Sea of Glory

frustrated with his commander. He felt that Wilkes had missed several opportunities to push the ship farther south. When Wilkes ignored his report of an opening in Disappointment Bay, Underwood took up a piece of chalk and vented his anger on the log slate, the public record of the ship’s course and speed that served as a rough draft for the ship’s log. On the slate he wrote that “an opening had been reported to the S & W before we tacked ship.”
    Since the log slate was not erased until noon of the following day, Underwood’s message was waiting for Wilkes when he came on deck the next morning. He was not pleased. He ordered Underwood on deck and asked why he hadn’t informed him of the opening. When Underwood told him that he had done exactly that, Wilkes claimed “he did not recollect the circumstances.” He also claimed that he had been aloft just prior to tacking and had seen “a barrier quite round by the S&W.” Even though they were now forty miles from Disappointment Bay, Wilkes ordered that they return to the bay so that he could prove Underwood wrong.
    It took them an entire day to retrace their steps. Once Wilkes was confident that the bay was, in fact, sealed off by ice, he did his best to humiliate Underwood. “I called all the officers on the deck,” he later wrote, “and then addressed Lt. Underwood who was required to point out the opening he had written of.” Underwood had no choice but to recant his earlier claims even though it was quite possible that the ice had shifted since they had last visited the bay.
    Wilkes saw this as “a heavy stroke upon [the officers’] machinations & deceits.” Others saw it as a personal vendetta. Although not aboard the Vincennes during the Antarctic cruise, Reynolds had already had sufficient opportunity to witness Wilkes’s attitude toward Underwood: “It seemed to be impossible for him sufficiently to gratify his malignant feelings towards that officer, and he pursued him with the most vindictive tyranny.” Reynolds attributed Wilkes’s behavior to jealousy. In addition to being well liked, Underwood was exceedingly well educated. “In comprehensiveness of mind, in scientific attainments, versatility of talent, and in professional knowledge Lt. Underwood far surpassed Lt. Wilkes,” Reynolds claimed. “Jealousy was a fierce passion in the breast of the Commander, and once awoke, it rendered him regardless of humanity, honor, or justice.”
    Rather than push on to the west, Wilkes decided to dawdle at the scene of Underwood’s disgrace. The ship was hove to, a hawser was readied, and they spent the day secured to an iceberg, filling up the tanks with freshwater melted from the ice while others performed magnetic observations on a nearby ice island. Wilkes even took the opportunity to sketch a picture of the Vincennes amid the ice. Once back aboard, he issued an order intended to eliminate any future misunderstandings. From now on, the officer of the deck was required to go to the masthead at the end of his watch and “report to me the exact situation of the ice.”
    Later that day, as they threaded their way through the ice, Wilkes hit upon the notion of charting the icebergs. “[I]t occurred to me,” he wrote, “that they might be considered as islands, and a rough survey made of them, by taking their bearings at certain periods, and making diagrams of their positions.” Although this struck several of his officers as being of extremely dubious navigational value, Wilkes insisted that they begin surveying the ice. Every few hours the latest batch of diagrams would be inserted into the chart Wilkes was making in his cabin. Wilkes reasoned that if weather conditions should require them to backtrack, he would now have a “tolerable chart” to guide their escape.
    At eight A.M. the next day, they sighted the Porpoise. Wilkes and Ringgold spoke briefly, comparing their longitudes, but neither one of them seems to have mentioned sighting land. For the first time since they reached the ice, the wind shifted to the southeast, supposedly the prevailing direction. With the wind finally behind them, Wilkes resolved to make up for lost time. With all sails set, the Vincennes took off at nine knots through the drift ice, with the Porpoise following in her wake. “Sailing in this way I felt to be extremely hazardous,” Wilkes wrote, “but our time was so short. . . . [B]y good look-outs, and carefully conning the ship, [we] were able to