HELL ON ICE

THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”

Books by

HELL ON ICE
THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”
by
COMMANDER
EDWARD ELLSBERG

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK 1938

Copyright, 1938,
By EDWARD ELLSBERG
AND
LUCY BUCK ELLSBERG
All rights reserved—no part of this book may be
reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

TO
EMMA WOTTON DE LONG
STILL WAITING AFTER SIXTY YEARS TO
REJOIN THE MAN WHO SAILED AWAY
IN COMMAND OF THE “JEANNETTE”

“... a truer, nobler, trustier heart,

More loving or more loyal, never beat

Within a human breast.”

PREFACE

On the summit of a grassy hill in Maryland looking across an arm of the Severn River toward the spreading lawns and the gray buildings of the Naval Academy stands a stone cross frosted with marble icicles topping an oddly shaped granite cairn.

In the summer of 1910, a boy of eighteen fresh from the Colorado Rockies, I stood, a new midshipman in awkward sailor whites, before that monument and read the inscription to Lieutenant Commander G. W. De Long and the officers and men who perished with him in the Jeannette Expedition of 1879 in search of the North Pole. Casually I noted that no one was buried beneath that cross, and since I had never heard before either of De Long or of the Jeannette, I wandered off to study the monuments to naval heroes whose deeds shone out in the histories I had read—the officers who in the wars with Tripoli had humbled the Barbary pirates; those who in the Civil War had braved Confederate forts and ironclad rams to save the Union; and most of all to stand before the tomb of John Paul Jones, the father of our Navy and a valiant seaman, fit companion to the great commanders of all ages.

Over the next twenty years I heard again occasionally of De Long in connection with the successful expeditions to the North and to the South Poles, finally reached by Peary and by Amundsen and those who followed in their footsteps. But except as a dismal early failure, De Long’s expedition seemed to have no significance, until some seven years ago a brief article by a friend of mine, Commander Louis J. Gulliver, appeared in the Naval Institute summarizing so splendidly the history of the Jeannette that immediately that old stone cross in Annapolis for me took on a new importance and I began to study what had happened. Reading what I could get my hands on concerning it, I soon enough saw that De Long’s early failure was a more brilliant chapter in human struggle and achievement than the later successes of Peary and of Amundsen.

But in my early search, based mainly on De Long’s journals as published nearly sixty years ago, much of what had happened eluded me; first, because De Long himself, fighting for the lives of his men in the Arctic, never had opportunity to set down in his journal what was going on (the most vivid day of his life is covered by two brief lines); and second, because the published version of his journal was much expurgated by those who edited it to create the impression that the expedition was a happy family of scientists unitedly battling the ice, whereas the truth was considerably otherwise as I soon learned.

Fortunately there came into my hands the old record of the Naval Court of Inquiry into the disaster, before which court the survivors testified, from which it appeared that De Long’s struggles with his men tried his soul even as much as his struggles with the ice; and on top of that discovery, with the aid of Congressman Celler of New York, I got from the records of Congress the transcript of a Congressional Investigation lasting two solid months, a volume of nearly eleven hundred closely printed pages, from which the flesh to clothe the skeleton of De Long’s journal immediately appeared. For there, fiercely fought over by the inquisitors (Congressional investigations apparently being no different over half a century ago from what they are today) were the stories of every survivor, whether officer or man, dragged out of him by opposing counsel, insistent even that the exact words of every controversy, profane as they might be, go down in the record to tell what really happened in three years in the ice pack. And there also, never otherwise published, were all the suppressed reports relating to the expedition, the expurgated portions of De Long’s journal, and the unpublished journals of Ambler and of Collins.

From the records of these two inquiries, Naval and Congressional, backed up by what had been published—the journal of De Long appearing as “The Voyage of the Jeannette”; “In the Lena Delta,” by G. W. Melville, chief engineer of the expedition; and “The Narrative of the Jeannette,” by J. W. Danenhower, navigator—stood forth an extraordinary human story. Over this material I worked three years.

How best to tell that story was a puzzle. De Long and the Jeannette Expedition had already most successfully been embalmed and buried by loving hands in the sketchy but conventional historical treatments of the published volumes mentioned above. To repeat that method was a waste of time. It then occurred to me that since I had once narrated in the first person in “On the Bottom” the battle of another group of seamen (of whom I was one) with the ocean for the sunken submarine S-51, I might here best give this story life and reality by relating it in fictional form as the personal narrative of one of the members of the expedition.

But who should that man be?

It was of course obvious that he must be chosen from the group of survivors. That narrowed the field to three officers and eight seamen. Now as between officers and seamen, it was evident that the officers were in a far better position to observe and to know what was happening than the seamen, so the choice was limited to the three surviving officers. For reasons that will afterwards be clear, among these three there could hardly be any question—Melville patently was best. And aside from the fact that Melville was a leading light in the expedition and next to De Long himself the man who actually bore the brunt of Arctic fury, he was an engineer, and since I am also, I could most easily identify myself with him and with his point of view.

So here as it might have been told about thirty years ago by Admiral George Wallace Melville, retired Engineer-in-Chief of the Navy, blunt, loyal, and lovable, a man whose versatility in four widely dissimilar fields of human endeavor gave him at his death in 1912 good claim to being considered one of America’s geniuses, is the Saga of the Jeannette.

Edward Ellsberg.

HELL ON ICE
THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”

CHAPTER I

This year, 1909, deserves remembrance for one thing at least aside from the retirement into private life of President Roosevelt. A few weeks ago through the Virginia Capes steamed into Hampton Roads our battlefleet, sixteen salt-crusted veterans of an unprecedented adventure—the circumnavigation of the globe by an entire fleet. There they were, back from the distant seas, guns roaring in salute to our president, flags flying everywhere, whistles from craft of all kinds shrieking them a welcome home.

Roosevelt, unafraid as always, had sent them out in the teeth of unnumbered critics who foresaw our battleships with broken-down machinery rusting in every foreign port from Valparaiso to Gibraltar, but instead with engines smoothly turning, the blunt noses of those sixteen battleships plowed back sturdily into Hampton Roads.

I had never had any fears. I had watched the machinery of every one of those sixteen ships grow on the drafting tables of the Bureau of Steam Engineering—pistons, cranks, connecting rods, boilers, pumps, condensers. My life went into the design of those engines and boilers on every ship, and from the flagship Connecticut proudly leading the long line down to the distant battleship bringing up the rear of the column, there wasn’t a boiler, there wasn’t a steam cylinder, that wasn’t part of George Wallace Melville. Under my eyes, under my guidance, they had grown from ideas on the drawing board to the roaring kettles and the throbbing engines before which panting coalheavers and sweating oilers toiled below to drive those beautiful white hulls round the world and safely home to Hampton Roads.

But now I can foresee the day of those ships is done, and I think I have discernment enough left to see that mine is also. Here in this year 1909, hardly six years since my retirement as Engineer-in-Chief of the Navy, I look upon the vast fleet the machinery of which I designed, and I see its passing. Last year the Lusitania, turbine-driven, speeding across the Atlantic to a new record, sounded the knell of the huge reciprocating engines I designed for all those battleships. And practically completed, waiting to join her older sisters, was the Delaware, our newest ship, a “dreadnought” so they call her now, a huge ship of 20,000 tons, but—fired by oil! Her oil fires spell the doom of the romance of the fireroom—the stokers, the grimy coalpassers, the slice bar—that pandemonium, that man-made inferno, with forced-draft fans roaring, with the clang of coal buckets trolleying from bunker to fireroom floor, with the glare of the flames on sweating torsos as the furnace doors swing back and brawny arms heave in the coal! They’ll all go soon, flying connecting rods and straining coalheavers, driven out by the prosaic turbine and the even more prosaic oil burner.

But so it goes. We marine engineers dream, design, and build, to send forth on the oceans the most beautiful creations man turns out anywhere on land or sea—but soon our ships fade from existence like a mist before the sun. For sixteen years I was Engineer-in-Chief for the Navy, and the machinery of that battlefleet the nation watched so proudly steaming home through the Capes was my creation, but I’ve seen enough in the fifty years since I entered the Navy when the Civil War broke out to doubt that ten years more will find a single ship of that armada still in active service. Turbines, oil burning boilers, bigger guns, heavier armor—they are crowding in fast now, and soon my ships will go to the wreckers to make way in the fleet for the bigger and faster vessels sliding down the building ways in the wake of the huge Delaware.

Odd how one’s perspective changes with the years! As a young engineer, I would have believed with those cheering thousands last month in Hampton Roads that to have had a guiding hand in creating that fleet would be the high light in my life—but now I know better. In the end it is how men lived and died, not the material things they constructed, that the world is most likely to remember. That is why in my mind a stone cross in Annapolis Cemetery looms larger and larger as the years drift by. Years ago, hewn from a driftwood spar, I set up the original of that cross in the frozen Lena Delta to stand guard over the bodies of my shipmates; that stone replica in Annapolis, silent marker of their memory, will loom up in our history long after there has completely vanished from the seas every trace of the ships and the machinery which the world now links with the name of Melville.

We were seeking the North Pole back in 1879 when I came to set up that cross. Today, exactly thirty years later, they’re still seeking it. At this very moment, unheard from for months, Peary is working north from Greenland. I wish him luck; he’s following a more promising route than that one through Behring Sea which we in the Jeannette found led only to disaster.

It’s strange. The roar of guns in battle, machinery, boilers, hot engine rooms and flaming firerooms, have made up most of my life since that day in 1861 when as a young engineer I entered the Navy to go through the Civil War, but now at sixty-eight, what sticks most in my mind is still that cruise of long ago when for two years our boiler fires were either banked or out, our engine never made a revolution, engineering went by the board, and with only the Aurora Borealis overhead to witness the struggle, with me as with all hands on the Jeannette existence settled into a grim question of ice versus ship, and God help us if the ship lost!

We were an odd company there in the Jeannette’s wardroom, five naval officers and three civilians, drawn together seeking that chimera, a passage through Behring Sea to the Pole. De Long, our captain, was responsible mainly for our being there—George Washington De Long—a man as big as his namesake, scholarly in appearance, to which a high forehead, a drooping mustache, and his glasses all contributed, but in spite of that a self-willed man, decisive, resolute, eager to be the first to end the centuries old search for what lay at the Pole. Behind De Long in this affair was James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald, and an outstanding figure in American journalism. Shortly before, Bennett had won world-wide notice and acclaim for the Herald by sending Stanley on the seemingly hopeless task of finding Livingstone in the wilds of unknown Africa and then topped off that success by backing Stanley’s amazing explorations on the Congo and the headwaters of the Nile. Bennett, seeking now fresh worlds to conquer in the interests of journalism, was easily persuaded by De Long to turn his attention and his money from conquered equatorial Africa to the undiscovered Pole. It was Bennett who purchased the Jeannette and put up the cash to fit her out. But once the ship was bought, Bennett hardly figured in the actual expedition. That was De Long’s show from beginning to end. And what an end!

I joined the Jeannette as engineer officer in San Francisco in April, 1879. An uninviting wreck she looked to me then alongside the dock at the Mare Island Navy Yard, torn apart by the navy yard workmen for the strengthening of her hull and for the installation of new boilers. A checkered history the Jeannette had had before I ever saw her—originally as the Pandora of the Royal Navy; then, with guns removed, in the hands of Sir Allen Young, as a private yacht in which her owner made two cruises to high latitudes in the Arctic seas. Finally, she was bought in England from Young by Bennett on De Long’s recommendation as the most suitable vessel available for the projected polar voyage.

The most suitable she may have been—over that point experts have wrangled through the years since. So far as I am concerned, the Jeannette was satisfactory. But the naval constructors and engineers at Mare Island, California, when De Long after a passage round the Horn in her sailed his purchase into the Navy Yard, made no bones about saying they thought De Long had been badly fooled and the ship would scarcely do. But what they thought of the Jeannette was neither here nor there. Bennett had bought her, De Long was satisfied with her. The criticisms of the naval experts at Mare Island, three thousand miles away, got little attention in Washington, where with the power of the New York Herald behind him and De Long’s enthusiasm to batter down all opposition, naval or otherwise, Bennett got a bill through Congress making the Jeannette a naval vessel, and (while Bennett was still to stand all the expenses of the expedition) directing the Navy to furnish the personnel and carry the project through as a naval undertaking.

So when I joined the ship there in San Francisco, I found her torn to pieces, with Lieutenant Chipp, who was to be executive officer, and Master Danenhower, slated to go as navigator, already on the spot following up the alterations as representatives of De Long. Danenhower, soon promoted to lieutenant, had joined in Havre and rounded the Horn with her. Lieutenant Chipp had shortly before arrived from China to take the post as executive officer. And during the weeks which followed my own arrival, came the others to fill out the officers’ mess—Surgeon Ambler; Mr. Collins, meteorologist; Mr. Newcomb, naturalist; and Mr. Dunbar, ice-pilot. A queer collection we were, as I well learned months before De Long’s dying fingers scrawled the last entry in the Jeannette’s log, and Fate played queer tricks with us.

