Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  As he held on for dear life, the Peacock’s port stern quarter, the weakest part of the ship’s frame, slammed into the side of the iceberg. “[T]he Shock & crash & splintering of riven Spars & upper works were any thing but agreeable. For an instant I thought that the Whole Stern must be stove, & that a few minutes would send us to the bottom.” But instead of being smashed to bits, the twelve-year-old vessel bounced, ricocheting off the face of the iceberg. “To strike a second time would be to ensure destruction,” Reynolds wrote. “Sail was made at once & the Ship’s head paid slowly off from the danger.”

  Even as the sails were being shaken from their gaskets, he was distracted by the sound of yet another crash. “Scarcely had we got from under [the iceberg], when down came the overhanging ledge of snow.” Tons of snow and ice rained down into the water just behind the ship’s quarterdeck, which was soon awash with the resultant upsurge of foam. “Mercy!” Reynolds wrote. “A moment longer and it had crushed us. I cannot tell you how I looked upon that Island as we were leaving it, by inches; there were the marks of the Ship’s form and paint, and there at its foot were the tumbled heaps of snow that had so nearly overwhelmed us.”

  Only now did Reynolds have the opportunity to observe the damage inflicted on the Peacock: “the Spanker boom & Stern boat went to splinters, the Boat’s davits, Taffrel, & all the Starboard Side of the upper works were Started as far forward as the gangway—these receiving the heaviest Shock, saved the Ship. I shall never forget the look of the old craft . . . , Ice, piled around her, so that we could see nothing Else [on] the Deck—the dark figures of the men & boats were the only relief to the dreary Whiteness.”

  Even if the disaster was largely his doing, Hudson was now in his element. It had become a fight for survival upon which everything depended on his skill as a seaman. Throughout the ordeal, Hudson remained calm and dignified, and his example inspired his officers and men. “There were no Shrieks,” Reynolds wrote, “no Exhibitions of bewilderment, & I verily believe that had the old ship settled in the Water, she would have gone down with three as hearty cheers as ever came from an hundred throats.”

  For the next four hours, Hudson worked his men unmercifully, swinging the yards back and forth in a desperate attempt to steer the Peacock through the ice to safety. But all their efforts seemed in vain. “We thumped, thumped . . . ,” Reynolds wrote, “making but little progress, & drifting to leeward . . . while the distance between us & the clear Sea was increasing Every moment, from the quantity of Ice brought down by the wind.” It was as if the wooden ship were being chewed to pieces by the ice. All of the anchors were stripped of their lashings and hung at the bows by the stoppers; the ship’s cutwater was splintered. At one point three of their chronometers were hurled from their beds of sawdust.

  Around three P.M. the wind died to almost nothing. They made fast to a bergy bit and attempted to hoist in the broken rudder. It came up in two pieces, and the carpenters went to work. Soon the wind began to increase; once again, the ice anchor did not hold. Hudson determined to make sail and try to force the ship through the ice. But without the rudder, the Peacock was, in Reynolds’s words, as “helpless as an Infant.”

  Some of the men attempted to pole the ship through the floes, extending spars over the bow and pushing with all their collective strength against the ice chunks in their path. Others were dispatched in boats to plant anchors in the ice that might be used to guide the ship. But since the ice was all around them, there was little room to use their oars. At one point a boat-crew found itself trapped between two bergy bits that had begun to swing together. The sea “boiled like a caldron” between the two walls of ice, which pressed against the boat’s gunwales until water began to spout through the seams. Just when it seemed that the boat was about to be crushed by the ice, the bergs moved apart, and the men pushed their way to safety. Others attempted to walk across the ever-shifting ice, laying down planks and lugging the sea anchors from berg to berg.

  By six P.M., Hudson and his men had succeeded in working the Peacock to within a hundred yards of a large open section of water. Unfortunately, the ship was now wedged into a seemingly impervious barricade of ice. “[W]e had the cruel mortification of seeing the place of comparative Safety so close at hand,” Reynolds wrote, “& yet be in as much & more peril, than we experienced through the day.”

