Two days later, they found themselves once again in a diminishing breeze, with the temperature dropping. It was so quiet that they could hear the water freezing around them. Palmer described it as “a low crepitation, like the clicking of a death-watch” as the sea’s surface took on an oily appearance that quickly congealed into a thick, soupy slush known as grease ice. Walker knew that if they didn’t break free quickly, they might never break free at all. He headed the Flying Fish downwind until he’d established some headway. Then he “gave her the mainsheet,” yanking in the large aft sail as the headsails were released and the helm was brought down. The schooner veered into the wind and, amid the crackling of sea ice, shot through the barrier to windward.
But they weren’t clear yet. For the next four hours they struggled to the north. The fearful sound of wood grinding against ice prompted the carpenter to attempt a modification to the bow. Borrowing planks from the cabin berths, he tried to reinforce the area of impact at the water-line, but with time running out, Walker refused to wait long enough for him to complete the job. They were constantly adjusting the helm, sometimes tacking, other times jibing, to avoid icebergs that towered over their two masts. Walker was convinced that it was the schooner’s small size that saved them. “I do not believe a ship could have passed these dangers,” he wrote. They finally reached open water at latitude 70°14’ south – less than one degree, or sixty miles, from Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra. Behind them to the south, the water had become “a firm field of ice.” It was time to head home.
They hadn’t surpassed Cook but they had come very close, and they had done it in a New York pilot boat instead of an overbuilt collier. “I have never known men subjected to equal hardships,” wrote Walker, who proudly pointed out that no American vessel had ever sailed farther south.
Geographers would later discover that even if Walker and his men hadn’t passed Cook in terms of latitude, they had succeeded in sailing closer to Antarctica. Due to her more easterly position, the Flying Fish had come to within no miles of Thurston Island, just off the Eights Coast of Antarctica. Today the eastern tip of Thurston Island is called Cape Flying Fish, while the island’s interior contains the Walker Mountains – lasting tributes to this truly extraordinary navigational accomplishment.
On March 25, just a day after their narrow escape from the ice, Walker and his men sighted the Peacock. After hearing Walker’s account of his adventures, Hudson ordered the Flying Fish back to Orange Bay at the tip of South America. The Peacock, in accordance with Wilkes’s instructions, headed north to Valparaiso, Chile, where the entire squadron would soon rendezvous.
It had been a difficult two months for William Reynolds. He had been forced to watch as the Porpoise, the Peacock, and two schooners left Orange Bay for the mystery that lay to the south. “Next year!” he had consoled himself in his journal, “Will be our turn.”
But the duty he had been given was far from a routine surveying assignment. Along with Lieutenant Alden and ten handpicked men, including some of the most experienced sailors in the squadron, he was ordered to explore one of the stormiest coasts in the world in a thirty-five-foot cutter-rigged launch. Although Wilkes appears not to have been fully aware of it, the hazard was huge. The launch, equipped with a small cuddy up forward, was too small and top-heavy to have any hope of weathering the storms that frequented the region. “If they ever get caught in a gale in a sea way …,” wrote the scientist Joseph Couthouy, who was also an experienced mariner, “she will play them the slippery trick before they know it.” For his part, Reynolds was well aware of the danger: “if we should be caught ‘out’ in a S.W. blow, and driven off the Land, we should be lost!”
On March 12, just a day after leaving Orange Bay, Reynolds and company were sailing between the Hardy Peninsula, at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, for the Wollaston and Hermit Islands, just to the northwest of Cape Horn. They were in the Mantello Pass, a more than sixty-mile-wide stretch of open water, when they saw “heavy masses of dark mackerel clouds” to the south. They had made it to within a half-mile of Wollaston Island when the wind suddenly switched in direction and climbed in velocity, turning the coast that was to be their salvation into a dreaded lee shore. They watched in horror as “the surf broke tremendously [and] saw plainly what would be our fate, unless we could soon find a secure anchorage.”
It began to rain; then it began to sleet as the wind continued to build. They had no choice but to make a wild dash for Hermit Island to the south. “[The launch] was pressed with sail,” Reynolds wrote, “& bounded from Sea to Sea, with a speed that astonished us.” One of the crewmembers was a man named Jim Gibson, a sailor who had once gone to school with Reynolds back in Lancaster. As the waves broke over the sides of the launch, the two old friends, finding themselves in an open boat at the end of the world, talked of “how Comfortable we should be, if [we] were only by his Aunt Hubley’s stove, sipping hot punch.”
The visibility was so terrible that they couldn’t see what lay ahead of them at Hermit Island. With the waves “deluging us fore and aft,” they came to within two boat-lengths of a rocky point. Just inside the point was a small cove sheltered from the wind. “[T]he helm was put hard down,” Reynolds wrote, “and in another moment we were in calm water, riding quietly at anchor.”
For the next two weeks, they would spend most of their time huddled in this and another cove, riding out a series of ferocious gales, one of which was so severe that back in Orange Bay – supposedly the securest anchorage in the Hardy Peninsula – the Vincennes dragged her anchors. But they were not alone. There were also the local natives, the Yahgan Indians, who, much like Reynolds and company, traveled from island to island in small open boats. Indeed, the Yahgans were wonderfully adapted to life in a bark canoe. With big torsos, long arms, and spindly legs with flaps of skin hanging down from their knees, they traveled the waters off Tierra del Fuego, often with their entire families in a single canoe: the mother and eldest boy paddling, the father bailing out water and tending the fire that always burned on a few stones and ashes in the center of the hull as the infants and toddlers nestled in a bed of dry grass. Despite the horrendous weather, the Yahgans wore little or no clothing and while on land lived in tiny smoke-filled huts surrounded by heaps of limpet shells.
When Darwin had first seen these people a few years before, he had been so shocked by their primitive state that he had written, “one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.” Reynolds, on the other hand, quickly discovered that the Yahgans had skills that he and Alden could only envy. After spending an entire night unsuccessfully attempting to light a fire, the naval officers watched in amazement as some Yahgans walked down to the beach the next morning and created a large blaze amid the wet underbrush. “[W]e could not learn by what means they kindled it,” Reynolds marveled. The Yahgans were also remarkable mimics, repeating with eerie precision just about everything the Americans said.
One day it began to snow, and the sailors and the Indians enjoyed a snowball fight. “[W]e Skylarked among the snow together, as if we had been old friends: they were naked, & we warmly clad & I just thought that we presented as wide a contrast of person & habit as could be met with any where in the world.” But Reynolds, a man who enjoyed his luxuries, was not about to go native. “[I]f they be the children of Nature,” he wrote, “I am thankful that I am a member of a more artificial community, & will [waive forever] the belief, that those barbarous ones who have the fewest wants, lead a more enviable existence than the great civilized mass.”
On March 25, the weather finally began to moderate. Just an hour after leaving their cove, they saw a sail in the distance. It proved to be the Sea Gull, and as the schooner approached, the officers on the launch took up a gun and fired a salute. When Reynolds first stepped onto