Sea of Glory

the old craft . . . , Ice, piled around her, so that we could see nothing Else [on] the Deck—the dark figures of the men & boats were the only relief to the dreary Whiteness.”
    Even if the disaster was largely his doing, Hudson was now in his element. It had become a fight for survival upon which everything depended on his skill as a seaman. Throughout the ordeal, Hudson remained calm and dignified, and his example inspired his officers and men. “There were no Shrieks,” Reynolds wrote, “no Exhibitions of bewilderment, & I verily believe that had the old ship settled in the Water, she would have gone down with three as hearty cheers as ever came from an hundred throats.”
    For the next four hours, Hudson worked his men unmercifully, swinging the yards back and forth in a desperate attempt to steer the Peacock through the ice to safety. But all their efforts seemed in vain. “We thumped, thumped . . . ,” Reynolds wrote, “making but little progress, & drifting to leeward . . . while the distance between us & the clear Sea was increasing Every moment, from the quantity of Ice brought down by the wind.” It was as if the wooden ship were being chewed to pieces by the ice. All of the anchors were stripped of their lashings and hung at the bows by the stoppers; the ship’s cutwater was splintered. At one point three of their chronometers were hurled from their beds of sawdust.
    Around three P.M. the wind died to almost nothing. They made fast to a bergy bit and attempted to hoist in the broken rudder. It came up in two pieces, and the carpenters went to work. Soon the wind began to increase; once again, the ice anchor did not hold. Hudson determined to make sail and try to force the ship through the ice. But without the rudder, the Peacock was, in Reynolds’s words, as “helpless as an Infant.”
    Some of the men attempted to pole the ship through the floes, extending spars over the bow and pushing with all their collective strength against the ice chunks in their path. Others were dispatched in boats to plant anchors in the ice that might be used to guide the ship. But since the ice was all around them, there was little room to use their oars. At one point a boat-crew found itself trapped between two bergy bits that had begun to swing together. The sea “boiled like a caldron” between the two walls of ice, which pressed against the boat’s gunwales until water began to spout through the seams. Just when it seemed that the boat was about to be crushed by the ice, the bergs moved apart, and the men pushed their way to safety. Others attempted to walk across the ever-shifting ice, laying down planks and lugging the sea anchors from berg to berg.
    By six P.M., Hudson and his men had succeeded in working the Peacock to within a hundred yards of a large open section of water. Unfortunately, the ship was now wedged into a seemingly impervious barricade of ice. “[W]e had the cruel mortification of seeing the place of comparative Safety so close at hand,” Reynolds wrote, “& yet be in as much & more peril, than we experienced through the day.”
    So far, the wind had remained relatively light. If it should begin to blow, however, they all knew the ship would go down in a matter of minutes as the jagged chunks of ice ripped through the ship’s frail sides. That evening, black clouds began to gather in the west. “[T]hey were rolled & curled together in windy looking wreathes,” Reynolds wrote, “& they had all the appearance of a coming storm.” He climbed aloft to have a better look.
    For several minutes, he stared at the clouds. “I watched until I saw the clouds move, ” he wrote. “I saw their shadow coming over the water, & now I thought in sad earnest, ‘ our time has come at last’ !” Convinced that they were all about to die, he could not help but anticipate how it would happen. “[H]ere were one hundred of us, in the full vigour of health & strength,” he wrote. “[I]n a few moments not one would be left to tell the tale of our destruction. All must go, without the hope of even a struggle for life— there could be no resistance: when the crush came, we should be swept away like the spars & timbers of the Ship.”
    Hudson gave the order to furl the sails. After that, the men had nothing to do but wait for the coming storm. As the black “funeral Cloud” approached, the breeze began to build. “[M]y feelings were almost overpowering in their force,” Reynolds admitted.