Johnson explained that soon after they returned to Orange Bay from the South Shetland Islands, he had been sent out on a search for the launch by Lieutenant Craven, who had begun to fear the worst. For their part, Alden and Reynolds were eager to hear about the Sea Gull’s sail south, and they soon learned about the schooner’s stop at Deception Island – how they had anchored in the lagoonlike harbor of a volcano’s drowned crater and set out on an unsuccessful search for the self-registering thermometer left by the British explorer Captain Foster. Johnson and his men had walked over the surface of an active volcano, and even as snow and sleet pummeled their heads, they could feel heat radiating up through the thick soles of their boots. At one point Johnson put his ear to the ground and heard a roaring sound, like “a strong draught in a chimney.”
Over the next week, as Alden supervised the completion of the survey from the security of the schooner, Reynolds fell in love – not with a woman, but with the Sea Gull. He became smitten with everything about this perfectly designed craft. One night as they rode out yet another gale, he could not help but wonder if the Sea Gull were, in fact, alive. “I could scarcely believe that all was mechanical,” he wrote, “that her nice & regular motion was merely the result of properties bestowed on her by the skillful builder. It seemed much more natural to think that She had a mind, an instinct, a will of her own, & that guided by it, she defied the threatening dangers of the Gale.”
By the time they returned to Orange Bay, the squadron was buzzing with excitement. The Flying Fish had brought back word of her historic sail south; Wilkes had returned in the Porpoise, his initial euphoria tempered by an incident at the Strait of Le Maire just off the eastern tip of Tierra del Fuego. In the same storm that had nearly killed Reynolds and his compatriots, one of Wilkes’s officers, Lieutenant John Dale, had been trapped with his boat’s crew on the shore of Good Success Bay. The Porpoise had been forced to make for the open sea, and it had taken almost a week to retrieve Dale and his men. Wilkes blamed the delay on Dale’s incompetence, and a court of inquiry was to be convened once they reached Valparaiso. In the meantime, the Peacock was already on her way to Valparaiso while the Relief was long overdue from her cruise to the Strait of Magellan. In the sixty days since they first arrived at Orange Bay, they had experienced no less than eleven gales, averaging between two and three days in duration. To be trapped in a storm against a lee shore in the Strait of Magellan was a fate no man wanted to contemplate.
On April 17, Wilkes decided that it was time for the Vincennes and Porpoise to depart for Valparaiso. He ordered the two schooners to wait another ten days for the Relief. If the storeship did return to Orange Bay, Wilkes wanted the schooners to transport the scientists to Valparaiso; otherwise they would be delayed even longer by an interminable passage north aboard the slow-sailing Relief. The next time the squadron reassembled, it would be in the warm waters of the Pacific.
The Vincennes anchored at Valparaiso on May 15. Wilkes found the Peacock, but saw no sign of the Relief. From Hudson, who had been at anchor now for close to three weeks, he learned that Lieutenant Long had arrived almost a month earlier and had since sailed up the coast to Callao, Peru, where he was taking on stores. Wilkes also learned why the Relief had not returned to Orange Bay.
While the rest of the squadron had headed south, the Relief had set out from Orange Bay for the Strait of Magellan on February 26. Long had been instructed to sail west and north, following the rocky coastline to the western entrance to the Strait. He was then to sail the length of the Strait, seeking shelter whenever necessary along its north shore while providing the scientists with every possible opportunity to collect specimens. By the time they returned to Orange Bay, no later than April 15, they would have completed a circumnavigation of Tierra del Fuego. But the voyage did not go as planned.
Instead of hugging the shore on his way to the Strait of Magellan, as Wilkes had advised him to do, Long chose to play it safe, heading well offshore before beginning to work north. Unfortunately a series of storms and headwinds turned what Wilkes had predicted would be a two-day passage to the mouth of the Strait into a seemingly interminable struggle up the coast. On March 17, three weeks after leaving Orange Bay, the Relief was finally beginning to approach the western coast of South America. The geologist James Dana looked forward to “fine sport among the guanacos [cousins of llamas], birds and fish of the Straits.” But then it began to blow a gale from the southwest.
“The winds howled through the rigging with almost deafening violence,” Dana wrote. The sleet and dense haze offered little visibility, but Lieutenant Long knew that somewhere to leeward lay what was known as the “Milky Way,” a region of countless rocks and tiny islands that virtually defied navigation. Philip King, the British navy captain whose sailing instructions Long had read with great care, said of the Milky Way: “No vessel ought to entangle herself in these labyrinths, if she does, she must sail by eye. Neither chart, directions, nor soundings, would be of much assistance and in thick weather the situation would be most precarious.”
At three p.m. the next day the lookout cried, “Breakers under the bows!” Out of the thick gray mist loomed the hundred-foot-high Tower Rocks, against which the waves of the Southern Ocean broke with such force that the spray shot up higher than the Relief’s masthead. The ship was brought about but could make no headway against the tremendous wind and waves. The mist broke clear for a few minutes, revealing Noir Island under the lee bow, just a few miles to the northeast. “[N]ight was approaching,” Lieutenant Long wrote, “to claw off or hold our own was impracticable, a portentous sky, and the ‘milky way’ close under our lee, warned us that our graves might be made in it.” Long resolved to sail for the shelter of Noir Island.
“We could not but admire the coolness and judgment of Captain Long,” Dana wrote, “who, through the whole was seated on the fore-yard, giving his orders as quietly and deliberately as in more peaceful times.” As the Relief bore down on Noir Island, Long ordered the men to prepare the anchors. In a half hour they had rounded the southeastern point of the island, where they found a small, partially sheltered cove. It would have to do. In sixteen fathoms of water, they brailed up their trysails, luffed into the wind, and let go two of their anchors, along with one hundred and fifty fathoms of chain, and furled the sails. “Here we felt comparatively safe,” Long wrote. That night, the naturalist Charles Pickering overheard one of the officers remark “that a few such days as this would make a man turn gray.” “[T]he sequel proved,” Pickering wrote, “that one’s hair does not turn gray so easily.”
When they awoke the next morning, the wind had diminished. They could see snow atop the six-hundred-foot-high peaks of the island. Some of the scientists, noticing a tiny cove beside them, even talked about going ashore. But then the wind began to build and shifted to the southeast. The island was no longer providing any protection. “A heavy Cape Horn sea was now setting into the harbor,” Dana wrote, “and as the ship reared and plunged with each passing wave we feared that every lurch would snap the cables or drag our anchors.” An old sailor who had been more than forty-five years at sea told Pickering that he “had never before seen such riding.” Behind them was a reef that terminated with a large jagged rock, which now lay directly astern. They watched as the waves thundered against it. That night, the anchors began to drag. Long ordered the men to lower a third anchor, then a fourth. “[T]here seems to be nothing that separates us from eternity,” he wrote in his log, “but the sailors semblance of Hope, the Anchor.”
The next morning, March 20, Long ordered the men to heave in the two larboard chains to see if the anchors were still attached to them. As he had suspected, one of them was gone completely while the other had lost its shank, rendering it worthless. “Our situation may be described,” he wrote, “but I shan’t attempt it.” The wind began to build, creating what Long described as “an awful swell.” As night approached, Long ordered his officers and men to “prepare for the worst.” Dana decided that in the event that the Relief drifted into the ironbound coast of Noir Island behind them, “his the happiest lot who was soonest dead” since those who weren’t drowned or battered to pieces on the rocks could only look forward to