On January 6, the squadron departed from Rio de Janeiro, but not before Wilkes and Nicholson exchanged a final, acrimonious flurry of correspondence. Wilkes accused the commodore of “endeavoring to decry [the Expedition’s] National character and destroy its efficiency by not extending to the Commanding Officers the courtesy and etiquette that their situation . . . commands.” It all came down to Nicholson’s having called him Mr. Wilkes. Baffled and irked by Wilkes’s tormented rage, Nicholson asked him a very good question: Rather than pretend to be something he wasn’t, why didn’t he instead choose to relish the fact that he, a young lieutenant, had been given such a prominent command? “You should feel more highly the honor which has been conferred upon you, as Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, . . . than all the empty and evanescent titles that could be given by either the people or officers of our own Country or any other.” Nicholson would ultimately send copies of his correspondence with Wilkes to Paulding at the Navy Department with a cover letter referring to “the wrong impressions he appears to entertain relative to his supposed rank.”
Even before the squadron had departed from the United States, Wilkes knew that he would be hard-pressed to reach Cape Horn in time to launch a voyage south before the end of the Antarctic summer in late January. From the beginning, time was of the essence. But Wilkes had shown little inclination to hurry. The squadron had spent a leisurely ten days at Madeira and more than a month in Rio. It was true that the Peacock had needed major structural repairs, but Wilkes had chosen to focus on his feud with Commodore Nicholson and his interminable pendulum experiments rather than the pressing need to fix the Peacock and be off as soon as possible. Instead of boldly forging ahead, Wilkes had hung back, apparently unable to confront the trial that lay to the south.
They were now more than a week into January and still had at least 1,800 miles between them and the tip of South America. Given the importance of the Antarctic cruise to the Expedition, Wilkes should have dispensed with the scheduled survey of the Rio Negro in Patagonia and sailed with all dispatch for Cape Horn. But to the astonishment of his officers, the squadron proceeded under easy sail and on January 25 dropped anchor at the mouth of the Rio Negro. The next morning, as First Lieutenant Craven directed preparations to begin the survey in the boats, Wilkes retreated to his cabin, where he lay in the grip of yet another one of his debilitating headaches.
By sundown, the boats were more than three miles from the Vincennes. The current was so strong that it was almost impossible to row against it, so with night approaching, Craven and his men made for the much closer Porpoise. Meanwhile, back on the Vincennes, Wilkes, still suffering from a headache, began to suspect that Craven had taken the opportunity to spend a night “in merrymaking” aboard the Porpoise.
The next morning, Wilkes determined that Craven must be punished. Even though he had absolutely no tangible proof of misconduct, he sent his trusted flag lieutenant Overton Carr to do his bidding. Craven was ordered back to the Vincennes while Carr assumed command of the survey. Craven soon learned that he had been suspended and that Carr had been named first lieutenant.
Craven and his fellow officers were at a loss to know what he had done wrong. As Wilkes would come close to admitting years later in his Autobiography, Craven’s real sin was not a breach of discipline, but his undeniable competence. By suspending Craven and making Carr the first lieutenant, Wilkes was consciously striking out at an officer whose chief fault was that he “regarded himself as the acting spirit in . . . managing the ship.” It was a shabby, duplicitous, and manipulative abuse of power, but Wilkes’s actions against Craven may have saved the Expedition. Prior to the incident, he had become stupefied with exhaustion and self-doubt. The leadership style that had worked at Georges Bank was clearly not going to get him through a voyage of this magnitude. Instead of being everyone’s friend, he was much better at cultivating his enemies. By lashing out at Craven he had finally roused himself to action. Refreshed and invigorated by his triumph over his first lieutenant, he began to look ahead with enthusiasm for the first time in the voyage.
Soon after Craven’s suspension, an onshore gale kicked up, putting the squadron in immediate peril. The surf was breaking on the nearby shore “with tremendous violence,” Reynolds wrote, “as if it would wash the sandy barrier away.” There wasn’t enough time to raise the heavy and cumbersome anchors, so the order was given to slip their cables. Leaving behind buoys to mark the locations of the anchors, the squadron began to claw away from the desolate shore of Rio Negro. Wilkes took great pride in the way that both he and his new first lieutenant responded to the challenge. “I was somewhat pleased to let [Craven] see that there were others quite as competent to perform the duties as he,” Wilkes wrote. By suspending his first lieutenant, he had “destroyed within his mind that over Conceit he had in the ability to alone perform and take care of the ship.” It was a form of psychological warfare Wilkes would subsequently employ against all officers who, in his judgment, dared to view themselves as indispensable.
