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.

Danenhower twisted his broad shoulders in his chair, directed a blank stare at Collins.

“Huh? If that’s another one of your puns, Mr. Meteorologist, what’s the point?”

Collins stopped laughing and looked pained.

“Don’t you see it, Dan?” he asked. “Why, that one’s rich! Celestial, equator, and you’re a navigator. Now, do you get it?”

Danenhower, determined with the rest of us to squelch Collins’ puns, looking as innocent of understanding as before, replied flatly,

“No! I’m too dumb, I guess. Where’s the point?”

“Why, Ah Sam’s a Chinaman, isn’t he?”

“If he’s not, then I’m one,” agreed Danenhower. “So far I’m with you.”

“Well, all Chinamen are sons of Heaven, aren’t they? So that makes him a Celestial. See? And you’re a navigator so you shoot the stars; they’re celestial too. And anybody’s stomach’s his equator, isn’t it? You see, it all hangs together fine. Now do you get it?” inquired Collins anxiously.

“I’m damned if I see any connection in all this rigmarole of yours with my attempts at getting better coffee,” muttered Danenhower. “Does anybody?” He looked round.

Solemnly first De Long, then Chipp, Ambler and I all shook our heads, gazing blandly at Collins for further elucidation as to what the joke might be.

Collins looked from one to another of us, then in disgust burst out,

“The farther all of you get from San Francisco, the weaker grow your intellects!” He leaned back sulkily. “By the time we get to the Pole, you won’t know your own names. Why, that one’s good! They’d see it in New York right off. I’ve half a mind to try it out on that Indian, Alexey. I’ll bet even he sees it!”

“Why don’t you try it on Ah Sam instead, then?” queried Danenhower, rising. “If our cook sees it, there’s hope. Maybe next you can make him see why he ought to put some coffee berries in the pot when he makes coffee, and that’ll be something even my thick skull can understand!” He jerked on his peacoat, lifted his bulky form from his chair, and strode to the door. “I’m going on deck. I’m too dumb, I guess, to see the points of Collins’ puns. But maybe if I’m not too blind yet, I can see the ice, anyway.”

With a wink at Ambler, our navigator vanished. It seemed to be working; perhaps we might yet cure Collins of his continuous stream of puns, for most of them were atrocious, and anyway, having now had a chance to get acquainted at close range with punning, I heartily agreed with whoever it was, Samuel Johnson I think, in averring that a pun was the lowest form of wit. With us the case was serious—here with the long Arctic night approaching, locking us within the narrow confines of our vessel, we were shipmates with a punster and no escape except to break him of it!

I rose also and went out on deck, the while Collins turned his attention to Dunbar, trying to get him, who also knew something of navigation, to admit that he at least saw the point in the meteorologist’s play on words, but I am afraid he picked the wrong person, for Dunbar’s grim visage remained wholly unresponsive.

Out on deck, clad in a heavy peacoat with a sealskin cap jammed tightly down over my bald spot, for the temperature was down to 26° F., I looked around. A distant view was impossible because of fog. Nearby were a few disconnected pools of water covered by thin ice, but short of miraculously jumping the ship from one pool to another over the intervening floes, there seemed no way for us to make progress. I glanced down our side. For several feet above the waterline, the paint was gone and our elm doubling was everywhere scraped bright with here and there a deep gouge in the wood from some jagged floe.

De Long joined me at the rail, looked despondently off through the mist, his pipe clenched between his teeth, the while he puffed vigorously away at it.

“A grand country for any man to learn patience in, chief,” he remarked glumly. “Since we can’t push through the pack to Wrangel Land over there on the western horizon, I’ve been hoping and praying at least to get the ship in to Herald Island to make winter quarters before we were frozen in, but look what’s happened!” He gazed over the bulwark at the nearby hummocks. “Yesterday I hoped today would make us an opening through to the land; today I hope tomorrow’ll do it. And tomorrow—?” He shrugged his shoulders and left me, to climb our frosted ratlines to the crow’s-nest on the chance that from that elevation he might see over the fog. This turned out a futile effort, since not till one p.m. when the fog finally lifted, were we able to move.

With the weather clearing, I got up steam while De Long, armed with binoculars, perched himself once more in the crow’s-nest, Dunbar again straddled the fore topsail yard, Chipp took the bridge, and we got underway for as odd a bit of navigation as all my years of going to sea have ever witnessed.

To start with, the only possible opening was on the port bow, but with heavy ice ahead and astern, there was insufficient room to maneuver the ship by backing to head her for the opening. So over the side went Bosun Cole and half the starboard watch, dragging with them one end of a six-inch hawser. Selecting a sizeable ice hummock a few shiplengths off on the port side which gave a proper lead to our forecastle bitts, Cole expertly threw a clove hitch in the hawser round the hummock, using the ice, so to speak, as a bollard; while on deck, Quartermaster Nindemann heaved in on the ship end of that line with our steam winch, warping the bow smartly round to port till it pointed fair for the opening, when Chipp gave me the signal,

“Slow ahead!”

With a few turns of the propeller, we pushed our bow into the crack between the floes. After that, with the line cast off, it was a case of full out on the throttle. With connecting rods, cranks, and pistons flying madly round, we certainly churned up a wild wake in that narrow lead wedging those cakes apart while the Jeannette squeezed herself in between the ice floes.

And so it went for the next three hours, the captain and the ice-pilot directing from aloft, while in the engine room we nearly tore the engines off their bedplates and the smoking thrust block off its foundation with all our sudden changes from “Full ahead” to “Full astern” and everything in between, while the Jeannette rammed, squeezed, backed, and butted her way through the ice, sometimes relying only on the engines, sometimes only on Jack Cole and his mates plodding along on the floes ahead of the ship dragging that six-inch hawser and occasionally taking a turn with it on some hummock to help warp the ship into position for ramming. Our solid bow and thick sides took a terrific beating that watch as we hammered our way through pack ice deeper than our keel, but everything held, and when we finally ceased a little after four, it was not from any fear of the consequences to the Jeannette, but only because the fog came down again, blotting out everything.

Once more we ran out our ice-anchor, and with that secured, recalled aboard the warping party. I came up out of the engine room, having taken enough out of our engines in a few hours to drive us halfway to China. Chipp, Danenhower, and the captain all were gathered on the bridge over my head.

“Well, Dan, how much’ve we made good toward Herald Island?” I enquired eagerly of Danenhower.

The navigator’s thickset brows contracted dejectedly as he peered down at me over the after rail.

“Maybe a mile, chief,” he answered.

Maybe a mile? And to get that mile, keeping up a full head of steam all the time for ramming, I had been burning coal furiously these past three hours. A hundred miles of progress at that rate and our coal would be completely gone. I turned questioningly toward the captain, asked,

“I suppose it’s bank fires now and save coal, hey, brother?”

Before answering De Long looked off through the fog. Ice ahead, ice astern, ice on both beams, with only tiny disconnected patches of water showing here and there among the floes. He shook his head.

“No, chief, we won’t bank this time. Let your fires die out altogether; save every pound of coal you can. If a good chance comes to move, I’ll give you ample time to get steam up again.”

And so we left it. As the day ended, the Jeannette, hemmed in by ice, lay an inert ship, unable to move in any direction, as a matter of form only, held to an ice-anchor; while below, after securing the engines, I reduced the watch to one man only, young Sharvell, coalheaver, left to tend the boilers while the fires died out in them.

The temperature, which never during that day rose above the freezing point, started to drop toward evening and soon fell to 23°. The result was inevitable. Young ice, making during the night over all patches of open water, had by morning completely cemented together the old pack.

One look over the side in the midwatch satisfied me there would be no call for the engines next day, nor unless something startling happened, for many a day. All the steam I could put behind my engines could not stir the Jeannette one inch from her bed, and as for warping her now with our winch, our stoutest hawsers would be about as useful as threads in tearing her from that grip of ice.

And so September 6, 1879, ended with the helpless Jeannette solidly frozen into the Arctic ice pack.

CHAPTER X

That freezing into immobility of the Jeannette in so low a latitude, fell like an icy shower on the spirits of our wardroom mess, and from that day sociability vanished. Already Dunbar and Newcomb were not on speaking terms; Collins regarded me sullenly and the rest of the mess hardly less so; and the captain, who on leaving St. Michael’s, had after an unpleasant disagreement with Mr. Collins in the wardroom, decided that he should be more punctilious and less informal in his intercourse with us, now withdrew into his official shell completely. For myself, this worried me not at all, for I well knew the effect that responsibility has on most skippers, and particularly realized (as De Long seemed finally also to have done) that for a captain not much senior in years nor in rank to most of his officers, close comradeship is incompatible with the maintenance of proper respect and authority.

However, if we had no sociability to cheer us up, we soon had plenty of other matters to make us forget the lack. The ice pack which held us was evidently under way, headed northward, and we had not been in the pack a day before the pressure, nipping us on the beam, shoved the Jeannette up on a submerged tongue of ice projecting somewhere below our port bilge, giving us a list to starboard of over 5° and causing some inconvenience in getting about. As if this were not enough, after a few watches to our great uneasiness our list suddenly increased to 9°, and incidentally jammed our rudder hard starboard.

Here was cause enough for real worry. A permanent list of 9° is in itself a great nuisance in getting about on a ship even in the tropics, but now with the temperature below freezing and the decks slippery with ice, we were in a bad way to keep footing. And if the list got worse and carried away our rudder or laid us on our beam ends as it threatened to do, what then?

We promptly bestirred ourselves. Under Lieutenant Chipp’s direction, improvised torpedoes made of kegs full of black powder were planted in the ice under our stern, but with no results. In spite of an all day struggle, not a torpedo could we explode. To Chipp’s intense chagrin, every fuse we had proved defective and would not burn. And an attempt to fire the charges with that newfangled device, electricity, also failed, apparently because our current was so weak it all leaked away through our non-insulated copper wires into the ice, leaving not enough at the terminals to set off our torpedoes.

To aggravate us while we toiled to straighten up our ship, we had an extraordinarily clear day, giving a splendid view across the ice of Herald Island off to the westward, with far beyond it a distinct range of peaks—Wrangel Land which, when we set out on our expedition we had fondly expected to spend the winter exploring. Frozen in, Heaven only knows how far away from it, we gritted our teeth and worked in the freezing weather to explode those torpedoes but to no purpose. Night fell and left us still in that perilous position.

Our fourth day in the ice found us still struggling to right the ship. The torpedoes were abandoned. We resorted to more primitive methods, those used centuries ago on sailing ships to careen for cleaning the hulls.

Jack Cole, bosun, and a gang of seamen swarmed up the icy shrouds, rigged a couple of heavy tackles at the mastheads, one at the fore, the other at the main, and secured their lower ends to ice claws hooked under the thick floes on our port side.

Then to the hoarse cry of the bosun,

“Yo, heave!” our entire crew, stretched out along the falls, lay back and foot by foot hove them well taut, till our port shrouds came slack and the captain signalled to belay hauling lest something carry away. But even under this terrific strain on our masts tending to roll us to port, our vessel, gripped firmly by the ice, righted herself not an inch.

De Long, regarding with keen disappointment our strained cordage and bent masts, had still one more shot in the locker. Torpedoes had failed, careening had failed, but we had yet an ice saw. He motioned to Alfred Sweetman, our tall English carpenter, standing at the base of the mainmast dubiously eyeing the overstrained crosstrees above him.

“Rig that ice saw, Sweetman!”

The carpenter responded hurriedly. While Jack Cole braced back the main yard so that its port end plumbed our quarter, Sweetman and his mates broke out from the hold our ice saw, a huge steel blade twenty feet long and broad in proportion, its cutting edge studded with coarse teeth that would have done credit to any full-grown shark.

Under Nindemann’s direction, the port watch went over the side armed with pick-axes and crowbars and started to break a hole for the saw through the ice on our quarter, while Cole and Sweetman swung the saw from a tackle at the yardarm, weighted its lower end with a small kedge anchor, and then awaited the completion of the hole through the floe. They had several hours to wait, for not till the gang on the pack had dug down fifteen feet did a crowbar go through into the open water below, which, gushing unexpectedly upward into the hole, soaked the diggers with freezing spray and sent them madly scrambling up the rough sides of their excavation.

Fifteen feet of ice! De Long’s mustaches drooped for a full due when Nindemann reported that. Only mid-September, and already fast in ice extending two feet below our keel! A gigantic block of ice to try to cut, but there was nothing for it but to saw away if we were ever to right our ship. Fortunately our saw was at least long enough.

The bosun plumbed the hole with the kedge anchor suspended from the yardarm, hauled everything two-blocks, and then,

“Let go!” he roared.

Down came the kedge with a run, crashed into the thin remaining ice-floor of the hole, broke through, carrying the lower end of the saw with it, and we were ready.

Then commenced four hours of strenuous labor. Sweetman and Nindemann, armed with crowbars, down on the pack guided the sides of the saw blade for a fore and aft cut, while on deck the starboard watch stretched out along the fall, alternately heaved and slacked away, on the upstroke lifting the weight of both saw and kedge anchor, on the downstroke depending on the weight of the kedge only to drag the blade down again, while on both strokes the steel teeth rasped and shrieked and tortured our ears as they tore into the solid ice.

But it was useless. In spite of Sweetman’s skilled guidance and Nindemann’s brawny shoulders, it was next to impossible to keep that blade going straight against such thick ice, for the bottom of the saw being so far below them, actually guiding it was wholly out of question, with the result that on nearly every stroke the saw jammed in the cut. After half a day’s arduous labor the net results were a badly bent saw, hardly a fathom of cut ice, and such a flow of sulphurous language both on deck and on the ice pack from those handling the saw that I doubt not it may well have melted more ice than we cut.

