Sea of Glory

there.’” Wilkes ordered the men to move away from their dangerous roost and make camp for the night.
    The next day Wilkes and Dr. Judd decided to get a closer look at Kilauea. An eruption in 1832 had filled the caldera with solid lava to within six hundred feet of the top. Later that same year, the middle of this new crater floor had collapsed, leaving a six-hundred- to one-thousand-foot-wide rim that had become known as the Black Ledge. It was now possible to use the Black Ledge as a kind of ramp down to the caldera floor. “The crackling noise made in walking over this crisp surface (like a coating of blue and yellow glass) resembles that made by treading on frozen snow in very cold weather,” Wilkes wrote. “Every here and there are seen dark pits and vaulted caverns, with heated air rushing over them. Large and extended cracks are passed over, the air issuing from which, at a temperature of 180 degrees, is almost stifling.” The Black Ledge’s sharp crust cut the men’s shoes, but it was Sydney that suffered the most. The pads of the dog’s feet were so severely injured that he would be lame for several days.
    A portion of the Black Ledge had partially collapsed, and Wilkes and his party scrambled down the fractured pieces of basalt to the caldera floor. They were now close enough to the pools of lava that the soles of their shoes began to smoke as the tips of their walking sticks caught fire. Their guide warned that a lava pool could suddenly overflow in a matter of seconds. Wilkes judged it “one of the most horrible deaths . . . [to be] cut off from escape by the red molten fluid.” When one of the nearby lava pools began to percolate ominously, they decided it was time to retreat to the Black Ledge.
    Later, Gerrit Judd would return to the crater floor of Kilauea. Wilkes wanted a sample from one of the lava pools for the Expedition’s collection, and Judd, always eager to please his leader, offered to give it a try, taking with him a frying pan lashed to a long pole. As a precaution against the tremendous heat, he wore thick woolen socks and leather sandals over his shoes, as well as gloves. He had worked his way down into a hollow that was between twenty and thirty feet below what Wilkes called “the great fiery lake” in the southern portion of the crater. He was climbing up black rocks that were so hot that his spit bounced off them as it would on a griddle. Above him he could see jets of lava shooting up twenty-five feet in the air and then dropping down into the lake. If the pool should overflow, he would be immediately burned to death. Quite sensibly, he ordered the natives in his party to retreat to higher ground. He was about to follow them when he heard a peculiar sound about fifty feet away. Instead of fleeing in panic, Judd went to have a closer look. “In an instant, the crust was broken asunder by a terrific heave,” Wilkes wrote, “and a jet of molten lava, full fifteen feet in diameter rose to the height of forty-five feet, with a most appalling noise.” Judd began to run for it, but realized that he was now under a ledge of rock, with nowhere to go on either side of him. The heat had become so intense that it was impossible for him to look in the direction of the lava; the rocks beneath his feet were shaking in anticipation of what he assumed would be another explosion of lava. “Although he considered his life as lost,” Wilkes wrote, “he strove, although in vain, to scale the projecting rock.”
    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