On March 11, they saw their first iceberg. “[E]ven the sailors left their breakfast to have a look at it,” Peale wrote. Peale busied himself shooting birds – including two albatrosses (“ash colored with sooty heads”), a blue petrel, and a cape pigeon. He hoped the birds would be blown back onto the deck of the Peacock, but the winds never seemed to cooperate, and the potential specimens were lost.
On Sunday, March 17, Hudson conducted a religious service on the half-deck. The sea was so high that the men had to lie down on the deck and, according to Peale, “hold on by whatever was near.” Hudson thought that this might have been the first time a sermon had been read “within the South Antarctic Circle,” adding, “I should indeed rejoice to extend the requirements of the Gospel … from Pole to Pole.”
The weather was miserable – a wet cold fog that often made it impossible to see the icebergs that loomed ahead until they “popp[ed] up suddenly in your face to bid you defiance.” Unlike Wilkes, who seemed to flourish amid the terrors of an iceberg-infested sea, Hudson quickly grew weary of the strain. “This fancy kind of sailing,” he confided in his journal, “is not all that it is cracked up to be.” But there was one advantage to the steadily falling temperatures. By March 18, the Peacock was coated in a thick layer of ice. “Our Antarctic Caulker has so thoroughly performed his duty,” Hudson wrote, “that we shall be comparatively dry below.”
On March 22, the fog lifted for a moment to reveal an icy barrier similar to what Cook had encountered more than half a century before. Hudson made his way east, hoping for an opening. Heavy squalls battered them on the twenty-fourth, the conditions made all the more dangerous by the presence of dozens of icebergs, some extending as high as two hundred feet above the sea. The next day, the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in almost a week, allowing them to make a noon sight. They were at latitude 68° south, longitude 97°58’ west – just a few degrees from Cook.
An hour later, “a strange sail” was sighted to the west. All hands rushed on deck; it was the first vessel they’d seen in almost a month. They hoisted their flag and fired a gun. To their great joy and relief they soon realized it was the Flying Fish, and at three p.m. the schooner passed astern of the Peacock, both crews giving each other three hearty cheers. A boat was dispatched to the Flying Fish, and soon Lieutenant Walker, along with a sailor whose cracked ribs were in need of medical attention, were on the Peacock’s deck. Walker had brought his chart with him and seemed eager to tell his story. Hudson ushered the young lieutenant below to his cabin, and with the chart spread out before them, Walker recounted how the Flying Fish, the smallest vessel in the squadron, had just made history.
William Walker had not been particularly happy about commanding the Flying Fish. He felt he should have been given the larger Sea Gull since he was ahead of Robert Johnson on the list. His friends consoled him with the assurance that the ninety-six-ton schooner “would at least make him an honourable coffin.”
Just two days later, on the night of February 26, Walker and his fourteen-man crew began to wonder if that was indeed what the Flying Fish was about to become. As they lay to in the squall that had separated them from the Peacock, gigantic seas continually broke over the schooner’s deck. To continue without the company of the much larger ship seemed like madness. But when the gale moderated the next day, they pushed on to the south.
On the night of March 2, another gale kicked up. The wind shifted direction, creating the same jumbled sea conditions that caused William Stewart’s fall aboard the Peacock. Aboard the schooner, it was part earthquake, part tsunami. “It was almost impossible to stand on deck without danger of being carried overboard,” wrote the surgeon James Palmer, “and below, everything was afloat. Books, clothes and cabin furniture chased each other from side to side; while the bulkheads creaked, and blocks thumped overhead, with a distracting din.”
The storm lasted thirty-six hours. On March 6, they experienced their first sunny day of the cruise. Birds followed behind them; a porpoise leaped at their bow; but at midnight it began to blow. “A dreadful night succeeded,” Palmer wrote. Huge seas broke across the deck, crushing their two boats and ripping the binnacle, the wooden box containing the compass, off its fastenings and into the ocean. The companion-slide was then torn away by a mountainous wave that flooded the cabin and knocked both the helmsman and lookout off their feet. When a whale rubbed up against the beleaguered schooner and an albatross flapped its wings in the face of one of the men, Walker began to wonder if all of nature had somehow conspired against them.
Three days later, they discovered a leak in the bread-room, requiring that they shift the stores aft. Most of the next day was spent at the pumps. The schooner was now leaking at every seam. Their clothes and bedding were completely soaked. Dispensing with their worthless exploring boots, they wrapped their feet in blankets in an attempt to stay warm. Then it began to sleet, covering the schooner’s deck, as well as the jackets of the men, in a glistening shell of ice. When the jib split, the icy conditions made it impossible to take in the sail, which hung over the side by a single hank on the forestay. Five of the men were now so debilitated by cold that they could barely stand. Yet all continued to do their duty without complaint.
On March 14 they reached a prearranged rendezvous point with the Peacock at 105° west, just a few degrees of longitude from Cook’s Ne Plus Ultra. Once the weather began to ease, Walker and his men took the opportunity to repair their damaged boats and tend to a sailor who had fractured a rib. After waiting a day, with no sign of the Peacock, they headed south.
The farther south they sailed, the more astonished they were by the amount of wildlife inhabiting this seemingly barren place. The water was filled with penguins; countless birds swarmed in the air; the many whale spouts reminded the men of smoke curling from the chimneys of a crowded city. At one point a huge right whale, longer than the Flying Fish, appeared in front of the schooner and refused to budge, forcing the men to push the creature off with boathooks.
On March 19 they passed between two icebergs that they calculated to be 830 feet high. They hove to beside one of the massive bergs to fill their water casks with meltwater. “Encompassed by these icy walls,” Palmer wrote, “the schooner looked like a mere skiff in the moat of a giant’s castle.” The towering walls of ice and the cold dry Antarctic air created strange acoustics. “The voice had no resonance,” Palmer wrote, “words fell from the lip and seemed to freeze before they reached the ear.”
Once they’d filled their casks, they continued on through the fog, the deck officer on watch always standing at the forecastle, listening for the roar of breakers. Several times they looked up to discover an iceberg’s frozen sides emerging from the mist. At twilight they narrowly averted slamming into a submerged tongue of ice that would have surely sunk them. Although the icebergs were a constant threat, there was yet another, far more insidious danger: becoming trapped in the ice as the temperature began to drop. By this point all their thermometers had been broken, so they mounted tin pots in the rigging and filled them with water. They would continue south until the water started to freeze.
On March 20, the fog suddenly lifted. There, just a few yards ahead of them, was the wall of ice that had stopped both Hudson and Cook. Fifteen to twenty feet high, it extended to both the eastern and western horizons. To the south lay “a vast and seemingly boundless field,” wrote Walker, who proceeded to head west and then east, “luffing and bearing away alternately to avoid dangerous contact with large detached masses.”
The next day, at four p.m., they found it – an opening to the south. With all sails set, they were doing eight knots, “flattering ourselves,” Walker remembered, “we should get beyond Cook.” But by noon of the next day, “our hopes were blasted in the bud.” They were hove to in another gale. All around them were icebergs, “whose pale masses just came in sight through the dim haze, like tombs in a vast cemetery.”
The next day the skies cleared and the wind disappeared. To the south it seemed as if they could see all the