Sea of Glory

Everest and K-2. Mauna Loa is also astonishingly broad, containing an estimated ten thousand cubic miles of rock, making it the most voluminous volcano on earth. Indeed, Mauna Loa is so heavy that it has depressed the seafloor by almost five miles. Measured from its base below the seafloor, Mauna Loa is ten and a half miles high—almost twice the height of Mount Everest.
    Prior to the visit of the U.S. Ex. Ex., there had been only three recorded ascents of Mauna Loa. The first unsuccessful attempt had been made in January 1779 by a party from Cook’s final expedition. Just a few weeks before Cook’s death in Kealakekua Bay on the western side of Hawaii, four men, including the American corporal of marines, John Ledyard, attempted to scale the volcano. After two days of climbing, Ledyard and his companions encountered a thicket so dense that they were forced to turn back. Fourteen years later, Archibald Menzies, a botanist with George Vancouver’s expedition, encountered the same thicket and also decided to abandon his attempt. Not until his third try, on February 1794, when he followed the advice of Hawaii’s ruling chief Kamehameha I, who suggested he approach the mountain from the southeast, did Menzies and three others reach the snow-covered summit. Menzies, an experienced and hardy naturalist, described the climb as “the most persevering and hazardous struggle that can possibly be conceived.”
    Since Menzies’s ascent, which Vancouver failed to mention in his narrative of the expedition and which was therefore unknown to Wilkes, two other scientists—the Scottish botanist David Douglas in 1834, and the scientist M. Isidor Lowenstern in 1839—had reached the top of Mauna Loa. In both instances, dreadful weather conditions reduced the naturalists’ time at the summit to a few hours. Wilkes, on the other hand, intended to create a temporary observatory atop Mauna Loa. This required that he bring the necessary equipment and provisions, including the panels of his pendulum house as well as his cumbersome and extremely delicate pendulum clock.
    Ever since the Frenchman Pierre Bouguer had conducted pendulum experiments in the Andes Mountains in Peru in 1737, scientists had been using pendulums, which measure the force of gravity, to determine the density of the earth’s more dramatic topographical features. Bouguer had found that the rocks of the Andes appeared to be less dense than the rocks of the Peruvian lowlands, thus becoming the first to realize that the density of the earth’s crust is variable. (Today these density variations are known as Bouguer anomalies.) Wilkes planned to take gravity readings not only atop Mauna Loa but at other locations across the island of Hawaii. If all went according to plan, his results would represent a major contribution to the study of the earth’s shape and density, known as geodesy.
    Wilkes included the naturalist Charles Pickering and the horticulturalist William Brackenridge in the Expedition, but there was one scientist who was noticeably absent. The geologist James Dana, destined to pioneer the science of volcanology, had been assigned to the Peacock. It was an astonishingly self-serving decision on the part of Wilkes, who apparently did not want the talented scientist to overshadow his own accomplishments at Mauna Loa. (Prior to the Peacock ’s departure, Dana had been able to make a brief visit to Hawaii, spending just a single day at the volcano of Kilauea.) For this particular expedition, Wilkes would have the island and its volcanoes to himself.
    “I look upon [the climb up Mauna Loa] as being one of the great works of my cruise,” he wrote Jane. “It requires no small exertion to accomplish it, but I have not much fear if the naked natives will hold out against the cold of its summit.” As always, uppermost in Wilkes’s thoughts was what this “novel and arduous enterprise” would do for his reputation. When he returned from the top of Mauna Loa, he confidently told Jane, “No one will be able to take away my fame.”
    Wilkes had employed the services of a leading Hawaiian missionary and doctor by the name of Gerrit Judd to organize the party of more than two hundred natives required to carry the equipment and provisions. Although the climb promised to be difficult, Wilkes was not about to go without some of the comforts he had come to expect aboard the Vincennes. His retinue included his steward, cook, his Chilean servant Juan, and, of course,