So at eight bells, when the gang over the side knocked off for mess, De Long, ruefully contemplating the twisted saw temporarily hanging in the clear at the yardarm, and the insignificant length of the cut compared with the stretch of ice along our hull which had yet to be severed, gave up and silently motioned Cole to unrig everything. With alacrity, all hands as soon as this was done, scrambled below to the forecastle.

A few minutes later, in the comparative warmth of the wardroom (50° instead of the 16° out on deck) with some difficulty on account of the slope, I eased myself into my chair near the head of the table on the captain’s left, silently bracing my plate with my knife to keep it from sliding away to starboard while Tong Sing ladled out the soup, hardly more than half filling my plate lest the steaming liquid overflow the low side.

“Well, mates,” observed Danenhower, at the low end of the table, contemplating his scanty portion, “such is life in the Arctic! We’re in for this list all winter. I’m glad I don’t like soup anyway. Stew’s more in my line.”

“Better see Ah Sam, then, Dan,” I advised, “and make sure he thickens that stew enough to insure a safe angle of repose, or your stew’ll flow away like the soup.”

“Don’t worry, boys; I’ll fix it,” broke in our executive officer, Mr. Chipp. “If we can’t right our ship, I can right this mess table anyhow. I’ll have the carpenter saw a foot off each of the legs on the high end and that’ll about compensate for the heel and level it off for us.”

“Chipp, I’m ashamed of you,” I objected. “Your cure’s worse’n the disease. That’ll fix the slope, true enough, but what’ll the skipper and you and I do? Shortening these legs a foot will put this end of the table in our laps. How’ll we eat then; cross-legged on the deck like a lot of Japs? Maybe you can, you must be used to it, being just back from there! But I’m afraid I’m too stiff in the joints to flemish down my legs properly!”

Chipp, who had just come back from the Orient to join the Jeannette, saw the point, considered a moment, then looked speculatively down the table to the low end where sat the mess treasurer and the juniors in the mess.

“You’re right, chief. That’ll never do; there’s too much rank up here to monkey with this end of the table. Instead, I’ll have Sweetman level off by adding a foot to those table legs on the starboard end.”

Immediately Danenhower, facing the captain from the low end of the table, flared up.

“And what do you expect me to do then, Mr. Chipp? Get myself a high chair like a damned infant so I can reach the table while I eat? And wear a bib too, maybe? Forget it!”

Chipp, squelched from both ends of the table, shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, I give up, mates! Anchor your soup plates anyway you can then. But don’t be blaming me if your chow finishes in the scuppers instead of down your gullets.” He relapsed into silence.

The meal proceeded with difficulty. Tong Sing, bending low over each man’s shoulder in succession, sought to maintain his grip on the sloping deck the while he tried to level off the platter of salt pork long enough for each to help himself, but it was evident that it was only a matter of time till one of us got the contents of that platter in his lap. After two near accidents, avoided only by skillful juggling of the platter by the impassive Tong Sing, the captain motioned the steward to quit serving and put the dish down before him.

“Enough, Charley. Set that platter down right here. Lend a hand, Melville, at passing those plates, and I’ll serve out myself. We’ll have to let formality in serving go by the board till spring’s here and we’re on an even keel again. Let’s have your plate now, Dan,” he called, as the relieved steward deposited the heaping dish of pork before the captain and padded off to the galley for the potatoes.

“Spring? When does spring arrive around these parts?” asked Danenhower irrelevantly, passing his plate.

“God knows, I don’t!” replied Chipp. “By June, I hope though. Why, Dan?”

“By June, eh?” The navigator counted on his fingers. “Nine months yet. And nine months more of having to navigate these careened decks is going to be tough on the legs. I’ll have a permanent limp in my left leg long before that, trying to keep erect.”

Dr. Ambler seated in the middle of the table looked at Danenhower, nodded seriously, and in his quiet Virginian drawl observed,

“You’re right, Dan. And since we can’t right the ship, we’ll have to level off the crew. What Chipp just said gave me an idea. How about my amputating a couple of inches from everybody’s left leg, just enough to counteract the list? That’ll keep you all on an even keel.”

“Hah, hah!” roared Chipp, looking at the doctor in mock amazement. “For a naval surgeon, my dear Ambler, your lack of seamanship pains me! Shorten our left legs, indeed? That’s all very well for a starboard list when a man’s going forward, but where’ll he be when he comes about and wants to go aft? Worse than ever, with his short flipper on the wrong side! Not for me, doctor. I’ll reef my legs myself on whichever side’s necessary. Your idea’s worse than mine!”

“I’m sunk,” admitted Ambler with a grin. “So that won’t work after all! And it looked such a grand scheme with a little easy surgery on the crew to avoid having to operate on all that ice!”

“If we stay here long enough,” observed Newcomb, “according to that new theory which my fellow naturalist, that great English scientist Darwin, recently advanced, Nature will accommodate us to our environment. The survival of the fittest, you know.”

“Well, ‘Bugs,’ that means we’ll all ultimately become polar bears or perish,” commented Ambler. “And since I don’t look with pleasure to doing either, let’s hope you and your biology are both wrong.”

By this time, fortunately all were served, and in the ensuing attack on the salt pork, conversation languished. But in spite of the badinage about our situation and the half-humorous remedies proposed to alleviate the nuisance of forever battling the sloping decks in working, the sloping tables in eating, and even the sloping bunks when we tried to sleep, it was evident that in the back of everyone’s mind was a lurking fear of what next the ice had in store for us. And the futility of our efforts in combating the ice pack were now too plain to all of us to sustain any further hope of effecting in the slightest degree any position our ship might assume, let alone her movements.

For some days we drifted impotently with the pack toward the northwest. With broken ice under pressure piling up along our high side and jamming our rudder hard against the pintles, the captain (who inwardly had been hoping for a series of September gales to come along and break up the pack and free us) at last reluctantly gave the order to unship it, which task with great difficulty on account of the thick ice, Cole and Sweetman finally succeeded in accomplishing, tricing the rudder up to the davits across the stern. So the end of the first week found us a rudderless ship moving at the whim of the ice pack, all chance of exploration gone, stopped at latitude 71° North, a latitude which had easily been reached in these same waters twenty years before by a sailing ship. And gnawing bitterly at our captain’s soul was the knowledge that till summer came to free us, in spite of steam or sail, the Jeannette Polar Expedition must drift idly with the pack, so far from the Pole as to be the laughing stock of the world when it became known, the while we consumed our supplies, burned up our coal, and wore out our bodies to no purpose.

Where was the pack taking us? Anxiously we daily watched the trend of the driftlead dropped to the bottom through a hole in the ice under our stern, then checked against occasional bearings of distant Herald Island and the few astronomical observations Danenhower got through the fogs. The navigator announced finally that we were drifting northwest with the pack, at a rate of about two miles per day. Where would that lead us? And when? By spring, to the shores of Wrangel Land perhaps, the captain hoped, not overly optimistic apparently even for actual realization of that prospect.

Meanwhile, I prepared for the worst below. To save coal, fires had on the day the ice caught us, been allowed to die out under the boilers. Now with our underwater hull practically sheathed in ice, the cold below was increasing, and to avoid freezing boilers and pipelines and bursting them as a result, it was necessary to free everything of water, leaving boilers, pumps, and engines empty, dry, and unfortunately as a consequence, unavailable for immediate service if required. Not to have some steam up and his auxiliaries, at least, ready for service, would irk any engineer. But to be even more helpless below, not even to have boilers filled and ready to light off in an emergency, gave me serious cause for worry. However, there was no way out. Keeping the water warm in the boilers and lines meant keeping fires alight which would consume precious fuel and leave us with empty bunkers when the ice at last released us and we could steam again. Keeping water in the boilers and lines without the fires, meant freezing and bursting our lines and perhaps our boilers, leaving us helpless to utilize the coal we had saved. One horn of that dilemma was as bad as the other; was ever an engineer faced with a worse choice of evils? The only way out was to be even more reckless, to empty everything, save coal, avoid freezing, and trust to luck that in a pinch somehow the boilers could be filled again with water, fired up, and steam raised once more before it was too late.

And that I did. Lee, machinist, and Bartlett, fireman, who were acting as my assistant engineers, turned to with their wrenches. Aided by the rest of the black gang, Boyd, Lauterbach, Iversen, and Sharvell, serving as a bucket brigade, they were soon busy breaking pipe joints, draining out water, drying out the boilers, and finally assembling everything as free of moisture as it was humanly possible to get it.

And that completed the job of reducing the Jeannette to a helpless hulk. No rudder with which to steer, no steam with which to move her engines, she was more helpless even than Noah’s Ark, which indeed she soon came to resemble when the portable deck house we brought with us from San Francisco was finally erected.

CHAPTER XI

On the Jeannette, we settled down to spending the winter in the ice pack. The first step was to turn loose on the ice all our dogs—a proceeding greeted with yelps of joy from the dogs at no longer being prisoners, and cheers from the men who foresaw not only the prospect once again of living in some peace and safety, but also of keeping our decks clean and shipshape. There was only one drawback. Some distance from the ship we had planted bear-traps in the hope of varying our menu with fresh meat. To our disgust, instead of bear, our first catch was one of our best dogs, Smike, nipped by the foreleg between the jaws of a trap. With some difficulty, Aneguin extricated the yelping brute and the starboard wing of the bridge having been converted to a dog hospital, Smike was turned in for repairs. Hardly had this been done before a second dog, Kasmatka this time, sprang another trap and Aneguin had two patients for his canine sickbay. This disturbed the captain, who fearful of losing all our dogs with the sledging season coming on, ordered the traps set out only at night when all the dogs had been herded aboard.

Meanwhile De Long kept a watchful eye on Herald Island looming up in the distance as we drifted with the ice to the northwest. Our skipper, anxious to discover if the island contained any driftwood which might serve us for fuel, or a possible harbor if by any chance the hoped-for September gales broke up the pack and allowed us by steaming up again to reach it, determined on exploring it while still it bore abeam, apparently only five miles off. So on the captain’s orders, Chipp, Alexey, and I made up an exploring party, taking a sledge, eight dogs, and provisions for a week. We set off on the morning of September 13, cheered by all the crew, and immediately I discovered something about dog teams. Instead of my boyhood pictures of a dog team racing in full cry over the snow with the Eskimo driver having nothing to do except to snap a whip as he gracefully reclined on the sledge, there was chaos. The dogs yelped and fought; the leaders battling in the rear, the rear dogs in the center, the harness all atangle, and progress the last thing apparently any dog was interested in. It took all our efforts to untangle the mess and get underway, with Alexey whipping the dogs to hold them in line, and Chipp and I behind pushing the sledge to get it started and encourage the dogs. Fortunately for us, the going at first was fair, with much young ice, still smooth and unbroken to ease our path, but we soon ran into rough and broken floes, over which we toiled for hours. In this wise we covered fifteen miles without Herald Island appearing any closer when, to our dismay, a wide open water lead blocked our path. From the edge of that gap we scanned the island beyond, still five miles away but clearly visible through the frosty air, to find that its shores were precipitous cliffs of rock, offering no signs of a safe harbor even if we could have worked the Jeannette inshore, while there was not the slightest evidence of vegetation or of any driftwood which might ease our fuel problem.

Chipp and I considered the situation. Without a boat, it was folly to attempt proceeding farther—we might, even if we managed to skirt this lead and make a landing on the island, find our return cut off by other leads and with our ship being carried to the northward by the drifting ice, be left to starve on that barren rock. Reluctantly then we turned back, but so slow was our progress over the rough ice pack we were forced at last to camp on the ice for the night. It was not till nine the next morning, which happened to be Sunday, that we sighted the ship, a little glum at returning with nothing to show for our journey except one small seal which Alexey had shot at the edge of the lead and which we carried strapped down on the sledge.

Instead of the peaceful calm of a Sunday morning, however, I found the ship in a turmoil. As we approached the stern with our sledge, trudging wearily along in Alexey’s wake and watching eagerly the thin column of smoke from the galley that to us meant just one thing—a hot breakfast—someone on deck shouted,

“Bear!”

The next I knew, down the gangway onto the ice came the quartermaster, Nindemann, a rifle in his hand, running in his stockinged feet as hard as he could toward our stem. Sure enough, there galloping off past the bow, was a big polar bear who quickly faded from view, but that meant nothing as white bears naturally enough do not stand out long against an ice background. A bear! Fresh meat instead of salt beef, if we got him! But polar bears had a reputation for ferocity and there was Nindemann, single-handed, going after one. What might not the bear do to him among those hummocks? Chipp and I looked at each other questioningly. Being somewhat ungainly and rather stout, I can hardly say that Nature ever designed me for chasing bears, besides which, having just tramped thirty miles across the broken pack, I hardly felt equal to joining any bear hunts, and I was about to suggest we let the Indian, Alexey, go in support, leaving us to struggle with the dogs, when the problem was solved for us. Down the gangway, going four bells in Nindemann’s wake came Danenhower, also flourishing a rifle, and in no time at all after that, Collins and Newcomb, both armed, shot down the gangplank also and were off on the run. By the time our sledge made the gangway and we hauled our tired legs up the incline, not only the bear but all four hunters were out of sight among the hummocks.

As we came over the side, I looked questioningly round for the watch officer to report my return aboard, but except for Dunbar who was already half up the foreshrouds on his way to the crosstrees, undoubtedly to get a better view of the chase, there wasn’t a man in sight on deck, so without further ceremony, both Chipp and I laid below to the wardroom, where, furs and all, we planked ourselves wearily down at the mess table, calling loudly for Tong Sing and hot coffee. At the table, in no wise disturbed by the shouting on deck, was Captain De Long, still lingering over his breakfast. Eagerly he questioned us about Herald Island while we ate; his disappointment at our report, utterly dashing his hope that the island might ever serve him as a base, was plainly evident, though he tried to conceal it from us by changing the subject.

