Sea of Glory

wrote. The sleet and dense haze offered little visibility, but Lieutenant Long knew that somewhere to leeward lay what was known as the “Milky Way,” a region of countless rocks and tiny islands that virtually defied navigation. Philip King, the British navy captain whose sailing instructions Long had read with great care, said of the Milky Way: “No vessel ought to entangle herself in these labyrinths, if she does, she must sail by eye. Neither chart, directions, nor soundings, would be of much assistance and in thick weather the situation would be most precarious.”
    At three P.M. the next day the lookout cried, “Breakers under the bows!” Out of the thick gray mist loomed the hundred-foot-high Tower Rocks, against which the waves of the Southern Ocean broke with such force that the spray shot up higher than the Relief ’s masthead. The ship was brought about but could make no headway against the tremendous wind and waves. The mist broke clear for a few minutes, revealing Noir Island under the lee bow, just a few miles to the northeast. “[N]ight was approaching,” Lieutenant Long wrote, “to claw off or hold our own was impracticable, a portentous sky, and the ‘milky way’ close under our lee, warned us that our graves might be made in it.” Long resolved to sail for the shelter of Noir Island.
    “We could not but admire the coolness and judgment of Captain Long,” Dana wrote, “who, through the whole was seated on the foreyard, giving his orders as quietly and deliberately as in more peaceful times.” As the Relief bore down on Noir Island, Long ordered the men to prepare the anchors. In a half hour they had rounded the southeastern point of the island, where they found a small, partially sheltered cove. It would have to do. In sixteen fathoms of water, they brailed up their trysails, luffed into the wind, and let go two of their anchors, along with one hundred and fifty fathoms of chain, and furled the sails. “Here we felt comparatively safe,” Long wrote. That night, the naturalist Charles Pickering overheard one of the officers remark “that a few such days as this would make a man turn gray.” “[T]he sequel proved,” Pickering wrote, “that one’s hair does not turn gray so easily.”
    When they awoke the next morning, the wind had diminished. They could see snow atop the six-hundred-foot-high peaks of the island. Some of the scientists, noticing a tiny cove beside them, even talked about going ashore. But then the wind began to build and shifted to the southeast. The island was no longer providing any protection. “A heavy Cape Horn sea was now setting into the harbor,” Dana wrote, “and as the ship reared and plunged with each passing wave we feared that every lurch would snap the cables or drag our anchors.” An old sailor who had been more than forty-five years at sea told Pickering that he “had never before seen such riding.” Behind them was a reef that terminated with a large jagged rock, which now lay directly astern. They watched as the waves thundered against it. That night, the anchors began to drag. Long ordered the men to lower a third anchor, then a fourth. “[T]here seems to be nothing that separates us from eternity,” he wrote in his log, “but the sailors semblance of Hope, the Anchor.”
    The next morning, March 20, Long ordered the men to heave in the two larboard chains to see if the anchors were still attached to them. As he had suspected, one of them was gone completely while the other had lost its shank, rendering it worthless. “Our situation may be described,” he wrote, “but I shan’t attempt it.” The wind began to build, creating what Long described as “an awful swell.” As night approached, Long ordered his officers and men to “prepare for the worst.” Dana decided that in the event that the Relief drifted into the ironbound coast of Noir Island behind them, “his the happiest lot who was soonest dead” since those who weren’t drowned or battered to pieces on the rocks could only look forward to dying of exposure on the island, which was now completely smothered in snow. Assuming his time had come, Pickering, the naturalist, decided to retire to his cabin. With a pillow under his head and his cloak wrapped around him, he stretched out on the cabin floor and fell instantly asleep—“a philosophic act,” Wilkes later wrote, “that was in keeping with his quiet and staid manner.”
    No one else aboard the Relief appears to