He would stay by his stove, thank you; he also saw no reason to send an officer aloft to verify their sighting. Assuring Eld that there would be plenty of opportunities to see land in the days ahead, he ordered that the ship be tacked. The wind was light, and he didn’t want to run into any trouble amid the ice. Strange conduct indeed for the captain of an exploring expedition.

  Both Reynolds and Eld were filled with “disappointment and mortification,” especially when they learned that no mention of their sighting had been made in the ship’s log. But there was nothing they could do. “I will never give up my belief that this was no deception,” Reynolds wrote, “& am perfectly willing to abide by the researches of any future navigators, confident that our discovery will be verified!”

  The next day, during Reynolds’s watch at 5:30 in the morning, they saw the Vincennes for the first time in two weeks. “I remember she passed behind an Ice berg,” Reynolds wrote, “& there was an immense discrepancy between its height & that of the Ship.” Although Wilkes had been able to sprint ahead at Macquarie Island, Hudson had succeeded in reaching the icy barrier to windward of the Vincennes, which had been sailing west along the ice for close to a week. It was an amazing feat of catch-up on Hudson’s part. Despite all of Wilkes’s machinations, all three vessels—the Porpoise, the Peacock, and the Vincennes—were now within just a few miles of one another.

  In contrast to Hudson’s loose and buoyant crew, the nerves of the officers and men of the Vincennes were drum tight. Wilkes would have it no other way. In true martinet fashion, he rarely spoke with his officers; when an officer dared speak to him, he inevitably dismissed the statement with an insult. It was an unfortunate state of affairs for a vessel in search of any and all indications of land. Even if an officer thought he saw land, there was little use in bringing it to the commander’s attention since Wilkes would inevitably reject the observation with a sneer.

  Over the last two days, however, there had been little opportunity to see much beyond the Vincennes’s bowsprit. Dense fog made navigating the icy barrier a particularly hazardous endeavor. Instead of their eyes, the lookouts depended on their ears. When they heard “the low and distant rustling of the ice,” they knew it was time to tack. Then there were the times when the usual sounds of a ship at sea—the rhythmic slap of the waves and the comforting creak of the rigging (which always seemed magnified in the fog)—suddenly ceased as the Vincennes glided into the eerily quiet lee of an unseen iceberg. “[T]he transition was so sudden,” Wilkes wrote, “that many were awakened . . . from sound sleep. . . . [It is] an occurrence from which the feeling of great danger is inseparable.” By January 16, the day before the Vincennes spoke the Peacock, the strain had begun to get the better of Wilkes. “[I]t at times acts on me as if a weight was hung all at once on my heart strings,” he wrote in his journal.

  With the sighting of the Peacock, Wilkes was greatly relieved to have the chance to speak with Hudson, and Reynolds reported that the two captains “had a long yarn.” Neither one of them made any mention of sighting land. Wilkes did tell Hudson that he had changed his mind about the necessity of sailing in tandem. Now that he no longer had an advantage to protect, Wilkes was inclined to let each vessel strike out on her own. “I was satisfied that the separation would be a strong incentive to exertion,” Wilkes wrote, “by exciting rivalry among the officers and crews of the different vessels.” It was a rivalry Hudson and his officers were eager to pursue.

  Providing Wilkes with some much-need
ed distraction from the tensions of the voyage was a new acquisition that he had gained in Australia: a giant Newfoundland dog named Sydney. Newfoundlands, or Newfies, are web-footed, 100- to 150-pound dogs originally bred for swimming, and in the nineteenth century they were such a common shipboard sight that they were known as ship dogs. The Lewis and Clark Expedition included a Newfoundland named Seaman, and when Napoleon Bonaparte fell overboard during his return from Elba, he was saved by a Newfie. In the months ahead, Sydney became a favorite with the crew of the Vincennes.

