Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition 1838–42. Nathaniel Philbrick

      No one else aboard the Relief appears to have slept a wink that night. “[E]very pitch of the ship was feared as the last,” Dana wrote. “How anxiously we followed her motion down as she plunged her head into the water, and then watched her rising from those depths, until with a sudden start she gained the summit of the wave, and reeled and quivered at the length of her straightened cable!” With each one of these upward thrusts, the remaining anchors and chains could be heard dragging across the rocks – an appalling rumble that to Dana’s ear sounded like the growling of distant thunder. At nine p.m. the crew was ordered on deck “to await the event.” By this time the sound of the dragging anchors had become “almost an incessant peal,” Dana wrote, “announcing that the dreaded crisis was fast approaching.”

      They had drifted to within a ship’s length of the reef One of the anchors finally caught and, for a few brief moments, the Relief hovered in the wild surge of the breakers. “[T]he ship rose and fell a few times with the swell,” Dana wrote, “and then rose and careened as if half mad: her decks were deluged with the sweeping waves, which poured in torrents down the hatches.” The strain on the cables proved too much, and at 11:30 P.M. the anchor chain parted. “[W]e found ourselves,” Long wrote, “at God’s mercy.”

      With the remnants of the cables hanging from the bow, the Relief began to drift to her apparent destruction. Then a miracle occurred. For the last few hours the wind had been gradually shifting to the east. Just when it looked as if they were about to fetch up on the large rock at the end of the reef, the Relief – as if nudged by the hand of God – drifted around the final hazard and out to sea.

      Long realized that there was now a possibility for action. He waited until Noir Island’s Astronomers Point bore west by south, then ordered the cables slipped. Under fore-trysail and storm-staysail, they wore the ship “short round,” Long wrote, “without unnecessary loss of ground.” More sail was set, and using the smooth water in the lee of Noir Island to his advantage, Long drove the Relief under “a heavy press of sail” to windward. The next morning Pickering awoke to discover that the crisis had passed. The Relief had clawed far enough to weather that Long was confident they would soon clear Cape Gloucester and “once more reach the wide waters of the Pacific in safety.”

      They had made no new discoveries, but the officers and men of the Relief had made their mark in the annals of American seamanship. “It is doubtful that in the history of the Navy,” one commentator has written, “there has been a more remarkable escape from destruction on a lee shore.” Long opened his sealed orders and learned that the squadron was headed for Valparaiso. Although he was supposed to have first returned to Orange Bay, he felt that without any anchors he had no option but to continue on to Chile. At Valparaiso, Long was able to secure an anchor from the British warship Fly, and on April 14, the Relief sat quietly at rest for the first time in more than a month and a half.

      When, a month later, Wilkes learned of the Relief’s travails, he was filled not with grateful wonder for her deliverance but with outrage and indignation. Long had committed the same sin that had resulted in the longest passage in recorded history to Rio de Janeiro. Ironically, while trying to play it safe, he had put not only his own vessel but the future of the Expedition at risk. If he had only done as Wilkes had recommended – hug the coast, rather than timidly stand off from it – none of this would have happened.

      On May 19, the Flying Fish, back under the command of Passed Midshipman Samuel Knox, arrived at Valparaiso. The Sea Gull was nowhere in sight. Shortly after leaving Orange Bay, the two schooners had encountered a particularly violent gale, and Knox had fled back to the bay. Knox had last seen the Sea Gull