CHAPTER II

Naturally, as her engineer officer, I scanned with deep interest every detail of the vessel to which I was to trust my life in the Arctic, and I may say that torn wide open as she lay when I first saw her, I had an excellent opportunity to get intimately acquainted with the Jeannette’s scantlings and with her machinery.

Even for that day, 1879, the Jeannette was a small ship, hardly 420 tons in displacement. She was only 142 feet long, 25 feet in the beam, and drew but 13 feet of water when fully loaded. She was a three-master, barque rigged, able in a fair breeze under full sail to make six knots, which, not to hold anything back, was almost two knots better than I was ever able to get her to do with her engines against even an ordinary sea.

Obviously, not having been built for Arctic service, the Jeannette’s hull required strengthening to withstand the ice, and when I first saw her, from stem to stern the ship was a mad-house, with the shipwrights busily tearing her apart as a preliminary to reenforcing her hull and otherwise modifying her for service in the north. Amidships was a huge hole in her deck through which her original boilers, condemned by a survey, had been lifted out to be junked. To make more room for coal (for we were outfitting for a three year cruise) the old boilers were being replaced by two smaller ones of a more efficient and compact design, by which device our coal stowage was increased in capacity nearly fifty per cent—an achievement of no mean value to a ship which, once we left Alaska, would have no opportunity to refuel on her voyage.

But this change in the fireroom, radical as it was, was trifling in comparison with the additions being made to the hull itself. To strengthen her for ramming into the ice-fields and to withstand the ice, the bow below the berth deck for a distance of ten feet abaft the stern was filled in solid with Oregon pine timbers, well bolted through and through. Outside in this vicinity, her stern was sheathed with wrought iron, and from the stern back to the forechains, row on row laid on horizontally, a series of iron straps was bolted to the outer planking to shield it from ice damage.

In way of the boilers and engines, completely covering her side framing, the inside of the ship was sheathed fore and aft with Oregon pine planks six inches thick, extending from the boiler bed timbers up the side to the lower deck shelf; and outside the ship from just above the water line to well below the turn of the bilge, a doubling of five inches of American elm had been added, so that the total thickness of the Jeannette’s side when we finally sailed was over nineteen inches, a thickness which put her in the class with Old Ironsides when it came to resisting local penetration.

But the work did not stop there. The sides might be invulnerable locally but still collapse as a whole like a nut in a nutcracker when gripped between two ice floes. To resist any such contingency, in addition to the two original athwartship bulkheads which supported the sides laterally, an athwartship truss of massive wood beams, 12 by 14 inches in section, braced diagonally against the bilges and the lower side of the main deck, was installed just forward of the new boilers to bolster the sides amidships; while just abaft these boilers there was refitted an old iron truss which the ship had previously carried somewhat further forward. The result of these additions was that so far as human ingenuity could provide, the Jeannette was prepared to resist both penetration and crushing in the ice. Certainly no steamer before her time had set out better braced to withstand the Arctic ice-fields.

My major interest, of course, was with the main machinery. On the Jeannette, this consisted of two back-acting engines, each with a thirty-two inch diameter cylinder and an eighteen inch stroke, developing a total of 200 horsepower at about 60 revolutions, which on our trials in the smooth waters of San Francisco Bay, gave the ship a speed of about five knots. Our shaft led aft through the sternpost to a two-bladed propeller, nine feet in diameter, so arranged under a well in the stern that the propeller could be unshipped and hoisted aboard whenever desired, which clearly enough was a valuable feature on a vessel subjected to ice dangers.

During our fitting-out period all this machinery was carefully overhauled, four extra blades for our propeller were provided; and at my request, two new slide valves for the main engines were fitted, in order to change the cutoff and give the engines a greater expansion, which by increasing the economy of steam consumption would conserve to the utmost our precious coal.

Aside from the above there were many minor items—the addition of another auxiliary pump (a No. 4 Sewell and Cameron); the installation of a complete distillation plant to provide us with fresh water; and the fitting on deck of a hoisting and warping winch made of a pair of steam-launch engines rigged out with the necessary gearing and drums for handling lines.

Not in my department, but of interest to all hands who were going to live aboard, were the changes made to the ship itself to increase its habitability in the north. Material for a portable deck house to cover our main deck over the forecastle was furnished us, and all exposed iron work throughout the vessel was felted over. An entrance porch was built over the forward end of the poop, leading to the officers’ quarters, and given to us in a knocked-down state, while the insides of both the forecastle and the wardroom were thickly covered with felt for insulation.

The thousand and one details in fitting out that we had to go into, I will pass over. De Long was in Washington, smoothing out difficulties, financial and otherwise, with the Navy Department, and obtaining all information on previous polar expeditions, both foreign and domestic, on which he could possibly lay a hand. Consequently all through the spring, on Chipp, on Danenhower, and on myself at Mare Island fell the task of following up the repairs and alterations; of getting the most we could done to the ship at the least expense; and as every naval officer who has ever taken his ship through an overhaul period well knows, of battling through the daily squabbles between ship’s officers and navy yard personnel as to who knew better what ought to be done and how best to do it. We did our utmost to tread on no one’s toes, but from the beginning the officers at the Navy Yard regarded the Jeannette herself as unsuitable for a serious polar voyage, and this hardly led to complete harmony between them and us; an unfortunate situation which I think may have also been aggravated somewhat by doubts on their part about what the Jeannette Expedition was really intended for—a newspaper stunt for the glorification of James Gordon Bennett, or a bona fide attempt to add to the scientific knowledge of the world? But whatever their feelings, they did a thorough job on the ship, even though the cost, about $50,000, must have been something of a shock to Mr. Bennett, who, after paying for the repairs previously made to the Jeannette in England, probably felt the vessel ready to proceed to the Pole with only a perfunctory stop at Mare Island to take aboard stores and crew. And I know, especially in the beginning of this fitting-out period, that De Long himself was on tenter-hooks for fear that the cost of all these unexpected repairs and replacements would cause Bennett to abandon the enterprise. He was constantly in his letters from Washington cautioning us to use our ingenuity and our diplomacy with the Yard’s officers to affect every practicable economy, and whenever possible within the terms of the Act of Congress taking over the Jeannette, to see that costs, especially for materials furnished, were absorbed by the Navy itself and not lodged against the expedition.

So we struggled along through April, May, and June, with my dealings on machinery mainly with Chief Engineer Farmer of the Navy Yard, while Chipp worked with Naval Constructor Much who handled all the hull work at Mare Island, and Danenhower confined himself to disbursing the funds and watching the accounts. The two new boilers (originally intended for the U.S.S. Mohican but diverted to us to expedite completion) were finally dropped into our hold, the beams and decking replaced, and the Jeannette, though life aboard was still a nightmare as the vessel rang from end to end under the blows of shipwrights’ mauls and caulking hammers, once more began to look something like a ship instead of a stranded derelict.

CHAPTER III

Meanwhile our crew was being assembled, an unusual group naturally enough in view of the unusual nature of our projected voyage.

Of Lieutenant De Long, captain of the Jeannette, originator of the enterprise, and throughout its existence the dominant spirit in it, I have already spoken. The choice of the others who made up the expedition, especially of those ranked as officers, rested with him. Good, bad, or indifferent, they were either selected by him or met his approval; no one else was to blame if, before our adventure ended, of some he wrote in the highest terms while others were at various times under arrest by his orders, and with one at least he was engaged in a bitter feud that lasted to the death of both.

Second in command was Lieutenant Charles W. Chipp, whom I have already briefly noted in connection with the repairs. He came all the way from the China Station to join the ship as executive officer. Chipp, of moderate height, who in appearance always reminded me of General Grant due both to his beard and his eyes, was a calm, earnest, reticent sort of person, serious, rarely given to smiles, and a first class officer. He was an old shipmate of De Long’s in the U.S.S. Juniata, and together they had had some previous Arctic experience when in 1873 their ship was sent north to the relief of the lost Polaris. On this mission, when the Juniata, not daring because of ice conditions to venture farther north, was stopped at Upernavik, Greenland, both De Long and Chipp cruised together for nearly two weeks in a small steam launch several hundred miles farther to the northward, searching among the bergs of Baffin Bay for the Polaris’ crew. To their great disappointment they failed to find them, a circumstance not however their fault, since unknown to the searchers, the Polaris survivors had already been rescued by a Scotch whaler and taken to Great Britain. On this hazardous voyage, covering over 700 miles in a 33 foot steam launch, amidst the bergs and gales of Baffin Bay, Chipp as De Long’s second got his baptism of ice, and in all the intervening years from that adventure, even from the distant Orient, he kept in close touch with De Long, eager if his shipmate’s dreams of a polar expedition of his own ever materialized, to take part. When early in 1878, the Pandora was finally purchased in England, Chipp was in China, attached to the U.S.S. Ashuelot. Upon learning of this concrete evidence of progress toward the Pole, he tried strenuously to secure his immediate detachment and join the renamed Pandora in England for the trip round the Horn, but in this he was unsuccessful, and it was not until late April, 1879, that by way of the Pacific he finally arrived from Foo Chow to join us in San Francisco.

The third and last of the line officers was Master John W. Danenhower, navigator, who a few weeks after we sailed, in the regular course of naval seniority, made his number as a lieutenant. Danenhower, the youngest of the officers aboard, having been out of the Naval Academy only eight years at the time, was during the summer of 1878 on the U.S.S. Vandalia, convoying ex-President Grant, then at the height of his popularity, on a triumphal tour of the Mediterranean. Here, off the coast of Asia Minor, the news of Bennett’s purchase of the Pandora for a polar expedition reached him. Whether prompted by youthful exuberance or a desire to escape the heat of the tropics, I never knew, but at any rate, Danenhower promptly got in touch, not with De Long, but with Bennett, offering his services, and shrewdly enough backing up his application with an endorsement obtained from the Vandalia’s distinguished passenger, General Grant himself!

For the owner of a Republican newspaper, this was more than sufficient. Bennett promptly accepted him, subject only to De Long’s approval. Scheduled shortly to sail from Havre to San Francisco with the Jeannette and confronted with the imperative need of finding immediately to help him work the ship some assistant in the place of the distant Chipp who was still ineffectually struggling in China to get his detachment, De Long gladly assented to this solution. Between Bennett, General Grant, and the cables, Navy red tape was rudely cut, Danenhower’s transfer swiftly arranged, and after a hasty passage by steamer and train across the Mediterranean and Europe, he arrived from Smyrna shortly before the Jeannette shoved off from Havre.

Danenhower, hardly thirty when we started, masked his youth (as was not uncommon in those days) behind an ample growth of sideburns. Unlike his two seniors in the Line, he had had no previous Arctic experience of any kind, but he was enthusiastic, impetuous, big in frame, strong and husky, and from all appearances better able than most of the rest of us to withstand the rigors of the north.

Concerning myself, then a passed assistant engineer in the Navy with the rank of lieutenant, little need be said. Of all the regular officers on the Jeannette, I was the oldest both in length of service and in years, being at the time we set out thirty-eight and having entered the Navy when the war began in 1861 as a third assistant engineer. My years in the poorly ventilated and hot engine rooms of those days had cost me most of my hair, but to compensate for this, I had the longest and fullest beard aboard the Jeannette, which I think gave me somewhat of a patriarchal appearance to which however my age hardly entitled me. Oddly enough, my first polar service was coincident with that of De Long and Chipp, for I was engineer officer of the U.S.S. Tigress, also searching Baffin Bay in 1873 for the Polaris survivors when we fell in with the Juniata’s launch, officered by De Long and Chipp, on the same mission searching off Cape York. When the launch had exhausted its small coal supply and returned to the Juniata we in the Tigress (which was really a purchased whaler and therefore better suited for the job than a regular naval vessel like the Juniata) continued the task.

My first acquaintance with De Long had come however several years earlier than this, when in the sixties, we were shipmates on the U.S.S. Lancaster on the South Atlantic Station, where in spite of the fact that he was on deck and I in the engine room, we got to know each other well. It was as a result of this friendship and the interest in polar research I had myself acquired on the Tigress that at De Long’s suggestion, I volunteered my services for the Jeannette. I had some difficulty getting the berth, however, for the Bureau of Steam Engineering, being hard pressed for personnel, was loath to let anyone in the Bureau itself go.

So far as her operation as a ship went then, these four of us, three officers of the Line, De Long, Chipp, and Danenhower, and one officer of the Engineer Corps, myself, made up the commissioned personnel of the Jeannette.

We had with us one more officer of the regular navy. Passed Assistant Surgeon James M. Ambler, a native of Virginia and a naval surgeon since 1874. Upon the recommendation of the senior medical officers of the Navy, Ambler was asked by De Long to take the berth, and gladly accepted.

I met Ambler for the first time on the Jeannette. Quiet, broad of brow, dignified in manner and bearing, of amazing vitality, he impressed me from the first both as an excellent shipmate and as a competent surgeon to whose skill, far from hospitals and resources of civilization, we might safely trust our health in the Arctic. And in this belief, the hazards of the months to come proved we were not mistaken.

