Sea of Glory

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