“Well, Chipp, there’s still Wrangel Land to look forward to.” He gazed listlessly up at the wardroom clock. “But that’ll have to wait. Right now I believe it’s time for Sunday inspection. Have Nindemann muster the crew immediately on deck.”

“Nindemann, sir?” asked Chipp puzzled, having just seen our quartermaster vanishing on a bear hunt.

“Yes, Nindemann of course. He has the watch now.”

“Sorry, captain,” answered Chipp, “but Nindemann went over the side just before we returned chasing a bear. He must be over a mile from here by now. However, now I’m back, sir, I’ll muster the crew myself.”

“Nindemann gone, you say? When he had the watch? Who gave him permission to leave; Danenhower, I wonder?” De Long frowned, then motioned to Tong Sing. “Tell Mr. Danenhower I want to see him right away.”

“Dan’s gone too, sir,” put in Chipp quickly before the steward could leave. “He followed Nindemann after that bear, to back him up, I suppose. I’ll arrange for the inspection, sir.”

De Long’s frown deepened perceptibly at this.

“So the navigator and the watch officer are both gone, eh? Who’d they leave in charge on deck?”

“Don’t know, captain,” answered the executive officer, “unless it might have been the ice-pilot. But Mr. Dunbar was halfway up the foremast when we came aboard, so I can’t just say.”

The skipper stroked his mustaches thoughtfully, finally ordered,

“Never mind the inspection, Chipp. I’ll delay it till they’re back. But this won’t do. Even if we are in the ice, I can’t have my crew disappearing from the ship whenever they see fit. Pass the word to all hands at the next muster that hereafter no officer or man leaves this vessel without first getting my permission. Do you understand that, Chipp?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” replied Chipp. “Having just been across thirty miles of this infernal ice, I quite agree with you, captain. We can’t have our men chasing God knows where among these hummocks and never knowing who’s gone nor why. But it’s not the men’s fault this time, sir, it’s mine. I should have covered that by an order a week ago when we entered the ice.”

“Never mind that, Chipp,” broke in De Long, “I’ll issue the order, you just tell Danenhower and Nindemann I want to see them when they return.” He rose abruptly, pulled on his fur parka, and went on deck.

Meanwhile on the distant pack, the bear hunt was in full cry, first the bear under a full head of steam, then Nindemann tenaciously following in his wake, then Danenhower a few hundred yards astern getting somewhat winded, and finally bringing up the rear of the column, Newcomb and Collins. Over the broken ice and in and out among the hummocks ran the bear, giving his pursuers no chance for a decent shot, and all the time (by instinct, no doubt) heading away from the Jeannette till it was lost to sight. After fifteen minutes of hot pursuit, Danenhower, torn between the need of supporting Nindemann ahead of him and the neglected Sunday inspection behind, and disheartened also by observing that the bear was steadily gaining, stopped at last, till the rear guard caught up with him and paused briefly at his signal.

“We haven’t a ghost of a chance now of catching that bear,” panted the winded navigator to his companions, “so I’m going back to prepare the ship for inspection. But you two keep on to help Nindemann in case that bear makes a stand. Savvy?”

Collins and Newcomb, saving their breath, nodded and set off again.

Danenhower, puffing heavily, returned to the ship, hurriedly mustered the crew on deck, officers to starboard, seamen to port, and finally, an hour late, went below to report to the captain that the ship was ready for inspection.

In the chill winter morning, with the thermometer not much above zero, we stood in our furs, officers indistinguishable in those baggy garments from seamen, waiting for the captain to emerge. A bleak enough scene. Along our whole port side was broken ice, piled up by the pressure (which was heeling us to starboard) in irregular heaps till it came practically fair with the rail and threatened if the pressure increased to rise still higher and flow like a glacier down our sloping deck. Aloft as usual, our rigging was outlined in ice, our masts and spars cased in it, and our furled sails against the yards so thoroughly frozen into a solid mass that had we wished to spread our canvas, it would have been beyond the power of human hands even with axes to loose one fold from another. That made me smile a bit. Our sails were even more useless than our engines, for given time, I could at least fire up again; but I could see no way in which Chipp could possibly make sail till summer came once more.

In the midst of my meditations, De Long emerged from the poop. Swiftly Danenhower called the roll, saluted the captain, reported three men absent. The captain, to whom by now this was no news, acknowledged curtly. The crew was dismissed, fell out, went below, and stood by their various stations there while the skipper inspected the berth deck, the galley, the storerooms, and in short, every space and hold, commenting briefly now and then. As a whole the ship was dry; in spite of the cold outside, no condensation and no frost as yet showed in our living quarters or storerooms.

Inspection over, the bosun passed the word for Divine Service in the cabin aft, but except for the officers aboard, the captain’s congregation was small. Attendance being voluntary, the majority of the crew stayed away, which may perhaps have been taken as a good omen for I well believe the old saying to be so, that the reliance of a sailor in God is in inverse proportion to his faith in the strength of his ship. Evidently then our seamen, seeing no special danger in our predicament, felt no great need for prayer, leaving that to the captain, who, they well knew, was in the absence of a chaplain required by the Navy Regulations to hold services. I may say here, however, for Captain De Long that he was a deeply religious man and it required no compulsion from the Regulations in his case to insure Divine Service and to ask the blessing of the Almighty upon his undertaking and his crew. Personally however, his position in the matter was a little odd, because De Long himself was of the Catholic faith. Nevertheless since most of the crew were if anything Protestants, he always conducted the services in the Episcopal ritual.

Services over, we laid up on deck, to find practically the whole crew lining the rail watching the absent hunters straggling back across the ice pack to the ship, with the winded Nindemann leading and the other two well in his rear. There were no signs of the bear, who had evidently successfully outrun his pursuers, but what I think mostly engaged the seamen’s attention as their eyes moved covertly from the captain at the starboard gangway to the returning hunters on the ice was their expectation of seeing the skipper light into the absentees for missing inspection. Nindemann, first over the side, a little surprised at seeing the captain at the gangway instead of Dunbar to whom he had turned over the the deck, saluted De Long, reported casually,

“Returning aboard, sir,” and unslinging his rifle, turned to go below.

“Wait a minute, Nindemann.” The quartermaster paused, De Long eyed him silently a moment, while the crew, a little forward, looked eagerly for fireworks, but to their disappointment De Long said very quietly,

“Nindemann, you were watch officer. For a quartermaster with all your years at sea, I thought you knew better than to leave the ship without permission. Never let it happen again.”

Nindemann, his stolid German countenance flushing under even that mild reproof, hesitated a moment between the relative desirabilities of silence and justification, then muttered,

“But, cap’n, before yet I go, I turn over the deck to Mr. Dunbar. And that bear, he was already yet running away. There was not time for anything.”

De Long shook his head.

“In an emergency, Nindemann, a watch officer may turn over the deck and leave. But a polar bear is not an emergency. Don’t do it again. That’s all now. Go below.”

For an instant, hoping to explain further, the quartermaster hesitated but one glance into De Long’s quiet blue eyes changed his mind.

“Aye, aye, sir.” He gripped his rifle, shuffled forward past his shipmates.

By this time, Collins and Newcomb were coming up the gangway. The knot of sailors, disappointed in the expected scene over Nindemann, lost interest and scattered. If the captain would not blow up a seaman for a serious breach of discipline, he would hardly lay out an officer for less. And in this they were correct. De Long went below before the two hunters reached the side; they reported their return to Dunbar, and had not Danenhower stopped them might have laid below unhindered. But the navigator, curious as to events, laid a brawny arm on little Newcomb’s shoulder, asked the naturalist banteringly,

“Well, ‘Bugs,’ how did you make out with that specimen of Ursus Polaris?”

“Ursus Polaris? There is no such specimen. Thalassarctus maritimus, you mean,” blandly replied Newcomb. “I regret to say the specimen outfooted us, and neither the quartermaster, the meteorologist, nor I unfortunately got in a shot.”

“Too bad,” agreed Danenhower, “but what by the way is a thalassa—What did you say?”

“Thalassarctus maritimus,” repeated Newcomb. “What the untutored call a polar bear or in Latin, Ursus Polaris. That’s all wrong. It’s an ice bear or, technically, a thalassarctus maritimus.”

“Well, well!” grinned Danenhower, “marvellous how a bear weighted down with a name like that can run, isn’t it? By the way, ‘Bugs,’ when you’ve stowed your rifle, you’ll have a chance to show off your Latin to the skipper. He wants to see you in his cabin.” He turned from Newcomb to the panting meteorologist. “And a little later he’d like to see you too, Collins.”

“Me? About what?” demanded Collins sharply.

“Just a little private warning about leaving the ship without permission, I guess. He’s already reprimanded me for it.” Danenhower laughed. “My fault, of course. I should have known better.”

“Well, I shouldn’t,” snapped out Collins, and disappeared through the door in the poop bulkhead, leaving Danenhower looking after him, amazed at the heat of his reply.

Sunday dinner was a quiet meal in spite of the fact that in the cabin for our main dish we had an unusual treat—roast seal—the one that Alexey had shot on our trip to Herald Island, and which we had dragged back on our sledge. The seal meat was excellent, something like rabbit, I thought, and a very welcome change from salted beef and pork, but nevertheless, except for Danenhower chaffing Newcomb, there was little conversation. I was tired from the journey to Herald Island, so also I knew was Chipp, but the wet blanket on the conversation was evidently Collins, who mum as a clam sat through the meal without a word to anyone, and as soon as he had cleaned his plate, departed suddenly without a “By your leave” to anyone.

De Long, a little perplexed at Collins’ quick departure, hastily drew a paper from his pocket, and broke the silence.

“Gentlemen, before anyone else leaves, here is an order I’ve issued to prevent a repetition of what happened this morning. Each of you please read and initial it.”

The order passed rapidly round the table. It was brief enough, requiring each officer and man to get the captain’s permission before leaving the ship, and requiring him to report both his going and returning to the officer of the deck. When all had noted and initialed it, the captain called to Tong Sing,

“Charley, show this immediately to Mr. Collins, and tell him to initial it.”

Tong Sing took the order, padded placidly out of the cabin in search of our departed messmate.

A little later, I went on deck myself. There outboard of the foremast, leaning on the port rail, morosely watching the pack of dogs on the ice snarling and fighting over the scraps of seal which Ah Sam had flung them, was Collins. From his flushed face and his agitated manner it was evident our meteorologist was much upset. While Collins’ puns had always much annoyed me, and my casual jokes had no doubt irritated him, still we were friends and on my appearance from the poop, he beckoned me to join him, which I did.

“I’m trapped, chief!” he burst out heavily. “Back in the States, my brother warned me I shouldn’t have shipped on this cruise as a seaman, but like a fool, I didn’t believe him then! Now it’s happened, and I’m trapped!”

“You trapped? What’s ailing you, Collins?” I asked, astonished at this hysterical outburst. “We’re all trapped with the Jeannette in the ice, but you’re no worse off than I am.”

“It’s not the ice, chief!” Collins gripped my arm, drew me close to the rail. “It’s the captain! I’ve been fearing this for weeks. You’re all right, you’re an officer. But I was fooled into shipping as a seaman! Now the captain’s got me where he wants me. Look at that!” He reached inside his parka. I looked. “That” was a somewhat faded newspaper clipping of an interview De Long had given a reporter from the Washington Post, an interview which months before I had once seen reprinted in a San Francisco newspaper.

“That’s where it started; look what De Long called me there!” With a shaking finger Collins pointed to the middle of the clipping, in a voice quivering with emotion, read an extract,

“‘It may be that some specialists or scientists will be invited or permitted to accompany us, but they will be simply accessories.’

“See that? Accessories!” Collins’ voice choked. “He’s labeled me as simply an accessory, Melville! I should have quit as my brother advised me when I first saw that interview, not gone and shoved my head into a trap by signing as a seaman!”

I looked at him curiously. Undoubtedly the man was overwrought, seething with suppressed passion which something had finally touched off. I tried to calm him.

“Now see here, Collins, what are you taking offense at? What’s so bad about your being an accessory to the Navy in this scientific stuff? You don’t think, do you, that in this expedition De Long and the whole Navy should be accessories to you?”

But Collins, boiling inwardly, did not even hear me. He seized my arm again, continued vehemently,

“And now he’s sprung his trap. That order he just sent me to sign! And to show what he thinks of me, he picks his Chinaman to order me to sign it! I’m in his power, on the books as just a seaman! Fool! If I’d had a grain of sense, I shouldn’t have come except as an officer or at least as a passenger!”

Collins was certainly beside himself. I looked swiftly round, fearing he would make himself ridiculous before the crew, but fortunately they were all still below, lingering over their Sunday dinner. I turned back to Collins.

“But what’s bothering you anyway, brother? What’s this trap you’re so excited about?”

“Don’t you see it, chief? It’s plain enough. I’m only a common seaman here. In the captain’s power! And now to humiliate me, he’s forbidden me to leave the ship without begging his permission!”

I stared at Collins incredulously. Was that all? If it had not been for his overwrought features, I could have laughed in his face.

“Don’t be so damned morbid, Collins,” I replied as gently as I could. “About that seaman business, you’re as much an officer aboard this ship as I am, regardless of how the law required them to put you down on the ship’s articles. Don’t you live in the cabin, mess with the officers, muster with the officers? What more do you want? Some gold lace on your sleeves? But even if you rated it, what good would it do you? Not one of us wears it here. As for the captain’s order, it hits me and every other officer and man aboard as much as it does you. It’s just part of the ship’s discipline.”