These five mentioned, regularly commissioned in the Navy, comprised the whole of those technically entitled to be considered as officers, but in the wardroom mess we had three others, Collins, Newcomb, and Dunbar, who came into that category in spite of the fact that they were shipped as seamen. The Act of Congress taking over the vessel authorized the Secretary of the Navy to detail such naval officers as could be spared and were willing to go, but as for the rest of the crew, it permitted only the enlistment of others as “seamen” for this “special service.” To some degree this created a dilemma which from the beginning had in it the seeds of trouble, for as a scientific expedition, Bennett desired to send along certain civilians. These gentlemen, who obviously were not seamen, and who felt themselves entitled to consideration as officers (in which belief the rest of us willingly enough concurred) were nevertheless informed by the Navy Department that legally they could go only as “seamen for special service” or not at all. How they were to be considered aboard ship and what duties they might be assigned, would rest with the commanding officer. This fiat of the Department, a bitter pill for the men concerned to swallow, was soon ameliorated by De Long’s assurance that those affected were to be treated as officers, and on this understanding Collins, Newcomb, and Dunbar were accordingly shipped as “seamen for special service.” And then and there was laid the basis of a quarrel which long after those involved were stretched cold in death, mercifully buried by the snowdrifts on the bleak tundras of the Lena Delta, still raged in all the unbridled malevolence of slander and innuendo through naval courts and the halls of Congress, venomously endeavoring to besmirch both the living and the dead.

Jerome J. Collins, of the staff of the New York Herald, was appointed by Mr. Bennett as meteorologist of the expedition, but was obviously aboard mainly as a newspaper man. Collins, a big man with a flowing mustache but no beard, was active, energetic, eager in a news sense to cover the expedition, often in trouble with the rest of us, for the usual naval temperament, taught to regard the captain’s word as law, was wholly missing in this newspaper man’s ideas of the freedom befitting a reporter. Collins’ appointment as meteorologist was natural enough for he ran the weather department of the Herald, though scientifically his knowledge of meteorology was superficial. But he plunged whole-heartedly into the subject, and aided by De Long who got him access both to the Smithsonian Institution and to the Naval Observatory, he absorbed all he could on meteorology in the few months which elapsed while we were fitting out.

Still, shipping as a “seaman” rankled in Collins’ soul; a small thing to worry over perhaps, but he was overly sensitive and often took offense when none was meant. Many times since have I wondered whether Collins, the only one amongst the wardroom mess not born an American, may not, like many immigrants, have been unduly tender on that account and therefore imagined subtle insults in the most casual comments of his shipmates about his birthplace, Ireland.

Our other civilian scientist was Raymond Lee Newcomb of Salem, Massachusetts, naturalist and taxidermist of the expedition. Newcomb, serious, slight in build, small as compared to the rest of us, seemed at first glance ill adapted to stand the gaff of a polar voyage, but technically he was a good naturalist and that settled his appointment, in spite of his boyish manner.

Last of all those comprising the wardroom mess was William Dunbar, ice-pilot, who hailed from New London and had been a whaler all his life, had commanded whalers in the Behring Sea, and of all those aboard, had had the longest and the most thorough knowledge of ice, ice packs, and the polar seas. By far the oldest man aboard, either in the wardroom or in the forecastle, Dunbar’s grizzled face, gray hairs, and fund of experience gave his words on all things Arctic an air of authority none of the rest of us could muster, and on his knowledge and sagacity as ice-pilot, we rested mainly our hopes of navigating the Jeannette safely through the ice-fields.

These were the eight that made up the Jeannette’s wardroom mess, each in his own way looking to the ice-fields and the mysterious regions of the Pole as the path to knowledge, to adventure, or to fame. Instead, even after thirty years, my heart still aches when I recall what the ice did to us and where for most of us that path led.

CHAPTER IV

Throughout May and June we were busy loading stores, coaling ship, running our trials, cleaning up the odds and ends of our alterations, and signing on the crew.

De Long in Washington, deluged from all over the country with requests from young men, old men, cranks, and crackpots of every type, eager to go along in all sorts of ridiculous capacities, diplomatically solved his difficulty by rejecting each claim in about the same letter to all:

“I have room in the Jeannette for nobody but her officers and crew. These must be seamen or people with some claim to scientific usefulness, but from your letter I fail to learn that you may be classed with either party.”

And then, having thus disposed of the undesirables, from Washington he wrote the Jeannette, carefully instructing Chipp as to the essential requirements for the seamen he desired to have signed on:

“Single men, perfect health, considerable strength, perfect temperance, cheerfulness, ability to read and write English, prime seamen of course. Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes preferred. Avoid English, Scotch, and Irish. Refuse point-blank French, Italians, and Spaniards. Pay to be Navy pay. Absolute and unhesitating obedience to every order, no matter what it may be.”

De Long’s instructions with respect to nationalities were based mainly on his assumptions with regard to their supposed abilities to withstand the rigors of the north, but they seemed to me to a high degree humorous when I consider that I, of Scotch descent, fell in the class to be “avoided,” while De Long himself of French Huguenot parentage, came in the group “to be refused point-blank.”

How little the average American of that day went to sea may be inferred from the fact that it did not even enter De Long’s mind to mention “Americans” among the various categories to be considered for his crew, though not forty years before in the heyday of wooden ships, the sails of Yankee clippers manned by Yankee seamen, whitened every ocean.

In early June, De Long came west and at Mare Island joined us to witness the final completion and trial of the ship. Completely satisfied with the changes made in the ship, he had nothing but praise for the manner in which we, his three subordinates, had carried on in his absence, and waved aside the gloomy prognostications of the Navy Yard officers and their comments about inadequate spars and sails, improper shape of hull, and (to put it briefly) the Jeannette as a whole, which they damned euphemistically in their official trial report:

“So far as practicable, we are of the opinion that she has been repaired and placed in condition for service in the Arctic Ocean.”

But on one thing, securing an escort as far as Alaska, De Long had firmly set his heart. He was anxious to get from San Francisco into the Arctic as rapidly as possible to take advantage of what summer weather he could in working his way north. The weather at sea to be expected being mostly head winds, speed meant proceeding under steam rather than under sail on the long trip to Alaska. This of necessity would use up most of our coal, forcing us to start the Arctic part of our journey with our bunkers either empty or what was almost as bad, full of such inferior and almost unburnable coal as was available in Alaska; unless an escort ship accompanied us as far as the Arctic Circle to replenish our bunkers then with the excellent anthracite obtainable in San Francisco.

Regardless, however, of all his arguments and his persuasions, De Long was unable to get the commandant at Mare Island to approve the detail of any naval vessel for this duty; nor, with Bennett unfortunately abroad, did he have, in spite of his most urgent telegrams, any better luck in forcing the Navy Department itself to order one. In this dilemma, at the last minute Bennett saved the situation by a cable from Paris, authorizing the charter of a schooner, the Fanny A. Hyde, to carry the coal north. De Long, relieved of his worry but exasperated beyond measure by the controversy, eased his mind by wiring back to the Herald,

“Thank God, I have a man at my back to see me through when countries fail!”

On June 28, the Jeannette was commissioned as a ship of the Navy. Thirty years have passed since then, but still that gay scene is as fresh and bright in my memory as only yesterday. Our entire ship’s company was mustered on the poop for the ceremony, officers in the glitter of swords, gold lace, and cocked hats to starboard, seamen in sober navy blue to port. Between those lines of rough seamen about to dare the Arctic ice, Emma De Long stepped forth, as fresh and lovely on that June day as summer itself, the very embodiment of youthful feminine grace if ever I have seen it in any port on this earth. With a dazzling smile that seemed to take in not only our captain but every member of his crew as well, she manned the halliards and amidst the hoarse cheers of the sailors swiftly ran aloft our flag, a beautiful silken ensign lovingly fashioned for her husband’s ship by the slender fingers which for the first time now hoisted it over us. And then with a seagoing salute as our new banner reached the masthead, she passed the halliards to the quartermaster, stepped back to De Long’s side, and clung proudly to his arm while he read the orders detailing him to the command, and the commandant of the Navy Yard, Commodore Colhoun, formally (and no doubt thankfully) turned the ship over to him.

A few days later, under our own steam we moved from Mare Island to San Francisco and there, away from the din of the yard workmen finally, we finished in peace loading stores in preparation for departure.

At last, on July 8, 1879, with the North Pole as our destination, the Jeannette weighed anchor, and gaily dressed out in all her signal flags, slowly steamed through the harbor, escorted by all the larger craft of the San Francisco Yacht Club, while as an indication of the esteem of Californians generally, Governor Irwin himself accompanied us to sea aboard a special tug.

That was a gala day for San Francisco, climaxing a week of banquets and farewell parties given for us in the city. Telegraph Hill was black with cheering crowds; on every merchant vessel in the bay as we passed flags dipped and impromptu salutes rang out. From the Presidio, a national salute blazed from the fortifications as we passed, the Army’s godspeed on our mission to their brothers of the Navy. It was well the Army saluted us, for that was the only official salute we received on our departure. De Long, much chagrined, noted as I noted, that not a single naval vessel, not a single naval officer, took part in the ovation at our departure, and that though three warships, the Alaska, the Tuscarora, and the Alert, lay at the Navy Yard only twenty-six miles away, and one of them at least might have been sent for the purpose. And as if to emphasize the point, the navy yard tug Monterey, which that very morning had brought the commandant down to San Francisco on other business, not only lay silently at her wharf while we steamed by her, but fifteen minutes later crossed our wake hardly a mile astern of us and without even a blast of her whistle as a farewell, steamed off in the direction of Mare Island.

From the machinery hatch where I was keeping one eye out for my clumsy engines and the other out for my last long glimpse of home, I watched in puzzled surprise as the Monterey silently disappeared astern, then looking up at the bridge nearly overhead, caught a glimmer of a wry smile on De Long’s face as he watched the Monterey. A navy expedition, we were sailing without the presence of a single naval representative in that vast crowd of men and ships cheering us on; worse perhaps, for it seemed as if we were being studiously ignored. Why? I have often wondered. Not enough rank on the Jeannette, perhaps.

But this was the only cloud on our departure, and I doubt if overwhelmed in the roar of the guns from the Presidio, the cheers from the citizens of San Francisco, and the shrieking of whistles from the flag-decorated vessels we passed, others, especially civilians, ever noticed it.

Slowly, under engines only, we steamed out the Golden Gate and met the long swells of the Pacific. Astern, one by one the escorting yachts turned back. On the starboard wing of the bridge at her husband’s side stood Emma De Long, a sailor’s daughter, and after a hectic courtship terminating finally in a sudden shipboard marriage in the far-off harbor of Le Havre, for eight years now a sailor’s wife. Silently she looked forward through the rigging, past furled sails, past yards and mast and bowsprit, across the waves toward the unknown north. Occasionally she smiled a little at De Long, rejoicing with him on the surface at least that at last his dream had come true, her eyes shining in her pride in the strength and the love of the man by whom she stood. But what her real feelings were, I, a rough seaman, could only guess, for she said nothing as she clung to the rail, her gaze riveted over the sea to the north into which in a few brief hours were to disappear forever her husband and her husband’s ship.

We stood on a few miles more. The coast line astern became hazy, our escorting fleet of yachts dwindled away to but one. Then a bell jangled harshly in the engine room below me, the engines stopped. For a few brief minutes the Jeannette rolled in the swells while to the shrilling of the silver pipe in the mouth of Jack Cole, bosun, our starboard whaleboat was manned, lowered, and shoved off, carrying toward that lone yacht which now lay to off our quarter, Emma De Long and her husband. There in that small boat, tossing unevenly in the waves a shiplength off, was spoken the last farewell. A brief embrace, a tender kiss, and De Long, balancing himself on the thwarts, handed his wife up over the low side of the yacht.

Another moment, and seated in the sternsheets of the whaleboat, De Long was once more simply the sailor. Sharply his commands drifted across the waves to us,

“Shove off!”

The bowman pushed clear of the yacht.

“Let fall!”

In silence, except for the steady thrash of the oars, our whaleboat came back to us, rounded to under the davits, was hoisted aboard. Again the bell jangled below. Our engines revolved slowly, the Jeannette sluggishly gathered speed, the helmsman pointed her west northwest. Off our quarter, the yacht came about, swiftly picked up headway, and with the two ships on opposite courses, she dropped rapidly astern. For a few minutes, with strained eyes I watched a white handkerchief fluttering across the water at us, then it faded in the distance. The bosun secured the whaleboat for sea, piped down, and without further ceremony, the sea routine on the Jeannette commenced. I took a final look at the distant coast and went below to watch the operation of my engines at close range.

