Sea of Glory

American naval vessels sitting quietly at anchor.
    “Never had such a thing been heard of,” Reynolds wrote. “They could not credit their eyes, & the Pilots who were looking out for us were mortified to death!” By arriving at night, they had slipped past the usually watchful pilots and then proceeded to navigate the difficult, nine-mile passage to Sydney Harbor. The next day, newspaper articles appeared, “highly flattering to our nautical skill & daring.”
    In one bold stroke, Wilkes had put his humiliation at Pago Pago behind him. Suddenly, it was as if the bickering and bad feeling that had once threatened to destroy the Expedition had never occurred. “[A]ll of us were perfectly elated,” Reynolds wrote, “that the first visit of an American squadron to the place had been in a manner so well calculated to excite their jealousy & to give us so much éclat. ”
    Reynolds later learned that the squadron’s arrival at Sydney had not been as dashing and heroic as it had first seemed. Although Wilkes would deny it, he had received more than a little help that night. Standing at his elbow the whole way had been his quartermaster, a former Sydney resident who knew the passage well. “It is just like Lt. Wilkes,” Reynolds wrote, “to usurp all the credit for himself.”
    It was just a hint of things to come.

CHAPTER 7
    Antarctica
    AT 5.4 MILLION square miles, the Antarctic Continent is roughly the size of the continental United States and Mexico combined. Almost all of it is perpetually covered in ice that in some areas is more than two miles thick. Since the ice reflects as much as 90 percent of the sun’s solar radiation, this is the coldest place on earth, with an average annual temperature of -22°F. Between 70 and 80 percent of the world’s freshwater is contained in this approximately 6.5-million-cubic-mile reservoir of ice and snow, in which is preserved a climate record that goes back 200,000 years. If the Antarctic ice sheet melted, the sea level of the globe would rise by more than two hundred feet.
    Antarctica is also the most inaccessible place on earth. Except for the point where the Antarctic Peninsula reaches toward Cape Horn at the Drake Passage (a gap of six hundred-plus miles), it is surrounded by a moat of more than two thousand miles called the Southern Ocean. In winter, a six-hundred-mile-wide belt of pack ice seals off the continent. In summer, when the ice begins to retreat, the waters surrounding Antarctica become the mariner’s equivalent of a minefield. Indeed, an entire vocabulary has been created to describe the appalling variety of icy hazards a navigator encounters as he or she approaches the continent. A “growler” is a piece of sea ice that is about 180 square feet and rises just a few feet above the sea; a “bergy bit” is about the size of a two-bedroom house, while a “floeberg” is described as a “massive piece of sea ice” with a dimpled or “hummocky” surface. But growlers, bergy bits, and floebergs are nothing compared to the vast, flat-topped icebergs that are spawned from the edges of the continent. “Calved” from the fronts of land-based glaciers, these tabular floes are unlike anything seen in the Arctic and are sometimes more than two hundred feet high and a hundred miles long. Making these dimensions even more remarkable is the fact that seven-eighths of a typical iceberg is underwater.
    As if the danger of ice were not bad enough, the weather in this part of the world is horrendous. Much of this has to do with Antarctica’s being the world’s highest continent, with an average elevation of 7,550 feet. Cold, very heavy air constantly flows down and north from the high interior; when these gravity-stoked “katabatic” winds collide with the water at the coast, they erupt into blizzards, creating a never-ending series of cyclonic storms that circulates clockwise around the continent. The ocean area from about 40° south to the Antarctic Circle has the strongest sustained winds found anywhere on earth.
    Wilkes was not only to penetrate as far as possible into this hazardous region, he was to explore it. As James Cook had found back in 1774, this amounted to an almost suicidal endeavor in a sailing vessel. Cook had been well aware that a continent to the south might exist, but given the terrible conditions between himself and a possible discovery, he judged it not worth the effort. Then there was the British sealer James Weddell’s claim,