“Ship’s discipline! Oh, no! That order’s aimed at me, personally! To make me beg for every little right. To take away my liberty. Because he fooled me into signing on as a seaman, the captain thinks now he can take away my rights. But I’ll show him! He can’t persecute me!”

Here was a damned mess. Hardly ten days in the ice and our meteorologist already talking insanely about persecution. He had the civilian’s foolish idea that aboard ship by some hocus-pocus an officer was a god, a passenger a free agent, and a seaman but a slave. Didn’t he realize by now that in the Navy every man aboard ship was equally subject to the captain’s authority; that in the hands of a tyrannical captain, an officer’s stripes afforded no protection from abuse? That if the captain really wished to humiliate and persecute him, a commission as an officer could not possibly save him? I tried to calm Collins’ fears.

“That order’s innocent enough, Collins, and it’s meant for all hands. The skipper’d probably forgotten all about you when he wrote it out.”

“Oh, no, he didn’t! It’s aimed at me, all right. But I’ll fool him!” Collins’ eyes positively glittered with rage. “Try to make me beg his permission, huh? I’ll start a silent protest by staying aboard. Before I ask De Long’s permission to leave, I’ll not go off this ship again even if I die for it!”

I gazed at Collins in perplexity. An impulsive Irishman if there ever was one, going off half cocked over a perfectly innocent order. What ailed the man? Did he think the captain was jealous of his professional attainments; was he afraid the captain meant to prevent him or anyone else aboard from reaping what glory he might from the success of our expedition? That outburst about being called an accessory—what suppressed emotions did that reveal? Was Collins such an idiot as to think that De Long after years of fighting and sweating to make this expedition a reality, was now going to act merely as sailing master on his own ship, putting aside his own dreams and ambitions of discovery in favor of a minor assistant of whose very existence he had been ignorant till a few short months before? I would never have believed such egotism possible, but as I looked into Collins’ distorted face, I began to wonder. However, so far as I was concerned, that was neither here nor there. We were going to have a long time in the ice yet together, and if life was to continue reasonably pleasant in the imprisoned Jeannette’s cabin, Collins must not make a fool of himself.

“Come now, Collins,” I begged persuasively, “think it over, and you’ll see what I tell you is so—the order’s reasonable enough. But even if it weren’t, you’d only make a bad matter worse by your ‘silent protest.’ I wouldn’t do that. It bears on me the same as it does on you. Now I’m an officer of twenty-three years seniority, which is more than De Long has, and were we both on board a frigate I’d be very much Mr. De Long’s senior. But here on the Jeannette he’s captain and my superior, so I don’t feel it bears on me at all that I have to ask his permission to come or go—it’s only a custom of the Service. And there’s the skipper now,” I added as De Long appeared on deck from the poop and stood blinking a moment in the glare from the ice. “Think it over!”

But unfortunately for my clumsy efforts to pour oil on the troubled waters, Collins’ eyes, gazing out over the ice, happened to fall at that moment on the two little wood and canvas outhouses a ship’s length off the starboard beam, which served officers and men as toilets, since frozen in as we were, the regular ship’s “heads” on the Jeannette itself had been placed out of commission. To these “heads” on the ice all hands of course went freely as nature called. Collins’ eyes lighted up as he contemplated them. He faced me with a queer grin.

“Well, chief, I’ll modify a bit what I just said about asking permission to leave the ship. In such simple language that he can’t possibly misunderstand, I’ll beg the captain’s royal permission every time I have to visit the ‘head’ and I’m going to start right now!” He turned aft toward the poop.

Amazed at Collins’ intended action, I grabbed his arm and stopped him short.

“Look here, old man, none of that! Do you want to insult the captain openly?”

Collins twisted out of my grip.

“What do you think he’s trying to do to me, chief? I’ll merely be carefully obeying his order. By God, I’m going to ask him to let me go on the ice right now!” He strode aft, stopped before the skipper, saluted him elaborately.

What he said to De Long, I can only imagine, since I was too far away to hear, but I judge he phrased his request in about as plain old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon as it could be put, for De Long, obviously startled, flushed a fiery red, retorted angrily, and then turned on his heel.

And from that time forth, Mr. Collins and Captain De Long remained separate in all things as much as they could, simply carrying on the duties of the ship. And from that time also, Collins, fancying offense to himself in almost every remark made in the wardroom mess, withdrew more and more from association with the rest of us, sticking only the more closely to Newcomb, who as the sole other non-seagoing civilian aboard, he may have considered as a sort of fellow victim.

CHAPTER XII

September passed, and the hoped-for gales which might break up the pack and allow us to escape, or at least to work into a winter harbor in distant Wrangel Land, failed to materialize. October came and went in the same manner, no real gales, no winds strong enough to have any effect on the ice, nothing but daily gusts of fine snow which cut our faces and spoiled our footing for exercise. Frozen in, we went with the ice drift, in a general northwesterly direction, till the rocky outline of Herald Island faded into the hummocky horizon to the south, while our continued failure to sight land to the westward made it less and less likely every day that Wrangel Land stretched northward as we had been led to expect. But we were not idle. After all, our expedition was a scientific one. Aside from attempting to reach the Pole, aside from discovering new lands in this unexplored ocean, our major aim was to add to the world’s knowledge of the Arctic seas, of the Arctic skies, of magnetic phenomena, of meteorological information and of animal life in the unknown north. For these purposes we were the most elaborately equipped expedition which had ever gone north. We carried two scientists and God only knew what varieties of scientific instruments gathered from the Smithsonian Institution and the Naval Hydrographic Office.

Since exploration and discovery were for the present out of question, De Long turned to all hands intensively on these scientific phases. On the ice a hundred yards from the ship so as to be unaffected by the iron in her, we set up a canvas observatory, with compass, dip circle, anemometer, rain-gauge, barometer, pendulum, and a variety of thermometers. Over the side, through a hole chopped in the thick ice, we provided an opening for our dredge and our drift lead. Hourly we took observations (and carefully recorded them) of every type of phenomenon for which we were equipped to measure—magnetic variation and dip, wind velocity and direction, humidity, air pressure and temperature, gravity readings, temperature of the sea at top, bottom, and points in between, salinity of the sea water, speed and direction of drift—all this data laboriously read night and day in the Arctic chill went into our logs. And for the zoological and botanical side of our expedition, all hands were directed to bring in for Newcomb’s inspection specimens of anything found on the ice, under, or above it, which meant that whatever our guns could knock down in the form of birds or beasts, or our hooks could catch in the way of fish, passed under Newcomb’s scrutiny before (in most cases) they went to Ah Sam and were popped into the galley kettles.

And to top off all in completing our polar records, we brought along an extensive and expensive photograph outfit, intending to get a continuous record of our life in the Arctic and particularly some authentic views of Aurora Borealis.

So there being nothing else to compete with it for our time, science received a double dose of attention, too much in fact. Taking the multitude of readings every hour (there were sixteen thermometers alone to be read) kept the watch officer hopping, and as each of us, except Collins and Newcomb, had ship and personnel matters to look after, it became to a high degree a nuisance. Most of this scientific work naturally should have fallen to Collins and Newcomb, but unfortunately matters in their departments went none too smoothly. The captain received a severe jolt when he learned that the photographic outfit, entrusted to Collins’ care, was practically useless because our meteorologist had neglected when buying his photographic plates in San Francisco to get any developer for them and that not a picture he took could be developed till we got back to civilization. When on top of this, one of our barometers and some of our precious thermometers entrusted also to Collins were carelessly broken, the captain began to mistrust Collins as a scientist and loaded a considerable part of the observation work on Chipp, on Ambler, and on me—a development which did not help to make any more amicable the attitude of Collins towards his shipmates.

Speaking frankly, after two months’ close association in the cabin of the Jeannette, we were beginning to get tired of each other’s company. Life on shipboard is difficult at best with the same faces at every meal, the same idiosyncrasies constantly rubbing your nerves, the same shortcomings of your messmates to irritate you; but ordinarily there are compensations. Shore leave gets you away from your shipmates, while foreign ports, foreign customs, foreign scenes, and foreigners give flavor to a cruise that makes life not only livable but to my mind rich in variety, and to a person like myself, completely satisfying. But in the polar ice, we came quickly to the realization that life on the Jeannette was life on shipboard at its worst—a small cramped ship, a captain who socially had retired into himself, only a few officers, and not a solitary compensation. No possibility of shore leave, no foreign ports—nothing but the limitless ice pack holding us helpless and no hope of any change (except for the worse) till summer came and released us. And, impossible to conceal, a mental despondency, as ponderable and as easily sensed as the cold pervading the ship gripped our captain as we drifted impotently with the pack between Herald Island and Wrangel Land, a thousand miles from that Pole which in a blare of publicity from the Herald, he had set out in such confidence to conquer.

Gone now were all the fine theories about the Kuro-Si-Wo Current and the open path to the northward through the Arctic Ocean that its warm waters would provide. We had only to look over the side at the ice floes fifteen feet thick gripping our hull to know that the “black tide” of Japan had no more contact with these frozen seas than had the green waters of the Nile. And just as thoroughly exploded was that other delusion on which we had based our choice of route—the Herr Doktor Petermann’s thesis that Wrangel Land was a continent stretching northward toward the Pole along the coasts of which with our dog teams we could sledge our way over firm ground to the Pole. Every glimpse we got of it as we drifted northwest with the pack for our first eight weeks showed conclusively enough that Wrangel Land was nothing more than a mountainous island to the southward and not a very large island at that. As for Dr. Petermann and his idea that Greenland stretched upward across the Pole to reappear on the Siberian side as Wrangel Land, if that ponderous German scientist who so dominated current European opinion on polar matters could have been forced to spend a week in our crow’s-nest observing how insignificant a speck his much publicized Wrangel Land formed of the Arctic scene, I am sure the result would have been such a deflation of his ego and his reputation as might be of great benefit at least to future explorers even if too late to be of service to us in the Jeannette, already led astray by the good doctor’s teachings.

How much the general knowledge amongst our officers that every theory on which the expedition had been based was false had to do with the lack of sociability and of harmony among us, and how much of it may have been owing simply to our physical imprisonment in the ice, I will not venture to say. But in my mind, the belief of all that as a polar exploring expedition we were already a failure, doomed never to get anywhere near the Pole, had a decided, if an unconscious, bearing on the reactions of all of us, and most of all on the captain and on Collins, both of whom had brought along massive blank journals whose pages they had confidently expected to fill with the records of their discoveries.

The captain’s journal I sometimes saw, as each evening around midnight he toiled over his entries. Instead of records of new lands discovered, of the attainment of ever-increasing latitudes exceeding those around 83° North reached by the English through Baffin Bay and Smith Sound, how it must have gnawed the captain’s heart that his entries had to be confined to such items as my struggles with our distilling apparatus, our difficulties with such newfangled gadgets as telephones and electric generators, or the momentous facts that Aneguin, Alexey, or Captain Dunbar (as the case might be) had chased a polar bear (or perhaps a walrus) which had been shot (or had escaped). All of these happenings to De Long’s chagrin must be recorded as having occurred in the low seventies, latitudes far to the south of those reached even by the insignificant and ill-equipped caravels of Dutch seamen three hundred years ago in their explorations of Spitzbergen.

What Collins put in his journal, I never knew. But I can well imagine how much it must have irked him, a newspaper man accustomed to live in an atmosphere of printing presses rumbling away over their grist of momentous world events to be spread daily before the eager eyes of Herald readers, to have nothing to record except perhaps his personal sense of injustice. Yet put down something every day he did, for I can still see him, his long drooping mustaches almost sweeping the pages, religiously bending over the leather-bound ledger every afternoon in his chilly cabin in the Jeannette’s poop, pouring the bitterness of his soul onto those pages, building up a record with which I doubt not he hoped when we returned to civilization to blast De Long out of the Service in disgrace.

CHAPTER XIII

On November 6, two months to a day of our being trapped in the pack, came the first break in the monotony of our imprisonment. About four in the afternoon Collins, trudging perhaps for the thousandth time the rough path to the observatory across that hundred yards of ice which we had come to regard as substantial as a Broadway sidewalk, came pell-mell back to the ship and up the gangway into the wardroom to startle us with the news that the pack ice had cracked wide open between our ship and the observatory! We rushed on deck and over the side. Sure enough it was so. A little behind Dr. Ambler and the captain, I arrived at the edge of the rent, over a yard wide already and continuously growing wider. While we could still jump the gap, there was a wild dash to get our precious instruments out of the observatory and back across the opening to the ship, which (all the officers taking a hand) we shortly accomplished without mishap. That done, with varying emotions we watched as over the next few hours the chasm widened, with the dark sea water showing in strong contrast to the whiteness of the snow-covered ice. But not for long did we see really open water, for with the temperature far below zero, the water which was welling up to within two feet of the top of the parted edges of the floe promptly froze, even though it was salt, into a sheet of young ice. The gap nevertheless kept widening till by midnight it was perhaps ten fathoms across.

What was causing the rupture? One man’s guess was as good as another’s, and all were worthless, I suppose. There was little wind, no land in sight for the edge of the pack to strand on, no evidence of pressure from any direction, and plenty of water beneath us, for the soundings showed over twenty fathoms to a soft mud bottom. Chipp’s surmise, that a tidal action was responsible, was as good an explanation as any. But what is not satisfactorily explainable is always fearsome, and it was perhaps excusable that we looked with some anxiety toward our ship and were secretly relieved to see her as steady as Gibraltar there in the ice some fifty fathoms off, still heeled as usual to starboard with her masts and spars showing not even a quiver as they stood sharply outlined against the frosty polar sky. And so the day ended.

