Sea of Glory

present they were headed south. When it began to snow on February 6, the quartermaster Thomas Piner, one of the older members of the Vincennes ’s crew, commented that they were now “getting into the suburbs.”
    Then it began to blow. “The ship laboured much,” Reynolds wrote, “damaging crockery by the wholesale & taking in oceans of water.” His ornate bed was not suitable for a gale, so he was forced to spend the night in a hammock in steerage: “[T]o pass the night among such a million of noises, from the tramping & voices of men, the bleating & grunting of the live stock, the workings of the Masts & guns, the creaking of the Ladders, the howling of the winds, the strong dash of the breaking waves, & the continual fetching away of some thing or other about decks, is to suffer more than can be imagined, but which is well known, to all who have weathered out a Gale at Sea.”
    The next day, warm clothing, including the India rubber jackets originally ordered by Jones, was distributed to the crew. On Saturday, February 16, exactly twenty-four weeks after leaving Norfolk, they sighted the wave-washed outcropping of Cape Horn. Despite the Horn’s fierce reputation, the weather was wonderful—warm, sunny, and quiet—and the Vincennes sailed on with her studding sails set.
    It was soon learned that they were to proceed to Orange Bay, a well-protected natural harbor just inside the Hermit Islands at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego. Ever since 1616 when the Dutch explorer Willem Schouten named the bleak rock at the end of South America for his hometown of Hoorn in the Netherlands, Cape Horn and its gale-force southwesterly winds had been studiously, often desperately avoided by vessels attempting a passage between the world’s two largest oceans. During the War of 1812, navy captain David Porter had rounded the Horn in the American frigate Essex. “[O]ur sufferings . . . have been so great,” he wrote, “that I would advise those bound into the Pacific, never to attempt the passage of Cape Horn, if they can get there by another route.” Wilkes and his men were about to sail into the mythic recesses of one of the most feared places on earth.
    Wilkes had instructed Lieutenant Long and the Relief to proceed directly to Orange Bay, where he was to have already set up a revolving signal light atop a hill. Since they had no charts of the waters immediately surrounding Cape Horn—a region no mariner in his right mind would choose to visit—they had to be very careful as they felt their way along this rocky, inhospitable tip of the world, especially since, as Reynolds observed, “changes occur here, like lightning—quick & often unexpected.”
    All that night the wind remained light and baffling. At six in the morning, by which time the sun had already been up for two hours, all hands were called on deck to work the ship through a narrow, rock-rimmed channel. The wind was against them, requiring that they tack the Vincennes every five minutes. Repeatedly tacking a seven-hundred-ton square-rigged ship in a confined space required exceptional coordination and skill: The ship’s bow was swung quickly into the wind, and with her head yards thrown aback, the bow fell off from the wind until the after yards were swung around so that the sails could fill as the ship settled onto the new tack. Soon after coming up to speed, it was time once again to tack. In light air, there was always a danger that the ship might not have enough momentum to complete the maneuver—known as “missing stays”—a potentially disastrous turn of events when in close quarters with a rock. Tension mounted aboard the Vincennes, especially when darkness started to come on. “We were in an unknown place,” Reynolds wrote, “we knew nothing of the localities, nothing positive & certain. We had no soundings [due to the extreme depth of the water] & of course could not Anchor.”
    In hopes of attracting the attention of the Relief, they fired guns and rockets. Lookouts strained to see the light that was supposed to have been placed on a high hill. Twice a star rising up over the land was mistaken for the signal.
    At midnight the wind began to freshen. In fear of blundering into the rocks, the topsails were reefed, and the Vincennes stood offshore and waited for daylight. At four that morning it was light enough to read on deck, and the Porpoise was discovered nearby. An hour later, as the sun rose “in fiery splendor,” they saw