Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  It was as if a dagger had been planted in his heart. For almost a year and a half, the Vincennes and his stateroom had been his home. The members of his mess had become his family. “My mind was utterly distraught!” he wrote. “I never felt leaving Home, with half the force of grief, that oppressed me, at being thus torn from my happy mess!”

  A ship is a total environment—self-contained, isolated from the outside world. The bonds formed within the wooden walls of a ship are as strong, if not stronger, than anything known on land. For more than a year, Reynolds had been a proud member of the Expedition’s flagship—his connection to his messmates made all the more resilient by their shared hatred of their commander. But Wilkes had found a way to hurt him and his friends where it would hurt most. Reynolds was one of the Ex. Ex.’s most popular officers, and his absence would be keenly felt throughout the ship; he had also made no secret of his changed feelings for Wilkes. It was time to get this sensitive and articulate officer off the Vincennes.

  News of Reynolds’s transfer created “a great hubbub.” The surgeon John Whittle was disconsolate. “Nothing which has occurred since we left home has given me so much grief as this,” he wrote. “He is a fellow of noble soul & has one of the most admirable tempers imaginable. Never have I become more attached to a man after so short an acquaintance.” Jim Gibson, the sailor who had been Reynolds’s boyhood friend back in Lancaster, came to help him pack. “[He was] in not much better plight than I was myself,” Reynolds wrote. “Poor fellow, I was sorry to leave him.”

  But it was his roommate William May who was the most devastated by the news. “May & I made perfect babes of ourselves,” Reynolds wrote. “Twas like the parting of man & wife: like the dissolution of a household!” May vowed that he would not stay aboard the ship with Reynolds gone. All attempts to calm him failed, and he stormed into Wilkes’s cabin. “Sir,” he shouted, “you have treated my friend, Mr. Reynolds, with great injustice. I am surprised! I am shocked! I am disgusted, Sir & I wish to quit the Ship; I cannot stay in her any longer!”

  Wilkes ordered May to leave the cabin. May’s father was a prominent member of Washington society, and Wilkes appears to have been extremely reluctant to see him go. Soon Robert Waldron, the purser, appeared in steerage to deliver a message from the commander: May had clearly been “very much excited & if he wished to remain in the Ship, he had only to say so”—otherwise, he would be ordered to the Flying Fish. “Anywhere!” May exclaimed. In a few minutes his orders were in his hands. The ship was hove to, and the two friends went their separate ways.

  Reynolds was received kindly by the officers of the Peacock but had some trouble fitting in. For almost a week, he had no assigned duty, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. Finally, when one of the officers became ill, he was given charge of the deck. “[W]henever we came within hail of the Vincennes during my watch,” he wrote, “I took great delight in shaking my trumpet & displaying myself in a most conspicuous manner. Sent away as a convict, banished for punishment, I was well pleased to show that in my new Ship I occupied a post of honor!”

  Eighteen days after the transfers of Reynolds and May, at sundown on November 29, the Vincennes and the Peacock were between thirty and forty miles from Sydney. The shore was not yet in sight. “[W]e gave up all hope of getting in until the next day,” Reynolds wrote, “and were sorrowed to think of the breakfast we should miss.” Much to everyone’s surprise, the Vincennes crowded sail, and Lieutenant Hudson ordered his men to follow suit. At eight o’clock, they sighted the Port Jackson light-house.

  The wind was with them, and with time being of the essence, Wilkes decided to push on even though they were without a pilot. “[O]n, on we went,” Reynolds wrote, “& undertaking rather a critical chance, Captn Wilkes ran his Ship clear up into the Harbor & we followed, anchoring off the Town at 11.” The next morning the citizens of Sydney were flabbergasted to see two American naval vessels sitting quietly at anchor.

  “Never had such a thing been heard of,” Reynolds wrote. “They could not credit their eyes, & the Pilots who were looking out for us were mortified to death!” By arriving at night, they had slipped past the usually watchful pilots and then proceeded to navigate the difficult, nine-mile passage to Sydney Harbor. The next day, newspaper articles appeared, “highly flattering to our nautical skill & daring.”

