Sea of Glory

fog)—suddenly ceased as the Vincennes glided into the eerily quiet lee of an unseen iceberg. “[T]he transition was so sudden,” Wilkes wrote, “that many were awakened . . . from sound sleep. . . . [It is] an occurrence from which the feeling of great danger is inseparable.” By January 16, the day before the Vincennes spoke the Peacock, the strain had begun to get the better of Wilkes. “[I]t at times acts on me as if a weight was hung all at once on my heart strings,” he wrote in his journal.
    With the sighting of the Peacock, Wilkes was greatly relieved to have the chance to speak with Hudson, and Reynolds reported that the two captains “had a long yarn.” Neither one of them made any mention of sighting land. Wilkes did tell Hudson that he had changed his mind about the necessity of sailing in tandem. Now that he no longer had an advantage to protect, Wilkes was inclined to let each vessel strike out on her own. “I was satisfied that the separation would be a strong incentive to exertion,” Wilkes wrote, “by exciting rivalry among the officers and crews of the different vessels.” It was a rivalry Hudson and his officers were eager to pursue.
    Providing Wilkes with some much-needed distraction from the tensions of the voyage was a new acquisition that he had gained in Australia: a giant Newfoundland dog named Sydney. Newfoundlands, or Newfies, are web-footed, 100- to 150-pound dogs originally bred for swimming, and in the nineteenth century they were such a common shipboard sight that they were known as ship dogs. The Lewis and Clark Expedition included a Newfoundland named Seaman, and when Napoleon Bonaparte fell overboard during his return from Elba, he was saved by a Newfie. In the months ahead, Sydney became a favorite with the crew of the Vincennes.
     
    No one knew it at the time, but the events of January 19—two days after the Vincennes spoke the Peacock —would be revisited and analyzed countless times in the years ahead. That morning, a Sunday, the Vincennes made her way into a deep bay at 154°30’ east, 65°20’ south. Lieutenant James Alden was the watch officer. For most of the morning it had been quite foggy. A few minutes after eight A.M., Alden heard waves breaking on an iceberg up ahead, and he informed Wilkes of the ship’s proximity to the ice. By the time Wilkes came on deck, the fog had lifted to the extent that it was possible to see the ice. Wilkes looked quickly around and said a few barely distinguishable words about managing the ship, then began to go below. At that moment, Alden thought he saw land to the southwest—a barely perceptible rise above the ice. “I said to him,” Alden later remembered, “‘there’s something there,’ pointing to it, ‘that looks like land.’” Wilkes made no reply and “seemed,” Alden recalled, “to treat the report with neglect and went below.”
    Wilkes had become convinced that his officers were “endeavoring to do all in their power to make my exertions go for nothing.” Except for First Lieutenant Carr, he trusted no one, and in his journal entry for January 19 he complained that “There is no one on board My own Ship that I can communicate with.” Out of desperation, Wilkes appears to have turned to his noncommissioned officers.
    About an hour after his terse conversation with Alden, Wilkes reappeared on deck between nine and ten A.M. By this point Alden had been relieved by Augustus Case as officer of the watch; Case, like Alden, was an officer with whom Wilkes had already had several run-ins. In an extremely unorthodox move, Wilkes left the quarterdeck and wandered over to the port gangway, where the gunner, John Williamson, was standing. “He came to me,” Williamson later reported, “and asked me what I thought of the appearance of land. My answer was, if it was not land, I had never seen land, then the conversation ended.” Although Wilkes had found someone to talk to, he had bypassed his watch officer and in so doing, had bypassed the ship’s official log, which was the watch officer’s responsibility. As a result, there would be no mention of sighting land in the Vincennes ’s log for January 19.
    In the meantime, just a few miles to the west, the Peacock entered another large bay in the ice. They pushed south for thirty miles until they found themselves enclosed on all sides. “The long swell of the Ocean was shut off altogether,” Reynolds wrote, “the water was smooth and motionless as an