Sea of Glory

backed up by the American Benjamin Morrell, that a navigable ocean existed beyond the icy barrier. Other British sealers had brought back isolated reports of sighting islands in the vicinity of the Antarctic Circle near where the Expedition would soon be headed. The fact of the matter remained, however, that in December 1839, as the U.S. Exploring Expedition prepared for its final push south, no one really knew what was down there at the bottom of the world.
     
    Wilkes was already aware of the French expedition led by Dumont d’Urville. In Sydney he learned that there was yet another expedition headed south. The British had just dispatched James Ross, the discoverer of the magnetic North Pole, on a mission to find the other magnetic pole in the vicinity of 66° south and 146° east—almost directly below Adelaide, Australia, and approximately 250 miles to the north of the latitude of Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra. In addition, Ross was to attempt to punch through the ice in his heavily reinforced vessels and sail as far as possible south. Ross—whose arrogance may have even surpassed Wilkes’s—knew that his rivals had a significant head start; still, he remained confident that he would outdo both of them. The French and Americans didn’t stand a chance.

    Certainly the people of Sydney would have agreed with at least half of that claim. As far as they could tell the American expedition was, in the words of one observer, “doomed to be frozen to death.” While Ross’s two ships—converted bomb vessels built to withstand the thunderous recoil of several deck-mounted mortars—had been equipped with an additional layer of eight-inch-thick oak planking, the American vessels were without any significant form of structural reinforcement to withstand the inevitable collisions with the ice. To make matters worse, the Peacock ’s already poor condition had deteriorated dramatically over the last six months; many key structural components were rotten and in need of replacement. But these repairs would have taken at least two months. After long consultation, Wilkes and Hudson decided that “the credit of the Expedition and the country” demanded that the Peacock sail south, no matter how bad her condition might be.
    But if the Yanks appeared ill prepared, they had a few factors in their favor. One of them was timing. Ross had left England just a few months before; where he was now was anyone’s guess. Although d’Urville’s expedition had gotten the jump on all of them, rumor had it that the French, after one unsuccessful push south two winters ago, were on their way back home. The Americans also possessed the advantage of some recent, very valuable experience amid the Antarctic ice. But perhaps most important was that the Americans didn’t appear especially bothered by the inadequacies of their equipment and preparation. “[The people of Sydney] saw us all cheerful, young, and healthy,” Wilkes wrote, “and gave us the character, that I found our countrymen generally bear, of recklessness of life and limb.”
    On the day after Christmas, the U.S. Ex. Ex.—minus the scientists, who would continue their researches in Australia, then secure passage to New Zealand, where they would meet up with the squadron in March—left Sydney Harbor. The wind was light, and the Vincennes once again missed stays. Despite his occasional demonstrations of bravado, Wilkes had earned a reputation among his officers and men as an “ignorant and nervous” seaman—not the best qualities for leading a squadron into the terrors of the Antarctic ice. But if Wilkes’s seamanship remained in question, his leadership style was no longer in doubt. As early as Rio de Janeiro, when he had been pushed to the verge of a nervous collapse, it had become clear that he needed a persona, what has been called a “mask of command,” to hide behind if he was to survive the ordeals that lay ahead. The mask that he chose to assume was that of the martinet, defined by British admiral W. H. Smyth as “A rigid disciplinarian; but one who, in matters of inferior moment, harasses all under him.” This was the form of leadership Wilkes would cling to for the duration of the voyage. “The acquirement of being a ‘martinette,’” Wilkes later wrote, “when once established goes far to carrying with it authority to induce obedience to command.”
    But it wasn’t all just an act on Wilkes’s part. He had become more than a little intoxicated by the