But morning brought a different scene. During the night from somewhere came a push on the pack which closed that chasm, forcing the layer of young ice which had formed over it up into broken masses on our floe. Then with all the young ice squeezed out, the two parted edges of the original pack came together under such great pressure that the advancing sheet was shoved up over the edge of the floe holding the ship, leaving broken masses seven to eight feet thick strewn helter-skelter in a long ridge along the line of junction.

As an engineer, I regarded that broken ice with severe misgivings. We fortunately were solidly frozen in, with our thick floe spreading in all directions interposed as a buckler between us and the pressing pack, but suppose our floe should split and leave us exposed? Could any ship withstand a squeeze in that Titan’s nutcracker? In spite of our thick sides and reenforcing trusses, the sight of those eight foot thick blocks of ice tumbled upon our floe was not reassuring.

On the Jeannette, men and officers alike questioningly scanned the scene while slowly the hours drifted by and we waited apprehensively in the silence of that Arctic morning for what was next, and while we waited even what light breeze there was died away to a perfect calm. Then without apparent reason and without warning, the gap in the ice suddenly yawned open to a width of some five fathoms and immediately down the canal thus formed, broken ice started to flow in a groaning, shrieking mass that so shook the floe in which the Jeannette was imbedded that to us there, only a few yards away clinging to the rail of our ship, it appeared each instant the sheet of ice protecting us must shatter and the Jeannette herself be sucked in to join that swirling maelstrom of hurtling ice cakes. Our eyes glued to the quaking floe into which we were frozen, we watched it shiver and throb under the battering of the broken blocks hurrying by, inwardly speculating on how long it would stand up. Occasionally I glanced furtively at the five sledges standing on the poop, packed with over a month’s provisions for men and dogs, ready at a moment’s notice to go over the side should we have to abandon ship. But if our ship, torn loose and caught in that mass of churning ice, was crushed and sank, how could we ever get safely away from her with our lives, let alone get clear those sledges carrying the food?

Five hours of that scene and of such thoughts we stood, and then, thank God, the flow of ice stopped. The Jeannette was unharmed. We were still safe. But how long a respite would we have? Who knew? Evidently not our captain. As I went below, worn and frozen, I heard him call out to our executive officer,

“Knock off all regular ship’s work, Chipp. Turn to immediately with all hands and make a couple of husky sledges to carry our dinghies over that ice if we have to abandon ship. And for God’s sake, shake it up!”

We got a day’s rest if one may call it that, while Nindemann, Sweetman, and both watches toiled feverishly on the sledges. Then came another day of strain, watching the moving ice grinding and smashing at our floe, breaking it away to within a hundred feet of us. Then a brief respite over night, only at 6 A.M. to have the motion start again worse than ever.

This time, hell seemed to have broken loose. From the pack came a noise the like of which I never heard before on land or sea, in war or peace, sounding like the shrieking of a thousand steamer whistles, the thunder of heavy artillery, the roaring of a hurricane, and the crash of collapsing houses all blended together as down that canal in the pack, a terrifying sight to behold, came stupendous pieces of floe ice as high as two and three story buildings. Sliding by crazily upended, they churned and battered against each other and against the thick edges of our floe with such unearthly screeching and horrible groanings that my eardrums seemed in a fair way to split under the impact of that sound!

Occasionally a berg would jam in the canal blocking the current. With that, under the force of the ice pressing behind, our floe would groan and heave up into waves till several feet of its edge cracked off, easing the pressure and relieving the jam—but each time leaving us with less and less of the floe between us and disaster.

Half an hour of this in the dim light of the early dawn, and then the movement ceased, leaving our tortured ears and jumping nerves to return to normal as best they could while the day broke. But our relief was considerably tempered when in the better light we discovered that a new crack had formed a little distance ahead across our bows and that into this opening an advancing floeberg was being driven along like a wedge towards our port side, threatening to cut into the undisturbed pack there and leave us imbedded in a tiny island of ice, to be exposed then to the wear of churning bergs on both sides of us!

With no further noticeable movement of the pack, we were left in peace to contemplate the possibilities of this situation till late afternoon, when the main stream again got underway and bombarded our floe to starboard heavily for four hours so strenuously that it seemed to all of us that this time we must surely go adrift. But at about 8 p.m., the motion ceased again, leaving us all in such a state of mind that the captain’s order for all hands to sleep in their clothes with knapsacks close at hand ready for instant flight, seemed to us the most natural thing in the world.

We didn’t get much sleep. Hardly had the midwatch ended, when little Newcomb, who unable to rest at all, had in spite of the bitter cold stayed on deck till 4 A.M., darted into De Long’s cabin, seized his shoulder, woke him with a shout,

“Turn out, captain! It’s all over this time! That ice is coming right down on us!”

De Long, already fully clothed, sprang from his bunk, seized his knapsack, and rushed on deck. The rest of us in the poop, none too sound asleep ourselves, were roused by the noise and hurriedly followed him up to find that Newcomb had hardly exaggerated.

On the starboard side, like buildings being poured through a chute, the broken floes were cascading along the channel at a livelier rate than ever, but that at least was hardly novel to us now. What froze our blood as we stood there in the cold light of the moon was the sight ahead. The rift in the pack which yesterday was headed across our bows, had changed direction squarely for our bowsprit, and now along that opening was coming toward us irresistibly and steadily, towering as high as our yardarms, a torrent of floebergs, thundering down on the yet unbroken pack between with a violence that made the sturdy Jeannette quiver under our feet like jelly!

Hardly audible in the roaring of the ice, Jack Cole shrilled away on his bosun’s pipe, then his hoarse voice bellowed along the berth deck,

“All hands! Stand by to abandon ship!”

Our entire crew poured up from below to shiver in a temperature of twenty below zero and shake, I have no doubt for other good reasons, as they stood helpless round the mainmast, all eyes riveted on that fearful wall of advancing ice, with a crest of hummocks, weighing twenty to fifty tons each, toppling forward like surf breaking on our floe. Another crash, another startling advance of the floebergs, and on top of the deckhouse I saw De Long suddenly grasp the mainstay with both hands and hang on for dear life, awaiting the final smash as that Niagara of ice struck us.

The blow never came. God alone knows why, but hardly twenty-five feet from our bows, the onrushing wall of ice suddenly halted, the pressure vanished, and we on the Jeannette were left to contemplate, in the deathly Arctic silence which ensued and in the growing light, the indescribable wreckage that had been wrought in the level floe that had once surrounded us. And then like a feeble anti-climax, the stillness was broken by the whistling of the bosun’s pipe, followed by his call,

“All hands! Lay below for breakfast!”

Breakfast? Who really wanted breakfast? What each of us earnestly wished was only to be far to the south, away from that dreaded pack ready to crush us, but seemingly delaying the fatal moment as a cat delays, knowing that the mouse with which it toys cannot get away.

CHAPTER XIV

Nothing else happened that day. Our dogs, which in the face of disaster we had rounded up and penned inside the bulwarks, where they relieved themselves by staging a continuous battle, we now let loose and they joyously celebrated their freedom in chasing each other over the broken ice. Watching their antics was some relief, little though it might be, to frayed nerves and helped take our imaginations off what that broken ice threatened to our ship.

As a further distraction, we had a clear day and far to the southward sighted mountains, which we made out to be the familiar north coast of Wrangel Land, some sixty miles away.

And that was all. The day which for us had dawned in imminent peril, ended quietly with the Jeannette still frozen in that two months old cradle of ice, still uncomfortably heeled well over to starboard. We began to breathe more freely.

We took no more meteorological observations, but so far as I was concerned, I had more to do than before. Though the fires were out in my boilers and all the machinery laid up, at De Long’s direction I spent a great part of my time below during this period continually scanning the sides and the trusses for any signs of giving way, and inspecting the bilges to see if the ship was making any water. Of such troubles there were no indications, but I had constantly while below to be wary of my head, for I found that the banging of the ice shook down a good deal of loose matter in the holds, and particularly in the bunkers.

November 13, one week from the day the pack first opened up on us and inaugurated our reign of terror, brought new excitement. Sleeping as before in my clothes, I was wakened at 2 A.M. by a loud crack which seemed to come directly from our keel. I slid from my bunk, in the passage outside bumped into the captain, and together we ran on deck, there to meet Collins who, on the midwatch taking the hourly temperature readings, had rushed over the side and now was coming back aboard. He reported that there was nothing new except a crack in the ice not over an inch wide running out from our stem. This was disquieting, but nothing else happened during the night and the daylight hours passed quietly enough without further disturbance; so much so that by afternoon the skipper (full of scientific zeal and expecting apparently some days of peace) ordered our meteorological instruments reinstalled in a temporary observatory. This we accordingly erected on one of the newly-formed hills of ice as far from the ship as we dared but still, fairly close aboard our starboard side.

From the grumbling of the seamen at this task as they dug into the flintlike ice for anchorage for the guys holding down the canvas tent over the instruments, I would say that the captain’s optimism was hardly shared by his crew, but that was neither here nor there and by 5 P.M. when the twilight faded and night fell, the job was done.

Chipp took the first sets of readings. At eight o’clock, after supper, I relieved him, to trek over the broken ice and by the dim light of an oil lantern inside that flapping tent, read the dip circle, the barometer, the anemometer, and a varied assortment of thermometers. All the time as I struggled for footing on the rough ice pinnacle I wondered what earthly good it all was, considering the negligible chances of any of this data ever being returned home for scientific minds to study.

At 10 P.M., I turned the job over to the captain (who, staying up anyway the while he wrote in his journal, ordinarily took the readings till midnight when Collins relieved him), and as was now my habit after a week of alarms, I turned in with my fur boots on, earnestly hoping to get some sleep to make up for the past week’s wear and tear.

Till 11 P.M., De Long in his cabin scratched away industriously at his journal. Then six bells struck, he dropped his pen, drew on his parka, and went over the side to take the hourly observations.

Being the commanding officer, and not one of his subordinates (in whom such an appreciation of the beauties of nature at the expense of punctuality in observations might have seemed a fault), De Long on his way to the observatory paused a few moments to stand on an ice hummock and admire a splendid auroral exhibition, a magnificent prismatic arch to the northward, filling the sky from east to west and reaching almost to the zenith. The beauty of this phenomenon was no longer a novelty to any of us, but still he stood awestruck in the silent night drinking in that soundless electrical play of colored light, when he heard behind him a crisp crackling as one of our dogs walking on the snow. Turning, he saw to his surprise no dog but instead two men, our so-called “anchor watch,” racing down the starboard gangway and over the ice to our stern.

Both the aurora and the still unread instruments were forgotten as the captain ran immediately for the bow. To his astonishment, there he found the ice pack peaceably floating away from our port side, leaving it completely exposed with open water lapping our hull for the first time in months!

And as he watched in dazed amazement, the gap opened so that in a few minutes we had alongside the Jeannette thirty fathoms of rippling water in which was gorgeously reflected the northern lights (a detail the beauty of which I think our captain now took little note). The split in the pack was as clean and as straight along our fore and aft centerline as if a giant hand had cut the ice with our keel, leaving the ship still imbedded in the starboard floe toward which she heeled. Meanwhile the port side pack, intact even to the bank of snow which had built up above our gunwales, was sliding noiselessly away to the northward, carrying with it, still asleep, three of our dogs who had bedded themselves down in its white crust!

A glimpse at our heeled over clipper bow and at our bowsprit thrusting forward over his head, quickened De Long into action. Nothing visible now remained to hold that tilted ship from sliding any second out of her bed and into open water! Back aboard he rushed, and once more the quiet of the night was torn by the whistling of the bosun’s pipe and Cole’s hoarse cry,

“All hands! Shake a leg! On deck wid yez!”

And again no sleep, as hastily in the darkness we hurried our meteorological instruments back aboard, struck the observatory we had so laboriously rigged only a few hours before, chased on board all the dogs we could catch, rigged out our dinghies and our other boats for immediate lowering, dug our steam-cutter out of the ice alongside and hoisted it aboard, ran in our gangway, and lastly rigged out a fall for lowering provisions over the side and into the boats.

That all this, on the sloping deck of the Jeannette, was done in the darkness at fifteen below zero and completed by midnight in less than an hour, indicates what speed and strength fear gave to our fingers and our feet. For the men tumbling up from below had to look but once at the precarious perch to which the Jeannette clung to send them flying to their tasks.

Midnight came.

Our work done, we stood by in the inhuman cold momentarily expecting to feel the ship lurch under our feet, slide suddenly off into the water, and without rudder, without steam, and without sails go adrift in the darkness in that ever widening rift in the parted pack.

After an hour of this, with nothing happening to relieve the strain, the tension became almost unbearable. De Long, looking over the silent groups of fur-clad seamen clustered there on deck alongside the boats, ordered Ah Sam to fire up the galley range and serve out hot coffee to the men, hot tea to the officers. He then told Cole to pipe down, but with all hands to stay in their clothes, ready for any call. So we lay below, but I doubt if anyone had much better luck than I getting to sleep again.

There was no need for reveille in the morning. The first streaks of light found the whole crew from Irish bosun to Chinese cook lining the bulwark, staring off to port. I climbed the bridge to get clear of the snarling dogs. There before me, already ensconced in the port wing was the skipper, rubbing his glasses to clear them of frost for a better view.

“What do you make of it, chief?” asked De Long, nodding in the direction of the distant pack.

I squinted off to port. A thin skin of young ice, possibly four inches thick, had formed over the exposed water. Across that, perhaps five hundred to a thousand yards away, was the bank of snow which the day before had been piled up against our bulwark.

