That afternoon it began to snow, and they sighted their first cape pigeons or petrels-dark-brown birds lightly spotted with white that are known for following ships in the Southern Ocean for days at a time. Cape pigeons are also regarded as a sign that icebergs are in the vicinity, and sure enough, at dawn the following day, they saw their first “island of ice.” Wilkes remarked that the icebergs looked worn, “as if the sea had been washing over them for some time.”
They had crossed the Antarctic Convergence, the area where the relatively warm waters from the north meet the cold surface waters to the south. They had entered a region of colder, less salty water, with markedly different flora and fauna. Both the Porpoise and the Sea Gull were soon surrounded by swimming penguins. “I had not known that the Penguins lived so much in water,” wrote Lieutenant Johnson, who was also impressed by the number of whales. “[O]n any part of the Horizon you might be able to sing out ‘Spout ho!’”
But it was the icebergs that most impressed all of them. “[W]e met with some large Islands of ice fifty times as large as the Capitol and much whiter,” Wilkes wrote Jane, “and a great deal higher.… [S]oon we were literally surrounded with them, and a most magnificent sight it was too.” On March 1 they sighted several of the South Shetland Islands – volcanic, snow-topped outcroppings that had prompted one sealer to wonder if “Madame Nature had been drinking too much when she form’d this place.”
Wilkes had hopes of landing on one of the islands to collect some specimens, but the conditions remained too rough. By March 3, they’d sailed to within sight of the eastern tip of Palmer’s Land. By now the icebergs were so numerous that navigation was extremely difficult. Johnson in the Sea Gull judged the conditions to be “utterly impassible.” But Wilkes remained undaunted. “[M]y little favorite the Porpoise showed herself worthy of the affection I have for her,” he wrote Jane. With the schooner following in her wake, the brig continued south, the helmsmen of both vessels forced to “put starboard and port every instant to avoid running into [ice].”
Instead of the danger, Wilkes was transfixed by the view. “I have rarely seen a finer sight,” he wrote. “The sea was literally studded with these beautiful masses, some of pure white, others showing all the shades of opal, others emerald green and occasionally here and there some of a deep black, forming a strong contrast to the pure white.” At one point, with no fewer than two hundred icebergs in sight, Lieutenant Ringgold turned to Wilkes and proclaimed, “This is adventuring with boldness.” The two of them laughed, and Wilkes decided to name the three small islands ahead of them the Adventure Islets.
At eight p.m. the fog socked in, forcing them to lay to till daylight. With both the air and water temperature at close to 28°F (the freezing point of salt water), it made for a miserable night, especially since the special cold-weather clothing provided by the government proved next to useless. When on March 5 the wind increased to a heavy gale as the temperature dropped to 25°F, Wilkes realized that it was time to retreat north. Both vessels were coated with snow and ice, but conditions were particularly bad aboard the Sea Gull. Every five minutes or so a large wave would break over the little schooner and drench the men. Icicles, “forming with the direction of the wind,” hung from the rigging; her fore sheets were so caked with ice that they were “the size of a sloop of war’s cable.” Wilkes ordered Johnson to return to Orange Bay after first stopping at Deception Island (one of the South Shetlands), where he was to attempt to retrieve a self-registering thermometer left by an earlier British expedition. Although he had no regrets about turning back, Johnson suspected that Wilkes was planning to continue on without him. After beating the ice from the rigging, the crew of the Sea Gull made sail for Deception Island.
Wilkes had no illusions about the terrible conditions. To continue south would have been madness given the time of year. While Johnson headed west, Wilkes ordered the helmsman of the Porpoise to steer north, along the eastern edge of the South Shetland Islands. Instead of being shaken and dispirited by his brief bout with the Antarctic ice, Wilkes remained jubilant. “[T]hus far,” he later reported to Jane, “I may say the Expedition has proved as successful as I could have hoped or expected.… I never felt myself so full of energy in my life as I do now.” “Adventuring with boldness” apparently agreed with the commander of the Ex. Ex.
To be sure, Wilkes had no reason to apologize for not pushing any farther south. Nine years before, Jeremiah Reynolds and some of the most experienced sealers in America (including the redoubtable Nathaniel Palmer) had not made it beyond the South Shetland Islands, even though the privately funded expedition had left Cape Horn more than a month earlier in the season than Wilkes. Just the year before, the veteran French explorer Dumont d’Urville, whose king had offered each member of his expedition a bonus of a hundred francs if they reached latitude 75° south and an extra twenty francs for every additional degree south, had met with disappointing results. Despite having started in early January, d’Urville had been unable to get beyond 65° south. By the time he sailed for South America, more than half his men had succumbed to scurvy.
D’Urville’s experience below the Antarctic Convergence had been so demoralizing that he had chosen to spend the current Antarctic summer months in Polynesia, gathering his men’s strength for one last sail south. This meant that even though the French had departed a year ahead of the U.S. Ex. Ex., they had lost their initial advantage. When it came to the race to being the first to identify what lay to the south, it was now a dead heat between the French and the Americans.
But, in actuality, both Wilkes and d’Urville, along with a slew of sealers in the early 1820s, had already glimpsed the Antarctic Continent. What Wilkes called Palmer’s Land is now known as the Antarctic Peninsula and has become the primary destination for tourists looking to visit the southernmost continent.
But all that was in the distant future. As far as Wilkes and d’Urville were concerned, the search was still on. And besides, there was always the chance that Lieutenant Hudson had met with unexpected success to the west.
It hadn’t started well. Soon after leaving Orange Bay on the morning of February 25, the Peacock and the Flying Fish had been blasted by a squall that sent them scurrying back for the protection of the bay’s outer anchorage. The next morning they were under way in a strong northerly breeze, but an unexpected current from the south of more than eight knots meant that they were barely making any real progress south.
The next day, in a blinding gale, the Peacock and the Flying Fish were separated. As agreed upon, the Peacock waited for twelve hours, but after seeing no sign of the schooner, Hudson ordered that they head to the southwest.
Like any sloop-of-war, the sides of the Peacock had been pierced to accommodate her guns; unfortunately, this did not make her a particularly good exploring vessel since the gun ports, which had begun to warp, leaked alarming amounts of the frigid Southern Ocean. Even Hudson’s cabin was frequently awash. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “most of us will have to submit to the tortures of Rheumatism as a set off to our curiosity and love of adventure.”
Two stoves were set up belowdecks, and hot coffee was served to the men at midnight. In the early predawn hours of March 9, it began to snow, prompting Lieutenant Oliver Hazard Perry Jr. (the son of the War of 1812 hero) to awaken the naturalist Titian Peale, the only member of the scientific corps to have been included in this first voyage south, and show him an unusual artifact: the snowball he had made while on deck.
A heavy cross-sea made for an uncomfortable ride, particularly for the men up in the ship’s rigging, who were ordered to let out the reefs in the topsails for the first time since leaving Orange Bay. Normally the sailors worked barefooted, but given the cold conditions, they’d been given government-issue “exploring boots” that proved to be as leaky as they were cumbersome. That day tragedy struck when William Stewart, captain of the maintop and one of the best seamen aboard the ship, fell from the maintopsail yard, bouncing off the main rigging before plunging into the sea. Sticking out of