Sea of Glory

soaked. Dispensing with their worthless exploring boots, they wrapped their feet in blankets in an attempt to stay warm. Then it began to sleet, covering the schooner’s deck, as well as the jackets of the men, in a glistening shell of ice. When the jib split, the icy conditions made it impossible to take in the sail, which hung over the side by a single hank on the forestay. Five of the men were now so debilitated by cold that they could barely stand. Yet all continued to do their duty without complaint.
    On March 14 they reached a prearranged rendezvous point with the Peacock at 105° west, just a few degrees of longitude from Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra. Once the weather began to ease, Walker and his men took the opportunity to repair their damaged boats and tend to a sailor who had fractured a rib. After waiting a day, with no sign of the Peacock, they headed south.
    The farther south they sailed, the more astonished they were by the amount of wildlife inhabiting this seemingly barren place. The water was filled with penguins; countless birds swarmed in the air; the many whale spouts reminded the men of smoke curling from the chimneys of a crowded city. At one point a huge right whale, longer than the Flying Fish, appeared in front of the schooner and refused to budge, forcing the men to push the creature off with boathooks.
    On March 19 they passed between two icebergs that they calculated to be 830 feet high. They hove to beside one of the massive bergs to fill their water casks with meltwater. “Encompassed by these icy walls,” Palmer wrote, “the schooner looked like a mere skiff in the moat of a giant’s castle.” The towering walls of ice and the cold dry Antarctic air created strange acoustics. “The voice had no resonance,” Palmer wrote, “words fell from the lip and seemed to freeze before they reached the ear.”
    Once they’d filled their casks, they continued on through the fog, the deck officer on watch always standing at the forecastle, listening for the roar of breakers. Several times they looked up to discover an iceberg’s frozen sides emerging from the mist. At twilight they narrowly averted slamming into a submerged tongue of ice that would have surely sunk them. Although the icebergs were a constant threat, there was yet another, far more insidious danger: becoming trapped in the ice as the temperature began to drop. By this point all their thermometers had been broken, so they mounted tin pots in the rigging and filled them with water. They would continue south until the water started to freeze.
    On March 20, the fog suddenly lifted. There, just a few yards ahead of them, was the wall of ice that had stopped both Hudson and Cook. Fifteen to twenty feet high, it extended to both the eastern and western horizons. To the south lay “a vast and seemingly boundless field,” wrote Walker, who proceeded to head west and then east, “luffing and bearing away alternately to avoid dangerous contact with large detached masses.”
    The next day, at four P.M., they found it—an opening to the south. With all sails set, they were doing eight knots, “flattering ourselves,” Walker remembered, “we should get beyond Cook.” But by noon of the next day, “our hopes were blasted in the bud.” They were hove to in another gale. All around them were icebergs, “whose pale masses just came in sight through the dim haze, like tombs in a vast cemetery.”
    The next day the skies cleared and the wind disappeared. To the south it seemed as if they could see all the way to the pole. “The eye ached for some limit to the space,” Palmer wrote, “which the mind could hardly grasp.” Behind them, several giant floes of ice collided, closing them in. The ice shifted again, opening up a sliver of space through which Walker attempted to squeeze his little schooner, sometimes forcing her into the ice. The carpenter ran aft, warning that the vessel was not built for this kind of abuse. “[B]ut there was no alternative except to buffet her through,” Palmer wrote, “or be carried to the south.” Finally at nine in the morning of March 22, they reached an area of relative safety. They were at latitude 70° south, longitude 101° west.
    Two days later, they found themselves once again in a diminishing breeze, with the temperature dropping. It was so quiet that they could hear the water freezing around them. Palmer described it as “a low crepitation, like the clicking of a death-watch” as the