Sea of Glory

beneath the house that made it difficult to retain warmth at night. He decided to thatch the pendulum house, placing dry grass procured from Hilo between the house and the tent and over the lava floor. By January 5, he was satisfied that he could maintain a temperature of 40°F inside the house, and the pendulum experiments were begun.
    Three days later on January 8, they were socked with another storm. “At 10 pm I was unable to proceed with the pendulum observations,” Wilkes wrote, “for such was the fury of the storm that the journeyman-clock, with a loud beat, although within three feet of my ear, could not be heard. I was indeed apprehensive that the whole tent, house, and apparatus would be blown over and destroyed.” Later that night the wind began to moderate, and by the next morning Wilkes resumed his experiments. Then, on January 10, they were hit with the highest winds of the Expedition.
    “I will not say that I never saw it blow so hard,” Charlie Erskine later remembered, “but I never saw it blow any harder. For fear of some damage to the instruments we were ordered to run out and take them down. We had no sooner got them stowed away snug in their cases than our camp was struck by a terrific hurricane which raised the roof of the pendulum house high into the air and scattered its fragments on the sides of the mountain. The other house was demolished and several valuable instruments badly injured. Pieces of canvas from our tents, spread out as big as table-cloths, might be seen floating in the air. The wind was so violent that it was impossible to keep our footing, so we laid down and clung closely to the side of the mountain.”
    As the sailors lay pinned to the jagged summit of Mauna Loa, they kept up their usual banter. “Amidst all this Jack had his jokes, you may be sure,” Erskine wrote. “You might hear one sing out, ‘I say, old gruffy, my lad, did you ever fall in with anything like this off Cape Cod? ‘No, my hearty, it even beats Cape Horn.’ Another would shout, ‘I’ve seen it blowing like blue blazes, but this is a regular blow-hard, hard enough to blow Yankee Doodle on a frying-pan.’”
    The next morning, Erskine was astonished to see that “the Star Spangled Banner” was still waving from the flagpole. “I felt proud to know that my country’s flag . . . had been borne by brave men, north, south, east, and west, and waved to the breeze in as high an altitude as the flag of any other nation.”
    The following night, after reassembling the scattered pieces of the pendulum house, Wilkes finally completed his experiments. Even though there was close to half a foot of snow on the ground, he resolved to assist in surveying the interior of the crater the next day, January 12. The wind had died to next to nothing and a brilliant equatorial sun shone down on the pure white snow. Wilkes made several observations with a theodolite, but as the sun climbed in the sky, he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on his work. “The weather was still and calm,” he wrote, “and a deathlike stillness prevailed, which I dreaded to break, even by making a remark to my companions upon the splendor of the scene before us. The sight was surpassingly grand.” In the distance, sandwiched between the deep blue of the ocean and the white haze of the sky, were the islands of Maui and Kaho‘olawe. They also had clear views of the surrounding peaks of Hualalai and Mauna Kea. “I can never hope again to witness so sublime a scene,” Wilkes wrote, “to gaze on which excited such feelings that I felt relieved when I turned from it to engage in the duties that had called me to that spot.”
    When Wilkes returned to the camp, he discovered that a party of forty natives had taken advantage of the break in the weather to climb to the summit. They had heard that Wilkes was willing to pay them well for helping to disassemble the village of Pendulum Peak and carry the equipment down the mountain. As the temperature began to plummet that evening, Wilkes realized that he had to provide shelter for the natives. The pendulum house was the largest building on the mountain, and after packing up the clock and pendulum, Wilkes ordered the natives to spend the night on the house’s bed of dry grass. He also ordered Joseph Clark to etch “Pendulum Peak, January 1841” into the lava. Clark subsequently asked that “U.S. Ex. Ex.” be added “in order that there might be no mistake as to who had