Sea of Glory

South Antarctic Circle,” adding, “I should indeed rejoice to extend the requirements of the Gospel . . . from Pole to Pole.”
    The weather was miserable—a wet cold fog that often made it impossible to see the icebergs that loomed ahead until they “popp[ed] up suddenly in your face to bid you defiance.” Unlike Wilkes, who seemed to flourish amid the terrors of an iceberg-infested sea, Hudson quickly grew weary of the strain. “This fancy kind of sailing,” he confided in his journal, “is not all that it is cracked up to be.” But there was one advantage to the steadily falling temperatures. By March 18, the Peacock was coated in a thick layer of ice. “Our Antarctic Caulker has so thoroughly performed his duty,” Hudson wrote, “that we shall be comparatively dry below.”
    On March 22, the fog lifted for a moment to reveal an icy barrier similar to what Cook had encountered more than half a century before. Hudson made his way east, hoping for an opening. Heavy squalls battered them on the twenty-fourth, the conditions made all the more dangerous by the presence of dozens of icebergs, some extending as high as two hundred feet above the sea. The next day, the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in almost a week, allowing them to make a noon sight. They were at latitude 68° south, longitude 97°58’ west—just a few degrees from Cook.
    An hour later, “a strange sail” was sighted to the west. All hands rushed on deck; it was the first vessel they’d seen in almost a month. They hoisted their flag and fired a gun. To their great joy and relief, they soon realized it was the Flying Fish, and at three P.M. the schooner passed astern of the Peacock, both crews giving each other three hearty cheers. A boat was dispatched to the Flying Fish, and soon Lieutenant Walker, along with a sailor whose cracked ribs were in need of medical attention, were on the Peacock ’s deck. Walker had brought his chart with him and seemed eager to tell his story. Hudson ushered the young lieutenant below to his cabin, and with the chart spread out before them, Walker recounted how the Flying Fish, the smallest vessel in the squadron, had just made history.
     
    William Walker had not been particularly happy about commanding the Flying Fish. He felt he should have been given the larger Sea Gull since he was ahead of Robert Johnson on the list. His friends consoled him with the assurance that the ninety-six-ton schooner “would at least make him an honourable coffin.”
    Just two days later, on the night of February 26, Walker and his fourteen-man crew began to wonder if that was indeed what the Flying Fish was about to become. As they lay to in the squall that had separated them from the Peacock, gigantic seas continually broke over the schooner’s deck. To continue without the company of the much larger ship seemed like madness. But when the gale moderated the next day, they pushed on to the south.
    On the night of March 2, another gale kicked up. The wind shifted direction, creating the same jumbled sea conditions that caused William Stewart’s fall aboard the Peacock. Aboard the schooner, it was part earthquake, part tsunami. “It was almost impossible to stand on deck without danger of being carried overboard,” wrote the surgeon James Palmer, “and below, everything was afloat. Books, clothes and cabin furniture chased each other from side to side; while the bulkheads creaked, and blocks thumped over-head, with a distracting din.”
    The storm lasted thirty-six hours. On March 6, they experienced their first sunny day of the cruise. Birds followed behind them; a porpoise leaped at their bow; but at midnight it began to blow. “A dreadful night succeeded,” Palmer wrote. Huge seas broke across the deck, crushing their two boats and ripping the binnacle, the wooden box containing the compass, off its fastenings and into the ocean. The companion-slide was then torn away by a mountainous wave that flooded the cabin and knocked both the helmsman and lookout off their feet. When a whale rubbed up against the beleaguered schooner and an albatross flapped its wings in the face of one of the men, Walker began to wonder if all of nature had somehow conspired against them.
    Three days later, they discovered a leak in the bread-room, requiring that they shift the stores aft. Most of the next day was spent at the pumps. The schooner was now leaking at every seam. Their clothes and bedding were completely