Sea of Glory

so much in water,” wrote Lieutenant Johnson, who was also impressed by the number of whales. “[O]n any part of the Horizon you might be able to sing out ‘Spout ho!’”
    But it was the icebergs that most impressed all of them. “[W]e met with some large Islands of ice fifty times as large as the Capitol and much whiter,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “and a great deal higher. . . . [S]oon we were literally surrounded with them, and a most magnificent sight it was too.” On March 1 they sighted several of the South Shetland Islands—volcanic, snow-topped outcroppings that had prompted one sealer to wonder if “Madame Nature had been drinking too much when she form’d this place.”
    Wilkes had hopes of landing on one of the islands to collect some specimens, but the conditions remained too rough. By March 3, they’d sailed to within sight of the eastern tip of Palmer’s Land. By now the icebergs were so numerous that navigation was extremely difficult. Johnson in the Sea Gull judged the conditions to be “utterly impassible.” But Wilkes remained undaunted. “[M]y little favorite the Porpoise showed herself worthy of the affection I have for her,” he wrote Jane. With the schooner following in her wake, the brig continued south, the helmsmen of both vessels forced to “put starboard and port every instant to avoid running into [ice].”
    Instead of the danger, Wilkes was transfixed by the view. “I have rarely seen a finer sight,” he wrote. “The sea was literally studded with these beautiful masses, some of pure white, others showing all the shades of opal, others emerald green and occasionally here and there some of a deep black, forming a strong contrast to the pure white.” At one point, with no fewer than two hundred icebergs in sight, Lieutenant Ringgold turned to Wilkes and proclaimed, “This is adventuring with boldness.” The two of them laughed, and Wilkes decided to name the three small islands ahead of them the Adventure Islets.
    At eight P.M. the fog socked in, forcing them to lay to till daylight. With both the air and water temperature at close to 28°F (the freezing point of salt water), it made for a miserable night, especially since the special cold-weather clothing provided by the government proved next to useless. When on March 5 the wind increased to a heavy gale as the temperature dropped to 25°F, Wilkes realized that it was time to retreat north. Both vessels were coated with snow and ice, but conditions were particularly bad aboard the Sea Gull. Every five minutes or so a large wave would break over the little schooner and drench the men. Icicles, “forming with the direction of the wind,” hung from the rigging; her fore sheets were so caked with ice that they were “the size of a sloop of war’s cable.” Wilkes ordered Johnson to return to Orange Bay after first stopping at Deception Island (one of the South Shetlands), where he was to attempt to retrieve a self-registering thermometer left by an earlier British expedition. Although he had no regrets about turning back, Johnson suspected that Wilkes was planning to continue on without him. After beating the ice from the rigging, the crew of the Sea Gull made sail for Deception Island.
     
    Wilkes had no illusions about the terrible conditions. To continue south would have been madness given the time of year. While Johnson headed west, Wilkes ordered the helmsman of the Porpoise to steer north, along the eastern edge of the South Shetland Islands. Instead of being shaken and dispirited by his brief bout with the Antarctic ice, Wilkes remained jubilant. “[T]hus far,” he later reported to Jane, “I may say the Expedition has proved as successful as I could have hoped or expected. . . . I never felt myself so full of energy in my life as I do now.” “Adventuring with boldness” apparently agreed with the commander of the Ex. Ex.
    To be sure, Wilkes had no reason to apologize for not pushing any farther south. Nine years before, Jeremiah Reynolds and some of the most experienced sealers in America (including the redoubtable Nathaniel Palmer) had not made it beyond the South Shetland Islands, even though the privately funded expedition had left Cape Horn more than a month earlier in the season than Wilkes. Just the year before, the veteran French explorer Dumont d’Urville, whose king had offered each member of his expedition a bonus of a hundred francs if they reached latitude 75° south and an extra twenty