Sea of Glory

and Wilkes had an emotional reunion at a house outside Sydney, where the two officers stayed up till four in the morning, talking about their adventures. Hudson spoke in detail about the Peacock ’s travails in the ice, but he made only a passing reference—if he mentioned it at all—to Reynolds’s and Eld’s having seen land on January 16. If he were to insist that his ship had been the first to sight land, he would have to explain his inexcusable refusal to acknowledge the passed midshipmen’s discovery on the sixteenth. Reynolds summed up the “dilemma” that the Peacock ’s commander had made for himself: “Captain Hudson would now give his head had he paid more attention to the thing; how to get out of the dilemma, he does not know. His judgment must be sacrificed & his neglect must be censured, if he now asserts that he saw Land on the 16 th .”
    Hudson also knew that Wilkes hungered to have the honor of the discovery all to himself. That night outside Sydney, he appears to have told the Expedition’s leader exactly what he wanted to hear. “He said it had all happened as it ought to have done,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “he meeting with all the hard luck and I with the success. If anything could have raised him higher in my estimation this has done so. . . . No one could be so fortunate as I have been in having a second like him.” It was only a matter of time, however, before the truth of Reynolds’s and Eld’s discovery—and Hudson’s mystifying blunder—would be revealed to the world.
    For now, Wilkes was more than willing to take full credit for the discovery. Given the competing claims of the French, he thought it best to go public with his own claim. In the March 13 edition of the Sydney Herald, under the headline “Discovery of the Antarctic Continent,” ran a story based on information provided by Wilkes: “we are happy to have it in our power to announce, on the highest authority, that the researches of the exploring squadron after a southern continent have been completely successful. The land was first seen on the morning of the 19 January.”
    On March 30, the Vincennes arrived at New Zealand’s Bay of Islands. Wilkes was pleased to find not only the scientists, but also the Porpoise and the Flying Fish. Many aboard the Vincennes had predicted that the schooner would never be seen again. The Antarctic waves had so battered the little vessel that the lookouts had been forced to lash themselves to the foremast when searching for icebergs. The schooner’s belowdecks had been almost constantly awash, and on February 5, the men formally requested that Lieutenant Pinkney turn back; by the following day they were on their way to New Zealand.
    Both the Flying Fish and the Porpoise had been at the Bay of Islands for the better part of a month now, and neither of their crews had made any mention of seeing land during the cruise south. But with the arrival of Captain Wilkes, all that changed. When Wilkes first told Ringgold of his discovery, the commander of the Porpoise asked Wilkes why he hadn’t mentioned seeing land when the two had spoken on January 26. Wilkes then insisted that he had mentioned it, but Ringgold apparently hadn’t heard him. After all, they had only been within hail for less than half a minute.
    Upon hearing of the Vincennes ’s discoveries, Ringgold’s memory began to improve. It might not be in his log, but he now remembered seeing land as early as January 13. Lieutenant Sinclair, perhaps jaded by his horrendous ordeal aboard the Flying Fish, remained skeptical of Ringgold’s new claim. “It is somewhat strange,” he wrote in his journal, “that we did not hear that the Porpoise had seen land before the arrival of the Vins but now that the Vins has discovered a new World, it appears that the Porpoise saw it before she did. . . . We are a great Nation!” Wilkes had his own doubts about Ringgold’s claim. In a letter to Jane, he insisted that both the Porpoise and the Flying Fish had “made no discoveries although it must have been before their eyes. I was a little surprised at my ship having done nearly all the work but this is entre nous and for all we gained by the others they might as well have been elsewhere employed.”
    Five days after writing Jane, Wilkes decided to share his findings with a fellow explorer. James Ross had not had sufficient time to sail south that winter; he would soon be in Tasmania, where he would make preparations for a voyage