Sea of Glory

short time.” These are the words of an egomaniac, but the fact of the matter remained that if Wilkes had not overruled his officers and medical staff on February 1 and continued west, the Expedition’s eventual claim to the discovery of a continent would have been difficult to support.
    As he had already done several times before, Wilkes had succeeded when just about everyone—including his own officers and men—had assumed he’d fail. Hudson, the most touted seaman of the squadron, had met with disaster. Wilkes, on the other hand, a naval officer with a frightening lack of sea experience but with a will of iron, had accomplished what has to be one of the most extraordinary feats of seamanship of all time. Braving several gales and countless icebergs, he had sailed his ill-equipped wooden man-of-war 1,500 miles along the windiest, least-accessible coast in the world. And he had done it without losing a single man. Today this stretch of the Antarctic coast is known as Wilkes Land.
    Even William Reynolds had to give the devil his due: “the Vincennes redeemed it all—the splendid success which attended her, in her run of 1500 miles along the Land, was more than even our most sanguine expectations had led us to expect: the great question was set at rest; never before had there been such an immense extent of Land explored in this Latitude.” But as had also happened so many times before during the Expedition, Wilkes’s subsequent actions would quickly work to undercut all that he had accomplished.
    Just a few days prior to their arrival at Sydney, Wilkes called all hands to muster. Once again praising the men for the “brilliant discovery we had made down south,” he reminded them that their orders required them to keep the discovery a secret. Almost as soon as they arrived in Sydney on March 11, Wilkes learned that d’Urville had first seen land on the afternoon of January 19 and had set foot on the continent two days later. The news came as a profound shock. “[W]e thought them all on their way home,” Reynolds reported, “lo and behold!” But there was no real cause for alarm. Yes, d’Urville had effected a landing, but what did that prove? D’Urville had traced only a 150-mile section of coast; after just a month amid the ice, he had decided to quit. “There is no question that it would have been possible to push further west,” d’Urville admitted in his journal, “and to chart a longer stretch of the ice barrier . . . , [but] I can frankly admit, I myself was weary of the tough work I had been doing, and I very much doubt whether I could have stood it much longer.” Only Wilkes, through sheer determination and nerve, had been able to verify the continental proportions of Antarctica.
    What bothered Wilkes and his officers, however, was the date that d’Urville claimed to have first sighted land: the afternoon of January 19. As the Americans well knew, it wasn’t until the end of January that they were sure land existed to the south. Soon after their arrival at Sydney, a rueful Lieutenant Alden, having heard the date of d’Urville’s discovery, met Wilkes at the gangway of the Vincennes. “[I] remarked to him that the French were ahead of us,” Alden later remembered. “‘Oh no,’ said he, ‘don’t you recollect reporting to me of land on the morning of the 19 th ?’”
    Alden said he didn’t remember seeing land on the nineteenth, but after consulting his journal he did recall his half-hearted mention of the appearance of land. As far as he was concerned, however, this did not constitute the date of their discovery. But Wilkes insisted that it did. Wilkes may have even altered his journal. His entry for the nineteenth makes no mention of land except for where the clause “with appearance of Land to the S.S.E.” is suspiciously jammed in at the end of a line.
    Wilkes had no reason to insist that he had sighted land on the morning of January 19; the important point—that he had been the first to verify the existence of a new continent—was not affected by the French claim. And besides, three days prior to the nineteenth, Passed Midshipmen Reynolds and Eld on the Peacock had first sighted land. But Wilkes appears to have not yet been made aware of this crucial piece of information.
    The Peacock had arrived in Sydney several weeks earlier, and the battered ship, whose stern had been worn to within an inch and a half of the woodends by the ice, was in the midst of repairs. Hudson