Sea of Glory

Wilkes. Reynolds had nothing but admiration for the boy, and when heavy rains made it impossible to survey the next day, he and Underwood were pleased to spend the morning and afternoon in the village’s “big house,” talking with Henry and the natives. But the next day, when they returned to the village after surveying the harbor, they discovered that Commodore Wilkes, along with Waldron and nine sailors, had walked across the island to pay Henry a visit. It was time to move on.
    A little more than a week later, Reynolds and Underwood had completed their circumnavigation of Tutuila. The following afternoon the Vincennes weighed anchor and began to beat out of Pago Pago. Five days earlier, the Peacock and the Flying Fish, which had been sent ahead to the island of Upolu in western Samoa, had attempted to do the same thing. Given her fore-and-aft rig, the schooner had had no problem, but it had taken four hours for the square-rigged Peacock to tack her way out to sea. The large ocean swell at the harbor mouth made it difficult for the ship to carry her momentum through the eye of the wind, and several times it had looked as if the Peacock might be in danger of fetching up on the rocks.
    From the beginning, it did not go well for the Vincennes. Even though the water was as smooth as glass within the inner reaches of the harbor, the ship was unable to complete her first tack—gradually losing all forward motion until she lay motionless in the water with her bow pointed into the wind, known as missing stays. “[B]ut this was not to be wondered at,” Reynolds wrote. “Our first Luff [Lieutenant Carr, who was responsible for executing the maneuver] had disgraced himself often before.” Luckily, the harbor pilot, an Englishman named Edmund Fauxall, stepped in and issued the orders required to get the ship moving again. The Vincennes proceeded along well enough until she reached the swell at the harbor mouth. “Now the greatest care & the nicest skill & judgment were required,” Reynolds wrote. “The ship was to be watched & tended, for she had a critical chance to play.” They were approaching the western edge of the entrance, a high bluff known as Tower Rock. Wilkes nervously asked the pilot if he thought the Vincennes would weather the obstruction. “I do not know yet, Sir” was the response. Soon enough it became clear that another tack would be required. The pilot issued the appropriate order. Wilkes repeated the order, and it was now up to Carr to tack the ship. “Had we gone round then,” Reynolds claimed, “all would have been right, but the Ship refused stays.” In addition to backing the head yards of the ship, it was often common to lower the headsails and haul the mizzen yard to weather so as to coax the bow through the wind. “Nothing was done to help her,” Reynolds bitterly observed; “she lost her way, gathered Stern-board & finally fell off with her head right on the rocks.” Like a stalled airplane plummeting to the ground, the Vincennes was drifting helplessly to her destruction.
    Instead of taking charge of the situation, Carr stood amidships, “his arms akimbo, looking at the sails in utter ignorance what to do.” Reynolds and several other officers peered over the gangway, checking to see if the Vincennes had begun to drift backward into the rocks. Wilkes asked querulously if the ship was going astern. Normally Carr would have been the one to answer him, but the first lieutenant seemed unable to speak, so Underwood and Reynolds spoke up for him. “Yes!” they shouted.
    “This is the last,” Wilkes croaked.
    But Pilot Fauxall, in Reynolds’s words, “knew his business.” Barking out the appropriate orders, he was able to manipulate the ship’s yards and rudder so that the Vincennes came head to wind once again. With Tower Rock to leeward and the swell rolling in from the ocean, it was now “do or die.” “We were within the influence of the rollers,” Reynolds wrote. “The Surf dashed & broke upon the rocks a few boatlengths under the lee, & looking down beneath the Ship, the rocks there, were staring you in the face!”
    Although the pilot succeeded in tacking the ship, their troubles were far from over. As the Vincennes struggled to gain headway, the ship’s slippage to leeward threatened to sweep her sideways back into the rocks. There was nothing left to do but wait and see if the ship could sail herself out of danger. “[T]here was the Stillness of death about