  No one knew it at the time, but the events of January 19—two days after the Vincennes spoke the Peacock—would be revisited and analyzed countless times in the years ahead. That morning, a Sunday, the Vincennes made her way into a deep bay at 154°30’ east, 65°20’ south. Lieutenant James Alden was the watch officer. For most of the morning it had been quite foggy. A few minutes after eight A.M., Alden heard waves breaking on an iceberg up ahead, and he informed Wilkes of the ship’s proximity to the ice. By the time Wilkes came on deck, the fog had lifted to the extent that it was possible to see the ice. Wilkes looked quickly around and said a few barely distinguishable words about managing the ship, then began to go below. At that moment, Alden thought he saw land to the southwest—a barely perceptible rise above the ice. “I said to him,” Alden later remembered, “‘there’s something there,’ pointing to it, ‘that looks like land.’” Wilkes made no reply and “seemed,” Alden recalled, “to treat the report with neglect and went below.”

  Wilkes had become convinced that his officers were “endeavoring to do all in their power to make my exertions go for nothing.” Except for First Lieutenant Carr, he trusted no one, and in his journal entry for January 19 he complained that “There is no one on board My own Ship that I can communicate with.” Out of desperation, Wilkes appears to have turned to his noncommissioned officers.

  About an hour after his terse conversation with Alden, Wilkes reappeared on deck between nine and ten A.M. By this point Alden had been relieved by Augustus Case as officer of the watch; Case, like Alden, was an officer with whom Wilkes had already had several run-ins. In an extremely unorthodox move, Wilkes left the quarterdeck and wandered over to the port gangway, where the gunner, John Williamson, was standing. “He came to me,” Williamson later reported, “and asked me what I thought of the appearance of land. My answer was, if it was not land, I had never seen land, then the conversation ended.” Although Wilkes had found someone to talk to, he had bypassed his watch officer and in so doing, had bypassed the ship’s official log, which was the watch officer’s responsibility. As a result, there would be no mention of sighting land in the Vincennes’s log for January 19.

  In the meantime, just a few miles to the west, the Peacock entered another large bay in the ice. They pushed south for thirty miles until they found themselves enclosed on all sides. “The long swell of the Ocean was shut off altogether,” Reynolds wrote, “the water was smooth and motionless as an Inland Lake and lay like a vast mirror in its frosted frame.” Even though the temperature was only 21°F, he climbed up to his perch at the masthead. “[T]he whiteness of all this was dazzling and intense,” Reynolds wrote; “unbroken, by the glistening sheet of water where the Ship floated, idle, quiet and at rest.”

  This time Reynolds was joined by Midshipman William Clark. As soon as he’d placed his spectacles on his nose, Reynolds cried out to Clark, “Do you see that?” Ahead of them was land. “[I]t was of great height,” Reynolds wrote, “of rounded uneven summit & broken sides.” Taking no chances, Reynolds immediately reported his discovery to the watch officer, Lieutenant Alonzo Davis. Davis cheerfully agreed that it was land. Soon Captain Hudson and a large number of officers and men were up in the rigging. “Well it was Land!” Reynolds wrote. As a joke, they began assigning names to the features they saw before them. “[O]ne cape was honored with the cognomen of the discoverer,” Reynolds proudly noted.

  What Reynolds didn’t learn until later was that by the time Hudson had returned to the Peacock’s deck, he had begun to doubt his own eyes. “Our land has turned out to be an iceberg,” he told Davis, the watch officer. When Davis informed him that he had already recorded the sighting in the ship’s log, Hudson told him “that we ought to be very certain” before mention of land was put down in writing, and he ordered Davis to remove the offending passage. Hudson was a competent seaman, but his exceedingly literal cast of mind was ill suited to the challenges of exploration. It was the second time in three days that he had refused to acknowledge a discovery by William Reynolds.

  Four days later, at five P.M. on Thursday, January 23, it appeared as if all would soon be forgiven. After continuing west, the Peacock had sailed into a bay that was even larger than all the others. The weather was mild and clear; the sea was smooth; and two boats were dispatched to perform magnetism experiments on a nearby chunk of ice as others attempted to find soundings. At 350 fathoms, the sounding lead hit bottom; pebbles and blue mud were found attached to the lead. “Great was the joy & Excitement throughout the ship,” Reynolds wrote, “for this was a certain indication of the proximity of Land.” As the men in the boats returned to the ship, unaware of the great find, the crew climbed into the rigging and shouted out three cheers. “[N]ow we were sanguine that ere long we should discover ‘terra firma,’” Reynolds enthused, “& the prize [of discovery] would be our own.”