CHAPTER V

Of our passage to the Alaskan Peninsula, there is not much to record. It was a shakedown cruise literally enough. The Jeannette, between the newly added weight of her hull reenforcements and the excessive amount of stores and coal aboard, was so grossly overloaded she had hardly two feet freeboard left amidships, and she labored so heavily in the seas as a consequence that for seagoing qualities, I do her no injustice when I say that as a ship she was little superior to various of Ericsson’s ironclad monitors with which I fell in on blockade duty during the late war. Indeed, had it not been for our masts and spars, our nearly submerged hull would no doubt have pleased even John Ericsson himself as affording a properly insignificant target for enemy gunfire.

From our second day out, when the breeze freshened a bit from the northwest and De Long, easing her off a few points to the southward, spread all our canvas to take advantage of it, we were under both sail and steam, but with the seas breaking continuously over our rail and our decks awash most of the time. With our negligible freeboard, we lifted to nothing but took all the seas aboard as they came, rolling heavily and wallowing amongst the waves about as gracefully as a pig in a pen.

In this wise, we discovered a few things, among them the fact that we were burning five tons of coal a day and making only four knots with our engines, which gave us hardly a hundred miles for a day’s run. Lieutenant Chipp, an excellent seaman if there ever was one but who had not before been out in the Jeannette, was certain he could do as well under sail alone as I was doing under steam, with a consequent saving of our coal, and persuaded the captain to let him try. So below we banked our fires, while the sailors racing through the rigging loosed all our square sails in addition to the fore and aft rig we already had set.

It was interesting to watch Chipp’s disillusionment. With all canvas spread up to the fore and main topgallant sails (the Jeannette carried nothing above these) Chipp started bravely out on the starboard tack, but in the face of a northwest breeze, he soon found that like most square riggers, she sailed so poorly by the wind, he had to pay her off and head directly for Hawaii before we began to log even four knots. That was bad enough but worse was to come. Having spent most of the afternoon watch experimenting with the trim of the sails, Chipp finally arrived at a combination to which we logged about four and a half knots, though in the direction of our destination, Unalaska Island, we were making good hardly three. Thus trimmed we ran an hour while the seagoing Chipp in oil skins and boots sloshed over our awash deck from bowsprit to propeller well, his beard dripping water, his eyes constantly aloft, studying the set of every sail from flying jib to spanker in the hope of improving matters.

In this apparently his inspection gave him no cause for optimism, for after a final shake of the head, he decided to come about and try her on the port tack, to see if by any chance she sailed better there, as is occasionally the case with some ships owing to the unsymmetrical effect of the drag of the screw. Stationing himself amidships, Chipp gave the orders.

Down went the wheel. Then came the final shock. To his great discomfiture, Chipp was wholly unable to bring the lumbering Jeannette into the wind and come about! Twice he tried, only to have the ship each time hang “in irons” with yards banging and sails flapping crazily till she fell off again and picked up headway on her old tack. After two failures, De Long tried his hand at it, then Danenhower made an attempt, but in spite of the nautical skill of all her deck officers and the smart seamanship of her crew, the Jeannette simply could not be made to tack. For all they could do under sail, the Jeannette might still be on that starboard tack headed for Honolulu, if the captain had not finally given up in disgust and roared out to his executive officer in the waist of the ship struggling with the sheets to square away for another attempt,

“Belay that! Leave her to me, Chipp! I’ll tack this tub!” and reaching for the bell pull, he rang the engine room,

“Full speed ahead!”

Knowing De Long’s impetuous nature, I had for some time been suspecting such a result and in the engine room, I had both coalheavers and engineers standing by, so I was ready with both boilers and machinery. I yanked open the throttle myself, and our back-acting connecting rods began to shuttle athwartships. Quickly our shaft came up to fifty revolutions. Above I heard the captain bellow,

“Hard a’ lee!”

This time, driven by her screw, the Jeannette maintained her headway, came obediently up into the wind, fell off to starboard, and quickly filled away on the port tack. When I poked my head above the machinery hatch coaming to observe results, there was the crestfallen Chipp just outboard of me, busily engaged in securing all on his new course, and I could not resist, a little maliciously, suggesting to him,

“Hey, brother! You want to stay at sea? Well, while you’re still young enough to learn, take my advice and study engineering. Sailing ships? In a few years, they’ll all be as dead as triremes! Better start now. Let me lend you a good book on boilers!”

But Chipp, still hardly willing to believe that he was beaten, seized a belaying pin, waved it in my direction, retorted hotly,

“Get below with your greasy machinery and sooty boilers! They’re the ruination of any vessel! Sails dead, eh? Unship that damned propeller of yours and I’ll tack her!” He jammed his sou’wester viciously down over his ears and ignoring my offer strode forward to check the set of the jibs.

De Long, leaning over the bridge, peering down at me over his dripping glasses, took my gibe at sails more philosophically.

“Well, chief,” he observed, “she handles now like nothing I ever sailed in before, but I suppose it’s my fault, not hers, she’s so low in the water. When we’ve burned some of this coal and lightened up, perhaps she’ll do better.” He puffed meditatively at his pipe while he turned to examine the compass. We were hardly within six points of the wind. In dismay De Long muttered, “Heading north! This course will never do if we want to get to Alaska this season. I guess we’ll have to douse sail, stick to the engines, and lay her dead into the wind, west nor’west for Unalaska, till the breeze shifts anyway.” He cupped his hands, shouted after his first officer,

“Mr. Chipp!”

Chipp, just passing the fore shrouds, turned, looked inquisitively up at the bridge.

“Mr. Chipp, furl all sail! We’ll proceed under steam alone till further orders!”

For three days we kicked along with unfavorable weather through rain, mist, and head seas. The Jeannette labored, groaned, and with no canvas to steady her, rolled and pitched abominably. Our two scientists, Newcomb and Collins, at the first roll went under with seasickness, and as the weather grew worse their misery passed description, though as is usual in such cases, they got scant comfort from the rest of us. What queer quirk of the seagoing character it is that makes the sailor, ordinarily the most open-hearted and sympathetic of human beings, openly derisive of such sufferings, I know not, but we were no exceptions, and towards Collins in particular, whose puns had occasionally made some of us in the wardroom self-conscious, we were especially barbed in our expressions of mock solicitude.

But if the seasickness of our men of science excited only our mirth, no such merry reaction greeted our discovery that Ah Sam, our Chinese cook, was also similarly indisposed. At first that Ah Sam was seasick was solely a deduction on our part to account for his complete disappearance from the galley, and the fact that for meal after meal we had to make out in the messroom with only such cold scraps as Charley Tong Sing, the steward, dished out. But when two days went by thus, Ah Sam’s whereabouts became a matter of concern to all of us and especially to the doctor. Still where he had stowed himself, even the bosun could not discover, and to all our inquiries about Ah Sam and to all our complaints about the food, we got from Charley only a shake of the head and in a high singsong the unvaried reply,

“Ah Sam, he velly sick man now. Cholly Tong Sing, he no feel so good too.”

With this unsatisfactory state of affairs in our supply department we had perforce to remain content, until after three days of total eclipse, Ah Sam rose again, one might say, almost from the dead.

I had just come up from the humid engine room to the main deck, and still bathed in perspiration, had paused to get my lungs full of fresh salt air before diving aft into the shelter of the poop. For a moment, with the wind blowing through my whiskers, I clung to the main shrouds. With both feet braced wide apart on the heaving deck, I stood there cooling off, when from the open passage to the port chartroom, which was the as yet unused workroom for Newcomb’s taxidermy, I heard in the doctor’s unmistakable Virginian accent,

“Well, I’ll be damned! Lend a hand here, Melville!”

I poked my head through the door. Ambler, who I afterwards learned had been tracking down the source of some mysterious groans, had pulled open a locker beneath the chart table, and there, neatly fitted into that confined space, was the lost Ah Sam!

I gasped. Have you ever seen a seasick Chinaman? The combination of Ah Sam’s natural yellow complexion with the sickly green pallor induced beneath his skin by mal de mer, gave him a ghastly appearance the like of which no ordinary corpse could duplicate. To this weird effect his shrunken body contributed greatly, for he had certainly disgorged everything he had ever assimilated since emigrating from China. (The evidence for this apparently exaggerated statement was such as to convince the most incredulous, but I will not go into details.)

Surgeon Ambler, holding his nose with one hand, grabbed Ah Sam by the pigtail and unceremoniously jerked him forth. Immediately Ah Sam sagged to the deck, his eyes rolling piteously.

Also holding my nose, I seized our cook by one shoulder and dragged him out on deck, where the surgeon gave him a dose of chloroform, which composed him somewhat. Why he had not already died, shut up in that locker, I cannot comprehend except on the assumption that he grew up in one of those stinkpot factories which Chipp, who was an authority on that country, claimed Chinese pirates maintain. But fearful lest he die yet unless kept out in the air, the captain planked him down at the lee wheel, where under the constant eye of the helmsman, he could not again crawl off to hide in some glory hole. There, clutching with a death grip at the spokes as the wheel spun beneath his fingers, Ah Sam stayed till next day, a fearful sight with pigtail flying in the breeze and eyes almost popping from their sockets each time a green sea came aboard; and whenever she took a heavy roll, poor Ah Sam’s lower jaw sagged open and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. Such a picture of abject despair and utter anguish as that Chinaman, I never saw.

The fourth day out the weather cleared, moderated somewhat, and the wind shifted to the northeast, so that assisted again by our sails, running on the starboard tack and keeping our desired course, we made a little over five knots for a day’s run of one hundred and thirty miles.

As we steamed toward Alaska, we gradually settled down with Chipp laboring continuously to get everything properly stowed. On deck, Ice Pilot Dunbar, Bosun Cole, and Ice Quartermaster Nindemann were designated as watch officers, with the seamen under them divided into two watches of four hours each. Below in the black gang, I divided my little force of six men into two watches of six hours each with Machinist Lee and Fireman, 1st Class, Bartlett in charge of the other two men comprising each watch.

For twenty-three days we stood on toward Unalaska Island in the Aleutian chain, a run of about two thousand miles from San Francisco. With better weather, our various landsmen began to show on deck, having acquired sealegs of a sort. Newcomb, first up, fitted out the port chartroom as his taxidermy shop, spread his tools, and went fishing over the side for albatross almost as soon as he was able to drag himself out of his bunk. With a hook and a line baited with a chunk of salt pork towing astern in the broken water of our wake, he waited patiently but without results while an occasional bird wheeled overhead, till at last, still wan from retching, he turned in, leaving his hook overboard. But Newcomb, whom the doctor and I (chaffing him on his Yankee accent) had nicknamed “Ninkum,” was decidedly game. It needed no more than a call from Ambler or me on sighting a new albatross eyeing from aloft that bit of salt pork, of

“Hey, Ninky, quick! Come and catch your goose!” to bring little Newcomb, aflame with scientific ardor, tumbling up from the poop to man his line hopefully.

At last an albatross measuring some seven feet in wing spread, which for this ocean is good-sized, swooped down and swallowed the bait, and a bedlam of cries from the anguished bird ensued which attracted the notice of all hands. Then came a battle, in which for a while it seemed debatable whether the albatross, flapping its huge wings frantically at one end of the line would come inboard, or whether little Newcomb, not yet wholly up to par, tugging on the other end, would go overboard to join it amongst the waves. But Newcomb won at last, landed his bird, promptly skinned it, and prepared it for mounting. And so much has the prosaic power of steam already done to kill the ancient superstitions of the sea, that this albatross, ingloriously hooked, came to its death at the hands of a bird-stuffer without objection or visible foreboding from any mariner aboard.

At last, twenty-three days out of San Francisco, with our bunkers nearly empty from fighting head winds, and anxious to make port before the coal gave out completely and forced us to rely on our sails alone, we made the Aleutian Islands, only to find them shrouded in thick fog. For Danenhower, our navigator, trouble started immediately. The only chart he had covering that coast was one issued thirty years before by the Imperial Russian Hydrographic Office, and it was quickly apparent that numberless small islands looming up through rifts in the fog were not down on the chart at all, while others he was looking for, were evidently incorrectly located.

Worst of all, Danenhower could not even accurately determine our own position, for when the sun momentarily broke through the clouds, the horizon was obscured in mist, and when the fog lifted enough to show the horizon, the sun was always invisible beneath an overcast sky. For hours on end, Danenhower haunted the bridge, clutching his sextant whenever the horizon showed, poised like a cat before a rat-hole, if the sun peeped out even momentarily, to pounce upon it. But he never got his sight.

Between thick fogs and racing tides, with our little coal pile getting lower and lower, we had a nerve-racking time for two days trying to get through Aqueton Pass into Behring Sea, the Jeannette anchored part of the time, underway dead slow the remainder, nosing among the islands, often with only the roar of breakers and the cawing of sea birds on the rocks to give warning through the mists of the presence of uncharted islets. Finally we slipped safely through, and to the very evident relief of both captain and navigator, on Saturday, August 2, dropped anchor in the harbor of Unalaska.

