Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  By this time his native companions were in full retreat. Judd called out urgently for help, and one of them turned back. Judd saw the arm of his good friend Kalumo extended toward him over the ledge, but before he could grab it, another jet of lava rose up in the air above their heads. Scorched by the searing heat, Kalumo withdrew his hand. Judd cried out, and Kalumo once again put out his hand. This time Judd grabbed it and was quickly pulled onto the ledge. “Another moment,” Wilkes wrote, “and all aid would have been unavailing to save Dr. Judd from perishing in the fiery deluge.”

  Even though he had barely escaped with his life, Judd refused to quit. The crater was now full of bubbling lava, and after securing the pole with the frying pan attached to it from one of the natives, he returned to the edge of the pool and dipped the pan into the lava. “The cake he thus obtained,” Wilkes wrote, “(for it resembled precisely a charred pound-cake), was added to our collections.”

  Judd had been badly burned around his wrists and elbows and wherever his shirt had touched his skin. But his injuries were nothing compared to Kalumo’s. His “whole face was one blister,” Wilkes wrote, “particularly that side which had been most exposed to the fire.” Wilkes estimated that the crater that had almost claimed Judd was approximately two hundred feet in diameter and thirty-five feet deep and had filled in less than twelve minutes. In honor of the doctor’s heroism, Wilkes named it Judd’s Lake.

  That night they all watched what Wilkes called “this mighty laboratory of nature” from the safety of the caldera’s edge. “The streams were of a glowing cherry-red color,” he wrote, “illuminating the whole crater around; the large lake beyond seemed swelling and becoming more vivid, so that we expected every moment to see an overflow from it of greater grandeur. . . . The sight was magnificent, and worth a voyage round the world to witness.”

  Before they departed for Mauna Loa, Judd insisted that the natives’ family members, who had severely depleted the Expedition’s provisions, return to Hilo. It had also become clear to Wilkes that the natives, with just a tapa worn as a shawl, were not equipped to withstand the cold temperatures of the volcano’s summit. In anticipation of their inevitable desertion, Wilkes sent a message to the Vincennes to send up fifty men and a complement of officers, along with additional provisions.

  Soon after leaving Kilauea, they reached a section of uneven ground that made it impossible for the natives to carry Wilkes’s and Brinsmade’s chairs. “My legs I confess regretted the change,” Wilkes wrote. He quickly became convinced that the guide, Puhano, who had led both Douglas and Lowenstern to the summit, had taken the wrong route. “I therefore, in company with Mr. Brinsmade, took the lead, compass in hand.”

  By the end of the day they had climbed into the clouds. That evening the temperature dropped to 43°F—more than forty degrees lower than it had been at Hilo. By the afternoon of the following day, December 19, they were beyond the tree line. “All the ground was hard, metallic-looking lava,” Wilkes wrote. The featureless landscape made it difficult for them to mark a trail. Wilkes ordered his men to collect branches from the few shrubs they passed so that they might be used as “fingerposts” to designate the path ahead. By three P.M., they had reached an altitude of 6,071 feet. “[E]ven light loads had become heavy,” Wilkes wrote, “and those of any weight, insupportable.” They were desperately low on food, but water was now their chief concern. They possessed a mere six gallons for over three hundred people. Wilkes ordered them to make camp.

  That night, the horticulturalist William Brackenridge, one of the most robust members of the Expedition, came down with what Wilkes termed “a violent attack of mountain-sickness.” Nausea and headaches are only a few of the symptoms of what is known today as hypoxia, a reaction to the reduced levels of oxygen at high altitudes that affects individuals without respect to their physical conditioning. Cold and dehydration are also known to aggravate the symptoms. That night, Wilkes wrote, “we all began to experience great soreness about the eyes, and a dryness of the skin.”

