Sea of Glory

Sydney. To make sure Judd had someone to talk to while he performed his experiments, Wilkes also brought along the American consul Peter Brinsmade. Since Wilkes had promised to pay him several times his annual missionary’s salary for his efforts, Judd was particularly anxious to please the man whom he deferentially referred to as “the Commodore.” Wilkes was delighted to discover that Judd had provided primitive sedan chairs for both himself and the consul, and he even sketched a drawing for Jane, showing him seated proudly on a parasol-equipped chair mounted on two poles shouldered by four natives. The Hawaiians, he told Jane, referred to him as “Komakoa,” or Great Chief, and “considered it a high honor to be thus employed.”
    But even the normally humorless Wilkes recognized the absurdity of the scene. As he and Brinsmade took up the rear, the diminutive Dr. Judd led a procession that included not only two hundred native bearers, but also their wives, children, and mothers-in-law. In addition to the pendulum clock, which required ten men, the natives lugged a small cannon for high-altitude sound experiments, the panels of the portable house, boxes of miscellaneous equipment, tents, and untold numbers of calabashes of food and water. There was even a herd of livestock that included a multitude of goats and one large, rowdy steer. “Little Dr. [Judd] sprang upon his horse, a lame one,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “and off he hobbled full of importance & business as the adjutant of our party. I laughed until the tears came into my eyes. So would you have done.” For Wilkes, this adventure was to provide a much-needed diversion. “I [was] most contented,” he wrote, “by feeling I was getting rid of [the] ship for a month at least and all its cares, duties, noise, etc. etc.”
    Since Mauna Loa is so wide, it is impossible to see the summit from its base; as a consequence, the volcano appeared to be much lower than it actually was. “From Hilo, Mauna Loa looks as if one might walk over its smooth surface without difficulty,” Wilkes wrote; “there is, indeed, so much optical deception in respect to this mountain that it served to give us all great encouragement.” Instead of marching directly up Mauna Loa, Wilkes planned first to visit the crater of Kilauea to the southeast. Although just over four thousand feet high, Kilauea (pronounced Keyla-WAY-ah) is the most active volcano in the world, and from Hilo, Wilkes could see “the silvery cloud which hangs over it by day.” As night came on, the fires beneath this pillar of steam gave the cloud a reddish hue, providing a haunting, almost biblical destination point for the climbing party.
    The incline was not steep, but the coarse basalt over which they walked was making short work of their shoes, and Wilkes sent down orders to the Vincennes for additional shoes and leather sandals for the natives. Three days later, with Kilauea not far ahead, they reached the upper edge of a dense stand of trees. “[O]n turning its corner,” Wilkes wrote, “Mauna Loa burst upon us in all its grandeur. . . . The whole dome appeared of a bronze color, and its uninterrupted smooth outline was relieved against the deep blue of a tropical sky. Masses of clouds were floating around it, throwing their shadows distinctly on its sides. . . . I now, for the first time, felt the magnitude of the task I had undertaken.”
    A group of ten sailors, including Charlie Erskine, Joseph Clark, and the quartermaster Tom Piner, pushed ahead to Kilauea. Erskine and his friends sat with their feet dangling over the crater’s edge, transfixed by the bubbling pools of bright-red lava, one of which sent up jets fifty to seventy-five feet in the air. Erskine estimated that the crater, known to scientists as a caldera, was “seven times as large as Boston Common”—about two by three miles across and a thousand feet deep.
    A sailor named Bill Richmond began, in Erskine’s words, “to spin a yarn about the kind of purchase he could rig in order to hoist one of the big icebergs we had seen in the Antarctic seas so as to drop it into this volcano. What a sizzling it would make!” It was dark by the time the rest of the expedition arrived. Wilkes immediately voiced his displeasure with Charlie and his compatriots. “He called us a ‘pack of foolish virgins,’” Erskine remembered, “and said ‘I don’t believe you could find half a dozen landlubbers so silly as to perch themselves