Sea of Glory

Pacific Station along the west coast of South America. Wilkes was about to encounter the ocean he had been dreaming about since he was a young boy.
     
    When the Franklin reached Quilca, Peru, Wilkes was assigned to the schooner Waterwitch with dispatches for General Bolívar in Guayaquil, Ecuador. They were off the port of Paita when they encountered the Two Brothers, a whaleship from Nantucket. In most instances naval officers took a dim view of whalemen. Their crews were often as inexperienced as they were undisciplined; the ships smelled of putrid blubber, smoke, and grease; loaded down with massive brick tryworks, a whaler presented a most unseamanlike sight as it slogged slowly over the waves.
    The evening before, Wilkes had read an account of the sinking of a Nantucket whaleship called the Essex (not to be confused with the naval frigate by that name) by an enraged sperm whale. When the captain of the Two Brothers introduced himself as George Pollard, Wilkes realized that he was speaking to the very man he’d been reading about—the former captain of the Essex.
    Pollard proceeded to tell the midshipman a story of unbelievable hardship, of how the crew took to their three small whaleboats and, fearful of cannibals on the islands to the west, began to sail against the trade winds for South America, almost three thousand miles away. All three boats would become separated from one another, and as the men began to die of starvation, the survivors realized that they had no alternative but to enact their own worst fears: they must eat the bodies of their dead shipmates. Pollard and a young Nantucketer were eventually rescued almost within sight of the coast of Chile after ninety-four days at sea. “I had by accident become acquainted with a hero,” Wilkes wrote, “who did not even consider that he had overcome obstacles which would have crushed 99 out of a hundred.”
    As it would turn out, several months after his conversation with Wilkes, Captain Pollard once again encountered disaster. At night in a storm to the southwest of the Hawaiian Islands, the Two Brothers fetched up on an uncharted shoal. As the ship was being pounded to pieces on the coral, the order was given to take to the whaleboats. Pollard had to be dragged from the deck. The next morning all hands were saved by the whaleship Martha and taken to Oahu. Upon returning to Nantucket, Pollard lived out the rest of his life as the town’s nightwatchman.
    What happened to Pollard on his final voyage was a frighteningly common occurrence in the Pacific, an ocean so huge that much of it was not yet adequately surveyed and charted. In addition to unmarked shoals that might crop up almost anywhere, there were hundreds of little-known islands surrounded by reefs of razor-sharp coral. In the absence of a published chart, a captain might rely on a handwritten map given him by a mariner who had recorded his not always trustworthy impressions; often he had only the island’s latitude and longitude to guide him.
    As a captain approached an unfamiliar shore, he prepared the ship’s anchors to be dropped at a moment’s notice in case he found himself trapped amid hidden rocks or shoals. He also ordered his men to heave the lead—a tapered cylinder of metal attached to a line marked in fathoms to ascertain the water’s depth. In spite of all these precautions, a captain studied the water ahead with an intensity that few landsmen could appreciate, scanning the surface for the dimples and swirls of an otherwise unseen current that might sweep the ship into the coral. He was also on the lookout for a change in color that might presage a sudden and disastrous change in depth. The night Captain Pollard lost his second whaleship in three years, he was standing on the rail, staring down worriedly at the waves after one of his officers reported that “the water alongside looked whiter than usual.” Seconds later, the ship slammed into a coral reef that had been impossible to see in the murky darkness.
    Two years after Pollard lost the Two Brothers, another Nantucket whaleship, the Oeno, disappeared without a trace in the Fiji Islands. Nine years later, the ship’s cooper, William Cary, returned home to Nantucket and told of how the Oeno had been wrecked on an uncharted reef; how the crew had been massacred on Vatoa or Turtle Island, and how only he had escaped by hiding for weeks in a cave. Eventually adopted by a Fiji chief, Cary lived in the islands for several