  In one bold stroke, Wilkes had put his humiliation at Pago Pago behind him. Suddenly, it was as if the bickering and bad feeling that had once threatened to destroy the Expedition had never occurred. “[A]ll of us were perfectly elated,” Reynolds wrote, “that the first visit of an American squadron to the place had been in a manner so well calculated to excite their jealousy & to give us so much éclat.”

  Reynolds later learned that the squadron’s arrival at Sydney had not been as dashing and heroic as it had first seemed. Although Wilkes would deny it, he had received more than a little help that night. Standing at his elbow the whole way had been his quartermaster, a former Sydney resident who knew the passage well. “It is just like Lt. Wilkes,” Reynolds wrote, “to usurp all the credit for himself.”

  It was just a hint of things to come.

  CHAPTER 7

  Antarctica

  AT 5.4 MILLION square miles, the Antarctic Continent is roughly the size of the continental United States and Mexico combined. Almost all of it is perpetually covered in ice that in some areas is more than two miles thick. Since the ice reflects as much as 90 percent of the sun’s solar radiation, this is the coldest place on earth, with an average annual temperature of -22°F. Between 70 and 80 percent of the world’s freshwater is contained in this approximately 6.5-million-cubic-mile reservoir of ice and snow, in which is preserved a climate record that goes back 200,000 years. If the Antarctic ice sheet melted, the sea level of the globe would rise by more than two hundred feet.

  Antarctica is also the most inaccessible place on earth. Except for the point where the Antarctic Peninsula reaches toward Cape Horn at the Drake Passage (a gap of six hundred-plus miles), it is surrounded by a moat of more than two thousand miles called the Southern Ocean. In winter, a six-hundred-mile-wide belt of pack ice seals off the continent. In summer, when the ice begins to retreat, the waters surrounding Antarctica become the mariner’s equivalent of a minefield. Indeed, an entire vocabulary has been created to describe the appalling variety of icy hazards a navigator encounters as he or she approaches the continent. A “growler” is a piece of sea ice that is about 180 square feet and rises just a few feet above the sea; a “bergy bit” is about the size of a two-bedroom house, while a “floeberg” is described as a “massive piece of sea ice” with a dimpled or “hummocky” surface. But growlers, bergy bits, and floebergs are nothing compared to the vast, flat-topped icebergs that are spawned from the edges of the continent. “Calved” from the fronts of land-based glaciers, these tabular floes are unlike anything seen in the Arctic and are sometimes more than two hundred feet high and a hundred miles long. Making these dimensions even more remarkable is the fact that seven-eighths of a typical iceberg is underwater.

  As if the danger of ice were not bad enough, the weather in this part of the world is horrendous. Much of this has to do with Antarctica’s being the world’s highest continent, with an average elevation of 7,550 feet. Cold, very heavy air constantly flows down and north from the high interior; when these gravity-stoked “katabatic” winds collide with the water at the coast, they erupt into blizzards, creating a never-ending series of cyclonic storms that circulates clockwise around the continent. The ocean area from about 40° south to the Antarctic Circle has the strongest sustained winds found anywhere on earth.

  Wilkes was not only to penetrate as far as possible into this hazardous region, he was to explore it. As James Cook had found back in 1774, this amounted to an almost suicidal endeavor in a sailing vessel. Cook had been well aware that a continent to the south might exist, but given the terrible conditions between himself and a possible discovery, he judged it not w
orth the effort. Then there was the British sealer James Weddell’s claim, backed up by the American Benjamin Morrell, that a navigable ocean existed beyond the icy barrier. Other British sealers had brought back isolated reports of sighting islands in the vicinity of the Antarctic Circle near where the Expedition would soon be headed. The fact of the matter remained, however, that in December 1839, as the U.S. Exploring Expedition prepared for its final push south, no one really knew what was down there at the bottom of the world.

