Sea of Glory

francs for every additional degree south, had met with disappointing results. Despite having started in early January, d’Urville had been unable to get beyond 65° south. By the time he sailed for South America, more than half his men had succumbed to scurvy.
    D’Urville’s experience below the Antarctic Convergence had been so demoralizing that he had chosen to spend the current Antarctic summer months in Polynesia, gathering his men’s strength for one last sail south. This meant that even though the French had departed a year ahead of the U.S. Ex. Ex., they had lost their initial advantage. When it came to the race to being the first to identify what lay to the south, it was now a dead heat between the French and the Americans.
    But, in actuality, both Wilkes and d’Urville, along with a slew of sealers in the early 1820s, had already glimpsed the Antarctic Continent. What Wilkes called Palmer’s Land is now known as the Antarctic Peninsula and has become the primary destination for tourists looking to visit the southernmost continent.
    But all that was in the distant future. As far as Wilkes and d’Urville were concerned, the search was still on. And besides, there was always the chance that Lieutenant Hudson had met with unexpected success to the west.
     
    It hadn’t started well. Soon after leaving Orange Bay on the morning of February 25, the Peacock and the Flying Fish had been blasted by a squall that sent them scurrying back for the protection of the bay’s outer anchorage. The next morning they were under way in a strong northerly breeze, but an unexpected current from the south of more than eight knots meant that they were barely making any real progress south.
    The next day, in a blinding gale, the Peacock and the Flying Fish were separated. As agreed upon, the Peacock waited for twelve hours, but after seeing no sign of the schooner, Hudson ordered that they head to the southwest.
    Like any sloop-of-war, the sides of the Peacock had been pierced to accommodate her guns; unfortunately, this did not make her a particularly good exploring vessel since the gun ports, which had begun to warp, leaked alarming amounts of the frigid Southern Ocean. Even Hudson’s cabin was frequently awash. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “most of us will have to submit to the tortures of Rheumatism as a set off to our curiosity and love of adventure.”
    Two stoves were set up belowdecks, and hot coffee was served to the men at midnight. In the early predawn hours of March 9, it began to snow, prompting Lieutenant Oliver Hazard Perry Jr. (the son of the War of 1812 hero) to awaken the naturalist Titian Peale, the only member of the scientific corps to have been included in this first voyage south, and show him an unusual artifact: the snowball he had made while on deck.
    A heavy cross-sea made for an uncomfortable ride, particularly for the men up in the ship’s rigging, who were ordered to let out the reefs in the topsails for the first time since leaving Orange Bay. Normally the sailors worked barefooted, but given the cold conditions, they’d been given government-issue “exploring boots” that proved to be as leaky as they were cumbersome. That day tragedy struck when William Stewart, captain of the maintop and one of the best seamen aboard the ship, fell from the maintopsail yard, bouncing off the main rigging before plunging into the sea. Sticking out of the water were his two exploring boots. Given the dangerous seas, it would have been impossible to send out a boat for him, but a quick-thinking sailor threw out a bowline and lassoed Stewart’s big boots, and he was soon hauled aboard. The surgeon determined that he’d suffered internal injuries during his fall, and two days later Stewart was buried at sea.
    On March 11, they saw their first iceberg. “[E]ven the sailors left their breakfast to have a look at it,” Peale wrote. Peale busied himself shooting birds—including two albatrosses (“ash colored with sooty heads”), a blue petrel, and a cape pigeon. He hoped the birds would be blown back onto the deck of the Peacock, but the winds never seemed to cooperate, and the potential specimens were lost.
    On Sunday, March 17, Hudson conducted a religious service on the half-deck. The sea was so high that the men had to lie down on the deck and, according to Peale, “hold on by whatever was near.” Hudson thought that this might have been the first time a sermon had been read “within the