Sea of Glory

later, Wilkes was approaching the latitude of Macquarie Island. He would later claim that they were too far to leeward to reach the rendezvous point without wasting too much time. And so, while Hudson did as his orders demanded and spent the next three days beating up to the island, Wilkes pushed on to the south. He had succeeded in giving himself a head start of more than six hundred miles over the two vessels, the Peacock and the Flying Fish, that had sailed farther south than he had the winter before. When the officers and men of the Peacock reached Macquarie Island and found no vessels waiting for them, Wilkes’s “miserable double dealing” was obvious to all. After dutifully planting a flag on the island, they set off for the south.
     
    On the evening of January 15, 1840, Reynolds, perhaps the happiest officer aboard the happiest ship in the squadron, saw his first iceberg. It was “glowing with the most vivid & brilliant hues,” he wrote; “blue as azure, green as emerald, and, ho! the contrast, whiteness like unto the raiment of an Angel. . . . The imagination cannot picture, neither our tongues convey, the faintest image of so glorious a spectacle.”
    Soon after sighting the iceberg, Reynolds decided it was time to put on the red flannels that Lydia and his mother had made for him. “[T]hey are so nice & warm,” he wrote in his journal, “bless those who made them! Grandmother’s stockings too! I feel the good of a Home, away down here!”
    They had entered a realm of perpetual daylight. “[W]hat a rooster would do here,” he wrote, “I cannot imagine.” During his watch from midnight to four A.M., some of the officers were reading Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. At 2:45 A.M., they watched the sun rise. “It is the funniest thing,” he commented, “this never-ending day.” Just as strange was the behavior of their compasses. Their proximity to the magnetic South Pole, where the earth’s magnetic force field flows in a nearly vertical direction, meant that their compass needles had been rendered virtually useless. An object as small as an iron button was enough to move the compass by as much as twenty degrees. One of Reynolds’s fellow officers rightly attributed this phenomenon to “the polar attraction acting in nearly a perpendicular direction upon a horizontal needle.” It was graphic evidence that they were approaching the very foundations of the earth.
    On the evening of January 15 at latitude 65°25’ south, Reynolds climbed to the masthead and saw not a single piece of ice ahead of them. “On the morrow,” he wrote, “we would be farther South than the Ship had reached last year. Soon we would pass 70 degrees—eclipse Cook & distance the pretender Weddell. No one hazarded an unfavorable opinion, & we were all in a perfect fever of excitement! I shall never forget that day!”
    Around four P.M., fog appeared at the edges of the horizon. Almost simultaneously they saw both the Porpoise and a solid barrier of ice looming out of the haze. For the time being they would have to lay aside their hopes of pushing farther south. “There was the low & continuous field of Ice,” Reynolds wrote, “running East & West, broken by many Bays & Islands, but effectually stopping any further progress. . . . Our dreams were at once destroyed!”
    Ringgold informed them that he had been sailing along the edge of the barrier for several days and had found no openings to the south. “We commenced working to windward,” Reynolds wrote, “in hope of finding a passage farther to the West, but our overflowing anticipations were checked, gone, broken entirely & we were humbled at the lesson we had received!”
    Around noon the next day, Reynolds went aloft with fellow passed midshipman Henry Eld from New Haven, Connecticut. By this point, the Peacock had separated again from the Porpoise. Reynolds and Eld were up on the crosstrees with the main topmast between them, more than a hundred feet above the surface of the sea, somewhere in the vicinity of 65° south, 160° east. Reynolds, who was nearsighted, had his spectacles on. He and Eld struggled to describe the beauty of what they saw spread out before them, but, as Reynolds wrote, “we had no words. To look over such a vast expanse of the frozen sea, upon which no human eye nor foot had ever rested, & which, formed from the Ocean, now resisted its waves & presented an impassable boundary to the mysterious regions beyond, filled us with