Sea of Glory

gun ports were underwater, swung upright. All around them the storm was raging; they could hear it roar. But here, in the lee of the berg, it was almost placid, and the officers and men—still frantic with excitement and fear—exchanged wild, desperate glances.
    In addition to the iceberg to windward, there was an equally large berg to leeward, and up ahead the channel between the two bergs appeared to be diminishing. As it was, they were in a passage so narrow that they would not have normally dared sail through it even in the finest weather. It was the sounds that first indicated that they had found a way out. The whistling of the wind grew louder as the ship began to lean again to leeward. “We had escaped an awful death,” Wilkes wrote, “and were again tempest-tossed.”
    At 4:30 A.M., they reached a small open area, and the ship was hove to. Wilkes had been on deck for nine straight hours. By seven A.M. the weather appeared to be moderating as the wind shifted from the southeast to the south. By noon it was no longer blowing a gale. “[W]e had escaped,” Wilkes wrote, “although it was difficult to realize a sense of security when the perils we had just passed through were so fresh in our minds.”
    January 30 proved a beautiful day. The breeze had shifted to the east; the sun shone brilliantly, and land was in sight to the south. Under full sail, the Vincennes sailed amid the maze of icebergs that had almost sunk the ship the day before. “We wound our way through them in a sea so smooth that a yawl might have passed over it in safety,” Wilkes wrote. “No straight line could have been drawn from us in any direction, that would not have cut a dozen icebergs in the same number of miles, and the wondering exclamations of the officers and crew were oft repeated—‘How could we have passed through them unharmed?’ and, ‘What a lucky ship!’”
    By eight A.M. they reached the icy barrier. Up ahead there was land, and to the southwest they saw a channel through the broken ice. Crowding all sail, they quickly shot through the opening into a two-mile section of clear water that reached all the way to the shore. Wilkes remarked to one of his officers that this would have been an excellent place to seek shelter in the last storm, little suspecting that in just a few hours that was exactly what they would be doing.
    The wind began to increase, and soon they were making nine knots toward the southern part of the bay. Up ahead they could see rocks and icebergs that were clearly aground. With the wind out of the south, they were tacking back and forth in an increasingly confined space. The wind was approaching gale strength, but the quick tacks made it impossible to shorten sail. Soon they were within just a half-mile of land. Dark, volcanic rocks were visible on either side of them. Just beyond the ice, the land rose to a height of approximately three thousand feet and was completely covered in snow. The mountainous ridge extended to the east and west sixty miles or more. On this day, January 30, 1840, at 140°02’30" east, 66°45’ south, Wilkes named the land before them “the Antarctic Continent.”
    He desperately wanted to set foot on his discovery, but the wind was not cooperating. A gale was coming on, and they needed to tack, but it was too windy. With precious little room to leeward, they luffed up, then “wore her short round on her heel.” In the midst of the jibe, Wilkes ordered soundings. At just thirty fathoms, they found a hard bottom. Wilkes made a hurried sketch of the inlet and called it Piner Bay for his loyal quartermaster. Fearing that their escape route would soon be closed off by the ice, he reluctantly ordered the helmsman to steer a course north. By noon they were clear of the bay, and the wind was blowing a full gale; by one P.M. they were under storm sails, with their topgallant yards on deck.
    “To run the gauntlet again among the icebergs was out of the question,” Wilkes wrote. There was too much sea ice to sail through. Wilkes felt they had no alternative but to heave to in the channel they had seen that morning. It was some consolation to know that the ship would drift faster than the bergs, but eventually, after about ten miles, they would run out of channel.
    The gale proved to be, in Wilkes’s words, “an old-fashioned snow storm,” except that these Antarctic flakes “seemed as if armed with sharp icicles or needles.” By one A.M., the lookouts saw ice