Naturally our first concern on entering port was coal. A brief glimpse around the land-locked harbor showed the Alaska Fur Company’s steamer St. Paul, the schooner St. George, owned by the same firm, and the Revenue Cutter Rush, but not a sign of our coal-laden schooner, the Fanny A. Hyde, nor any report of her having already passed northward on her way to our rendezvous at St. Michael’s. So I went ashore with Captain De Long to canvass the local fuel situation. We found eighty tons of coal belonging to the Navy, the remnant of a much larger lot sent north some years before, but so deteriorated by now from long weathering and spontaneous combustion as to be in my opinion nearly worthless. Even so, that being all the coal there was I was investigating the problem of getting it aboard when the commander of the Revenue Cutter requested we leave it for his use, because it would be his sole supply in getting back to San Francisco in the fall. Naturally we in the Jeannette, anxious to get as far north as possible before dipping into what our consort was carrying for us, were not wholly agreeable to waiving our claim as a naval vessel to that coal in favor of the Revenue Service, but this difficulty was soon adjusted by the offer of the Alaska Company’s agent to refill our bunkers with some bituminous coal he had on hand, his company to be reimbursed for it in New York by Mr. Bennett. This happy solution settled our fuel question for the moment, so while the natives took over the job of coaling ship, I turned my attention for a few hours to making myself acquainted with the island.

After nearly a month at sea, I found Unalaska pleasant enough, with its green hills surrounding the harbor and its small settlement, comprising mainly the houses of the Fur Company’s agents and employees, their warehouses, and last and perhaps most important just at this time, a Greek church. It seems that the steamer St. Paul, which we found in the harbor on our arrival Saturday, had just come down two days before from the Pribilof Islands loaded with sealskins, and carrying as passengers from those tiny rocks practically all the bachelor sealers of Pribilof in search of what civilization (in the form of metropolitan Unalaska) had to offer. All Thursday and Friday there was great excitement here as the native belles paraded before the eager eyes of these none too critical prospective bridegrooms. By Saturday, most choices were made and the Greek Catholic Church had a busy day as the couples passed in a continuous procession before the altar and the Russian priest tied the knots. There being no inns or dwellings to accommodate the multitude of honeymooners, the problem was simply enough solved by each newly-wedded couple going directly from the church door for a stroll among the nearby hills. By afternoon, only some few of the sealers, idealists undoubtedly, who were unable to discover among the native women anyone to suit them, were still left wandering disconsolately about the town, peering into every female face, in a queer state of indecision which the smiles of Unalaska’s beauties seemed unable to resolve.

Between coaling ship, taking aboard furs for winter clothing, and receiving some six tons of dried fish for dog food, we on the Jeannette were kept busy for the three days of our stay, while our nights were enlivened by the most vicious swarms of mosquitoes it has ever been my misfortune to encounter, and all attempts to keep them out of my bunk with the ill-fitting bed curtains were wholly futile. My bald spot was an especial attraction for them; in desperation I was at last forced to sleep in my uniform cap.

On August 6, we hoisted anchor and got underway, with the whole town on the waterfront to see us off amidst the dipping of colors and a salute from three small guns in front of the Fur Company’s office. I made out plainly enough in the crowd the Russian priest with his immense beard, but De Long and I differed sharply over the presence of any of the brides amongst the throng. So far as I could judge, there were no women there, merely a large crowd of men waving enviously after us as we circled the harbor on our way toward Arctic solitude.

With our usual luck, we bucked a head wind for all the first day out, but to our great gratification, on the second day the wind shifted to the southward and freshened so that we logged the almost unbelievable day’s run of a hundred and seventy-three miles for an hourly average of seven and a quarter knots—for the Jeannette almost race horse speed! But it was too good to last. Next day we had dropped down to a little under six knots, and then the breeze failed us altogether and we finished the last three days of our run to St. Michael’s with our useless sails furled, under steam alone at our usual speed of four knots.

CHAPTER VI

The Kuro-Si-Wo Current, the “black tide” of Japan, somewhat akin to our Gulf Stream, rises in the equatorial oceans south of Asia, flows eastward, is partly deflected northward by the Philippines, and then impelled by the southwest monsoons flows at a speed reaching three knots past Japan in a northeasterly direction, a deep blue stream some twelve degrees warmer than the surrounding Pacific Ocean. It was a commonly accepted belief that eastward of Kamchatka, it separated into two branches, one flowing southward along the west coast of North America to temper the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia, while the second branch continued northward through Behring Strait into the Arctic Ocean.

As is well known, for several centuries most of the attempts to reach the North Pole had gone by way of Baffin Bay and Greenland, where without exception they were all blocked by ice. Ours was the first expedition to make the attempt by way of Behring Sea, De Long being willing to test the theory that the warm waters of the Kuro-Si-Wo, flowing northward through the Arctic Ocean, might give a relatively ice-free channel to a high northern latitude, perhaps even to the Pole itself; while if it did not, the shores of Wrangel Land (of which next to nothing was yet known), stretching northward and perhaps even crossing the Pole to reappear in the Atlantic as Greenland as many supposed, would offer a base in which to winter the ship while sledge parties could work north along its coasts toward the Pole.

On these two hypotheses rested mainly our choice of route. With the Jeannette in the Behring Sea at last, it remained only to pick up our sledging outfit and put our theories to the test. So for St. Michael’s on the mainland of Alaska we headed, where six hundred miles to the northward of Unalaska on the fringe of the Arctic Circle our dogs awaited us and our rendezvous with the Fanny A. Hyde was to take place.

The passage took us six days, and many were the discussions round our wardroom mess table while we steamed on through Behring Sea approaching the real north, as to the correctness of these theories. Especially heated were the arguments with respect to the extent of Wrangel Land whose very existence some polar authorities doubted altogether, since the late Russian Admiral Wrangel (for whom it was named) in spite of a most diligent search, egged on by native reports, never himself was able to find it. As for Kellett and the whaler Long, who afterwards and some years apart claimed to have seen it and even to have coasted its southern shores, they were not everywhere believed.

Aside from these uncertainties, speculation waxed hot over a secondary object of our voyage, to us an unfortunate but unavoidable complication to our task, a search for Professor Nordenskjöld, a Swedish explorer. Attempting that sixteenth century dream, never yet realized, of the Northeast Passage from Europe to the Orient via the Siberian Ocean, he had sailed northward the year before us in the Vega from Stockholm to circumnavigate Asia. Nordenskjöld, so it was reported, had successfully reached by the winter time of 1878 Cape Serdze Kamen on the coast of Siberia only a little north of Behring Strait, where almost in sight of his goal, he was frozen in. Since then, except for an unverified rumor from the natives of that occurrence, nothing further had been heard of him or of his ship and naturally both in Sweden and in Russia there was considerable anxiety over his fate.

As a consequence, before sailing from San Francisco, we had been ordered by the Secretary of the Navy to search off Cape Serdze Kamen for Nordenskjöld, to assist him if necessary, and only after assurance of his safety, to proceed northward on our own voyage. But we were hopeful that because of the very open summer reported at Unalaska by whalers coming in from the north, Nordenskjöld had been enabled to resume his voyage southward and that we should on our arrival at St. Michael’s obtain some definite news of his safe passage through Behring Strait, thereby obviating the necessity of our dissipating what few weeks were left of summer weather in searching the Siberian coasts for him instead of striking directly for the Pole with the Jeannette while the weather held.

So one by one, the days rolled by till on August 12 we finally dropped our mudhook in St. Michael’s. After securing my engines, I came on deck to find De Long turning from the unprepossessing collection of native huts and the solitary warehouse which made up the Alaska Company’s settlement there, to survey gloomily the empty harbor. Here he had confidently expected to find the Fanny A. Hyde waiting with our coal, but no schooner was anywhere visible.

Instead of the schooner, the only boat in sight was a native kyack from which as soon as the anchor dropped, clambered aboard for his mail Mr. Newman, the local agent, who had about given up hope of seeing us this year.

That our schooner had not arrived was evident enough without discussion. But when De Long learned from Newman that they had no tidings whatever of Nordenskjöld, that they had had so far this season no communication with Siberia, and that at St. Michael’s they knew even less of Nordenskjöld and his whereabouts than we when we left San Francisco, it was obvious from the droop of the skipper’s mustaches that his depression was complete. No schooner, no coal, and now the prospect of having to search Siberia for Nordenskjöld instead of going north!

De Long, as I joined him at the rail to greet Mr. Newman, was polishing his eyeglasses on the edge of his jacket. Meticulously replacing them on his nose as I came up, he sourly scanned the settlement ashore.

“A miserable place, Melville! Look at those dirty huts. Only four white men and not a single white woman here, so the agent says.” He turned to the Fur Company agent, added prophetically, “Yet do you know, Mr. Newman, desolate as that collection of huts there is, we may yet look back on it as a kind of earthly paradise?”

Already immersed in his long delayed mail from home, Newman nodded absent-mindedly. Apparently he was under no illusions about life in the far north.

The captain shrugged his shoulders, philosophically accepted the situation, and after some difficulty in dragging Newman’s attention away from his letters from home, we got down to business with the agent, which of course was coal. It developed immediately that St. Michael’s had only ten tons of coal, which were badly needed there for the winter. This was hardly a surprise as we had every reason to expect some such condition, but it settled any vague hopes we had that we might coal and proceed before our schooner came. We resigned ourselves to waiting for the Fanny A. Hyde.

Next came the matter of our clothing. On that at least was some compensation for our delay. Through Mr. Newman, arrangements were made to send ashore all the furs we had acquired at Unalaska and have the natives (who were experts at it) make them up for us into parkas and other suitable Arctic garments, instead of having each sailor of our crew (who at best had only some rough skill with palm and needle on heavy canvas) attempt with his clumsy fingers to make his own.

With that arranged, the while we waited for our schooner, we settled down to making the best of St. Michael’s, all of us, that is, except De Long, who chafing visibly at the delay, thought up one scheme after another of expediting matters. But each one involved ultimately burning even more coal than waiting there, so finally the baffled skipper retired to his cabin to await as best he could our coal-laden tender.

But even for the seamen, making the best of St. Michael’s soon palled and they gave up going ashore. A liberty meant nothing more than wandering round in the mud and the grass, for the village had nothing more to offer a sailor. Even liquor, the final lure of such God-forsaken ports when all else fails, was here wholly absent, its sale being illegal in Alaska Territory. The illegality our seamen knew about, but the absence they refused to believe till a careful search convinced them that the negligible communication of this spot with civilization made it the one place in the wide world where the laws prohibiting liquor were of necessity observed.

So every other distraction failing, we were thrown back on fishing, the sailor’s last resource. Out of curiosity, we set a seine alongside the Jeannette. The amount of salmon and flounders we caught opened my eyes—we easily hauled in enough each cast to keep the whole crew in fresh fish every meal, till our men were so sick of the sight of fish that the little salt pork or canned meat served out occasionally from our stores was a welcome change. I see now why these waters are the world’s best sealing grounds—they are literally alive with food for the seals, which by the millions swarm over the islands in these shallow seas. The steamer St. Paul which we had fallen in with at Unalaska on her way back to America, had her hold packed solid with sealskins, one hundred thousand of them in that vessel alone, a treasure ship indeed!

While the sailors fished, we in the wardroom cast about in various ways for diversion. Newcomb (whom privately the captain was already beginning to regret having brought along, for not only did Newcomb seem never to have grown up but it was now too late to hope that he ever would) went into business for himself. Reverting to the habits of his forbears in far-off Salem, he went ashore with a five dollar bill, purchased from the Alaska Company’s store a variety of needles, thread, and similar notions, carted them a mile or two up the coast well out of sight of St. Michael’s, set up a “Trading Post,” and proceeded to sell his wares to the innocent Indians at just twice what the company store was asking for them.

For this piece of sharp practice at the expense of the natives who were helpfully engaged in making up our fur clothing, gleefully related to the wardroom mess on his return aboard, Newcomb earned the immediate contempt of his fellow New Englander, Dunbar, who burst out,

“You damned Yankee pedlar!” And from that day on, our ice-pilot who himself hailed from the land of the wooden nutmegs and was therefore perhaps touchy of making New England’s reputation any worse, refused again to speak to Newcomb, though some of the rest of us, including myself, felt with Newcomb that there was at least some humor in the situation.

Tiring of fish and of St. Michael’s, I organized a duck-hunting party with Dr. Ambler, Dunbar and Collins for my companions. For a while, I hesitated over including Collins, for by now I had discovered he also had a serious flaw in his character—his sole idea of humor was getting off puns, and so far all the attempts of his shipmates in the wardroom to cure him of it had failed. But as Collins was also our best hand with a shotgun, I decided to stand the puns for a few hours on the chance of increasing our bag of game and asked him to go.

We purposely took a tent and camped ashore all night to be ready for the ducks at dawn. We got about a dozen (Collins knocked down most of them) but without blinds to work from or decoys to attract our game, it was a tough job and we tramped a long way along the marshy beaches looking for game. During this search we separated, and I with my shotgun at “ready” was scanning the beach for ducks just below a small bluff, when suddenly there came sliding down its precipitous slope on all fours, face first with hands and feet spread out in the mud in a ludicrous attempt to stop himself, our meteorologist, Collins!

