Sea of Glory

dressed in white shirts and trousers, were mustered on the deck and landed on shore. A procession was formed, with Wilkes and his officers at the head, followed by the port and starboard watches, the marines, and a fifer and drummer. Striding proudly beside the master-at-arms, clearly enjoying his first time ashore since his arrest, was Veidovi, along with Wilkes’s dog Sydney.
    For Wilkes, whose relations with his officers and men had been so acrimonious and difficult, it was a day like no other. “It was truly gratifying,” he wrote, “to see them all in such good health and spirits, not a man sick, and their clothes as white as snow, with happy and contented faces.” That night, he and his officers had dinner together for the first time in more than a year. The pendulum house had been transformed into a banquet hall and the feasting continued until well past midnight. What might have been a night of unalloyed celebration was inevitably tempered with talk of the Peacock. “It was impossible to conjecture her fate,” Wilkes wrote, “yet her continued absence and detention beyond the time of her anticipated arrival, naturally excited many fears and surmises, which as the time passed on, made each one [of us] more certain that some disaster had befallen them.”
     
    The Peacock and the Flying Fish left Honolulu on June 2. Prior to their departure, Hudson had told Reynolds and the schooner’s commander, Passed Midshipman Samuel Knox, that he intended to use the schooner to locate the channel across the Columbia River bar before he risked the much larger, and deeper, Peacock. As a consequence, the two vessels sailed to the Pacific Northwest in tandem, with the ship carrying short sail so as not to lose the Flying Fish. Not until Sunday, July 18, after a passage of forty-six days—more than twice as long as it took the Vincennes and the Porpoise —did the Peacock and the Flying Fish finally reach the mouth of the Columbia. They were now almost three months late.
    As the fog began to clear that morning, the officers of the Flying Fish made preparations for the arrival of Captain Hudson. When Knox discovered that his dress uniform had been eaten by mice, Reynolds gloated that he had left his uniform safely tucked away in a drawer aboard the Peacock; but Knox was to have the last laugh.
    As far as the officers of the schooner were concerned, the conditions were not favorable for crossing the bar. There was a heavy swell running, and the breakers at the river mouth were dangerously high. The Peacock was well to weather of them, and instead of sailing down to deliver Hudson to the Flying Fish, the ship steered straight for the breakers ahead. “[I]t would be useless to deny that we had a presentiment that disaster & distress, or death, would happen to some of the vessels, or to some of us . . . ,” Reynolds wrote. “I never could get rid of this feeling, and, like the others, could only hope for the best.”
    A sense of foreboding also seems to have possessed the Peacock ’s captain. Hudson had told Wilkes of his concern about the Columbia River bar as early as the previous fall in Honolulu. His dread of the Columbia may have contributed to his now being three months behind schedule. But the Peacock ’s lateness only added to her captain’s anxieties, especially given the prospect of having to explain himself to the judgmental Wilkes. When finally faced with the breakers that had been figuring so prominently in his thoughts for the last eight months, Hudson appears to have panicked. Instead of using the schooner to search out the channel as he had previously planned, he decided to save a few hours by sailing boldly across the bar in the Peacock. His rashness in Antarctica had nearly sunk the ship; his officers and men could only hope that they would be luckier this time.
    At 11:30 A.M., approximately seven miles from Cape Disappointment, Hudson called “All Hands to Work Ship into Port.” With his copy of the sailing directions in his hand, he walked to the forward part of the ship, where he would divide his time between the forecastle and the foreyard, as Lieutenant George Emmons climbed up to the foretop yard. The directions indicated that they should head east for Cape Disappointment until Chinook Point bore east-northeast. But just as they reached the proper bearing, they encountered a steep, violent sea. Hudson became convinced that they were too far to the south. He wore the ship around and headed