Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  They hadn’t surpassed Cook, but they had come very close, and they had done it in a New York pilot boat instead of an overbuilt collier. “I have never known men subjected to equal hardships,” wrote Walker, who proudly pointed out that no American vessel had ever sailed farther south.

  Geographers would later discover that even if Walker and his men hadn’t passed Cook in terms of latitude, they had succeeded in sailing closer to Antarctica. Due to her more easterly position, the Flying Fish had come to within 110 miles of Thurston Island, just off the Eights Coast of Antarctica. Today the eastern tip of Thurston Island is called Cape Flying Fish, while the island’s interior contains the Walker Mountains—lasting tributes to this truly extraordinary navigational accomplishment.

  On March 25, just a day after their narrow escape from the ice, Walker and his men sighted the Peacock. After hearing Walker’s account of his adventures, Hudson ordered the Flying Fish back to Orange Bay at the tip of South America. The Peacock, in accordance with Wilkes’s instructions, headed north to Valparaiso, Chile, where the entire squadron would soon rendezvous.

  It had been a difficult two months for William Reynolds. He had been forced to watch as the Porpoise, the Peacock, and two schooners left Orange Bay for the mystery that lay to the south. “Next year!” he had consoled himself in his journal, “Will be our turn.”

  But the duty he had been given was far from a routine surveying assignment. Along with Lieutenant Alden and ten handpicked men, including some of the most experienced sailors in the squadron, he was ordered to explore one of the stormiest coasts in the world in a thirty-five-foot cutter-rigged launch. Although Wilkes appears not to have been fully aware of it, the hazard was huge. The launch, equipped with a small cuddy up forward, was too small and top-heavy to have any hope of weathering the storms that frequented the region. “If they ever get caught in a gale in a sea way . . . ,” wrote the scientist Joseph Couthouy, who was also an experienced mariner, “she will play them the slippery trick before they know it.” For his part, Reynolds was well aware of the danger: “if we should be caught ‘out’ in a S.W. blow, and driven off the Land, we should be lost!”

  On March 12, just a day after leaving Orange Bay, Reynolds and company were sailing between the Hardy Peninsula, at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, for the Wollaston and Hermit Islands, just to the northwest of Cape Horn. They were in the Mantello Pass, a more than sixty-mile-wide stretch of open water, when they saw “heavy masses of dark mackerel clouds” to the south. They had made it to within a half-mile of Wollaston Island when the wind suddenly switched in direction and climbed in velocity, turning the coast that was to be their salvation into a dreaded lee shore. They watched in horror as “the surf broke tremendously [and] saw plainly what would be our fate, unless we could soon find a secure anchorage.”

  It began to rain; then it began to sleet as the wind continued to build. They had no choice but to make a wild dash for Hermit Island to the south. “[The launch] was pressed with sail,” Reynolds wrote, “& bounded from Sea to Sea, with a speed that astonished us.” One of the crewmembers was a man named Jim Gibson, a sailor who had once gone to school with Reynolds back in Lancaster. As the waves broke over the sides of the launch, the two old friends, finding themselves in an open boat at the end of the world, talked of “how Comfortable we should be, if [we] were only by his Aunt Hubley’s stove, sipping hot punch.”

  The visibility was so terrible that they couldn’t see what lay ahead of them at Hermit Island. With the waves “deluging us fore and aft,” they came to within two boat-lengths of a rocky point. Just inside the point was a small cove sheltered from the wind. “[T]he helm was put hard down,” Reynolds wrote, “and in another moment we were in calm water, riding quietly at anchor.”

  For the next two weeks, they would spend most of their time huddled in this and another cove, riding out a series of ferocious gales, one of which was so severe that back in Orange Bay—supposedly the securest anchorage in the Hardy Peninsula—the Vincennes dragged her anchors. But they were not alone. There were also the local natives, the Yahgan Indians, who, much like Reynolds and company, traveled from island to island in small open boats. Indeed, the Yahgans were wonderfully adapted to life in a bark canoe. With big torsos, long arms, and spindly legs with flaps of skin hanging down from their knees, they traveled the waters off Tierra del Fuego, often with their entire families in a single canoe: the mother and eldest boy paddling, the father bailing out water and tending the fire that always burned on a few stones and ashes in the center of the hull as the infants and toddlers nestled in a bed of dry grass. Despite the horrendous weather, the Yahgans wore little or no clothing and while on land lived in tiny smoke-filled huts surrounded by heaps of limpet shells.

