Sea of Glory

feelings, which we were powerless to utter.” Then they saw something that suddenly restored their powers of speech. As if with one voice they cried out, “There is land!”
    Many miles in the distance, beyond the icy barrier, they saw three distinct peaks—one pointed, the other two more rounded. “They rose to an immense height,” Reynolds wrote. “We looked for half an hour at least, & procured a glass to satisfy ourselves that we were not mistaken. We were convinced that our judgment was correct & that we actually beheld the long sought for Terra Firma of the Antarctic continent.”
    They had come upon the massive, never-before-explored body of Antarctica. If the Antarctic Peninsula below Cape Horn is the continent’s panhandle, the wide rounded mass below Australia and extending west along the Antarctic Circle toward Africa is the pan. The Peacock was now at the eastern extreme of the pan’s northerly edge. The date was January 16.
    Both officers scrambled down the rigging to report the sighting. Eld went below to find Captain Hudson, and Reynolds sought out Lieutenant Thomas Budd, the officer of the deck. Although Reynolds could still see the mountaintops from the deck, they were not as clearly defined as they had been from aloft. When he pointed out the land, Budd expressed his doubts and chose not to send anyone to the masthead to confirm the sighting. Reynolds had no alternative but to wait for the appearance of Hudson on the quarterdeck. But Hudson never came.
    Reynolds later learned from Eld that Hudson had acted even more oddly than Budd. When told of the discovery, Hudson said that he had no doubt that Eld and Reynolds had seen land; in fact, he was convinced that the large icebergs near them were sitting on the bottom of the sea. But when Eld urged him to come see the mountaintops for himself, Hudson demonstrated an almost bovine lack of curiosity. He would stay by his stove, thank you; he also saw no reason to send an officer aloft to verify their sighting. Assuring Eld that there would be plenty of opportunities to see land in the days ahead, he ordered that the ship be tacked. The wind was light, and he didn’t want to run into any trouble amid the ice. Strange conduct indeed for the captain of an exploring expedition.
    Both Reynolds and Eld were filled with “disappointment and mortification,” especially when they learned that no mention of their sighting had been made in the ship’s log. But there was nothing they could do. “I will never give up my belief that this was no deception,” Reynolds wrote, “& am perfectly willing to abide by the researches of any future navigators, confident that our discovery will be verified!”
    The next day, during Reynolds’s watch at 5:30 in the morning, they saw the Vincennes for the first time in two weeks. “I remember she passed behind an Ice berg,” Reynolds wrote, “& there was an immense discrepancy between its height & that of the Ship.” Although Wilkes had been able to sprint ahead at Macquarie Island, Hudson had succeeded in reaching the icy barrier to windward of the Vincennes, which had been sailing west along the ice for close to a week. It was an amazing feat of catch-up on Hudson’s part. Despite all of Wilkes’s machinations, all three vessels—the Porpoise, the Peacock, and the Vincennes —were now within just a few miles of one another.
    In contrast to Hudson’s loose and buoyant crew, the nerves of the officers and men of the Vincennes were drum tight. Wilkes would have it no other way. In true martinet fashion, he rarely spoke with his officers; when an officer dared speak to him, he inevitably dismissed the statement with an insult. It was an unfortunate state of affairs for a vessel in search of any and all indications of land. Even if an officer thought he saw land, there was little use in bringing it to the commander’s attention since Wilkes would inevitably reject the observation with a sneer.
    Over the last two days, however, there had been little opportunity to see much beyond the Vincennes ’s bowsprit. Dense fog made navigating the icy barrier a particularly hazardous endeavor. Instead of their eyes, the lookouts depended on their ears. When they heard “the low and distant rustling of the ice,” they knew it was time to tack. Then there were the times when the usual sounds of a ship at sea—the rhythmic slap of the waves and the comforting creak of the rigging (which always seemed magnified in the