  Wilkes was already aware of the French expedition led by Dumont d’Urville. In Sydney he learned that there was yet another expedition headed south. The British had just dispatched James Ross, the discoverer of the magnetic North Pole, on a mission to find the other magnetic pole in the vicinity of 66° south and 146° east—almost directly below Adelaide, Australia, and approximately 250 miles to the north of the latitude of Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra. In addition, Ross was to attempt to punch through the ice in his heavily reinforced vessels and sail as far as possible south. Ross—whose arrogance may have even surpassed Wilkes’s—knew that his rivals had a significant head start; still, he remained confident that he would outdo both of them. The French and Americans didn’t stand a chance.

  Certainly the people of Sydney would have agreed with at least half of that claim. As far as they could tell the American expedition was, in the words of one observer, “doomed to be frozen to death.” While Ross’s two ships—converted bomb vessels built to withstand the thunderous recoil of several deck-mounted mortars—had been equipped with an additional layer of eight-inch-thick oak planking, the American vessels were without any significant form of structural reinforcement to withstand the inevitable collisions with the ice. To make matters worse, the Peacock’s already poor condition had deteriorated dramatically over the last six months; many key structural components were rotten and in need of replacement. But these repairs would have taken at least two months. After long consultation, Wilkes and Hudson decided that “the credit of the Expedition and the country” demanded that the Peacock sail south, no matter how bad her condition might be.

  But if the Yanks appeared ill prepared, they had a few factors in their favor. One of them was timing. Ross had left England just a few months before; where he was now was anyone’s guess. Although d’Urville’s expedition had gotten the jump on all of them, rumor had it that the French, after one unsuccessful push south two winters ago, were on their way back home. The Americans also possessed the advantage of some recent, very valuable experience amid the Antarctic ice. But perhaps most important was that the Americans didn’t appear especially bothered by the inadequacies of their equipment and preparation. “[The people of Sydney] saw us all cheerful, young, and healthy,” Wilkes wrote, “and gave us the character, that I found our countrymen generally bear, of recklessness of life and limb.”

  On the day after Christmas, the U.S. Ex. Ex.—minus the scientists, who would continue their researches in Australia, then secure passage to New Zealand, where they would meet up with the squadron in March—left Sydney Harbor. The wind was light, and the Vincennes once again missed stays. Despite his occasional demonstrations of bravado, Wilkes had earned a reputation among his officers and men as an “ignorant and nervous” seaman—not the best qualities for leading a squadron into the terrors of the Antarctic ice. But if Wilkes’s seamanship remained in question, his leadership style was no longer in doubt. As early as Rio de Janeiro, when he had been pushed to the verge of a nervous collapse, it had become clear that he needed a persona, what has been called a “mask of command,” to hide behind if he was to survive the ordeals that lay ahead. The mask that he chose to assume was that of the martinet, defined by British admiral W. H. Smyth as “A rigid disciplinarian; but one who, in matters of inferior moment, harasses all under him.” This was the form of leadership Wilkes would cling to for the duration of the voyage. “The acquirement of being a ‘martinette,’” Wilkes later wrote, “when once established goes far to carrying with it authority to induce obedience to command.”

  But it wasn’t all just an act on Wilkes’s part. He had become more than a little intoxicated by the sudden influx of power he associated with his self-propelled rise to commodore of the U.S. Ex. Ex. Proper obeisance must be paid. In a letter to Jane he bragged about keeping the American consul in Sydney waiting for two hours while he finished up some experiments. “I am now a great man,” he wrote, “and others will wait patiently.”

  In amiable contrast to the Expedition’s leader was second-in-command William Hudson. In addition to being an excellent seaman, he had shown no interest in maintaining rigid discipline in this nonmilitary operation. His officers were not required to move to the leeward side of the quarterdeck when he came up from below. His cabin was frequented by his officers, who always seemed to be in excellent spirits. The Peacock might be in terrible structural condition, but as William Reynolds could attest, she was a “happy ship.” With full confidence in their captain’s ability to get them out of the toughest scrape, the Peacock’s officers looked with anticipation to the adventures that awaited them. “Antarctic Stock was high!” Reynolds effused in a letter to his mother.