  When Darwin had first seen these people a few years before, he had been so shocked by their primitive state that he had written, “one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.” Reynolds, on the other hand, quickly discovered that the Yahgans had skills that he and Alden could only envy. After spending an entire night unsuccessfully attempting to light a fire, the naval officers watched in amazement as some Yahgans walked down to the beach the next morning and created a large blaze amid the wet underbrush. “[W]e could not learn by what means they kindled it,” Reynolds marveled. The Yahgans were also remarkable mimics, repeating with eerie precision just about everything the Americans said.

  One day it began to snow, and the sailors and the Indians enjoyed a snowball fight. “[W]e Skylarked among the snow together, as if we had been old friends: they were naked, & we warmly clad & I just thought that we presented as wide a contrast of person & habit as could be met with any where in the world.” But Reynolds, a man who enjoyed his luxuries, was not about to go native. “[I]f they be the children of Nature,” he wrote, “I am thankful that I am a member of a more artificial community, & will [waive forever] the belief, that those barbarous ones who have the fewest wants, lead a more enviable existence than the great civilized mass.”

  On March 25, the weather finally began to moderate. Just an hour after leaving their cove, they saw a sail in the distance. It proved to be the Sea Gull, and as the schooner approached, the officers on the launch took up a gun and fired a salute. When Reynolds first stepped onto the schooner’s deck, he was stunned by its comparative size. “The Sea Gull seemed a monster,” he wrote. “I thought her almost too large.” Most of all, however, he felt, for the first time in several weeks, safe.

  Johnson explained that soon after they returned to Orange Bay from the South Shetland Islands, he had been sent out on a search for the launch by Lieutenant Craven, who had begun to fear the worst. For their part, Alden and Reynolds were eager to hear about the Sea Gull’s sail south, and they soon learned about the schooner’s stop at Deception Island—how they had anchored in the lagoonlike harbor of a volcano’s drowned crater and set out on an unsuccessful search for the self-registering thermometer left by the British explorer Captain Foster. Johnson and his men had walked over the surface of an active volcano, and even as snow and sleet pummeled their heads, they could feel heat radiating up through the thick soles of their boots. At one point Johnson put his ear to the ground and heard a roaring sound, like “a strong draught in a chimney.”

  Over the next week, as Alden supervised the completion of the survey from the security of the schooner, Reynolds fell in love—not with a woman, but with the Sea Gull. He became smitten with everything about this perfectly designed craft. One night as they rode out yet another gale, he could not help but wonder if the Sea Gull were, in fact, alive. “I could scarcely believe that all was mechanical,” he wrote, “that her nice & regular motion was merely the result of properties bestowed on her by the skillful builder. It seemed much more natural to think that She had a mind, an instinct, a will of her own, & that guided by it, she defied the threatening dangers of the Gale.”

  By the time they returned to Orange Bay, the squadro
n was buzzing with excitement. The Flying Fish had brought back word of her historic sail south; Wilkes had returned in the Porpoise, his initial euphoria tempered by an incident at the Strait of Le Maire just off the eastern tip of Tierra del Fuego. In the same storm that had nearly killed Reynolds and his compatriots, one of Wilkes’s officers, Lieutenant John Dale, had been trapped with his boat’s crew on the shore of Good Success Bay. The Porpoise had been forced to make for the open sea, and it had taken almost a week to retrieve Dale and his men. Wilkes blamed the delay on Dale’s incompetence, and a court of inquiry was to be convened once they reached Valparaiso. In the meantime, the Peacock was already on her way to Valparaiso while the Relief was long overdue from her cruise to the Strait of Magellan. In the sixty days since they first arrived at Orange Bay, they had experienced no less than eleven gales, averaging between two and three days in duration. To be trapped in a storm against a lee shore in the Strait of Magellan was a fate no man wanted to contemplate.