  The natives were particularly hard hit, and many of them began to question Wilkes’s motives. “[T]hey never knew of anyone having gone up this mountain before,” he wrote, “and thought me mad for taking so much trouble to ascend it.” The next day was a Sunday, and Dr. Judd conducted a religious service. While several natives went below for some calabashes of much-needed water, Wilkes and his companions used the day of rest to acclimate themselves to the change of altitude. They also had the opportunity to enjoy the view, which in an age before recreational mountain climbing and air travel was unlike anything they had ever seen. Beneath them were the clouds, “all floating below us in huge white masses, of every variety of form.” Beyond and above the clouds was the horizon line, where the greenish sweep of the sea blended seamlessly with the “cerulean blue” of the sky. “The whole scene reminded me,” Wilkes wrote, “of the icy fields of the Southern Ocean.” Around three P.M., as the sun began to settle in the west, the clouds started to move up the mountainside, and “finally,” Wilkes wrote, “we became immersed in them.”

  Soon after setting out the next morning, December 21, from what Wilkes called Sunday Station, the ascent became much steeper. “[T]he whole face of the mountain consisted of one mass of lava,” Wilkes wrote, “that had apparently flowed over in all directions from the summit.” The sun beat down on the black rock, and the men found their desire for water “redoubled” since the previous day. Wilkes had originally planned on using the snow at the volcano’s summit to provide water for his men. But the summit was still eight thousand feet above them, requiring a hike of two, perhaps three more days. Around noon, Wilkes called a temporary halt. “Most of the party were now lying on the rocks,” he wrote, “with the noonday sun pouring on them; a disposition to sleep, and a sensation and listlessness similar to that procured by sea-sickness, seemed to prevail.” Judd offered to climb ahead in search of snow, and Wilkes gladly sent the doctor on his way. For his part, Wilkes had no choice but to succumb to exhaustion: “I enjoyed as sound an hour’s sleep on the hard lava as I have ever had.”

  They climbed another two miles before making camp near a large cave, which provided excellent shelter for the natives. This would become known as the Recruitment Station. As darkness descended, there was no sign of Dr. Judd. Fires were lit, and in a few hours Judd appeared, bone weary and with a snowball in his hands. He had climbed for about four and a half hours, roughly halfway to the summit, before he reached snow. He reported that the drifts appeared to be melting fast. It would require a long hard day of hiking if they were to have water the next day. That night, despite the grim conditions, Charlie Erskine and his fellow sailors made the best of it in the shelter of the cave, “singing, laughing, and joking, as if on a picnic party.” “Place the sailor in any situation you will,” Charlie insisted, “you cannot deprive him of his mirth and gayety.” Tom Piner, the elderly quartermaster and a devout Christian, told his young companions that they were now “as near to heaven as we ever would be unless we mended our ways.”

  On the morning of December 22, Wilkes left Lieutenant Thomas Budd in charge of the Recruitment Station as he pushed on with a party of twelve natives and seven men, including his steward and servant. Throughout the day, the temperature continued to drop, and Wilkes kept the natives ahead of him so that they couldn’t desert. By the afternoon it was just 25°F and blowing a gale from the southwest. The natives were now in danger of freezing to death. Wilkes ordered them to deposit their loads in the lee of a nearby wall of rocks, then granted them permission to return to the station below. “[T]hey seemed actually to vanish,” he wrote. “I never saw such agility displayed by them.” Soon the natives on the trail below began to desert en masse. “The mountain became . . . a scene of confusion,” he wrote, “being strewn with instruments, boxes, pieces of portable houses, tents, calabashes, etc.”

  Wilkes was left with only his guide and nine men. A snowstorm was coming, the temperature had dropped to 18°F, and many of them
had become stricken with a severe case of altitude sickness. Wilkes described it as “a violent throbbing of the temples and a shortness of breath, that were both painful and distressing.” Although they found it difficult even to move, Wilkes ordered them to start building a shelter out of the coarse blocks of lava (which they referred to as clinkers) strewn about the mountainside. Soon they’d constructed a circular enclosure, with a piece of canvas serving as the roof. They hung blankets along the inside walls, “which I hoped,” Wilkes wrote, “would keep us from being frozen.” Wilkes’s steward had some tea in his knapsack, and after making a small but serviceable fire, they enjoyed what food they had. “The supper being ended,” Wilkes wrote, “we stowed ourselves away within the circular pen; and while the men kept passing their jokes about its comforts, the wind blew a perfect hurricane without.” That night the temperature dropped to 15°F. They were at an altitude of 13,190 feet.

