Sea of Glory

rain; then it began to sleet as the wind continued to build. They had no choice but to make a wild dash for Hermit Island to the south. “[The launch] was pressed with sail,” Reynolds wrote, “& bounded from Sea to Sea, with a speed that astonished us.” One of the crewmembers was a man named Jim Gibson, a sailor who had once gone to school with Reynolds back in Lancaster. As the waves broke over the sides of the launch, the two old friends, finding themselves in an open boat at the end of the world, talked of “how Comfortable we should be, if [we] were only by his Aunt Hubley’s stove, sipping hot punch.”
    The visibility was so terrible that they couldn’t see what lay ahead of them at Hermit Island. With the waves “deluging us fore and aft,” they came to within two boat-lengths of a rocky point. Just inside the point was a small cove sheltered from the wind. “[T]he helm was put hard down,” Reynolds wrote, “and in another moment we were in calm water, riding quietly at anchor.”
    For the next two weeks, they would spend most of their time huddled in this and another cove, riding out a series of ferocious gales, one of which was so severe that back in Orange Bay—supposedly the securest anchorage in the Hardy Peninsula—the Vincennes dragged her anchors. But they were not alone. There were also the local natives, the Yahgan Indians, who, much like Reynolds and company, traveled from island to island in small open boats. Indeed, the Yahgans were wonderfully adapted to life in a bark canoe. With big torsos, long arms, and spindly legs with flaps of skin hanging down from their knees, they traveled the waters off Tierra del Fuego, often with their entire families in a single canoe: the mother and eldest boy paddling, the father bailing out water and tending the fire that always burned on a few stones and ashes in the center of the hull as the infants and toddlers nestled in a bed of dry grass. Despite the horrendous weather, the Yahgans wore little or no clothing and while on land lived in tiny smoke-filled huts surrounded by heaps of limpet shells.
    When Darwin had first seen these people a few years before, he had been so shocked by their primitive state that he had written, “one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.” Reynolds, on the other hand, quickly discovered that the Yahgans had skills that he and Alden could only envy. After spending an entire night unsuccessfully attempting to light a fire, the naval officers watched in amazement as some Yahgans walked down to the beach the next morning and created a large blaze amid the wet underbrush. “[W]e could not learn by what means they kindled it,” Reynolds marveled. The Yahgans were also remarkable mimics, repeating with eerie precision just about everything the Americans said.
    One day it began to snow, and the sailors and the Indians enjoyed a snowball fight. “[W]e Skylarked among the snow together, as if we had been old friends: they were naked, & we warmly clad & I just thought that we presented as wide a contrast of person & habit as could be met with any where in the world.” But Reynolds, a man who enjoyed his luxuries, was not about to go native. “[I]f they be the children of Nature,” he wrote, “I am thankful that I am a member of a more artificial community, & will [waive forever] the belief, that those barbarous ones who have the fewest wants, lead a more enviable existence than the great civilized mass.”
    On March 25, the weather finally began to moderate. Just an hour after leaving their cove, they saw a sail in the distance. It proved to be the Sea Gull, and as the schooner approached, the officers on the launch took up a gun and fired a salute. When Reynolds first stepped onto the schooner’s deck, he was stunned by its comparative size. “The Sea Gull seemed a monster,” he wrote. “I thought her almost too large.” Most of all, however, he felt, for the first time in several weeks, safe.
    Johnson explained that soon after they returned to Orange Bay from the South Shetland Islands, he had been sent out on a search for the launch by Lieutenant Craven, who had begun to fear the worst. For their part, Alden and Reynolds were eager to hear about the Sea Gull ’s sail south, and they soon learned about the schooner’s stop at Deception Island—how they had anchored in the lagoonlike harbor of a volcano’s drowned crater and set out on an