  On April 17, Wilkes decided that it was time for the Vincennes and Porpoise to depart for Valparaiso. He ordered the two schooners to wait another ten days for the Relief. If the storeship did return to Orange Bay, Wilkes wanted the schooners to transport the scientists to Valparaiso; otherwise they would be delayed even longer by an interminable passage north aboard the slow-sailing Relief. The next time the squadron reassembled, it would be in the warm waters of the Pacific.

  The Vincennes anchored at Valparaiso on May 15. Wilkes found the Peacock, but saw no sign of the Relief. From Hudson, who had been at anchor now for close to three weeks, he learned that Lieutenant Long had arrived almost a month earlier and had since sailed up the coast to Callao, Peru, where he was taking on stores. Wilkes also learned why the Relief had not returned to Orange Bay.

  While the rest of the squadron had headed south, the Relief had set out from Orange Bay for the Strait of Magellan on February 26. Long had been instructed to sail west and north, following the rocky coastline to the western entrance to the Strait. He was then to sail the length of the Strait, seeking shelter whenever necessary along its north shore while providing the scientists with every possible opportunity to collect specimens. By the time they returned to Orange Bay, no later than April 15, they would have completed a circumnavigation of Tierra del Fuego. But the voyage did not go as planned.

  Instead of hugging the shore on his way to the Strait of Magellan, as Wilkes had advised him to do, Long chose to play it safe, heading well offshore before beginning to work north. Unfortunately a series of storms and headwinds turned what Wilkes had predicted would be a two-day passage to the mouth of the Strait into a seemingly interminable struggle up the coast. On March 17, three weeks after leaving Orange Bay, the Relief was finally beginning to approach the western coast of South America. The geologist James Dana looked forward to “fine sport among the guanacos [cousins of llamas], birds and fish of the Straits.” But then it began to blow a gale from the southwest.

  “The winds howled through the rigging with almost deafening violence,” Dana wrote. The sleet and dense haze offered little visibility, but Lieutenant Long knew that somewhere to leeward lay what was known as the “Milky Way,” a region of countless rocks and tiny islands that virtually defied navigation. Philip King, the British navy captain whose sailing instructions Long had read with great care, said of the Milky Way: “No vessel ought to entangle herself in these labyrinths, if she does, she must sail by eye. Neither chart, directions, nor soundings, would be of much assistance and in thick weather the situation would be most precarious.”

  At three P.M. the next day the lookout cried, “Breakers under the bows!” Out of the thick gray mist loomed the hundred-foot-high Tower Rocks, against which the waves of the Southern Ocean broke with such force that the spray shot up higher than the Relief’s masthead. The ship was brought about but could make no headway against the tremendous wind and waves. The mist broke clear for a few minutes, revealing Noir Island under the lee bow, just a few miles to the northeast. “[N]ight was approaching,” Lieutenant Long wrote, “to claw off or hold our own was impracticable, a portentous sky, and the ‘milky way’ close under our lee, warned us that our graves might be made in it.” Long resolved to sail for the shelter of Noir Island.

  “We could not but admire the coolness and judgment of Captain Long,” Dana wrote, “who, through the whole was seated on the foreyard, giving his orders as quietly and deliberately as in more peaceful times.” As the Relief bore down on Noir Island, Long ordered the men to prepare the anchors. In a half hour they had rounded the southeastern point of the island, where they found a small, partially sheltered cove. It would have to do. In sixteen fathoms of water, they brailed up their trysails, luffed into the wind, and let go two of their anchors, along with one hundred and fifty fathoms of chain, and furled the sails. “Here we felt comparatively safe,” Long wrote. That night, the naturalist Charles Pickering overheard one of the officers remark “that a few such days as this would make a man turn gray.” “[T]he sequel proved,” Pickering wrote, “that one’s hair does not turn gray so easily.”