“Well, captain, it’s a quarter of a mile off anyway,” I answered. “Maybe more.” From the overhanging wing of the bridge I glanced curiously down on our inclined side, exposed now for the first time in months. Near the waterline, still looking fresh and bright, were those gouges in our elm doubling we had received in early September while butting and ramming a way through that twisting lead into the pack. Looking at those battle scars, I wished fervently that we had had less luck that day in battering our way in. But that was a subject the rights and wrongs of which were now never discussed among the officers. Instead, scanning our listed masts and our unsupported port side, I asked,

“What in the name of all that’s holy is keeping us from sliding clear?”

“God knows, I don’t,” replied De Long solemnly. “I just can’t figure it out. When one side of our ice cradle slides away from us without so much as taking with it any splinters from our hull, it makes my theory that our planking’s solidly frozen to the ice on our starboard side seem crazy. For why should the ice attach itself so firmly to the planking on one side, and to the other side not at all? It’s beyond me, Melville, why we don’t slide off.” He adjusted the furry edge of the hood of his parka around his eyeglasses, peered down a second at the scarred side below him, then while his glasses were still bright and clear, stared off toward the wall of snow topping the edge of the departed pack and finally nodded his head as if agreeing with my estimate of its distance.

Looking worn and haggard, for if possible our captain had had even less sleep than any of us during the past week, De Long finished his examination, eyed for a long time his crew stretched out below us along the rail, then turned to me,

“Melville, you’re older than I. In the late war you were at sea fighting the rebels when I was still a midshipman, and you’ve been through lots besides. So I feel I can talk to you, and lean on you as on no one else on this ship, and God above us knows, I need someone here to lean on! Every morning I pray to Him for our safety, every night I give thanks to Him for our escapes during the day. But here in the Arctic, God seems so distant, and this steady strain on my mind is fearful! Look at my men below there, look at my ship! Neither my men nor my ship are secure for a second, and yet I can’t take a single step for their security. A crisis may come any moment to bring us face to face with death—and all I can do is to be thankful in the morning that it has not come during the night, and at night that it has not come since the morning! And that’s the Arctic exploration I’ve brought them on! Living over a powder keg with the fuse lighted, waiting for the explosion, would be a similar mode of existence! Melville, it’s hardly bearable!” And then looking down again at the crew, he muttered wearily,

“But I’ve got to keep on bearing it. Call me if anything happens, chief. So long as we’re still hanging on here, I’ll try to get some sleep now.” With sagging shoulders eloquently proclaiming his utter exhaustion, he slumped down the ladder and off the bridge, leaving me alone, figuratively to add an “Amen” to his estimate of our situation.

For over a week, the listing Jeannette, which looked as if the pressure of a little finger would send her tumbling out of her inclined bed, nevertheless clung to her half cradle in the pack, defying apparently all the principles of physical force so far as I as an engineer understood them.

On the third day after the pack separated, we had a bad southeast gale blowing all night and all day, with terrific squalls at times reaching a velocity of fifty miles an hour. Although that wind hit us squarely on the starboard bow, its most favorable angle for casting us adrift, the Jeannette held grimly to her berth and nothing happened. Then on the fifth day, urged on by a northerly blow, the floebergs again got underway, broke up the young ice to port of us, and jammed themselves under our bows with heavy masses of ice pressing directly on the stem. We confidently looked to see the ship knocked clear this time, but evidently other floebergs jammed against our exposed side exerted such a heavy beam pressure that we stayed in place, though the poor Jeannette, squeezed both ahead and abeam, groaned and creaked continuously under the stresses on her strained timbers. The sixth day, the seventh day, and the eighth day, we had more of the same, with streams of floebergs bombarding our exposed port side, and on the starboard side our floe steadily dwindling under the impact of the bergs hurtling through the canal there.

Life on the Jeannette became almost impossible. Sleeping with our clothes on, jumping nervously from our bunks at every sudden crackling in the ship’s timbers, at each unexpected crash of the bergs outside, we got slight rest for our bodies and none at all for our nerves. And in the middle of all this, the sun disappeared below the horizon for good, leaving us to face what might come in the continuous gloom of the long Arctic night. According to Danenhower’s calculations, we could expect the sun to rise again in seventy-one days, unless meanwhile we drifted farther to the northward, in which case of course our night would be still further prolonged.

On the ninth day since the separation of the pack, the wind rose once more, blowing directly on our starboard beam, and the never-ceasing stream of bergs began again to pile up across our stem, for us an ominous combination.

On the tenth day, fearing the worst, we rounded up all our dogs, and waited. The pressure ahead increased, with floating ice piling up along the port side higher than our rail, finally starting the planking in our bulging bulwarks. Under the bowsprit, the rising ice blotted from sight our figurehead. Then an upended floeberg crashed violently into the pack under our starboard bow and wedged its way relentlessly toward our side. The pressure became tremendous. Beneath our feet the Jeannette’s tortured ribs groaned dismally. On deck we looked silently at one another, waiting. Something was going to collapse this time. Which would give way first, ship or ice?

Suddenly the Jeannette lifted by the stern, shifted a little in her cradle. Instantly the floeberg under our starboard bow drove forward, split our floe, and with a lurch and a heavy roll to port we slid into open water, afloat and undamaged, on an even keel once more!

Intensely relieved at having got clear without being crushed, we nevertheless looked back sadly, as we drifted off among the floebergs, at the shattered remnants of the ice cradle which for two and a half months had sheltered us, to see it now tumbling about in elephantine masses, no longer a haven of refuge in our trials.

Well, we were afloat. It was at least some consolation to have a level deck beneath our feet while we waited, sailors with no control whatever over our ship, for what next the ice pack had in store for us.

But the pack gave us a respite. Idly we drifted about in a wide bay of broken ice, stopping for a brief time alongside one floe, then drifting off till stopped by another. The wind moderated, the temperature rose somewhat till it stood near zero, and finally it began to snow. There being no signs of imminent danger, the captain ordered the bosun to pipe down and we went below, permitted at last to eat a meal without having the plates threaten to slide each instant off the table.

CHAPTER XV

What next?

I had thought that our experiences so far had sufficiently numbed my nerves to enable me to stand anything further with comparative calm, but I had underestimated the ice pack.

During the night after our going afloat nothing happened as we drifted, but by early morning of the next day, November 25, we were once more in action, fighting the pack for our existence.

At six a.m., as a preliminary, drifting ice pressed us against the edge of the pack and piled high up against our side, nipping our port bow. An hour or so later, this developed into a heavy squeeze which started more of our bulwark planking, and listed us sharply to port. At this, coming while we were at breakfast, things commenced to look bad and we began to shuffle nervously in our chairs, all hands eyeing the exit to the poop, but Danenhower tried to ease the mental strain for us when, bending down to retrieve his spoon which for the third time had rolled off the sloping table to the deck, he remarked,

“Well, mates, if you’ve been itching for the good old days, now’s your chance to cheer. With this heel, the Jeannette’s beginning to feel to me like the old home again!”

But nobody laughed, and when after an hour of that ticklish heel, the pressure slacked and we leveled off, no one regretted the missing list, unnatural as its absence now felt to us.

Coming up on deck after a hasty breakfast, we found ourselves adrift again near one end of a narrow lead of water perhaps a couple of miles long, at the far end of which appeared a sizeable open bay. De Long debated earnestly with both Chipp and Dunbar, whether he ought to attempt to run out an ice-anchor and make fast to a floe, though the question was largely academic for never did a large enough floe come near us.

In the late afternoon with still no decision, the question was settled for us when a strong current springing up for some unknown reason, the rudderless ship began to drift stern first down that canal in the pack. At the same time the broken ice behind us also got underway and started to follow, bearing down ominously for our bows.

We moved along with increasing speed, to our deep relief steadily gaining on the broken floes pursuing us, till unfortunately at a bend in the canal, our stern took the bank and stopped us dead. At this, with our rudder post anchored in the floes, it seemed as if we were caught, when De Long sang out happily,

“Look! Her bow is paying round as prettily as if she were casting under jibs!” and to our surprise, it was so. Our stem swung through a complete arc of 180°, our stern drifted clear of the ice, and there we were, wholly without effort on our part, properly headed downstream with the current!

But even that slight delay while coming about promptly put us in difficulties. As our stern drifted free of the bank, the oncoming ice struck us and we were jammed through that canal to an accompaniment of tumbling and shrieking masses of ice awful to contemplate. Huge hummocks, tons in weight, overhung our bulwarks, threatening to break off and crash down on our decks; floebergs large as churches bobbed up and down alongside like whales, seemingly about to come aboard and overwhelm us, time after time leaving us breathless as huddled inboard round the mainmast we watched, not daring to go near the rail, even more afraid to seek shelter below. Helpless, the Jeannette was pushed, rammed, squeezed, and hammered along amidst the screeching of the floes. Just as helpless, we stood in the Arctic night thankful nevertheless for the bright moonlight which at mid-afternoon was flooding the scene, for had we without that moon been in darkness forced to stand by and listen to that shrieking ice without being able to see, God alone knows what effect terror would have had on us!

This hair-raising passage lasted half an hour. Then as suddenly as our ordeal had started, it ended in the midst of an eruption of ice cakes by our being spewed from a final jam blocking the canal into a large open bay where the current, with room to spread at last, quickly lost speed, and the terrifying floebergs, no longer constricted, fell slowly away from our sides!

With fervent sighs of relief at our deliverance we saw the battered Jeannette lose headway, float gently toward the wide floe forming the southerly bank of the bay, and quietly ram her blunt nose into the young ice there, bringing up without a tremor and holding fast. So ended our day.

It was getting along toward the end of November. For three days after that, we lay against the edge of the bay while the young ice thickened about us and a heavy southeast gale kicked up. Our useless masts and spars whipped and rattled in the squalls, our rigging, swollen to two or three times natural size by coatings of frost, sang in the wind in a deep bass pitch wholly new to us, and the ship shook in the gusts as if her sticks were going to be torn clean out of her. But to us as sailors none of this was wholly novel; our only anxiety was what effect this gale, the worst we had yet seen in the Arctic, would have on the pack. We chopped a hole in the young ice alongside, got a lead line down, and soon observed that the whole pack was drifting to leeward with the wind, moving to the northwest apparently into a large water space temporarily existing unseen by us somewhere there in the Arctic Sea. These drift observations gave us cause for sober thought. What would happen if, with the gale still blowing to urge the ice northwest, something across its path brought the pack to a stand?

We soon found out. On the third day of the storm, in the dim light of a moon just rising in the morning, we saw the leeward ice commence to move past the ship, paradoxically going to windward. Whatever it was, something had brought the drifting pack to a sudden halt, but the gale still howled on, driving to the northwest, and unfortunately for us as we lay broadside to it, driving the ice to windward fairly onto our port beam, dead against our framing. We were in for another squeezing by the pack.

Before long the Jeannette, with the pressure squarely on her ribs, caught now between opposing floes extending her entire length, was quivering and snapping worse I think than ever in our experience. Our spar deck arched up under the strain, pitch and oakum were squeezed out of the seams, and a bucket full of water standing on a hatch on the poop was half emptied of its contents by the constant agitation.

To leeward of us, where the ice appeared weaker, one sheet rode up over another and against this double thickness of ice our starboard side jammed, while the port floe (which for some reason seemed stronger than the ice to leeward) pressed fiercely against us there. The Jeannette thus gripped, shivered and groaned dismally and her decks bulged upwards till the heavy athwartship trusses in her hull below came into play and took the squeeze directly. When the ship was able to give no further, the noise ceased, and for half an hour perhaps with only the trembling of the decks to indicate the struggle, the pack pressed and the Jeannette resisted while we as helpless spectators waited the outcome.

Suddenly the port floe humped and crumbled, relieving the thrust. Our sprung decks flattened out to normal; we gasped in relief. But our thankfulness was premature as it turned out, for piling its broken edges higher against our side, the port floe, driven in by the wind, pushed up for another nip and the whole performance was immediately repeated with the Jeannette in a few minutes as badly squeezed as before.

For eight solid hours the Jeannette fought the pack, over a dozen times seemingly compressed to the point of collapse, only to have the floe ice crumple up first and let her spring back into shape each time. There was nothing we could do to aid her—as De Long put it, it was simply a question of the ice going through her or of her being strong enough to stand it. She was strong enough, which was all we could say, and when at last in the late afternoon the gale died down, the pressure ceased and she was still intact, we said it fervently. A good ship, the Arctic Steamer Jeannette.

CHAPTER XVI

December, 1879, our fourth month in the pack, came in with crisp cold weather; and as the days passed with the ice about us thickening and the pack showing signs of some stability, we began again to breathe without the subconscious dread that each minute was to be our last. After a few days thus, we even settled into the winter routine of the ship, released our dogs, and commenced to take some interest in the wonders of the Arctic night.

For a month, under the shadow of death, personalities had been forgotten, personal idiosyncrasies submerged. Now with the easing of that strain, our likes and dislikes, our personal vanities, and the ordinary problems of existence in the Arctic, popped up once more.

De Long began to worry over scurvy. No Arctic expedition previously of which we had knowledge had been free of it; in many of them, scurvy, even more than ice, had been responsible for their tales of horrible suffering, death, and disaster. Overmuch salt was apparently the cause of scurvy; proper diet, proper water, and proper exercise were the antidotes prescribed by Dr. Ambler, and De Long plunged vigorously into a program designed to protect us from that loathsome disease.

Exercise to fortify our bodies, the easiest of the requisites to provide, received immediate attention. On December 2, after the first night in weeks during which the captain felt secure enough to take off his clothes when turning in, came a new order.

We were lounging round the messroom, hungrily waiting for breakfast while Tong Sing padded about between pantry and table, setting out the oatmeal, the coffee, and the thick slices of bread when the door from the captain’s stateroom swung back, and with a grave,

“Good morning, gentlemen,” in came De Long, holding a paper in his hand.