  Morale was not so good aboard the Porpoise. In Sydney her commander, Lieutenant Cadwalader Ringgold, had become embroiled in a petty feud with a member of his medical staff, Charles Guillou, and the popular surgeon had been transferred to the Peacock. Ringgold was also at loggerheads with his first lieutenant Robert Johnson, who along with several other officers had done his best to embarrass Ringgold at a social event prior to the squadron’s departure.

  For sheer bad feeling, however, nothing could compare to the crew of the Flying Fish. Just a few days before, the schooner had lost five of ten men to desertion. Her commander, Robert Pinkney, was able to scare up a few dubious characters from the Sydney waterfront, but the schooner was still down by several men, and Wilkes claimed he had none to spare from the Vincennes. “I do not suppose that a vessel ever sailed under the U.S. Pendant with such a miserable crew as we have now,” wrote Pinkney’s second-in-command, George Sinclair. “It will be a great wonder to me if we return from the southern cruise.”

  Once the squadron was clear of Sydney, Wilkes insisted that all four vessels sail abreast; every now and then they would be ordered to heave to so that Wilkes could communicate by boat with his commanders. In the event that any of them should become separated, he had designated a rendezvous point: Macquarie Island, a wave-washed, penguin-infested pile of rocks 2,100 miles to the south. For the officers and men of the Peacock, who felt that they had the best chance of success, it all seemed like an exasperating waste of time. “Lt. Wilkes evidently did not intend to afford either of his subordinates an opportunity to get ahead of him in sailing to the Southward,” Reynolds wrote. “For this reason most likely, he orders them to keep in company with him.” For six days the four vessels succeeded in staying together. Then on January 1 it began to blow. Soon the Flying Fish was in trouble.

  Scudding before the wind in the gale, Pinkney didn’t have the manpower required to shorten sail. The schooner’s foresail began jibing back and forth uncontrollably, finally carrying away the jaws of the gaff. Soon the forestay, upon which the vessel’s entire rig depended, was broken, and the square yard was in pieces. Giant waves were breaking across the deck. Incredibly, the signal to “make sail” was raised on the Vincennes. Sinclair was outraged. Instead of helping them, the flagship “kept her course and deliberately left us to whatever fate the Gods of the winds might have in store for us; a few deep toned curses accompanied her.”

  From the safety of the Vincennes’s quarterdeck, Wilkes glanced aft and commented to Reynolds’s good friend Lieutenant James Alden that the officers of the Flying Fish were clearly “afraid.” “[I]t is impossible to describe the disgust with which [Alden] heard such an insinuation,” Reynolds later wrote, “from a man who in all times of difficulty and danger was as humble about the decks as a whipped puppy, and as incapable as he was humble.” As
night came on, the Flying Fish disappeared in the darkness. More than a few sailors speculated that the schooner had joined the Sea Gull at the bottom of the Southern Ocean.

  Three days later the Vincennes and the Porpoise lost contact with the Peacock. Four days later, Wilkes was approaching the latitude of Macquarie Island. He would later claim that they were too far to leeward to reach the rendezvous point without wasting too much time. And so, while Hudson did as his orders demanded and spent the next three days beating up to the island, Wilkes pushed on to the south. He had succeeded in giving himself a head start of more than six hundred miles over the two vessels, the Peacock and the Flying Fish, that had sailed farther south than he had the winter before. When the officers and men of the Peacock reached Macquarie Island and found no vessels waiting for them, Wilkes’s “miserable double dealing” was obvious to all. After dutifully planting a flag on the island, they set off for the south.

  On the evening of January 15, 1840, Reynolds, perhaps the happiest officer aboard the happiest ship in the squadron, saw his first iceberg. It was “glowing with the most vivid & brilliant hues,” he wrote; “blue as azure, green as emerald, and, ho! the contrast, whiteness like unto the raiment of an Angel. . . . The imagination cannot picture, neither our tongues convey, the faintest image of so glorious a spectacle.”

  Soon after sighting the iceberg, Reynolds decided it was time to put on the red flannels that Lydia and his mother had made for him. “[T]hey are so nice & warm,” he wrote in his journal, “bless those who made them! Grandmother’s stockings too! I feel the good of a Home, away down here!”