  When they awoke the next morning, the wind had diminished. They could see snow atop the six-hundred-foot-high peaks of the island. Some of the scientists, noticing a tiny cove beside them, even talked about going ashore. But then the wind began to build and shifted to the southeast. The island was no longer providing any protection. “A heavy Cape Horn sea was now setting into the harbor,” Dana wrote, “and as the ship reared and plunged with each passing wave we feared that every lurch would snap the cables or drag our anchors.” An old sailor who had been more than forty-five years at sea told Pickering that he “had never before seen such riding.” Behind them was a reef that terminated with a large jagged rock, which now lay directly astern. They watched as the waves thundered against it. That night, the anchors began to drag. Long ordered the men to lower a third anchor, then a fourth. “[T]here seems to be nothing that separates us from eternity,” he wrote in his log, “but the sailors semblance of Hope, the Anchor.”

  The next morning, March 20, Long ordered the men to heave in the two larboard chains to see if the anchors were still attached to them. As he had suspected, one of them was gone completely while the other had lost its shank, rendering it worthless. “Our situation may be described,” he wrote, “but I shan’t attempt it.” The wind began to build, creating what Long described as “an awful swell.” As night approached, Long ordered his officers and men to “prepare for the worst.” Dana decided that in the event that the Relief drifted into the ironbound coast of Noir Island behind them, “his the happiest lot who was soonest dead” since those who weren’t drowned or battered to pieces on the rocks could only look forward to dying of exposure on the island, which was now completely smothered in snow. Assuming his time had come, Pickering, the naturalist, decided to retire to his cabin. With a pillow under his head and his cloak wrapped around him, he stretched out on the cabin floor and fell instantly asleep—“a philosophic act,” Wilkes later wrote, “that was in keeping with his quiet and staid manner.”

  No one else aboard the Relief appears to have slept a wink that night. “[E]very pitch of the ship was feared as the last,” Dana wrote. “How anxiously we followed her motion down as she plunged her head into the water, and then watched her rising from those depths, until with a sudden start she gained the summit of the wave, and reeled and quivered at the length of her straightened cable!” With each one of these upward thrusts, the remaining anchors and chains could be heard dragging across the rocks—an appalling rumble that to Dana’s ear sounded like the growling of distant thunder. At nine P.M. the crew was ordered on deck “to await the event.” By this time the sound of the dragging anchors had become “almost an incessant peal,” Dana wrote, “announcing that the dreaded crisis was fast approaching.”

  They had drifted to within a ship’s length of the reef. One of the anchors finally caught and, for a few brief moments, the Relief hovered in the wild surge of the b
reakers. “[T]he ship rose and fell a few times with the swell,” Dana wrote, “and then rose and careened as if half mad: her decks were deluged with the sweeping waves, which poured in torrents down the hatches.” The strain on the cables proved too much, and at 11:30 P.M. the anchor chain parted. “[W]e found ourselves,” Long wrote, “at God’s mercy.”

  With the remnants of the cables hanging from the bow, the Relief began to drift to her apparent destruction. Then a miracle occurred. For the last few hours the wind had been gradually shifting to the east. Just when it looked as if they were about to fetch up on the large rock at the end of the reef, the Relief—as if nudged by the hand of God—drifted around the final hazard and out to sea.

  Long realized that there was now a possibility for action. He waited until Noir Island’s Astronomers Point bore west by south, then ordered the cables slipped. Under fore-trysail and storm-staysail, they wore the ship “short round,” Long wrote, “without unnecessary loss of ground.” More sail was set, and using the smooth water in the lee of Noir Island to his advantage, Long drove the Relief under “a heavy press of sail” to windward. The next morning Pickering awoke to discover that the crisis had passed. The Relief had clawed far enough to weather that Long was confident they would soon clear Cape Gloucester and “once more reach the wide waters of the Pacific in safety.”

  They had made no new discoveries, but the officers and men of the Relief had made their mark in the annals of American seamanship. “It is doubtful that in the history of the Navy,” one commentator has written, “there has been a more remarkable escape from destruction on a lee shore.” Long opened his sealed orders and learned that the squadron was headed for Valparaiso. Although he was supposed to have first returned to Orange Bay, he felt that without any anchors he had no option but to continue on to Chile. At Valparaiso, Long was able to secure an anchor from the British warship Fly, and on April 14, the Relief sat quietly at rest for the first time in more than a month and a half.