Reynolds and his fellow officers were not sure what to think about Craven’s suspension. No one liked trouble, and yet a suspension might allow for promotions from below. Perhaps Wilkes had his reasons. “[T]he friends who were so devoted to the Commander would not suffer a voice to be raised against him,” he wrote, “and threatened to quarrel with any one who should say a word to his prejudice. Mr. Wilkes was still an Idol to many, and he knew it.”
After retrieving their anchors, the squadron left Rio Negro on February 3. Although Wilkes knew where they were headed, he chose, once again, not to share the information with his officers. Some guessed they were headed for the Falkland Islands; others figured that due to the lateness of the season, they were headed around the Horn for Valparaiso, Chile. Whatever the case might be, for the present they were headed south. When it began to snow on February 6, the quartermaster Thomas Piner, one of the older members of the Vincennes’s crew, commented that they were now “getting into the suburbs.”
Then it began to blow. “The ship laboured much,” Reynolds wrote, “damaging crockery by the wholesale & taking in oceans of water.” His ornate bed was not suitable for a gale, so he was forced to spend the night in a hammock in steerage: “[T]o pass the night among such a million of noises, from the tramping & voices of men, the bleating & grunting of the live stock, the workings of the Masts & guns, the creaking of the Ladders, the howling of the winds, the strong dash of the breaking waves, & the continual fetching away of some thing or other about decks, is to suffer more than can be imagined, but which is well known, to all who have weathered out a Gale at Sea.”
The next day, warm clothing, including the India rubber jackets originally ordered by Jones, was distributed to the crew. On Saturday, February 16, exactly twenty-four weeks after leaving Norfolk, they sighted the wave-washed outcropping of Cape Horn. Despite the Horn’s fierce reputation, the weather was wonderful—warm, sunny, and quiet—and the Vincennes sailed on with her studding sails set.
It was soon learned that they were to proceed to Orange Bay, a well-protected natural harbor just inside the Hermit Islands at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego. Ever since 1616 when the Dutch explorer Willem Schouten named the bleak rock at the end of South America for his hometown of Hoorn in the Netherlands, Cape Horn and its gale-force southwesterly winds had been studiously, often desperately avoided by vessels attempting a passage between the world’s two largest oceans. During the War of 1812, navy captain David Porter had rounded the Horn in the American frigate Essex. “[O]ur sufferings . . . have been so great,” he wrote, “that I would advise those bound into the Pacific, never to attempt the passage of Cape Horn, if they can get there by another route.” Wilkes and his men were about to sail into the mythic recesses of one of the most feared places on earth.
Wilkes had instructed Lieutenant Long and the Relief to proceed directly to Orange Bay, where he was to have already set up a revolving signal light atop a hill. Since they had no charts of the wate
rs immediately surrounding Cape Horn—a region no mariner in his right mind would choose to visit—they had to be very careful as they felt their way along this rocky, inhospitable tip of the world, especially since, as Reynolds observed, “changes occur here, like lightning—quick & often unexpected.”
All that night the wind remained light and baffling. At six in the morning, by which time the sun had already been up for two hours, all hands were called on deck to work the ship through a narrow, rock-rimmed channel. The wind was against them, requiring that they tack the Vincennes every five minutes. Repeatedly tacking a seven-hundred-ton square-rigged ship in a confined space required exceptional coordination and skill: The ship’s bow was swung quickly into the wind, and with her head yards thrown aback, the bow fell off from the wind until the after yards were swung around so that the sails could fill as the ship settled onto the new tack. Soon after coming up to speed, it was time once again to tack. In light air, there was always a danger that the ship might not have enough momentum to complete the maneuver—known as “missing stays”—a potentially disastrous turn of events when in close quarters with a rock. Tension mounted aboard the Vincennes, especially when darkness started to come on. “We were in an unknown place,” Reynolds wrote, “we knew nothing of the localities, nothing positive & certain. We had no soundings [due to the extreme depth of the water] & of course could not Anchor.”
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.”
CHAPTER 5
The Turning Point
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 hereafter.” 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 dan
gerous 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 and very wet ride as the narrow schooner surfed into the backsides of the cresting seas. On February 28, the jarring strain of several days of wave-riding caused the Sea Gull’s gaff to break. Despite the immense seas, Johnson was able to maneuver the schooner to within a few feet of the Porpoise and transfer the splintered spar to the brig’s carpenter, who had it repaired in a few hours.
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.”