  Around four A.M., their canvas roof collapsed, dumping a large quantity of snow into the shelter. They did their best to restore the roof, but all of them were now extremely cold. “I need scarcely say,” Wilkes wrote, “I passed a most uncomfortable night.”

  The next morning one of the men found a calabash of provisions that had been abandoned by the natives. After what the sailors termed “a comfortable breakfast,” they set out around eleven A.M. They soon discovered that the upper portion of the volcano was, in Wilkes’s words, “a mass of clinkers.” “[ I ]t . . . continued snowing in squalls,” he wrote, “with a keen southwest wind driving in our faces; the ground being covered a foot deep with snow, rendered it more dangerous and irksome to pass over such loose and detached masses.”

  They reached the caldera of Mauna Loa in the early afternoon. Although not as active as Kilauea, the volcano’s proportions stunned Wilkes and his men: “The very idea of standing on the summit of one of the highest peaks in the midst of this vast ocean, in close proximity to a precipice of profound depth, overhanging an immense crater . . . would have been exciting even to a strong man,” Wilkes wrote; “but the sensation was overpowering to one already exhausted by breathing the rarefied air, and toiling over the lava which this huge caldron must have vomited forth in quantities sufficient to form a dome sixty miles in diameter, and nearly three miles in height.”

  Wilkes had entertained hopes of descending into the crater that afternoon but quickly realized that the snow and high winds required them to make camp. By four P.M. they’d pitched a tent about sixty feet from the ledge of the crater. Since it was impossible to drive stakes into the rock, they used blocks of lava to secure the tent’s ropes. Once the tent had been set up, Wilkes ordered the men, with the exception of his steward and servant, to return to their previous encampment. Wilkes intended to spend his first night on the summit of Mauna Loa much as he did in the cabin of the Vincennes, accompanied by only his steward and his trusted servant Juan.

  That night the storm picked up. “Our fire was dispersed,” Wilkes wrote, “candles blown out, and the tent rocking and flapping as if it would go to pieces, or be torn asunder from its fastenings, and disappear before the howling blast. I now felt that what we had passed through on the previous night was comfort in comparison to this. The wind had a fair sweep over us, and as each blast reached the opposite side of the crater, the sound which preceded its coming was at times awful; the tent, however, continued to stand, although it had many holes torn in it, and the ridge-pole had chafed through its top.”

  The next morning they were unable to light a fire. With four inches of snow on the ground, Wilkes decided that the three of them should wait until assistance arrived from below. Around eleven A.M., Judd and Charles Pickering reached the summit. Judd opened the tent door and found Wilkes and his attendants wrapped in their blankets.

  Judd had some bad news. All the natives had deserted. “I was glad to hear it,” Wilkes later wrote Jane, “for I could not help pitying their forlorn condition in such bitter weather. This put me in better spirits, greatly to [Judd’s] surprise. . . . I became merry, got something to eat and comforted myself that my sailors would be along soon and be all the help I could wish for, & so it happened.”

  Over the next few weeks, a series of supply stations was established between the summit and the Vincennes that sent a steady stream of provisions and men to what Wilkes called Pendulum Peak. By the end of December, there were enough men on the summit to finish the construction of a virtual village comprising a dozen structures, each surrounded by its own stone wall, with a much larger wall encircling the entire outpost. Several days of fine weather greatly facilitated their efforts but also showed Wilkes the incredible variations in temperature encountered at this altitude—ranging from 13°F at night to 92°F in the noonday sun. For Wilkes, this was troubling, since his pendulum experiments must be conducted at a constant temperature. He must do everything in his power to insulate the pendulum house.

