Sea of Glory

“finally,” Wilkes wrote, “we became immersed in them.”
    Soon after setting out the next morning, December 21, from what Wilkes called Sunday Station, the ascent became much steeper. “[T]he whole face of the mountain consisted of one mass of lava,” Wilkes wrote, “that had apparently flowed over in all directions from the summit.” The sun beat down on the black rock, and the men found their desire for water “redoubled” since the previous day. Wilkes had originally planned on using the snow at the volcano’s summit to provide water for his men. But the summit was still eight thousand feet above them, requiring a hike of two, perhaps three more days. Around noon, Wilkes called a temporary halt. “Most of the party were now lying on the rocks,” he wrote, “with the noonday sun pouring on them; a disposition to sleep, and a sensation and listlessness similar to that procured by sea-sickness, seemed to prevail.” Judd offered to climb ahead in search of snow, and Wilkes gladly sent the doctor on his way. For his part, Wilkes had no choice but to succumb to exhaustion: “I enjoyed as sound an hour’s sleep on the hard lava as I have ever had.”
    They climbed another two miles before making camp near a large cave, which provided excellent shelter for the natives. This would become known as the Recruitment Station. As darkness descended, there was no sign of Dr. Judd. Fires were lit, and in a few hours Judd appeared, bone weary and with a snowball in his hands. He had climbed for about four and a half hours, roughly halfway to the summit, before he reached snow. He reported that the drifts appeared to be melting fast. It would require a long hard day of hiking if they were to have water the next day. That night, despite the grim conditions, Charlie Erskine and his fellow sailors made the best of it in the shelter of the cave, “singing, laughing, and joking, as if on a picnic party.” “Place the sailor in any situation you will,” Charlie insisted, “you cannot deprive him of his mirth and gayety.” Tom Piner, the elderly quartermaster and a devout Christian, told his young companions that they were now “as near to heaven as we ever would be unless we mended our ways.”
    On the morning of December 22, Wilkes left Lieutenant Thomas Budd in charge of the Recruitment Station as he pushed on with a party of twelve natives and seven men, including his steward and servant. Throughout the day, the temperature continued to drop, and Wilkes kept the natives ahead of him so that they couldn’t desert. By the afternoon it was just 25°F and blowing a gale from the southwest. The natives were now in danger of freezing to death. Wilkes ordered them to deposit their loads in the lee of a nearby wall of rocks, then granted them permission to return to the station below. “[T]hey seemed actually to vanish,” he wrote. “I never saw such agility displayed by them.” Soon the natives on the trail below began to desert en masse. “The mountain became . . . a scene of confusion,” he wrote, “being strewn with instruments, boxes, pieces of portable houses, tents, calabashes, etc.”
    Wilkes was left with only his guide and nine men. A snowstorm was coming, the temperature had dropped to 18°F, and many of them had become stricken with a severe case of altitude sickness. Wilkes described it as “a violent throbbing of the temples and a shortness of breath, that were both painful and distressing.” Although they found it difficult even to move, Wilkes ordered them to start building a shelter out of the coarse blocks of lava (which they referred to as clinkers) strewn about the mountainside. Soon they’d constructed a circular enclosure, with a piece of canvas serving as the roof. They hung blankets along the inside walls, “which I hoped,” Wilkes wrote, “would keep us from being frozen.” Wilkes’s steward had some tea in his knapsack, and after making a small but serviceable fire, they enjoyed what food they had. “The supper being ended,” Wilkes wrote, “we stowed ourselves away within the circular pen; and while the men kept passing their jokes about its comforts, the wind blew a perfect hurricane without.” That night the temperature dropped to 15°F. They were at an altitude of 13,190 feet.
    Around four A.M., their canvas roof collapsed, dumping a large quantity of snow into the shelter. They did their best to restore the roof, but all of them were now extremely cold. “I need