In hopes of attracting the attention of the Relief, they fired guns and rockets. Lookouts strained to see the light that was supposed to have been placed on a high hill. Twice a star rising up over the land was mistaken for the signal.
At midnight the wind began to freshen. In fear of blundering into the rocks, the topsails were reefed, and the Vincennes stood offshore and waited for daylight. At four that morning it was light enough to read on deck, and the Porpoise was discovered nearby. An hour later, as the sun rose “in fiery splendor,” they saw it – the Relief at anchor. By six in the morning, they, too, were anchored in Orange Bay.
That afternoon Wilkes finally withdrew “the veil of mystery.” “[A]ll hands went to work as if Life & death depended on their exertions,” Reynolds wrote. Despite the lateness of the season, they were “to go South.”
THERE WASN’T MUCH that could intimidate James Cook. But on January 30, 1774, the indomitable explorer met his match. Four days after crossing the Antarctic Circle, he reached latitude 71°10’ south – farther south than anyone had ever ventured. In front of him stood an immense and impenetrable field of ice, “whose horrible and savage aspect I have no words to describe.” He could have pushed east or west in search of an opening to the south, but Cook had had enough. “I whose ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go, was not sorry at meeting with this interruption,” he later recorded in his journal. He suspected that a large landmass existed to the south, but he was quite content to leave its discovery to someone else. “[W]hoever has resolution and perseverance to clear up this point by proceeding farther than I have done,” he wrote, “I shall not envy him the honour of the discovery.”
More than sixty-five years later, on February 25, 1839, Charles Wilkes held out hope that he might claim that prize. Unfortunately, it was already a month later in the season than when Cook had reached what had become known as his “Ne Plus Ultra” (Latin for “No Farther”), and Wilkes had not yet left Orange Bay.
The last week had been a mad scramble of preparation. The Vincennes was to remain in Orange Bay, where Lieutenant Carr would oversee the collection of meteorological data as well as the celestial observations required to check the rates of their chronometers. Lieutenant Alden, with Passed Midshipman William Reynolds as his second-in-command, was to survey the rocky coastline of Tierra del Fuego in a thirty-five-foot launch. In the meantime, Lieutenant Long in the Relief would take the scientists on a collecting trip into the Strait of Magellan. That left the Porpoise, the Peacock, and the two schooners for a voyage south.
The Antarctic summer had already turned to autumn – dramatically increasing the risk of becoming trapped in the ice. In the event that they might be forced to winter below the Antarctic Circle, the vessels were loaded with enough provisions to last between eight and ten months. Orange Bay became a scene of near-constant activity. Boxes of provisions were taken from the Relief and the Vincennes and loaded into the Peacock, Porpoise, Flying Fish, and Sea Gull as boats bearing firewood and casks of water continually came and went from shore.
Due to the dangerous nature of the duty they were about to undertake, Wilkes decided that lieutenants, instead of passed midshipmen, should be put in command of the schooners. When it was learned that two junior lieutenants, Robert Johnson and William Walker (both part of Wilkes’s inner circle), were to command the Sea Gull and the Flying Fish, respectively, there was an outcry of protest from the senior lieutenants; Hudson’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Samuel Lee, even wrote Wilkes a strongly worded letter. Wilkes responded in a manner that was calculated “to astonish everyone.” With a stroke of his pen, he dismissed Lee from the squadron, ordering him to report to the Relief for passage back to the United States once he reached Valparaiso. This required a complete reshuffling of officers, and in less than an hour, Wilkes had issued the necessary orders, reassigning a total of eleven lieutenants. (Now down an officer, Wilkes reinstated First Lieutenant Craven to active duty aboard the Vincennes, but not until Craven had written a letter of apology.)
Wilkes would later describe the suspension of Lieutenant Lee as “the turning point of the discipline of the cruise.” Lee, like Craven before him, was one of the senior lieutenants he had inherited from the earlier expedition. He was now convinced that they were part of a “mutinous cabal” that if allowed to continue unchecked would destroy the squadron. “[T]he many headed Hydra is completely overcome,” he wrote Jane, “but I have [to] keep a very watchful eye on the boys here-after.” Lieutenant Johnson, the new commander of the Sea Gull, had a different perspective on the incident. “Every one says the devilish Schooners are the cause of it all,” he wrote. “They ought at first to have been given to the two senior lieutenants when they applied for them.”
By February 25, it was time to depart. Wilkes divided the four vessels into two groups. Hudson, in command of the Peacock, would sail west and south in the company of the Flying Fish in an attempt to better Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra in the vicinity of longitude 106° west. Wilkes had taken over command of the Porpoise and, along with the Sea Gull, would sail south and east toward the South Shetland Islands.
Wilkes’s greatest hopes for discovery lay to the east of the South Shetlands. In the more than sixty years since Cook’s historic voyage south, only one navigator had bettered his mark On February 18, 1823, the British sealer James Weddell, sailing from the South Orkney Islands, well to the east of the South Shetlands, had reached latitude 74°15’ south, longitude 34°16’ west, almost two hundred miles farther south than Cook Instead of a wall of ice, Weddell had encountered open water and warm temperatures, prompting him to wonder if instead of land, a navigable sea might extend all the way to the pole. Since that time, no explorer had been able to come close to Weddell’s achievement. Wilkes theorized that the lateness of the season might actually work to his advantage when it came to reproducing the conditions the British sealer had encountered in what is known today as the Weddell Sea.
The Porpoise and the Sea Gull were the first to depart Orange Bay at 7:30 A.M. on February 25. “[W]e gave them three hearty cheers,” Reynolds wrote, “wishing them, with all our hearts, a prosperous time, and a safe return.” At four p.m., a heavy squall pushed the two vessels with a shove out into the fearsome waters of the Drake Passage, the six-hundred-mile stretch of open water between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands. The Drake Passage is the only place on earth where the wind can circulate around the entire globe without ever touching land, making it one of the most dangerous places on the planet for a sailing vessel.
The following day, they came upon a whaleship from New York, homeward bound with 3,800 barrels of oil. Realizing that the whalers would soon be back in the United States, Wilkes asked if they’d be willing to take along some letters. The whaling captain cheerfully agreed, and soon the officers of both the Porpoise and the Sea Gull were scribbling out notes to their loved ones. They were descending into one of the coldest, most perilous parts of the world at a time of year when anyone with any sense would have been headed in the opposite direction. All of them could not help but wonder if these might be the last letters they ever wrote. “I am in excellent spirits,” Wilkes assured Jane, “and am living with Ringgold during this trip.” He added that their nephew Wilkes Henry “is quite well and grown astonishingly.”
With the wind almost directly behind them, they sailed to the southeast at nine knots over huge rolling waves that Wilkes calculated to average thirty-two feet in height. For those aboard the tiny Sea Gull, it was proving to be a thrilling