  After erecting the house’s wooden walls, he placed a thick, hair-cloth covering both inside and out; he then surrounded the entire house with a heavy-duty canvas tent. But this did not provide sufficient protection. In addition to the fluctuations in air temperature, Wilkes became convinced that there was a “hollow tunnel or cavern” beneath the house that made it difficult to retain warmth at night. He decided to thatch the pendulum house, placing dry grass procured from Hilo between the house and the tent and over the lava floor. By January 5, he was satisfied that he could maintain a temperature of 40°F inside the house, and the pendulum experiments were begun.

  Three days later on January 8, they were socked with another storm. “At 10 pm I was unable to proceed with the pendulum observations,” Wilkes wrote, “for such was the fury of the storm that the journeyman-clock, with a loud beat, although within three feet of my ear, could not be heard. I was indeed apprehensive that the whole tent, house, and apparatus would be blown over and destroyed.” Later that night the wind began to moderate, and by the next morning Wilkes resumed his experiments. Then, on January 10, they were hit with the highest winds of the Expedition.

  “I will not say that I never saw it blow so hard,” Charlie Erskine later remembered, “but I never saw it blow any harder. For fear of some damage to the instruments we were ordered to run out and take them down. We had no sooner got them stowed away snug in their cases than our camp was struck by a terrific hurricane which raised the roof of the pendulum house high into the air and scattered its fragments on the sides of the mountain. The other house was demolished and several valuable instruments badly injured. Pieces of canvas from our tents, spread out as big as table-cloths, might be seen floating in the air. The wind was so violent that it was impossible to keep our footing, so we laid down and clung closely to the side of the mountain.”

  As the sailors lay pinned to the jagged summit of Mauna Loa, they kept up their usual banter. “Amidst all this Jack had his jokes, you may be sure,” Erskine wrote. “You might hear one sing out, ‘I say, old gruffy, my lad, did you ever fall in with anything like this off Cape Cod? ‘No, my hearty, it even beats Cape Horn.’ Another would shout, ‘I’ve seen it blowing like blue blazes, but this is a regular blow-hard, hard enough to blow Yankee Doodle on a frying-pan.’”

  The next morning, Erskine was astonished to see that “the Star Spangled Banner” was still waving from the flagpole. “I felt proud to know that my country’s flag . . . had been borne by brave men, north, south, east, and west, and waved to the breeze in as high an altitude as the flag of any other nation.”

  The following night, after reassembling the scattered pieces of the pendulum house, Wilkes finally completed his experiments. Even though there was close to half a foot of snow on the ground, he resolved to assist in surveying the interior of the crater the next day, January 12. The wind had died to next to nothing and a brilliant equatorial sun shone down on the pure white snow. Wilkes made several observations with a theodolite, but as the sun climbed in the sky, he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on his work. “The weather was s
till and calm,” he wrote, “and a deathlike stillness prevailed, which I dreaded to break, even by making a remark to my companions upon the splendor of the scene before us. The sight was surpassingly grand.” In the distance, sandwiched between the deep blue of the ocean and the white haze of the sky, were the islands of Maui and Kaho‘olawe. They also had clear views of the surrounding peaks of Hualalai and Mauna Kea. “I can never hope again to witness so sublime a scene,” Wilkes wrote, “to gaze on which excited such feelings that I felt relieved when I turned from it to engage in the duties that had called me to that spot.”

  When Wilkes returned to the camp, he discovered that a party of forty natives had taken advantage of the break in the weather to climb to the summit. They had heard that Wilkes was willing to pay them well for helping to disassemble the village of Pendulum Peak and carry the equipment down the mountain. As the temperature began to plummet that evening, Wilkes realized that he had to provide shelter for the natives. The pendulum house was the largest building on the mountain, and after packing up the clock and pendulum, Wilkes ordered the natives to spend the night on the house’s bed of dry grass. He also ordered Joseph Clark to etch “Pendulum Peak, January 1841” into the lava. Clark subsequently asked that “U.S. Ex. Ex.” be added “in order that there might be no mistake as to who had been there.”