  So far, the wind had remained relatively light. If it should begin to blow, however, they all knew the ship would go down in a matter of minutes as the jagged chunks of ice ripped through the ship’s frail sides. That evening, black clouds began to gather in the west. “[T]hey were rolled & curled together in windy looking wreathes,” Reynolds wrote, “& they had all the appearance of a coming storm.” He climbed aloft to have a better look.

  For several minutes, he stared at the clouds. “I watched until I saw the clouds move,” he wrote. “I saw their shadow coming over the water, & now I thought in sad earnest, ‘our time has come at last’ !” Convinced that they were all about to die, he could not help but anticipate how it would happen. “[H]ere were one hundred of us, in the full vigour of health & strength,” he wrote. “[I]n a few moments not one would be left to tell the tale of our destruction. All must go, without the hope of even a struggle for life—there could be no resistance: when the crush came, we should be swept away like the spars & timbers of the Ship.”

  Hudson gave the order to furl the sails. After that, the men had nothing to do but wait for the coming storm. As the black “funeral Cloud” approached, the breeze began to build. “[M]y feelings were almost overpowering in their force,” Reynolds admitted. Suddenly, the cloud’s appearance began to change as the wisps dissolved into a harmless mist. Instead of a squall, they found themselves in the middle of a snowstorm. Soon they were back at work, trying to move the ship through the ice.

  By one A.M. Hudson realized that they all needed some rest. They had been working nonstop for more than seventeen hours. While one watch remained on deck, the rest went below for some sleep. Reynolds, who was due back on deck in just three hours, fell into his cot. Almost immediately he was in the grip of a terrifying nightmare. “[A]ll the feelings I had mastered during the day,” he wrote, “haunted me in dreams. I died a hundred deaths. I was buried under the Ice; & the whole terrible catastrophe of a wreck from the first moment of the Ice striking the deck to the last drowning gasp, occurred with a vividness that I shall never forget!” With every jar of the ship against the ice, he awoke, convinced that he had just breathed his last. “[T]hose 3 hours in my cot,” he remembered, “were worse than all the others on deck, with real danger to look upon!”

  It was little wonder Reynolds had had such a troubled sleep. While he tossed and turned in his cot, Hudson had decided that he had no choice but to drive the ship through the ice. Setting all available sail and with the wind behind, he repeatedly rammed the Peacock’s bow into the obstacles ahead. Soon the foremost piece of the keel, known as the gripe, had been battered to pieces, but Hudson continued on. By the time Reynolds came on deck, the ship had punched her way into a clear channel and was making good progress to the north.

  By ten that morning, the carpenters had completed their repair of the rudder. Even though his watch had ended and he was completely exhausted, Reynolds insisted on remaining on deck to witness the re-shipping of the rudder. Using a tackle hooked at a point above the rudderpost and secured to the tiller hole, the rudder was lifted high enough so that its upper pintle (a large metal hook) could be lowered into the gudgeon, a metal loop secured to the sternpost. Once this upper pintle was in place, the rudder was held tightly against the sternpost by the rudder chains as it was carefully lowered until the other pintles had been engaged. In the case of the Peacock’s jury-rigged rudder, there were just two of the usual five pintles remaining.

  By 11:30 A.M., the Peacock was on her way again, following a narrow sliver of water that might close in at any moment. By midnight, they had sailed more than thirty miles and were in the open ocean at last.
It was Sunday, and after religious service, Hudson called a meeting of the commissioned officers in his cabin. Given the condition of the ship and especially the rudder, it was generally agreed that they had no alternative but to return to Sydney for repairs.

  “And so ended our attempt South!” Reynolds wrote. “So vanished our bright hopes, and all that was left for us, was to wish the others better fortunes! True we had seen the Land afar off, & had touched the bottom with our lead, but this was a Lame tale to tell. . . . True we had done all we could, and had nearly become martyrs to our zeal; but disasters never tell much, when productive of defeat, & we were mortified to the very hearts core.”

  And yet, they had one thing to be thankful for. They were all still alive. If the Vincennes had run into similar trouble, Reynolds was sure that Wilkes would have been powerless to save the ship and her crew. “The hero of Pago Pago,” he wrote, “was not the man for such terrible occasions as that.”

