Sea of Glory

years, doing battle against rival tribes, and meeting, in an incredible encounter, an old schoolmate from Nantucket. David Whippy had deserted from a whaleship several years before and was now an adviser to a chief; and he made it clear to Cary that he was never going back. Not before enduring three more shipwrecks did Cary finally escape the Fijis and return to Nantucket.
    Whalemen were not the only ones at the mercy of the uncharted hazards of the South Sea. As the sea otter population in the Northwest dropped catastrophically due to overhunting, New England merchants were forced to look elsewhere for trade goods. In the Hawaiian Islands they found sandalwood, prized by the Chinese for making incense and ornamental boxes. In less than a decade Hawaiian sandalwood was also approaching extinction, so it was on to the treacherous waters of the Fiji Islands, where, in addition to sandalwood, there were plentiful supplies of bêche-de-mer, a sea slug used for soups in China. The deadly reefs surrounding the islands claimed so many ships that it became impossible to buy insurance for a voyage to Fiji. In 1834, the East India Marine Society of Salem made a desperate plea to local and federal governments to provide their sailors with reliable charts: “The Feejee or Beetee Islands, what is known of them? They were named but not visited by Captain Cook, and consist of sixty or more in number. Where shall we find a chart of this group, pointing out its harbors and dangers? There are none to be found, for none exist!”
    American commercial ambition had taken U.S. vessels to parts of the world where not even Cook and dozens of subsequent European exploring expeditions had ventured. Of all the navigators to sail from the United States, it was the sealers who pushed this form of free enterprise exploration the farthest.
    Sealers, many of them from Stonington, Connecticut, were a different breed from the sea otter traders. The otter traders never had to get their hands dirty. Sea otters were so difficult to pursue that only Native Americans in their canoes or Aleuts in their kayaks possessed the expertise to capture the fast-swimming creatures. Killing seals, on the other hand, was well within the abilities of any sailor. The rookeries in the Pacific were located on bleak, remote islands where, at least in the beginning, incredible numbers of seals were waiting to be slaughtered and skinned. It is estimated that over three million seals were exterminated on the Juan Fernandez Islands alone in just a seven-year period. In Canton a seal skin sold for in the neighborhood of a dollar, the payment often made in tea.
    In the years after the War of 1812, practitioners of what was referred to as “the skinning trade” had reduced the seal population of the Pacific to disastrously low levels, forcing them to sail farther and farther south in pursuit of new rookeries. By 1820, sealers from both Britain and America had reached the South Shetland Islands—an eerie volcanic land of fog, ice, and seals almost six hundred miles below Cape Horn. Although the British claimed the honor of the discovery, the Americans, who subscribed to a policy of secrecy since they knew how quickly an island’s seal population could be exterminated, insisted that they had known about the islands all along. In 1820, Stonington sealers took 8,868 skins in the South Shetlands; the next year they returned and killed over 60,000 seals.
    It was during this cruise that the twenty-one-year-old Nathaniel Palmer, captain of the forty-seven-foot tender Hero, temporarily left the company of the Stonington fleet and headed south in search of new sealing grounds. Not far below the South Shetlands he found a peninsula of rugged land. Surrounded by icebergs and swimming schools of penguins, he followed the coastline south until dense fog—so thick that he could not see the lookout on the forecastle—forced him to turn back. In the early morning hours of February 6, the fog lifted, revealing a surprising sight. On either side of the tiny tender were two Russian exploring ships under the command of Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen.
    The admiral was astounded at the tiny size of the American craft, just a third of the length of his own ship. “It was with great difficulty that I could make the old admiral believe I had come from U States in so small a vessel,” Palmer later remembered. Through an interpreter, Bellingshausen told Palmer that previous to being