The spectacle was so comical that unthinkingly I roared out to Ambler,

“Look at the old cow there, sliding down the hill!” but I soon enough regretted my outburst for it was evident that Collins, plastered with mud from his mishap and in no humor to see anything funny in his antics, was furious and took my remark as a deep personal insult. So all in all, my hunting party was no great success, and by the time I signalled our cutter to stand in and pick us up, we were all so stiff from sleeping on the hard ground, so throbbing in every muscle from our tramp, and so sullenly did Collins keep eyeing me, that I began to doubt whether a dozen ducks were worth it.

Dr. Ambler, lolling back on the cushions in the sternsheets of the cutter, homeward bound, apparently took a similar view.

“About once a year of this satisfies me completely, chief.” He paused, ruefully massaged his aching calves, then in his careful professional manner continued, “As a doctor, I’m convinced that man’s an animal that must take to hard work gradually. No more plunging headlong into it for me! I prescribe a day’s complete rest in our berths for all hands here the minute we hit the ship!”

The doctor, I believe, followed his own prescription, and perhaps Collins and Dunbar did too, but I didn’t have time. We had broken a pump-rod on our way to Alaska, temporarily stopping our boiler feed. In that emergency, the spare auxiliary I had installed at Mare Island was immediately cut in on the feed line, saving us from hauling fires and going back to sail alone, but it left us with no reserve pump and it was up to me somehow to provide another rod. Neither Unalaska nor St. Michael’s could help me in the least—a machine shop in those primitive trading posts had never even been dreamed of.

With the help of Lee, who was a machinist, and of Bartlett, fireman, first class, I now set about supplying a new pump-rod from our own resources. While at Mare Island, in view of the uncertainty of repair faculties in the Arctic, like prudent engineers we had acquired for the Jeannette quite a set of tools. I won’t exactly say we stole them, for after all they merely moved from one spot owned by Uncle Sam to another also under his jurisdiction, but at any rate, in good old Navy fashion during our stay at the Navy Yard everything not nailed down in the machine shop there that appealed to us and that we could carry, somehow moved aboard the Jeannette, and now all our recent acquisitions came in handy. I rigged up a long lathe. Out of some square stock once intended by the Navy Yard for forging out chain plates for the Mohican, we turned out a very favorable replica in iron of our broken rod, squared off the shoulders for the pistons, cut the threads for the retaining nuts, and long before the schooner showed up in port, had the disabled pump reassembled with the new rod and banging lustily away on the line once more, hammering feed water into our steaming boiler, thus making good my promise to the captain when the old rod broke. This particularly pleased De Long, who I am afraid, like most Line officers, underestimating the resourcefulness of Navy engineers and particularly Scotch ones, had been fearful that we might have to turn back or at least take a long delay while we awaited the arrival, on the St. Paul’s return trip, of a new rod from the United States.

For six days we waited in St. Michael’s, eyes glued to the harbor entrance, undergoing as the captain feelingly expressed it that “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick,” when at last on August 18 the Fanny A. Hyde showed up, beating her way closehauled into the harbor. She was a welcome sight not only to our careworn skipper but to all of us, who long before had completely exhausted in a couple of hours the possibilities of St. Michael’s, and in our then state of ignorance, were eager to move on into the even more barren Arctic.

In fact, so eager were we to be on our way that the captain signalled the schooner not to anchor at all but to come alongside us directly, prepared immediately for coaling.

The next three days were busy ones for all hands, lightering coal in bags up from the schooner’s holds, dumping it through the deck scuttles into our bunkers, and there trimming it high up under the deck beams to take advantage of every last cubic inch of the Jeannette’s stowage space. Most of this work of muling the coal around we had to do with our own force, for the schooner with a crew of six men only and being a sailing vessel, with no power machinery of any kind, could assist us but little. Here our deck winch, made of those old steam launch engines which I had fitted aboard at Mare Island, came in very handy in saving our backs, for with falls rigged from the yardarms by our energetic Irish bosun, I soon had the niggerheads on that winch whipping the bags of coal up out of the schooner’s holds and dropping them down on our decks in grand style.

Needless to say, however, with coal littering our decks and coal dust everywhere, with staterooms and cabins tightly sealed up to prevent its infiltration, and with our whole crew as black as nigger minstrels, we carefully abstained from taking aboard any other stores and least of all our furs or dogs from ashore, till coaling was completed and the ship washed down.

At this coaling we labored steadily until late on the twentieth of August when checking the coal we had already transferred and what was left aboard the schooner, I came to the conclusion that there would still be twenty tons remaining on the Fanny A. Hyde for which we could find no stowage, even on our decks, and entering the captain’s cabin, I suggested to him that instead of dismissing our escort at St. Michael’s as intended, he take a chance and order her to follow us on our next leg, the three hundred mile journey across Norton Sound and Behring Strait to St. Lawrence Bay in Siberia, where that last twenty tons of coal she carried, which otherwise would go back to the United States, would just about replenish what we burned on the way over to Asia.

To put it mildly, when I sprang this suggestion on him De Long greeted it with a cheer, but he went me one better.

“That twenty tons she’ll certainly carry along for us, chief, but that’s not all! What’s left in her now, and how long’ll it take you to get her down to that last twenty tons?”

“She’s got fifty tons still aboard her, captain,” I answered. I looked at my watch. It was getting along toward evening already. “But the last thirty tons which we can take aboard from her, will go almighty slow! Trimming it down inside those stifling bunkers to top ’em off for a full due is the devil’s own job—it’ll take us all day tomorrow certainly!”

De Long, who, downcast over the non-arrival of the schooner, had not cracked a smile for a week, now stroked his long mustaches gleefully.

“Fine, chief! Pass the word to Lieutenant Chipp to belay any more coaling. He’s to knock off immediately and start washing down. Here’s where we get back one of those lost days, anyway.” De Long regarded me with positive cheerfulness. “We’ll sail tomorrow! If the Fanny Hyde’s going to carry twenty tons for us to Siberia, she might as well carry the whole fifty that’s still aboard her! So instead of coaling here any more, we’ll quit right now, swing ship in the morning to check our compasses, then load furs, stores, and dogs in the afternoon, and sail tomorrow night from this God-forsaken hole! How’ll that suit you, chief?”

“Brother, full ahead on that!” I exclaimed. “You’ll never get St. Michael’s hull down any too soon for me!”

So to the intense relief of the crew, Jack Cole was soon piping down coaling gear. The schooner cast loose, shoved off, and anchored clear, and as darkness fell the hoses were playing everywhere over the Jeannette’s topsides, washing down, while from every scupper a black stream poured into the clear waters of the bay, as a welcome by-product effectively putting an end to any more fishing in our vicinity.

Our last day at St. Michael’s was perhaps our busiest.

In the morning, steaming slowly round the harbor, we swung ship for compass deviations, with Danenhower hunching his burly shoulders constantly over the binnacle while Chipp at the pelorus took bearings of the sun. By noon this essential task was completed and we anchored again, commencing immediately after mess gear was stowed to receive stores from ashore.

The display of furs we received, made up now into clothing, of seal, mink, beaver, deer, wolf, Arctic squirrel, and fox, all to be worn by rough seamen, would have caused pangs of jealousy among the ladies on Fifth Avenue, who would have lingered long over each sleek garment, lovingly caressing its velvety softness. But instead of that, disregarded by everyone in our haste, down the hatch shot our furs, our only concern being to get them aboard and weigh anchor.

Following the clothing came aboard assorted cargo—forty Eskimo dogs, five dog sleds, forty sets of dog harness, four dozen pairs of snowshoes, sixty-nine pairs of sealskin boots, ton after ton of compressed fish for dog food, three small Eskimo skin boats called baideras, and numberless odds and ends; while to top off all, as a personal gift Mr. Newman insisted on presenting to the captain a very handsomely silver-mounted Winchester repeating rifle and eight hundred rounds of ammunition for it.

Last but not least important, came aboard some new members of our crew, two Alaskan Indians from St. Michael’s. This pair, Alexey and Aneguin, carefully selected on the recommendation of the entire white population of St. Michael’s (all four of them), were after a lengthy pow-wow over terms with the headman of the native village shipped as hunters and dog-drivers. Alexey, as senior hunter, was to be paid twenty dollars a month; Aneguin, his assistant, as a hunter’s mate (to put it in nautical parlance) was to receive fifteen; and each was to draw from the company store an outfit worth fifty dollars to start with and on discharge to receive a Winchester rifle and 1000 cartridges. To the wife of Alexey and to the mother of Aneguin, thus deprived of their support, were to be issued at the Jeannette’s expense from the Alaska Company’s store, provisions to the value of five dollars each monthly until their men should finally be returned to St. Michael’s.

These terms being finally settled to the satisfaction of all, Alexey and Aneguin reported aboard at 5 P.M., both for the first time in their lives dressed in “store clothes” which they had just drawn from Mr. Newman’s stock, and proud as peacocks in shiny black Russian hats, topped with flaming red bands. Alexey (who to the best of my knowledge, aside from our captain, was the only married man aboard) was accompanied by his Indian wife, a small, shy, pretty woman in furs oddly contrasting with her husband’s stiffly worn civilized raiment, and by his little boy. Tightly holding each other’s hands, this tiny Alaskan group drifted wonderingly over the ship, children all in their open-mouthed curiosity; while Aneguin, accompanied by his chief and a delegation of natives come to see him off, was just as naive in exclaiming over everything he saw, and the excitement of all reached a high pitch when Captain De Long presented to Alexey’s shrinking little wife a china cup and saucer with “U.S.N.” in gold on it, and to her little boy, a harmonica.

As evening drew on and the hour for departure approached, Alexey and his wife, seated on a sea chest on the poop, clung silently to each other, till at the hoarse call of the bosun, “All visitors ashore!” accompanied by significant gestures toward the rail, they parted affectionately—and forever.

For a few minutes there was a grand scramble of Indians over our bulwarks into native boats. Then to the rattling of the chain links in the hawsepipe, our cable came slowly in and with a blast of our whistle in salute, we got underway for St. Lawrence Bay, on the Siberian side of Behring Sea.

CHAPTER VII

Through a light breeze and a smooth sea we steamed out in the darkness. The Fanny A. Hyde, ordered to follow us at dawn, we expected to reach port in Siberia even ahead of our own arrival since she was now very light while we, heavily laden once more, were nearly awash.

A new note in seagoing came into our lives upon departing from St. Michael’s—our forty dogs. They quickly proved to be the damnedest nuisances ever seen aboard ship, roaming the deck in carefree fashion, snarling and fighting among themselves every five minutes, and unless one was armed with a belaying pin in each hand, it was nearly suicide to enter a pack of the howling brutes to stop them. They fought for pure enjoyment so it seemed to me, immune almost from any harm, for their fur was so thick and tangled, they got nothing but mouthfuls of hair from snapping at each other. In spite of fairly continual fighting, we got the ship along for after all my engines drove her on, but how we should ever fare under sail alone I wondered, unless each seaman soon got the knack of disregarding half a dozen pseudo-wolves leaping at him each time he rushed to ease a sheet or to belay a halliard or a brace. Meanwhile we let the dogs severely alone, it being the duty of Aneguin and Alexey to feed and water them, and apparently also to beat them well so that their fighting was not one continuous performance.

We had expected to make the three hundred miles across Behring Sea to St. Lawrence Bay in Siberia in two and a half days, but we did not. Our second day out, the wind freshened, there was a decided swell from the northward, and all in all the weather had a very unsettled look. With most of our sail set, we logged five knots during the morning, but as the seas picked up, the ship began to pitch heavily, and in the early afternoon a green sea came aboard that carried away both our forward water-closets, fortunately empty at the time. At this mishap, we furled most of our canvas and slowed the engines to thirty revolutions, greatly easing the motion.

But as the night drew on it became evident we were in for it. The ocean hereabouts is so shallow that an ugly sea quickly kicks up under even a fresh breeze, and we were soon up against a full gale, not a pleasing prospect for a grossly overloaded ship. There was nothing for it, however, except to heave to, head to the wind, and ride it out under stormsails only. Accordingly in the first dog watch, I banked fires, stopped the engines, and the Jeannette lay to on the starboard tack under the scantiest canvas we dared carry—stormsail, fore and aft sail, and spanker only, all reefed down to the very last row of reef-points.

For thirty hours while the gale howled, we rode it out thus, the overloaded Jeannette groaning and creaking, submerged half the time, with confused seas coming aboard in all directions. Every hatch on deck was tightly battened down; otherwise solid water, often standing two and three feet deep on our decks, would have quickly poured below to destroy our slight buoyancy and sink us like a rock.

But even so, in spite of lying to, we took a terrific battering, and time after time as we plunged into a green sea, it seemed beyond belief that our overloaded hull should still remain afloat.

In the middle of this storm, worn from a night of watchfulness, with Chipp on the bridge temporarily as his relief, Captain De Long sat dozing in his cabin chair, not daring even to crawl into his bunk lest he lose a second in responding to any call. Suddenly a solid sea came over the side, with a wild roar broke on board, and in a rushing wall of water carrying all before it, hit the poop bulkhead, smashed in the windows to the captain’s stateroom, and in an instant flooded the room. Our startled skipper coming out of his doze found himself swimming for his life in his own cabin, all his belongings afloat in a tangle about him!