“Good morning, captain,” we replied in a ragged chorus, and hardly waiting till the skipper had seated himself, slid into our chairs. As usual, I lifted the cover of the oatmeal dish and started to serve.

“Wait a minute with that, Melville; I want to read this order.” The captain adjusted his glasses, stroked his mustaches a moment while scanning what he had written, then in his scholarly manner read,

“Until the return of spring, and on each day without exception when the temperature is above thirty degrees below zero, the ship will be cleared regularly by all hands from eleven a.m. till one p.m. During this period every officer and man will leave the ship for exercise on the ice, which should be as vigorous as possible. No one except the officer entering the noon observations in the log will for any purpose during this period return to the ship.

(Signed) George Washington De Long,
Commanding.”

De Long as he finished, passed the paper to the executive officer on his right, and ordered crisply,

“Chipp, have all the officers initial this now, and then publish it to the crew at quarters.” In a more conversational tone, he added to us, “I suppose, gentlemen, the order’s obvious enough. We’ve got to go and get some exercise or we’ll all stagnate in this darkness and make it easier for scurvy to get us. I’ve chosen the time when at least there’s a little twilight, even though the sun’s gone. Does anybody have any suggestions regarding exercises?”

The paper (together with Chipp’s pencil) passed back and forth across the table as one after another, starting with Chipp, we initialed the order, but no one had any comments to make. Once more I started to dish out the oatmeal. Danenhower, at the foot of the table, signing last, tossed the sheet of paper to Tong Sing, who shuffling across the wardroom, with an Oriental bow laid it down before the captain.

“Here, Chipp, take this to read to the crew,” said the skipper, starting to push it toward the exec, then on second thought, holding it an instant while his eyes glanced perfunctorily down the column of initials below his signature. A deep flush came over his cheeks as he read and he stiffened a little in his chair, but without looking up, he announced sternly,

“Mr. Collins, I see you failed to sign this. What’s the matter?”

There was an instant of tension, then,

“Collins isn’t here yet, captain,” put in Chipp swiftly. “He’s often late for breakfast. Thinks that having to take the observations on the midwatch is such a strain, he’s got to sleep in every morning to recuperate, I guess. I’d tell him later.”

“Oh, yes, I forgot that Mr. Collins is not usually with us for breakfast.” The skipper’s flush faded, he finished pushing the order to Chipp. “Very well, have him sign when he shows up. Now with respect to the exercise for the crew, Chipp, serve out a couple of footballs. They may want to play. And tell them that anyone who wishes can get permission to take a rifle and go hunting.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Chipp folded the order, shoved it into his jacket. “But I’m not so keen on that hunting business, captain. Skulking around through all these broken hummocks, the men’ll be shooting each other or the dogs, thinking that they’re bears or seals or something. It always happens.”

“I won’t shed any tears over the dogs, anyway,” growled Dunbar. “I think shooting a couple of dozen of ’em ‘by mistake’ would be a good thing!”

“Belay that, Dunbar, you wouldn’t be so heartless,” piped up Danenhower. “Don’t destroy my last boyhood illusion. What would life in the Arctic be without our dogs, anyway?”

“Still hell, Dan, if you ask me, either with or without ’em,” replied the ice-pilot grimly, passing his plate to me for oatmeal. “But getting back to the question of exercise, cap’n, I think letting the men hunt’s a fine idea. Surprising how far a man goes thinking that at the next waterhole he’ll surely get a seal!”

The surgeon laughed softly.

“He’ll be surprised all right if he goes with you, Dunbar,” drawled Ambler. “I’ve done it and I know. Every time you say a thing’s a mile away across this ice, the only reason it isn’t two miles off is because it’s three. The men’ll be surprised all right if you take them hunting.”

Virginian and Yankee, the doctor and the ice-pilot were off again on their favorite argument, Dunbar’s gross underestimation of the distances he covered on his many scouting trips over the ice. But I had another problem on my mind, and as soon as I had washed down my oatmeal with the hot coffee (which by now Danenhower had managed to get Ah Sam to turn out as a strong black concoction) I went on deck to struggle with my distilling apparatus.

Historically, there is no doubt that scurvy, the seaman’s curse since the days of Noah’s voyage in the Ark, has always resulted on long cruises from the absence of fresh vegetables, the over-abundance of salt beef, and the impure water (contaminated from the bilges) which marked the sailor’s diet. And no one who has ever seen the swollen joints, the rotting teeth, the hemorrhages under the skin, and the bloated faces of the victims, but strains to fight shy of scurvy as a shipmate.

Fresh vegetables, the first defense against this scourge, we could only carry in limited degree when we left San Francisco, and they had long since been exhausted. Of canned vegetables, especially tomatoes, we had a considerable supply and on these we leaned heavily as an antidote. Then of course we had three barrels of lime-juice, the specific remedy introduced in 1795 by Sir Gilbert Blake with such good results in the British Navy that ever since then the British tars, forced to drink the stuff regularly, have been called in derision “limeys” by their Yankee cousins. But in spite of all this we did not feel safe. Other Arctic expeditions within the last fifty years, as strongly fortified as we with lime-juice and in some cases as well supplied with canned vegetables, had before the end of a winter in the ice found scurvy decimating them in spite of their precautions.

We were fitted out with copies of every printed record of polar exploration that either in the United States or in Europe, Bennett or his satellites on the New York Herald could lay hands on. And De Long, a good student if the Navy ever produced one, spent hours in his cabin poring over the accounts of his contemporaries and his predecessors in the ice puzzling out that riddle. Why in spite of lime-juice and canned vegetables, in spite of pure fresh water daily replenished from melting ice, had even our immediate rivals in the race to the Pole still fallen prey to scurvy?

Their books gave no answer, but our experiences in getting water by melting ice from the floebergs round us soon gave us a clue. We had been led to believe that when sea water froze under very low temperatures, the salt in it crystallized out, rose to the freezing surface as an efflorescence, and was washed or blown away, leaving the ice free of salt and fit to be melted into good drinking water. Indeed Dr. Kane, whose words at that time were accepted as gospel truth on all matters Arctic, had written,

“Ice formed at a temperature of -30° Fahrenheit will yield a perfectly pure and potable element.”

And confirming this, Lieutenant Weyprecht, of the Austrian expedition which in latitude 81° N. had discovered Franz Josef Land only a few years ago, said that they found that ice over “a certain thickness” yielded a pure water.

We were confident therefore when we entered the pack that we needed only to send out a party with pick-axes to obtain from the nearest convenient spot on the floe an abundant supply of fresh water for drinking, cooking, and washing purposes. But we were unpleasantly surprised to discover that we could find not a particle of ice anywhere, whether cut from the top, the bottom, or the middle of the floe, whether taken from old floes fifteen feet thick or young ice a foot thick, that did not contain from twenty to thirty times as much salt per gallon as even the poorest water Dr. Ambler felt he could safely allow our men to drink continuously.

During our initial few weeks in the pack we regarded this situation with incredulity, the same incredulity I have no doubt that the medieval alchemist displayed when his dabbling revealed a fact failing to conform to the principles of matter set forth by the master, Aristotle—it simply could not be so! We concluded at first that perhaps the ice immediately around us had not been formed at low enough temperatures, or that it had not yet had time to reach that “certain thickness.” But having nevertheless to get drinking water the while we waited for temperature and time to form round us the pure ice for our permanent supply, we were reduced to scouting far and wide over the floes, scraping together from drifts here and there enough snow to melt up for our minimum needs.

But as 1879 faded into 1880, we drifted to the northward, and the Arctic winter struck us in all its cold fury, we were given a choice opportunity to try to our hearts’ content ice of every thickness, formed under every temperature from barely freezing down to -60° F., and we could no longer blink the facts. On this matter, the masters from Dr. Kane to Lieutenant Weyprecht were about as reliable as a lot of gabbling old witches—what they said simply was not so!

In the absence of any startling geographical discoveries or of any marked progress toward the Pole, that we had exploded a third Arctic fallacy (those respecting the Kuro-Si-Wo Current and Wrangel Land being the first two) gave to Captain De Long and Dr. Ambler a sense of having accomplished something at last. For Dr. Ambler deduced from the observed fact that all floe ice retained some salt, the mystery of the scurvy problem in previous expeditions. These, using floe ice more or less mixed either with pure snow or ice formed from melting snow, had obtained water passably potable but actually (though their fixed misconceptions kept them ignorant of it) containing so much salt that in spite of lime-juice rations and what-have-you in the way of canned vegetables, the scurvy had struck them down.

That deduction made it simple for us. All we had to do was to avoid the use of tainted floe ice and we would be the first Arctic expedition in history to dodge the scurvy. And in case the Jeannette Expedition discovered nothing else, to bring that discovery back home would at least salve in some measure our pride as explorers.

But if we were not to use the floes, where then was our water to come from? The obvious answer seemed to be from carefully selected snowdrifts, but as we floated north with the pack, we learned the futility of that. The drifts we relied on for the first weeks after we entered the pack were soon used up and Nature never replenished them. Apparently off the north coast of Siberia in the early fall it snowed, but as we drifted to the north of Wrangel Land and the temperature, falling far below zero, stayed there, to our dismayed astonishment we learned that in the ordinary sense it never snowed where we were! Apparently the intense cold froze all the vapor out of the atmosphere, leaving such a trifling percentage in the dry air that regardless of other favorable conditions for a fine snowfall, there just wasn’t enough moisture to provide the makings. The result was that in a gale when a temperature change brought snow, all that fell was a fine powdery deposit, ice mainly, which driven by the wind cut into our faces like needles. What was worse for us however (for in most cases we could stay inboard during a blow) was that the gale drove these particles over the pack with such force that they acted like a sand blast on the surface of the floes, with the net result that when the wind died, such drifts as we could find were so complete a mixture of powdered floe and driven snow as to be heavily salted and wholly unfit for human needs.

Now, while we could find no newly formed safe drifts, it had not been wholly impossible for us to get sufficient good snow from the old ones by going further and further afield in the pack until the last gale in November. This after making us “shoot the rapids” so to speak in that canal, had left us stranded miles from our original refuge in a pack of what was mostly relatively young ice. Naturally there were no old drifts in that vicinity and the captain, at first fearful of being torn away at any minute, was reluctant to permit anyone to get out of sight of the ship in searching for snow. Willy-nilly, therefore, we got our water by scraping the tops of nearby drifts formed in the last storm. This was so salty, however, that within two days Dr. Ambler had several of the officers and most of the crew under treatment for diarrhoea. Aside from the ordinary effects of this disorder in reducing the vitality of those afflicted, to us it was especially disastrous, for since the “heads” on the ship were for obvious reasons shut up, we had for months been using portable “heads” made of tenting, set up on the ice some little distance from the ship. It needs little imagination therefore to understand what diarrhoea meant to a man under the frequent necessity of hastily rushing off through the Arctic night to a flimsy canvas tent to sit there in the bitter cold of a temperature some thirty degrees or more below zero.

Given a few weeks of such excessive salinity in our water and it was obvious that scurvy would get us, but that at least would take several weeks. De Long was faced with the imperative necessity of rectifying the situation within a few days or of risking the loss of his crew as a result of the unavoidable physical exposure which diarrhoea entailed under our peculiar circumstances.

De Long, Ambler, Chipp, and I held an ambulant council of war. Muffled in our parkas, we first searched the pack around us for suitable snowdrifts in the forlorn hope that perhaps the men had missed a good one. We found a few that to the taste seemed passable, but in each case the hope faded when the surgeon squeezed a drop of silver nitrate into a melted sample, and inevitably the milky white reaction showed excessive salt.

Not very hopefully we scanned the “head” situation. No chance of improvement there. Since the ship was immovably frozen into the ice, we dared neither to reopen the “heads” on the ship nor bring the ones on the floe any closer to the gangway without risking an outbreak of contagion.

So there being no safe water available from the pack ice, no hope of getting any from snowfalls, and the absolute need of providing some quickly lest the next movement of the ice find us with a helpless crew unable even to abandon ship, it was the conclusion of the council that, regardless of cost, we must make our own from sea water. Naturally enough since I was engineer officer, De Long turned that problem over to me.

Ordinarily it would not have been much of a problem technically. On the ship steaming normally, and feeding her boilers from the sea, I might have bled some steam off the auxiliary line, put it through a distilling coil or worm we had fitted in our engine room, and collected the resulting fresh water. But we were not only not steaming normally, we were not steaming at all, because for the reasons I have given previously our fires were out, our firerooms were cold, and our boilers were emptied.

Aside from that, there was another angle to it that griped the captain. To take sea water and distill it over into fresh water you’ve got to boil it. That takes heat, and heat takes coal, and coal was of all things we had aboard the most precious, more so even than food, for in a pinch with our food exhausted we might go out on the pack with rifles and knock down bears, seals, and walruses enough to exist on, but where in those icy wastes could we go to knock down even one ton of coal to feed our boilers when our bunkers were emptied? For we had left only ninety tons, which (save for the scanty supply I doled out to Ah Sam daily for cooking, and to Bosun Cole for stoking the two stoves forward and aft to keep men and officers from freezing to death) under the captain’s orders I was religiously husbanding, so that if ever we were released by the pack, we might be able again to fire up our boilers and do some of that exploring for which we had come north.

Up to now, to live at all, we had had to burn coal enough to run the galley and our heating stoves; from now on, if we were to live without scurvy, we would have in addition to burn coal enough to run some kind of an evaporator. What kind it might be, to give us safe water and still consume the least possible quantity of “black diamonds,” the captain left to me.

