Sea of Glory

perspective on the incident. “Every one says the devilish Schooners are the cause of it all,” he wrote. “They ought at first to have been given to the two senior lieutenants when they applied for them.”

    By February 25, it was time to depart. Wilkes divided the four vessels into two groups. Hudson, in command of the Peacock, would sail west and south in the company of the Flying Fish in an attempt to better Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra in the vicinity of longitude 106° west. Wilkes had taken over command of the Porpoise and, along with the Sea Gull, would sail south and east toward the South Shetland Islands.
    Wilkes’s greatest hopes for discovery lay to the east of the South Shetlands. In the more than sixty years since Cook’s historic voyage south, only one navigator had bettered his mark. On February 18, 1823, the British sealer James Weddell, sailing from the South Orkney Islands, well to the east of the South Shetlands, had reached latitude 74°15’ south, longitude 34°16’ west, almost two hundred miles farther south than Cook. Instead of a wall of ice, Weddell had encountered open water and warm temperatures, prompting him to wonder if instead of land, a navigable sea might extend all the way to the pole. Since that time, no explorer had been able to come close to Weddell’s achievement. Wilkes theorized that the lateness of the season might actually work to his advantage when it came to reproducing the conditions the British sealer had encountered in what is known today as the Weddell Sea.
    The Porpoise and the Sea Gull were the first to depart Orange Bay at 7:30 A.M. on February 25. “[W]e gave them three hearty cheers,” Reynolds wrote, “wishing them, with all our hearts, a prosperous time, and a safe return.” At four P.M., a heavy squall pushed the two vessels with a shove out into the fearsome waters of the Drake Passage, the six-hundred-mile stretch of open water between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands. The Drake Passage is the only place on earth where the wind can circulate around the entire globe without ever touching land, making it one of the most dangerous places on the planet for a sailing vessel.
    The following day, they came upon a whaleship from New York, homeward bound with 3,800 barrels of oil. Realizing that the whalers would soon be back in the United States, Wilkes asked if they’d be willing to take along some letters. The whaling captain cheerfully agreed, and soon the officers of both the Porpoise and the Sea Gull were scribbling out notes to their loved ones. They were descending into one of the coldest, most perilous parts of the world at a time of year when anyone with any sense would have been headed in the opposite direction. All of them could not help but wonder if these might be the last letters they ever wrote. “I am in excellent spirits,” Wilkes assured Jane, “and am living with Ringgold during this trip.” He added that their nephew Wilkes Henry “is quite well and grown astonishingly.”
    With the wind almost directly behind them, they sailed to the southeast at nine knots over huge rolling waves that Wilkes calculated to average thirty-two feet in height. For those aboard the tiny Sea Gull, it was proving to be a thrilling and very wet ride as the narrow schooner surfed into the backsides of the cresting seas. On February 28, the jarring strain of several days of wave-riding caused the Sea Gull ’s gaff to break. Despite the immense seas, Johnson was able to maneuver the schooner to within a few feet of the Porpoise and transfer the splintered spar to the brig’s carpenter, who had it repaired in a few hours.
    That afternoon it began to snow, and they sighted their first cape pigeons or petrels—dark-brown birds lightly spotted with white that are known for following ships in the Southern Ocean for days at a time. Cape pigeons are also regarded as a sign that icebergs are in the vicinity, and sure enough, at dawn the following day, they saw their first “island of ice.” Wilkes remarked that the icebergs looked worn, “as if the sea had been washing over them for some time.”
    They had crossed the Antarctic Convergence, the area where the relatively warm waters from the north meet the cold surface waters to the south. They had entered a region of colder, less salty water, with markedly different flora and fauna. Both the Porpoise and the Sea Gull were soon surrounded by swimming penguins. “I had not known that the Penguins lived