Sea of Glory

Inland Lake and lay like a vast mirror in its frosted frame.” Even though the temperature was only 21°F, he climbed up to his perch at the masthead. “[T]he whiteness of all this was dazzling and intense,” Reynolds wrote; “unbroken, by the glistening sheet of water where the Ship floated, idle, quiet and at rest.”
    This time Reynolds was joined by Midshipman William Clark. As soon as he’d placed his spectacles on his nose, Reynolds cried out to Clark, “Do you see that?” Ahead of them was land. “[I]t was of great height,” Reynolds wrote, “of rounded uneven summit & broken sides.” Taking no chances, Reynolds immediately reported his discovery to the watch officer, Lieutenant Alonzo Davis. Davis cheerfully agreed that it was land. Soon Captain Hudson and a large number of officers and men were up in the rigging. “Well it was Land!” Reynolds wrote. As a joke, they began assigning names to the features they saw before them. “[O]ne cape was honored with the cognomen of the discoverer,” Reynolds proudly noted.
    What Reynolds didn’t learn until later was that by the time Hudson had returned to the Peacock ’s deck, he had begun to doubt his own eyes. “Our land has turned out to be an iceberg,” he told Davis, the watch officer. When Davis informed him that he had already recorded the sighting in the ship’s log, Hudson told him “that we ought to be very certain” before mention of land was put down in writing, and he ordered Davis to remove the offending passage. Hudson was a competent seaman, but his exceedingly literal cast of mind was ill suited to the challenges of exploration. It was the second time in three days that he had refused to acknowledge a discovery by William Reynolds.
    Four days later, at five P.M. on Thursday, January 23, it appeared as if all would soon be forgiven. After continuing west, the Peacock had sailed into a bay that was even larger than all the others. The weather was mild and clear; the sea was smooth; and two boats were dispatched to perform magnetism experiments on a nearby chunk of ice as others attempted to find soundings. At 350 fathoms, the sounding lead hit bottom; pebbles and blue mud were found attached to the lead. “Great was the joy & Excitement throughout the ship,” Reynolds wrote, “for this was a certain indication of the proximity of Land.” As the men in the boats returned to the ship, unaware of the great find, the crew climbed into the rigging and shouted out three cheers. “[N]ow we were sanguine that ere long we should discover ‘terra firma,’” Reynolds enthused, “& the prize [of discovery] would be our own.”
    The already happy crew of the Peacock became delirious with excitement. Holding up the mud-smeared lead line, sailors ran about the deck to the music of a fiddle as others burst into song. Taking advantage of the quiet seas, men played shuffleboard below while others rolled tenpins on the gun deck. Hudson gave the order to “splice the main brace,” and soon every man had received an extra allowance of grog. “[W]e were a merry ship,” Reynolds wrote. “Little did any one think of the change that a few short hours would bring about!”
    One of the boat crews had captured a huge penguin on the ice. “[H]e was cruelly put to death,” Reynolds wrote, “so that his skin might be preserved for the Satisfaction of those who are content to see the curious things of the world, second hand.” Early the next morning Hudson appeared on deck “in the greatest glee.” When the penguin’s gut had been cut open, they had found thirty-five pebbles inside. Although he had been slow to show much enthusiasm concerning Reynolds’s earlier reports of land, Hudson took these pebbles as incontrovertible proof that they were on the verge of a historic discovery. “Poor man!” Reynolds wrote. “He was nearly beside himself with joy.”
    Reynolds turned in at four that morning, “dreading no evil & confident that we would succeed in finding Land ere we were many days older. True! Even in a few hours, we came nigh to finding it, but at the bottom of the Ocean!!”
    When he came on deck at eight A.M., Reynolds discovered that Hudson, in his newfound gusto for exploration, had sailed the ship into an exceedingly perilous position. They were surrounded by ice, but Hudson intended to push on even farther to the very edge of the barrier. There were indications of high land just beyond the barrier, and Hudson wanted to prove