Sea of Glory

scarcely say,” Wilkes wrote, “I passed a most uncomfortable night.”
    The next morning one of the men found a calabash of provisions that had been abandoned by the natives. After what the sailors termed “a comfortable breakfast,” they set out around eleven A.M. They soon discovered that the upper portion of the volcano was, in Wilkes’s words, “a mass of clinkers.” “[ I ]t . . . continued snowing in squalls,” he wrote, “with a keen southwest wind driving in our faces; the ground being covered a foot deep with snow, rendered it more dangerous and irksome to pass over such loose and detached masses.”
    They reached the caldera of Mauna Loa in the early afternoon. Although not as active as Kilauea, the volcano’s proportions stunned Wilkes and his men: “The very idea of standing on the summit of one of the highest peaks in the midst of this vast ocean, in close proximity to a precipice of profound depth, overhanging an immense crater . . . would have been exciting even to a strong man,” Wilkes wrote; “but the sensation was overpowering to one already exhausted by breathing the rarefied air, and toiling over the lava which this huge caldron must have vomited forth in quantities sufficient to form a dome sixty miles in diameter, and nearly three miles in height.”
    Wilkes had entertained hopes of descending into the crater that afternoon but quickly realized that the snow and high winds required them to make camp. By four P.M. they’d pitched a tent about sixty feet from the ledge of the crater. Since it was impossible to drive stakes into the rock, they used blocks of lava to secure the tent’s ropes. Once the tent had been set up, Wilkes ordered the men, with the exception of his steward and servant, to return to their previous encampment. Wilkes intended to spend his first night on the summit of Mauna Loa much as he did in the cabin of the Vincennes, accompanied by only his steward and his trusted servant Juan.
    That night the storm picked up. “Our fire was dispersed,” Wilkes wrote, “candles blown out, and the tent rocking and flapping as if it would go to pieces, or be torn asunder from its fastenings, and disappear before the howling blast. I now felt that what we had passed through on the previous night was comfort in comparison to this. The wind had a fair sweep over us, and as each blast reached the opposite side of the crater, the sound which preceded its coming was at times awful; the tent, however, continued to stand, although it had many holes torn in it, and the ridge-pole had chafed through its top.”
    The next morning they were unable to light a fire. With four inches of snow on the ground, Wilkes decided that the three of them should wait until assistance arrived from below. Around eleven A.M., Judd and Charles Pickering reached the summit. Judd opened the tent door and found Wilkes and his attendants wrapped in their blankets.
    Judd had some bad news. All the natives had deserted. “I was glad to hear it,” Wilkes later wrote Jane, “for I could not help pitying their forlorn condition in such bitter weather. This put me in better spirits, greatly to [Judd’s] surprise. . . . I became merry, got something to eat and comforted myself that my sailors would be along soon and be all the help I could wish for, & so it happened.”
    Over the next few weeks, a series of supply stations was established between the summit and the Vincennes that sent a steady stream of provisions and men to what Wilkes called Pendulum Peak. By the end of December, there were enough men on the summit to finish the construction of a virtual village comprising a dozen structures, each surrounded by its own stone wall, with a much larger wall encircling the entire outpost. Several days of fine weather greatly facilitated their efforts but also showed Wilkes the incredible variations in temperature encountered at this altitude—ranging from 13°F at night to 92°F in the noonday sun. For Wilkes, this was troubling, since his pendulum experiments must be conducted at a constant temperature. He must do everything in his power to insulate the pendulum house.
    After erecting the house’s wooden walls, he placed a thick, hair-cloth covering both inside and out; he then surrounded the entire house with a heavy-duty canvas tent. But this did not provide sufficient protection. In addition to the fluctuations in air temperature, Wilkes became convinced that there was a “hollow tunnel or cavern”