  The already happy crew of the Peacock became delirious with excitement. Holding up the mud-smeared lead line, sailors ran about the deck to the music of a fiddle as others burst into song. Taking advantage of the quiet seas, men played shuffleboard below while others rolled tenpins on the gun deck. Hudson gave the order to “splice the main brace,” and soon every man had received an extra allowance of grog. “[W]e were a merry ship,” Reynolds wrote. “Little did any one think of the change that a few short hours would bring about!”

  One of the boat crews had captured a huge penguin on the ice. “[H]e was cruelly put to death,” Reynolds wrote, “so that his skin might be preserved for the Satisfaction of those who are content to see the curious things of the world, second hand.” Early the next morning Hudson appeared on deck “in the greatest glee.” When the penguin’s gut had been cut open, they had found thirty-five pebbles inside. Although he had been slow to show much enthusiasm concerning Reynolds’s earlier reports of land, Hudson took these pebbles as incontrovertible proof that they were on the verge of a historic discovery. “Poor man!” Reynolds wrote. “He was nearly beside himself with joy.”

  Reynolds turned in at four that morning, “dreading no evil & confident that we would succeed in finding Land ere we were many days older. True! Even in a few hours, we came nigh to finding it, but at the bottom of the Ocean!!”

  When he came on deck at eight A.M., Reynolds discovered that Hudson, in his newfound gusto for exploration, had sailed the ship into an exceedingly perilous position. They were surrounded by ice, but Hudson intended to push on even farther to the very edge of the barrier. There were indications of high land just beyond the barrier, and Hudson wanted to prove that “the indications” were indeed land. It may or may not have been in an effort to make up for his earlier conservatism, but the Peacock’s commander was once again demonstrating a disturbing lack of judgment—this time by needlessly risking his ship and men.

  By 8:40 A.M. they had gone as far as was possible in a sailing vessel. “We were entirely surrounded by loose Ice,” Reynolds wrote, “some pieces were larger than the Ship & they were packed so closely together that we had no room to proceed or maneuver in.” It was time to extricate themselves from the ice—if that was still possible. Every now and then a space would open up, but just as Hudson gave the order to tack, a chunk of ice would move in, preventing their escape. Finally, Hudson was able to bring the Peacock into the wind, but the resistance offered by the many pieces of ice knocking against the hull slowed the ship until she began to slip backward. Behind them was what Reynolds described as a “huge lump of ice,” an
d the Peacock rammed into it, stern first. The collision wrenched the rudder so severely that the head split and tore away the ropes that linked it to the wheel. Soon the entire crew was on deck to watch as the ship once again slammed into the ice, this time completely shattering the rudder, which now dangled from the sternpost like a broken wing.

  If they had any hope of escape—let alone sailing more than two thousand miles back to Sydney—they needed a rudder. But to unship and repair the steering device required an open patch of water. To the south, they saw what they needed: a clear area in the lee of a big island of ice. Using the sails to steer the ship, Hudson attempted to maneuver them through the growlers and bergy bits, which inevitably thumped against the hull and banged into the topsides, tearing away a section of the ship’s keel as well as the lashing around the port anchor. Once they’d reached open water, a boat was lowered with an ice anchor. If they could secure the Peacock to the ice, they might be able to unship the rudder and begin to repair it.

  Reynolds climbed into the rigging to assist in furling the sails. The wind began to freshen, and the ice anchor, by now dug into an ice island, started to slip. Reynolds watched from the masthead as the men on the island struggled to keep the anchor in its bed of ice and snow, but in the end there was nothing they could do to stop it from breaking free. Faster and faster, the ship began to slide backward. Up on top of the mast, Reynolds turned and saw a terrifying sight. Behind them was an iceberg of immense dimensions—many miles long and higher than the masts of the Peacock. “It rose from the Water, bluff as the sides of a house,” Reynolds wrote, “the upper edge projecting like the eaves and when we were under it, it towered above the mast head.”