For the first hour of that gale, the howling of our forty Eskimo dogs was a fair rival to the howling of the wind through the rigging, but as the waves began to break aboard, the poor dogs, half-drowned, quieted to a piteous whimper, and with their tails between their legs, sought shelter from the rushing seas in the lee of the galley, the bulwarks, the hatch coamings even—anything that would save them from the impact of those swirling waves. For once there was no fighting, each dog being solely absorbed in keeping his nose above water, and when possible on that heaving deck, in keeping his claws dug into the planking to save himself from being flung headlong into the lee scuppers.

But the gale finally blew itself out, and thankfully spreading our reefed canvas, we arrived four days out of St. Michael’s in lonely St. Lawrence Bay, to find the little Jeannette, a tiny symbol of civilization, dwarfed in that vast solitude by snow-capped mountains rising precipitously from the water, a magnificent spectacle of nature in her grandest mood.

But our isolation was broken soon enough by two large baideras which pushed out to meet us, crowded with natives who without leave clambered over our rails, eagerly offering in broken English to engage themselves as whalers, which naturally enough they assumed was the purpose of our cruise.

But we welcomed them gladly enough for another reason. What did they know of Nordenskjöld?

From their chief, a tall, brawny fellow calling himself “George,” after much cross-examination De Long elicited the information that a steamer, smaller even than the Jeannette, had been there apparently three months before, and that during the previous winter he, Chief George, had on a journey across East Cape to Koliutchin Bay on the north coast of Siberia, seen the same ship frozen in the ice there. This seemed to check with our last news on Nordenskjöld’s Vega. If indeed she had reached St. Lawrence Bay and passed south, she was of course safe now and we need no longer concern ourselves. But was it really the Vega?

Patiently, like a skilled lawyer examining an ignorant witness, De Long worked on George to find that out. Who was the Vega’s captain? An old man with a white beard who spoke no English. Who then had George conversed with? Another officer, a Russian, who spoke their tongue, the Tchuchee dialect, like a native. Who was he? On this point, George, uncertain over nearly everything else, was absolutely positive, and answered proudly,

“He name Horpish.”

But to De Long’s great disappointment, on consulting the muster roll of the Vega with which we had been furnished, no “Horpish” appeared thereon. Again and again, Chipp, De Long, and I pored over that list of the Swedish, Danish, and Russian names of the men and officers accompanying Nordenskjöld, while George, leaning over our shoulders, repeated over and over, “Horpish, he Horpish,” obviously disgusted at our inability to understand our own language.

Finally De Long put his finger on the answer. There, a few lines down from Nordenskjöld on that list was the man we were looking for—

“Lieutenant Nordquist, Imperial Russian Navy.”

I pronounced it a few times—Nordquist, Horpish—yes, it must be he. Phonetically in Tchuchee that was a good match for Nordquist.

And this was all we learned. The steamer, whatever her name, had stayed only one day, then departed to the southward, loaded according to George with “plenty coals.”

With some bread and canned meat in return for this sketchy information, we eased George and his followers, greatly disappointed at not being signed on as whalers, over the side before we lost anything. For while these Tchuchees appeared dirty, lazy, and utterly worthless, their unusual size made them potentially dangerous enemies when in force, and we posted an armed watch on deck as a precaution.

Our schooner arrived soon after we did, and we finished hoisting out of her all the coal down to the last lump, ending up with 132 tons stowed in our bunkers, which was their total capacity, and with 28 tons more as a deckload, giving us a total of 160 tons with which to start into the Arctic, nearly twice the amount of coal the Jeannette was originally designed to carry.

On August 27 we finished coaling and steamed out towing the schooner astern of us, for it seemed unsafe with her little crew of only six to leave her to get underway in desolate St. Lawrence Bay amidst that ugly-looking crowd of brawny Tchuchees, all experts at handling harpoons and looking none too scrupulous over what they chose to hurl them at.

Once clear of the harbor, we headed north for Cape East, while the lightened Fanny A. Hyde, carrying now as cargo only the last mail we ever sent back, spread her sails and with (for her but not for us) a fair wind was soon hull down to the southward, our last link with home finally severed.

Steaming steadily into a strong head wind, we stood on through Behring Strait and during the night passed between East Cape and the Diomede Islands, three barren rocks jutting from the sea, forming stepping stones almost between the continents of Asia and America, over which may very well have passed ages ago that immigration at the time of the dispersion of the human race which brought man first to North and then to South America.

But this human migration of former ages, even if so, interested us little in comparison with what the migratory waters of the ocean might be doing now. At the captain’s orders, Collins prepared a set of thermometers and dropped them overboard strung out on a line. If the Kuro-Si-Wo Current actually flowed northward into the Arctic Sea as we hoped, through this narrow funnel it must pass, and as we steamed slowly northward through the strait, Collins periodically read the thermometers to get the temperatures at varying depths, while Newcomb tended a dredge towed astern to obtain samples of the marine life at the bottom.

To our keen chagrin, the most that could be said for the results of our observations was that they were neutral—they proved or disproved nothing. The water was about the same in temperature from top to bottom and did not differ appreciably from the temperature of the air, a result which certainly did not indicate the presence of any marked warm current thereabouts. But then on the other hand, as we passed through, the fresh breeze we encountered from the northwest, blowing down through the strait, might well on that day have upset or even reversed the normal flow of water in a channel only twenty-eight fathoms deep. The thermometers proved nothing. How about the dredge? Eagerly we awaited a report from Newcomb with respect to his examination of its contents. Were the specimens in any degree symptomatic of the tropical waters of the Kuro-Si-Wo Current?

But there also we got scant comfort. The catch in the dredge was nondescript, and no deductions could safely be drawn. If the Kuro-Si-Wo Current on which we were banking so heavily for the success of our expedition flowed into the polar seas, at least we found no evidence of it.

As the day dawned with the empty horizon widening out before us to the north, we found ourselves at last in the Arctic Ocean, our gateway to the Pole. We stood to the northwest with somewhat overcast skies, coasting along the northern shores of Siberia before striking off for Wrangel Land, our thorough-going captain determined to steam a little out of his way to make one more stop at Cape Serdze Kamen to check Chief George’s story of the Vega’s actually having been there and left.

In the late afternoon, we made out a headland on our port hand, which the vigilant Danenhower, fortunately able just then to catch a sight of the sun to establish our position, pronounced as the desired cape. We stood in and anchored, but with steam up ready for getting underway instantly, since we were on a lee shore with none too good a holding ground.

After supper, the starboard whaleboat was cleared away and lowered, and the captain, backed up by Chipp, Dunbar, Collins and Alexey, started in for a collection of native houses on the beach to investigate about the Vega. But when they approached the shore, they found such a heavy sea rolling over a rapidly moving fringe of pack ice that the whaleboat’s efforts to get through were wholly ineffectual and after half an hour were abandoned when it was observed that the natives were getting ready to come out themselves in a skin boat.

Led by their chief in a bright red tunic, these latter, better acquainted with the coast than we, managed to make passage through the ice into the open water off shore, where they followed the whaleboat back to our ship and then over the side into the Jeannette’s cabin.

But there, in spite of Alexey’s best efforts with native dialects on the chief, who had all the dignity of a king, we were unable to make our questions about Nordenskjöld understood, or get anything understandable out of him except the one word,

“Schnapps?”

But to this De Long shook his head. He was too well acquainted with the results to pass fire-water out to natives. So with this we were stalled till the natives pushed forth a decrepit old squaw, who once an inhabitant of Kings Island, apparently had recognized Alexey’s dialect. But even on her, neither the name of Nordenskjöld nor of the Vega made any impression till Alexey, remembering Chief George’s reference to the Russian officer who spoke Tchuchee, mentioned Lieutenant Nordquist.

Immediately the squaw became all animation and her face lighted with understanding.

“Horpish?” She nodded her head vigorously and from then on, all was plain sailing. Alexey had difficulty in getting in a word sideways, “Horpish” had made such an impression. “Horpish’s” ship had been there a day, coming from a little further west in Koliutchin Bay, where she had wintered, a fact very soon verified by Chipp, who going ashore to visit that spot, came back with a miscellaneous collection of articles—Swedish coins, buttons from Russian, Danish, and Swedish uniforms, and prized most of all by the natives and hardest to get from them, a number of empty tin cans!

This evidence settled conclusively our search for Nordenskjöld and the Vega. Undoubtedly she had been at Cape Serdze Kamen as rumored; she had passed undamaged through Behring Strait, and must now be on her way southward through the Pacific to Japan, if indeed she had not already arrived there. We need no longer concern ourselves over Nordenskjöld and his crew, their safety was assured.

So on the last day of August, we hoisted in our whaleboat and stood out to the northward. It being Sunday, at 2 P.M. we rigged ship for church in the cabin, and our captain, a devoutly religious man, held Divine Service, attended by all the crew save those on watch.

With heads bowed, we stood while our ship steamed away from that bleak coast, our anchor hoisted in for the last time, with our thoughts divided between Nordenskjöld safely homeward bound and ourselves headed at last into the unknown polar seas.

As Collins rolled the notes solemnly out from the little organ and the rough voices of our sailors echoed the words, never before had I seen men at sea so deeply stirred by that heartfelt appeal,

“Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!”

CHAPTER VIII

For the first time, ice now began to be a factor in our cruise. We had noted a little along the Siberian shore churned by the surf when the whaleboat attempted a landing off Serdze Kamen, but now as we stood away from the coast, pack ice to the westward making out from Koliutchin Bay bothered the ship noticeably, with loose ice in large chunks bobbing about in the waves, necessitating constant conning by the officer of the watch to avoid trouble. Finally at 10 P.M., with ice growing heavier, while our course to Wrangel Land lay N.W. by N., the captain changed course to N.E. for a few hours to take her out of it, and then having come to open water, back to N.W., on which course under sail and steam we stood on through the night and all next day with beautifully clear cold weather attending us.

About a hundred miles to the southward of where Wrangel Land should be, we made out the ice pack once more, extending this time from dead ahead uninterruptedly around to the westward as far as eye could see. Confronted thus by the solid pack across our path, there was nothing for it but to head the Jeannette off to the eastward, away from our objective, skirting as closely as we dared that pack on our port side, solid ice now seven feet thick!

Meantime a fine southeast breeze sprang up and to this we made all sail, heading northeast with wind abeam and the ice dead to leeward, while from the crow’s-nest, grizzled old Dunbar, our ex-whaler ice-pilot, closely scanned the pack for any lead of open water through it going northward, but he found not the slightest sign of one.

On that course we were constantly increasing our distance from Wrangel Land instead of diminishing it, so De Long after morosely regarding for some time the fine wake which our six-knot speed was churning up in the icy water astern, finally ordered me when darkness fell to stop the engines, bank fires, and save the coal, letting her go under sail alone for the night.

Late in the first watch then, the engines were secured, the fires heavily banked in the boilers to burn as little coal as possible, and stocky Bartlett, fireman in charge of the watch, instructed to keep them so. With all secured below I came up on deck, for a few minutes before turning in looking off to leeward across the black water at the vague loom of that solid ice pack fringing the near horizon.

Eight bells struck, the watch was changed, the men relieved tumbling below to the forecastle with great alacrity for in spite of the southeast breeze, there was a sharp chill in the cutting wind as the Jeannette, with all sails drawing, plunged ahead at full speed. Deeply laden and well heeled over by a stiff beam wind, we were running with the lee scuppers awash, and the cold sea threatened momentarily to flood over our low bulwark. What with the icy water and the chilly air, the contrast with the warmth of the boiler room I had just left was too much for me. With a final glance overhead at our straining cordage and taut canvas and a wave to Dunbar who with dripping whiskers dimly visible in the binnacle light on the bridge above me, had just taken over the watch on deck, I ducked aft into the poop and wearily slid into my bunk.

On the starboard tack with the wind freshening, the Jeannette stood on through the night. One bell struck. In the perfunctory routine drone of the sea, the lookout reported the running lights burning bright and the report was gravely acknowledged by Mr. Dunbar, though we might just as well have saved our lamp oil, for what ship was there besides ourselves in that vast polar solitude to whom those lights, steadily burning in the darkness, might mean anything in the way of warning?

Nevertheless we were underway. Habit and the law of the sea are strong, so on deck the incongruity of the reports struck no one. Hans Erichsen, a huge Dane posted in the bow as lookout, turned his eyes lazily from the gleaming lights in the rigging toward the bowsprit once more, gradually accustoming them again to the darkness ahead.

And then hoarse and loud, nothing perfunctory this time about the call, came Erichsen’s cry,

“Ice ho! Dead ahead and on the weather bow!”

On the silent Jeannette, that cry, cutting through the whistling of the wind and the creaking of the rigging, echoed aft in the poop to bring up in the twinkling of an eye, tumbling half clad out of their bunks, Captain De Long, Mr. Chipp, and all the other officers.