  CHAPTER 8

  A New Continent

  WHILE THE OFFICERS and men of the Peacock had been fighting their way out of the ice and the Porpoise pursued her own course along the edge of the icy barrier, Wilkes, in typical fashion, fell into a squabble with one of his lieutenants. On January 23, a day after passing the opening that would almost claim the Peacock, the Vincennes reached a bay in the ice that was about twenty-five miles wide. By midnight they had ventured almost fifteen miles into the opening when they encountered a closely packed group of icebergs. Wilkes determined that it was impossible to go any farther and ordered that they tack away and continue west. On his chart he called it Disappointment Bay.

  But not all of his officers agreed with him, especially Lieutenant Joseph Underwood. Over the last few days, Underwood was becoming increasingly frustrated with his commander. He felt that Wilkes had missed several opportunities to push the ship farther south. When Wilkes ignored his report of an opening in Disappointment Bay, Underwood took up a piece of chalk and vented his anger on the log slate, the public record of the ship’s course and speed that served as a rough draft for the ship’s log. On the slate he wrote that “an opening had been reported to the S & W before we tacked ship.”

  Since the log slate was not erased until noon of the following day, Underwood’s message was waiting for Wilkes when he came on deck the next morning. He was not pleased. He ordered Underwood on deck and asked why he hadn’t informed him of the opening. When Underwood told him that he had done exactly that, Wilkes claimed “he did not recollect the circumstances.” He also claimed that he had been aloft just prior to tacking and had seen “a barrier quite round by the S&W.” Even though they were now forty miles from Disappointment Bay, Wilkes ordered that they return to the bay so that he could prove Underwood wrong.

  It took them an entire day to retrace their steps. Once Wilkes was confident that the bay was, in fact, sealed off by ice, he did his best to humiliate Underwood. “I called all the officers on the deck,” he later wrote, “and then addressed Lt. Underwood who was required to point out the opening he had written of.” Underwood had no choice but to recant his earlier claims even though it was quite possible that the ice had shifted since they had last visited the bay.

  Wilkes saw this as “a heavy stroke upon [the officers’] machinations & deceits.” Others saw it as a personal vendetta. Although not aboard the Vincennes during the Antarctic cruise, Reynolds had already had sufficient opportunity to witness Wilkes’s attitude toward Underwood: “It seemed to be impossible for him sufficiently to gratify his malignant feelings towards that officer, and he pursued him with the most vindictive tyranny.” Reynolds attributed Wilkes’s behavior to jealousy. In addition to being well liked, Underwood was exceedingly well educated. “In comprehensiveness of mind, in scientific attainments, versatility of talent, and in professional knowledge Lt. Underwood far surpassed Lt. Wilkes,” Reynolds claimed. “Jealousy was a fierce passion in the breast of the Commander, and once awoke, it rendered him regardless of humanity, honor, or justice.”

  Rather than push on to the west, Wilkes decided to dawdle at the scene of Underwood’s disgrace. The ship was hove to, a hawser was readied, and they spent the day secured to an iceberg, filling up the tanks with freshwater melted from the ice while others performed magnetic observations on a nearby ice island. Wilkes even took the opportunity to sketch a picture of the Vincennes amid the ice. Once back aboard, he issued an order intended to eliminate any future misunderstandings. From now on, the officer of the deck was required to go to the masthead at the end of his watch and “report to me the exact situation of the ice.”

  Later that day, as they threaded their way through the ice, Wilkes hit upon the notion of charting the icebergs. “[I]t occurred to me,” he wrote, “that they might be considered as islands, and a rough survey made of them, by taking their bearings at certain periods, and making diagrams of their positions.” Although this struck several of his officers as being of extremely dubious navigational value, Wilkes insisted that they begin surveying the ice. Every few hours the latest batch of diagrams would be inserted into the chart Wilkes was making in his cabin. Wilkes reasoned that if weather conditions should require them to backtrack, he would now have a “tolerable chart” to guide their escape.

  At eight A.M. the next day, they sighted the Porpoise. Wilkes and Ringgold spoke briefly, comparing their longitudes, but neither one of them seems to have mentioned sighting land. For the first time since they reached the ice, the wind shifted to the southeast, supposedly the prevailing direction. With the wind finally behind them, Wilkes resolved to make up for lost time. With all sails set, the Vincennes took off at nine knots through the drift ice, with the Porpoise following in her wake. “Sailing in this way I felt to be extremely hazardous,” Wilkes wrote, “but our time was so short. . . . [B]y good look-outs, and carefully conning the ship, [we] were able to avoid any heavy thumps.”

