Sea of Glory

perhaps twenty miles off, with a foothold that I could scarcely preserve from the depth I was in and the swash of the Seas, and surrounded by the men [in the boat] who were holding books, pencils, spy glass, and watch, all of which were used in turn.”
    All agreed that surveying in an open boat did terrible things to a man’s constitution. It was said that two months of this duty was enough to shorten a person’s life by one to two years. Some of the officers would spend as many as fifty consecutive days on boat duty. By the end of their stay at Fiji, Hudson calculated that the Peacock ’s four boats had covered a total of 8,225 miles.
    On the evening of July 3, after twelve days of surveying, Reynolds returned for a brief respite aboard the Peacock. “[T]he little motion [the ship] had at her anchor,” he wrote, “was so different from the quick & irregular jumping of the boats that I tottered, lost my balance & staggered as a drunken man.” He soon discovered that the mood aboard the Peacock was even worse than when he had left. Yet another accident had occurred. While firing the guns to measure baselines for the boats, a sailor had unwisely slipped a cartridge of powder into his shirt. A spark from the gun’s touchhole flew onto the cartridge, and more than three pounds of gunpowder exploded. Reynolds’s friend Dr. Guillou didn’t give the poor sailor much of a chance. He now lay on a cot on the ship’s deck, his horribly scorched skin covered with swatches of oil-soaked linen. “Oh! It was piteous to see him so,” Reynolds wrote. “He lingered on, in the most intense pain & groaning continually so that no one could rest in the ship.”
    As if this weren’t enough of a nightmare, the Peacock ’s officers and men had received an entirely different kind of scare from the natives. That morning, off the island of Tavea, a young chief and his party of three canoes had come alongside with some news that they wanted to share with the Papalangi. The chief’s wife excitedly informed Hudson that they had just taken three prisoners from a rival village and had “roasted them & eaten part!” What’s more, in one of their canoes was a piece of a body, wrapped in plantain leaves. “The infernal devils were eager to show their hellish food,” Reynolds wrote, “and they held up the flesh, in the Canoe alongside, that it might be seen. Not content with this, they brought a skull on board, all raw & bloody, with the marks of their teeth, where they had torn away strips of flesh; and one of their Epicures, was crunching an Eye, to which was hanging some of the fat & muscles of the face & cheek.” Perhaps enjoying the fact that the Americans were so obviously taken aback, the native munching the eye exclaimed, “Vinaka, vinaka,” or “Good, good.” Hudson turned and vomited over the Peacock ’s side.
    For six feet of cloth, the purser William Spieden purchased the skull for the Expedition’s collection. “Everybody in the Ship seemed oppressed with a weight of horror,” Reynolds wrote, “& there was a crushing & awfully nervous feeling came over me, which I could not shake off.” The next morning, Reynolds went to the forward part of the ship to look at the skull. “God!” he wrote, “to think that this had but a day or two ago contained a cunning brain!”
     
    As the officers proceeded with the survey, the scientists were performing some of the most important work of the Expedition. Although the botanist William Rich was, in the words of James Dana, proving “so-so,” William Brackenridge and Charles Pickering were more than making up for his lack of expertise. Indeed, the two scientists had become an informal team, with Brackenridge, a broad-shouldered Scot, who had formerly been in charge of the famed Edinburgh Gardens, providing the practical know-how while the diminutive Pickering, whose technical expertise in a variety of fields was unsurpassed, assisted in classification of the 650 different plant species they found in Fiji. It was Pickering who had discovered that as long as they didn’t bring any objects of value with them, the natives showed no interest in doing them any harm. This enabled the two scientists to trek unmolested into the interiors of the islands, where they found a new species of tomato as well as a virulent species of poison ivy that they carefully collected with sticks. In Vanua Levu, Brackenridge found the last remaining groves of sandalwood, which had been