“Hard alee!” roared Dunbar to the helmsman, desperately endeavoring to bring her into the wind to avoid a collision, for with ice alee, ahead, on the weather bow, there was no way out except to tack.

But the Jeannette, heavily laden and with a trim by the stern as she then was, had never successfully come about except with the help of her engines. And now the fires were banked! But she must tack or crash!

“All hands!”

Through the darkness echoed the rush of feet tumbling up from the forecastle, racing to man sheets and braces, the shrill piping of the bosun, hoarse orders, then a bedlam of curses and the howling of dogs as all over the deck, men and animals collided in the night.

In response to her hard over rudder, the Jeannette’s bow swung slowly to starboard while from ahead, plainly audible now on our deck, came the roar of the waves breaking high on the solid pack.

Would she answer her helm and tack?

Breathlessly we waited while with jibs and headsails eased and spanker hauled flat aft, the Jeannette rounded sluggishly toward the wind and the open sea and away from that terrible ice.

Then she stopped swinging, hung “in irons.” With our useless sails flapping wildly and no steam to save us, helplessly we watched with eyes straining through the darkness as the Jeannette drove broadside to leeward, straight for the ice pack!

CHAPTER IX

We struck with a shivering crash that shook the Jeannette from keel to main truck, and hung there with yards banging violently. Lucky for us now, that nineteen inch thickness of heavily reenforced side and the stout backing of those new trusses below—that impact would have stove in the side of any ordinary vessel!

But though we had survived that first smashing blow, we were in grave danger. Impotent with sails and rudder to claw off that ice bank, we lay there in a heavy seaway, rolling and grinding against the jagged shelf on which the wind was pushing us.

That put it up to the black gang. I rushed below into the fireroom.

“Bartlett!” I yelled. “Wide open on your dampers! Accelerate that draft!”

“Sharvell! Iversen!” I sang out sharply to my two coalheavers. “Lively with the slice bars! Cut those banked fires to pieces! Get ’em blazing!”

For thirty anxious minutes we fought before our two Scotch boilers with slice bars, rakes, and shovels to raise steam, while through our solid sides as we toiled below the water line, we heard the groaning and the crunching of the ice digging into our planking and from above the slapping of the sails, the howling of the dogs, and the kicks and curses of the seamen still struggling futilely to get the ship to claw off to windward.

At last with fires roaring, the needle of our pressure gauge started to climb toward the popping point; I reported we were ready with the engines.

De Long doused all sail; under steam alone with our helm hard aport and propeller turning over at half speed, we swung our bow at last to starboard into the wind and slowly eased away from the pack, decidedly thankful to get clear with no more damage than a terrible gouging of our stout elm planking. And under steam alone for the rest of the night we stood on dead slow nearly to windward between east and southeast, keeping that ice pack a respectable distance on our port hand till dawn came and with it, a fog!

For the next few watches, we played tag with the ice-fields, standing off when the fog came in, standing in when the fog lifted, searching for an open lead to the northward. At one time during this period, the fog thinned to show to our intense astonishment, off to the southeast a bark under full sail, a whaler undoubtedly, standing wisely enough to the southward away from the ice, but so far off, anxious as we were not to lose any northing while we sought an open lead, we never ran down and spoke him.

Soon, a little regretfully, we lost him in the fog, the last vessel we ever saw, homeward bound no doubt and a missed opportunity for us to send a farewell message home before we entered the ice-pack around Wrangel Land.

Finally with nothing but ice in sight except to the southeast, De Long decided to try a likely looking lead opening to leeward, toward the northwest. So with the captain in the crow’s-nest and the ice-pilot perched on the topsail yard, we entered the lead, Lieutenant Chipp on the bridge conning the ship as directed from aloft. Cautiously we proceeded in a general northwesterly direction up that none too wide lead of water with broken ice-fields fairly close aboard us now on both sides, for some seven hours till late afternoon, when simultaneously the lead suddenly narrowed and the fog thickened so much that we stopped, banked fires, and put out an ice-anchor to a nearby floe.

Chilled, cramped, and dead-tired from his long day in the crow’s-nest, De Long laid down from aloft and promptly crawled into his bunk, while the fog continuing, we lay to our ice-anchor till next day.

For the first time on our cruise, the temperature that night dropped below freezing, with the odd result that by morning between the fog and the freezing weather, our rigging was a mass of shimmering snow and frost, magically turning the Jeannette into a fairy ship, a lovely sight with her every stay and shroud shining and sparkling in the early dawn, and the running rigging a swaying crystal web of jewels glistening against the sky.

But as the fog still hung on, and we consequently could not move, I am afraid our captain, more interested in progress northward than in beauty, gave scant heed, and it was left to Ambler and me, being early on deck, really to drink in the soul-satisfying loveliness of that scene.

Some new ice, a thin film only, made around the ship during the night, the weather being calm and the surface of our lead therefore undisturbed and free to freeze, but it was insignificant in thickness compared to the pack ice surrounding us, which seemed everywhere to be at least seven feet in depth, of which thickness some two feet were above water and the rest below, with some hummocks here and there pushed up above the smooth pack to a height of six feet perhaps.

By afternoon, the fog cleared enough for us to haul in our ice-anchor, spread fires and get underway along our lead, which running now in a northeasterly direction we followed for two hours, poking and ramming our way between drifting floes. Then to our delighted surprise, we emerged into the open sea again, open, that is, between east and north only, with ice filling the horizon in all other directions.

With some searoom to work in, we speeded the engines and headed north, where we soon passed a drifting tree, torn up by the roots, an odd bit of flotsam to encounter in those waters, but which as it must have come from the south encouraged us since it lent some weight, however slight, to the Japanese Current theory about which we were beginning to entertain serious doubts. But we had little time to speculate on this, for soon from the lookout came the cry,

“Land ho!”

Sure enough, bearing northwest, apparently forty miles off and much distorted by mirage, was land which from our position and its bearings we judged to be Herald Island. This island I must hasten to explain was so named, not after the New York Herald whose owner, Mr. Bennett, was financing our expedition, but after H.M.S. Herald, whose captain, Kellett, had discovered and landed on that island thirty years before, in 1849.

Immediately from alow and aloft all hands were scanning the island, through binoculars, through telescopes, and with the naked eye. There was much animated discussion among us as to its distance, but regardless of that we could do nothing to close on it, for the ice-field lay between. So as night fell, we merely steamed in circles at dead slow speed, just clear of the pack.

Day broke fine and crisp with a light northerly breeze off the ice. Picking the most promising lead toward Herald Island, we pushed the Jeannette into it, and for two hours amidst drifting floes we made our way with no great trouble, when, to our dismay, we began to meet new ice in the lead, from one to two inches in thickness. For another two hours, we pushed along through this, our steel-clad stem easily breaking a path through which we drove our hull, with the thin ice scratching and gouging our elm doubling, when we came at last smack up against the thickest pack we had yet seen, some ten to fifteen feet of solid ice. This, needless to say, brought us up short. Since we could do nothing else, we ran out our ice-anchor to the floe ahead, while we waited hopefully for some shift in the pack to make us a new opening.

With clearer weather, several times during the morning as we lay in the ice, we made out distinctly not only Herald Island but other land beyond, above, and also to the southwest of it, which from everything we had been told, should be part of that Wrangel Land on which we were banking so much to afford us a base for our sledging operations toward the Pole. Consequently we searched the distant outlines of this continent with far greater interest than we had bestowed on the nearer profile of Herald Island, but to no conclusion. Danenhower, Chipp, and De Long, all experienced seamen, strained their eyes through glasses, scanning what could be seen of the coast of Wrangel Land, but so far even from agreeing on its remoteness, looking across ice instead of water so upset their habits of judging, that their estimates of its distance varied all the way from forty to one hundred miles, while De Long even doubted whether what he saw beyond Herald Island was land at all but simply a mirage. Being only an engineer, I took no part in these discussions, more concerned myself in staring at the unyielding edges of the nearby floes and wondering, if our navigation for the next few weeks was to consist mostly of traversing leads filled with such floating ice cakes, how long we could hope to go before an ice floe sucked in under our counter knocked off a propeller blade, and how long a time would elapse before our four spare blades were all used up. But there was no great occasion for such worry on my part. Not till afternoon could we move at all, and then only for a couple of hours, when once more we were brought up by solid ice ahead and with banked fires again anchored to a floe, called it a day, and laid below for supper.

Supper was an unusually somber meal. Such an early season encounter with the ice-fields and at so low a latitude, was a sad blow to our hopes of exploration. De Long, at the head of the table, served out silently as Tong Sing placed the dishes before him; I, on his left, carved the mutton and aided him at serving—to Chipp first, then to the others on both sides of the table down to Danenhower, who as mess treasurer sat at the foot of the table opposite the captain. Potatoes, stewed dried apples, bread, butter, and tea made up the rest of our unpretentious meal, the simplicity of which perhaps still further emphasized our situation and put a damper on any conversation. Only the shuffling of the Chinese steward’s feet on the deck as he padded round the little wardroom with the plates broke the quiet.

De Long, brooding over the ship’s situation, was gradually struck by the absence of conversation and its implications. More I think to make conversation than in the hope of gaining any information, he picked out the ice-pilot on my left, sawing earnestly away at his mutton, and asked him,

“Well, Mr. Dunbar, do you think we’ll get through this lead to Herald Island?”

Dunbar, absorbed like the rest of us in his thoughts, surprised me by the speed, so unusual for him, with which without even looking up he snapped out his reply,

“No, cap’n, we won’t!” Then more slowly as he turned his grizzled face toward the head of the table, he added vehemently, “And what’s more, while God’s giving us the chance, I’d wind her in that little water hole astern of us and head out of this ice back to open water before the bottom drops out of the thermometer and we’re frozen in here for a full due!”

Astonished by the heat of this unexpected reply, De Long looked from the old whaler, who in truth had hurled a lance into the very heart of each man’s thoughts, to the rest of us, all suddenly straightened up by the thrust.

“And why, Mr. Dunbar?” in spite of a pronounced flush he asked mildly. “Where can we do better, may I ask?”

“Further east, off Prince Patrick’s Land, to the north’ard of the coast of North America,” replied Dunbar shortly. “A whaler’ll stay in open water further north’n this over on the Alaska side most any time; the current sets that way toward Greenland, not this side toward Siberia.”

De Long calmly shook his head.

“No use, pilot; we’re not whaling and we’ll not go east. That would take us away from Wrangel Land, and sledging north along the coasts of Wrangel Land’s our only hope for working into the real north from Behring Strait. No, we can’t do it. We’ll have to take our chances here.”

Dunbar, his suggestion overruled, made no reply, masking his disappointment by hunching a little lower over his plate and hacking away once more at the chunk of mutton before him. And as suddenly as it had flared up, all conversation ceased.

September 6 dawned, for us on the Jeannette a day to which we often looked back with mingled feelings. During the night our water lead froze up behind us. In the morning, as far as the eye could see in every direction now was only ice—no water, no open leads anywhere. A fog hung over the sea, blotting out Herald Island, but a light northerly wind gave some promise of clearing the atmosphere later on.

We gathered at breakfast in the cabin, a somber group. Under way for a week since leaving Cape Serdze Kamen, we had made but 240 miles to the north, to reach only lat. 71° 30′ N., a point easily to be exceeded by any vessel all year round in the Atlantic. But here we were, completely surrounded by ice. Was this the exceptionally open Arctic summer, so free of ice, that in Unalaska we had been informed awaited us?

Danenhower, loquacious as always, broke the silence, observing to no one in particular,

“This damned coffee’s even worse than usual, all water and no coffee beans. Ah Sam’s had time enough to learn by now. Can’t anyone persuade that Chink to put some coffee in the pot? What’s he saving it for?”

“Maybe the sight of all that ice discourages him,” observed Ambler. “Perhaps he thinks we’re in for a long hard winter and he’s got to save. I reckon he’s right too, for that ice pack sure looks to me as if it never has broken up and turned to water yet.”

“Right, surgeon.” Captain De Long at the head of the table, busily engaged in ladling out a dish of hominy, looked up at Ambler and nodded pessimistically,

“And what’s worse for us, it looks to me as if it never will, unless someone whistles up a heavy gale to break up the pack.”

Chipp, uncomplainingly engaged in drinking down his portion of the insipid coffee, took objection at this.

“Don’t try that, captain! In any gale that’d break up this pack the pack’d break the Jeannette up in the process. No, let Nature take her course melting that ice; it may be slower but it’s safer.”

“Come down to earth!” broke in Danenhower. “Let’s leave the pack a minute; it’ll be there for a while yet. I was talking about coffee. Hasn’t anybody in this mess got influence enough to get Ah Sam to pack a little coffee in the pot for all this water to work on?”

“Well,” grinned Collins, seeing a chance to slip in a pun, “you’re the navigator, Dan. Why don’t you try shooting that Celestial’s equator? That ought to stir him up.”

Collins, chuckling happily, glanced round for approval.