  At noon the next day, they lost sight of the Porpoise. The following day, January 28, was, in the words of James Alden, “as clear as a bell.” Alden was the officer of the watch. He was reefing a topsail when he saw what he considered to be his first undeniable glimpse of land. This time Wilkes was willing to listen when Alden reported the sighting. Wilkes climbed up into the rigging with him and, according to Alden, “looked at it for some time and said, ‘There is no mistake about it.’” As far as Wilkes’s officers were concerned, this was the day, January 28, when they first became convinced that land did indeed exist to the south.

  They were in the middle of a vast field of tabular icebergs. At one point they had at least one hundred of them in sight, and by eleven A.M.

  they had run more than forty miles through the bergs, with land still in sight to the south. Soon the weather began to thicken; by two P.M. the barometer started to fall; by five, it was blowing a gale. There were huge icebergs in every direction. The last time they’d seen open water was more than forty miles back, and with his chart in hand, Wilkes resolved to retrace their way through the bergs.

  By eight P.M., it was, in Wilkes’s words, “blowing very hard.” It was also snowing, reducing visibility to just a few hundred feet. Even if the surrounding icebergs had been stationary (which, of course, they weren’t), it would have been impossible to navigate by chart in these conditions. It was now simply a matter of survival as the lookouts strained to see ahead. Icebergs seemed to be just about everywhere. There “were many narrow escapes,” Wilkes wrote; “the excitement became intense; it required a constant change of helm to avoid those close aboard.” It was necessary to keep the ship moving at what seemed like an insanely fast speed given the hazards ahead of them, but it was the only way to maintain sufficient steerage. The Vincennes was like a tractor-trailer truck with its accelerator stuck to the floor, weaving its way down a crowded highway. A collision seemed almost inevitable. “I felt that no prudence nor foresight could avail in protecting the ship and crew,” Wilkes wrote.

  At midnight, all hands were called on deck. The ship was covered wit
h ice, and almost as soon as his feet touched the deck, Gunner Williamson, the man with whom Wilkes had talked about seeing land ten days earlier, slipped and broke several ribs. “The gale at this moment was awful,” Wilkes wrote, “large masses of drift-ice and ice-islands became more numerous.” In these terrifying conditions, Wilkes’s behavior hardly inspired confidence. Alden would later tell Reynolds of the commander’s “incoherent and improper orders, his running in frightened anxiety about the decks, his readiness to take suggestion from anyone (no etiquette or isolation then) and the utter want of reliance in him that was felt, not only by the officers but by the crew.”

  As the crew struggled to reef the sails, which were coated in a thick layer of ice, a seaman by the name of Brooks became trapped on the lee yardarm. The sail had blown over the yard and prevented him from returning to the deck along with the others. Only belatedly did someone see him, still clinging to the yard. Wilkes and First Lieutenant Carr stared blankly aloft, apparently unable to figure out how to get Brooks down. Alden and Passed Midshipman Simon Blunt leapt into the rigging. By tying a bowline around the sailor’s body, they were able to drag him up into the top, then pass him down to the deck and to safety. The surgeons reported he had been within minutes of freezing to death. In addition to Brooks, some of the best sailors on the ship were sent below, overcome with physical and nervous exhaustion as well as the debilitating effects of the cold.

  Suddenly a huge berg loomed in front of them. “Ice ahead!” was the cry, followed by “On the weather bow!” and then, “On the lee bow and abeam!” “All hope of escape seemed in a moment to vanish,” Wilkes wrote; “return we could not, as large ice-islands had just been passed to leeward: so we dashed on, expecting every moment the crash.” Up until now, they had attempted to stay to windward of the bigger bergs, but this time they had no choice but to go below it. As they passed into the lee of the berg, the ship’s sails went slack as the hull, formerly heeled so far over that the lee gun ports were underwater, swung upright. All around them the storm was raging; they could hear it roar. But here, in the lee of the berg, it was almost placid, and the officers and men—still frantic with excitement and fear—exchanged wild, desperate glances.