Sea of Glory

unsuccessful search for the self-registering thermometer left by the British explorer Captain Foster. Johnson and his men had walked over the surface of an active volcano, and even as snow and sleet pummeled their heads, they could feel heat radiating up through the thick soles of their boots. At one point Johnson put his ear to the ground and heard a roaring sound, like “a strong draught in a chimney.”
    Over the next week, as Alden supervised the completion of the survey from the security of the schooner, Reynolds fell in love—not with a woman, but with the Sea Gull. He became smitten with everything about this perfectly designed craft. One night as they rode out yet another gale, he could not help but wonder if the Sea Gull were, in fact, alive. “I could scarcely believe that all was mechanical,” he wrote, “that her nice & regular motion was merely the result of properties bestowed on her by the skillful builder. It seemed much more natural to think that She had a mind, an instinct, a will of her own, & that guided by it, she defied the threatening dangers of the Gale.”
    By the time they returned to Orange Bay, the squadron was buzzing with excitement. The Flying Fish had brought back word of her historic sail south; Wilkes had returned in the Porpoise, his initial euphoria tempered by an incident at the Strait of Le Maire just off the eastern tip of Tierra del Fuego. In the same storm that had nearly killed Reynolds and his compatriots, one of Wilkes’s officers, Lieutenant John Dale, had been trapped with his boat’s crew on the shore of Good Success Bay. The Porpoise had been forced to make for the open sea, and it had taken almost a week to retrieve Dale and his men. Wilkes blamed the delay on Dale’s incompetence, and a court of inquiry was to be convened once they reached Valparaiso. In the meantime, the Peacock was already on her way to Valparaiso while the Relief was long overdue from her cruise to the Strait of Magellan. In the sixty days since they first arrived at Orange Bay, they had experienced no less than eleven gales, averaging between two and three days in duration. To be trapped in a storm against a lee shore in the Strait of Magellan was a fate no man wanted to contemplate.
    On April 17, Wilkes decided that it was time for the Vincennes and Porpoise to depart for Valparaiso. He ordered the two schooners to wait another ten days for the Relief. If the storeship did return to Orange Bay, Wilkes wanted the schooners to transport the scientists to Valparaiso; otherwise they would be delayed even longer by an interminable passage north aboard the slow-sailing Relief. The next time the squadron reassembled, it would be in the warm waters of the Pacific.
     
    The Vincennes anchored at Valparaiso on May 15. Wilkes found the Peacock, but saw no sign of the Relief. From Hudson, who had been at anchor now for close to three weeks, he learned that Lieutenant Long had arrived almost a month earlier and had since sailed up the coast to Callao, Peru, where he was taking on stores. Wilkes also learned why the Relief had not returned to Orange Bay.
    While the rest of the squadron had headed south, the Relief had set out from Orange Bay for the Strait of Magellan on February 26. Long had been instructed to sail west and north, following the rocky coastline to the western entrance to the Strait. He was then to sail the length of the Strait, seeking shelter whenever necessary along its north shore while providing the scientists with every possible opportunity to collect specimens. By the time they returned to Orange Bay, no later than April 15, they would have completed a circumnavigation of Tierra del Fuego. But the voyage did not go as planned.
    Instead of hugging the shore on his way to the Strait of Magellan, as Wilkes had advised him to do, Long chose to play it safe, heading well offshore before beginning to work north. Unfortunately a series of storms and headwinds turned what Wilkes had predicted would be a two-day passage to the mouth of the Strait into a seemingly interminable struggle up the coast. On March 17, three weeks after leaving Orange Bay, the Relief was finally beginning to approach the western coast of South America. The geologist James Dana looked forward to “fine sport among the guanacos [cousins of llamas], birds and fish of the Straits.” But then it began to blow a gale from the southwest.
    “The winds howled through the rigging with almost deafening violence,” Dana