The problem started not with “How much water do we need?” but with “How little water can we get by on?” I canvassed this question with the doctor, the captain, the exec, Ah Sam and finally Jack Cole—all of whom had something to contribute on what was the least possible quantity needed for drinking, for cooking, for tea, and for washing—and I came out with the answer that 40 gallons of water a day, about a gallon and a quarter for each one of our thirty-three men, was the irreducible minimum.

Naturally for this quantity, which was more or less in line with the daily capacity of any really ambitious Kentucky moonshiner’s still, it was foolishness to think of firing up so large a kettle as one of our main boilers. Thinking over what else we had, my recollection lighted on a small Baxter boiler which we had brought along to furnish steam for driving an Edison electro-magnetic generator and illuminating the ship with his newfangled carbon lamps. Edison’s generator having proved a flat failure (probably because it got soaked in salt water on our stormy crossing of Behring Sea) the captain had ordered the whole works dismantled and struck below into the hold. Without further delay, I had Lee and Bartlett resurrect the Baxter boiler (leaving the rest of the outfit below) and this little boiler with the help of my machinist and fireman, I soon had rigged up inside the deckhouse, with its steam outlet hooked to a small coil set outside in the open air on top of the deckhouse, where the cold air would act as a very effective condenser on the vapor passing through the worm.

Meanwhile, not waiting for this contraption to get into action, at the surgeon’s suggestion the skipper ordered Cole to break out from the hold a couple of barrels of lime-juice, which on December 2 for the first time on the cruise, he started to issue. In our mess, a pitcher of this stuff was placed on the table at dinner, where under the watchful eye of the surgeon, each one of us, sweetening it to taste, had to drink an ounce. For the crew, Alfred Sweetman, carpenter, was given the responsibility of seeing that the men took theirs, and as each watch laid below for dinner, under Sweetman’s observation, each man was handed a tin cup with his ration of lime-juice and an ounce of sugar to sweeten the unsavory mess, and compelled to drink it before he could draw his food ration. Months of storage in casks had not improved its flavor any, so in spite of Ambler’s gaze and Sweetman’s vigilance, had it not been for the sugar generously served out to sweeten the dose, I have little doubt that, scurvy or no scurvy, all sorts of ingenious dodges would shortly have been developed to avoid swallowing that tart medicine.

When the last pipe joint was tightened up, Bartlett fired the Baxter boiler and we commenced distilling. Our first few days at it were to my surprise pretty much a failure, for the distilled water which we collected up on deck in a barrel set underneath the outlet of the condensing worm, while better than the melted snow, still tested far too high in salt for safe use, and our diarrhoea continued unabated. This puzzled me (not to mention severely disappointing the captain) and it took some hours of sleuthing about to discover the trouble. I then found that we were feeding the boiler from a tank atop the deckhouse. This tank was filled by the seaman on watch who hauled water to the topside in a bucket from a hole chopped in the floe alongside. Unless the man was careful (and a sailor working outside in a temperature of 30° below zero is interested only in speed and not in care) he would slop the sea water over both coil and deckhouse, from which places enough trickled down into the fresh water barrel to ruin completely our day’s output. Having discovered this, I promptly rigged a pan over the barrel to catch the drip and looked hopefully for better water. But my hopes were dashed once again when, watching Surgeon Ambler test a sample from our next barrel of water (the result of a whole day’s distilling), I saw to my disgust the sample turn as milky as ever immediately he dropped a little silver nitrate into it.

By now, we had been suffering four days from diarrhoea and the situation was serious. I dropped everything else to devote my whole time to watching the operation of our evaporator, endeavoring by an analysis of what I could see done and what theoretically must be going on inside the apparatus from firebox to receiving barrel, to locate the reason or reasons why from our sea water feed, we failed to get over and condense a pure steam, leaving all the salt behind as a brine in the boiler. Thinking at first we might be boiling off the water too fast, I had Bartlett damp his fire somewhat to make less steam, but I soon found that that solved nothing. For with too little steam going up through our condensing coil in the frigid atmosphere outside, the condenser promptly froze up and burst a pipe, putting a stop to distilling altogether till Lee thawed out the coil and repaired the leak.

But hardly had we resumed operation again when what I saw gave me the answer. Bartlett started up his little feed pump, and began vigorously to pump cold water into the hot boiler to bring up the level in the glass. Promptly, as shown by the needle on the gauge, the pressure in the boiler tumbled and the water in the sight glass started to bubble vigorously. And that had been our difficulty. The sudden injection of cold feed water evidently created a vacuum in the steam space. Under the reduced pressure the hot water in the boiler had boiled off so violently that it carried salt spray up with the steam and over into the distiller, where it ruined our make.

Now I had it.

“Enough, brother!” I sang out to Bartlett. “Stop that pump, haul fires and secure everything!”

And from then on, alternating between sweating over that hot boiler and freezing on our enforced trips to the “head,” Bartlett, Lee, and I struggled all through the night. We shifted the location of the feed water line inside the little boiler to a point as far away from the steam space as we could get it, and inserted a constriction in the steam line to the feed pump so that no one could, even by accident, start the pump suddenly or make it stroke at anything more than dead slow speed.

In the early morning, we finished, refilled the boiler, fired up, and again started distilling. When we had to feed the boiler, we fed slowly (which was the only way the pump would now run), and I felt sure from the slight fluctuation of the pressure gauge that I had at last ensured operation steady enough to eliminate priming. And when at noon with the barrel half full of distilled water, Bartlett, Lee, and I, in the front row of a cluster of fellow sufferers, gathered wearily round the surgeon as he poised his silver nitrate solution over the test cup, I felt there was some warrant for the hearty cheer which echoed down the deck when Ambler announced,

“Very pure, chief!”

So ended our struggle to get fresh water. And in a few days our intestinal troubles ended too, a result for which all hands were devoutly thankful. But when I reported our success to the captain, while he was even more laudatory in congratulating me than anyone else had been, still for him there was a fly in the ointment which completely took the edge off his enthusiasm.

“How much coal does that distiller use up, Melville?” he queried.

“About two pounds of coal per gallon of water made, sir,” I answered.

He figured mentally a moment, blinked sadly at me through his glasses, then muttered,

“Two pounds per gallon, chief? Why, it’s nearly a hundred pounds of coal a day just for distilling! That expenditure will ruin us if we have to keep it up. Snow, snow! That’s what we need!”

CHAPTER XVII

Continuing his program for dodging scurvy, De Long followed up his exercise order by another calling for a thorough monthly medical examination of all hands. In this I believe he had two objects—the main one, of course, to give the surgeon a chance to catch and deal with the first symptom of disease and especially scurvy, before it had any opportunity to get out of bounds; the other, by maintaining a record at frequent intervals of our physical condition, to study the effect of the long Arctic night and of Arctic conditions generally on the human body, and to learn perhaps the best method of combating these effects.

I read the order absent-mindedly, made a mental note that at ten next morning I was due for examination, and in the midst of my engrossment over the urgent problem of how to save some coal, promptly put the matter out of my thoughts. An hour later, Charley Tong Sing touched my shoulder and announced in a singsong voice,

“Captain wantee you, chief, in cabin allee samee light away.”

More discussions about coal economy, I presumed.

But that idea was quickly knocked out of my head when stepping into the cabin I found myself facing not the captain alone but also Mr. Collins.

A little surprised at this unexpected situation, I looked enquiringly from one to the other. Both men were on their feet, both were angry, and evidently trouble was in the offing. Not being invited to take a seat, naturally I remained standing also, looking quizzically from Collins to the captain, wondering what was up.

I found out soon enough. De Long, waiting only till he was sure that the steward was out of the room and the door firmly closed behind me, with an evident effort to maintain an even tone broke the silence.

“Melville, I’ve sent for you as the officer aboard with longest experience in Service customs to get from you an independent opinion on the propriety of my medical examination order before I proceed to enforce it. It seems that Mr. Collins here objects.”

So that was it.

I swore inwardly. Here was Collins heading for trouble again, and unfortunately for me, here I was dragged into the muddle, evidently by the captain this time, and from the nature of the case, bound to offend our meteorologist if I even opened my mouth. What ailed Collins anyway? I had never seen a man on shipboard with such an unholy penchant for getting himself into difficulties.

Apparently the wrinkling of my bald brow and the way I fingered my beard as the situation hit me, gave Collins an inkling of my feelings, for without giving me a chance to speak, he burst out heatedly,

“You’re absolutely correct, I do object! And regardless of what Melville or anybody else you bring in here may say, I’m going to keep on objecting! I never liked that exercise order you’ve already issued, even though I’m obeying it. I’m a grown man, and I was before ever I saw this ship, and I’ve got sense enough to decide for myself how much exercise I need to keep my health and when I need to take it, without anybody telling me. I don’t need to be ordered out like a schoolboy for supervised play, nor have my steps dogged like a poor man’s cur to see I take it. Nevertheless, I swallowed that. But this is too much! I’ve got some rights and I’ve got some pride! Even if I am down on the shipping articles as a seaman, I’m not a damned guinea pig, to be stripped naked every few weeks for the doctor to experiment on!”

This time I guess my jaw did drop in open-mouthed astonishment. That seaman business again. How it must be rankling in Collins’ soul! I looked from Collins’ overwrought face to De Long’s, flushing a fiery red. Had he been any other skipper I had ever sailed with, I should have seen Collins immediately clapped into the brig for gross insubordination. But of the scholarly De Long’s reactions I was not so certain. Prudently I closed my mouth without uttering a word. There was nothing I could say anyway that wouldn’t make a bad situation worse.

De Long’s blue eyes, a startling contrast to his burning cheeks, blinked queerly through his glasses as he stood there, struggling inwardly to control himself the while regarding Collins.

“The scholar in him’s going to win out over the sailor,” I thought to myself. “There’ll be no arrest.”

And so it proved. For what seemed an oppressive length of time under that strain, the captain, without speaking, glared at Collins and Collins unflinchingly glared back. Finally in an unbelievably mild tone, the captain broke the tension.

“Will you please be seated, chief? I should have asked you before.” I sat down. “And that will do for you, Mr. Collins; you may go now. I see that Mr. Melville and I will get along much more rapidly discussing this subject without your presence.”

Like an animal suddenly uncaged Collins, still glaring, turned his back on us, and broke from the cabin, leaving the door wide open. The captain closed it, then sank into an armchair facing me, nervously chewing the twisted ends of his mustaches. Still breathing heavily from his repressed emotions, he turned to me,

“Melville, it seems that everything I do for the discipline and safety of my crew, that man takes as a personal affront! And now over this examination matter, he’s positively insubordinate! I sent for you that we might all discuss that order in a reasonable manner, and find out what’s wrong with it, if anything is. But you saw what happened instead! Nevertheless, chief, I want your frank opinion. Is there anything wrong with that order?” De Long paused, looked anxiously at me.

“To tell you the truth, captain,” I said, “I read it only once hurriedly and then never gave it a second thought. The Navy Regulations require us all to stand an annual physical examination; what difference it makes to anyone, except to the doctor who has to do the work, if it’s monthly, I can’t see. But so long as Dr. Ambler isn’t complaining, what’s Collins blowing up about it for?”

De Long shook his head wearily.

“I don’t know, unless he can’t get it out of his head that I’m persecuting him. That hallucination of his about being a seaman started him off on it long ago. Congress wrote the law commissioning the Jeannette under which he shipped—I didn’t. He had to ship that way or not at all, but Heaven knows I’ve treated him as an officer in spite of it! A lot of good it’s done. I try to make every allowance for his point of view, but there is a limit. I can’t let him defy me on this medical examination. Even if I were so derelict in my duty as to allow discipline to be flouted by such mutinous conduct, I just can’t take chances on having a sick crew in our desperate situation!”

“Right enough, captain,” I agreed. “I should think even Collins would see that. He’s an intelligent, educated man. But I think there’s something in addition to the persecution bug that’s biting him this time. Did you catch the inflection he put on that word ‘naked’?”

“I’m afraid I was so astounded at his words, I missed his inflections,” confessed the skipper. “What about it? What’s wrong with ‘naked’ here, inflected or not? There’s not a woman within a thousand miles of us to embarrass anybody.”

In spite of the gravity of the situation, I grinned inwardly at that.

“Well, captain,” I said, “so much the worse for us. I just have an idea that’s one reason this crew’s all so glum. But that’s not what I was aiming at in Collins’ case. Women don’t enter into his ideas of embarrassment. It’s all in the way he was brought up. He’s a sensitive person, almost morbid, I’d say, and the idea of having to strip before anybody, especially under what he thinks is compulsion, gripes his ideas of dignity and personal privacy. Now, I’m not excusing insubordination, sir, but with Collins’ peculiar civilian background in this expedition, since you’ve asked for it, I’d suggest a modification of that order that’ll still get the results and not hurt anybody’s feelings. Of course the change can’t be for him alone; that would never do—but why not modify it so’s the doctor examines all the officers stripped to the waist only, and all the crew stripped completely? That’ll have two good effects. It won’t require anything of Collins that offends his dignity, and it’ll show him that he’s getting better treatment than the ‘seamen’ he’s so wrought up about being classed with. Then if anything’s ever going to clear the cobwebs out of his brain and stop his bellyaching, that’ll do it.”

To De Long, already overburdened with a sense of failure and the weight of the Arctic problems menacing us, and sincerely desirous of maintaining harmony amongst his personnel, this appealed as a sensible solution. He nodded approvingly.

“A good idea,” he agreed, expansively relaxing in his chair. “I’ll do it! And much obliged to you for the suggestion, chief. It helps a lot to feel I can always rely on you to lend a hand when there’s anything wrong, whether with the machinery or the men.”

“Hey, brother!” I cautioned, “easy on taking in so much longitude in your thanks. Better wait till you see how it works. I’ll guarantee the machinery on this ship, but God himself won’t guarantee the men!” and with that I took my departure and returned to my evaporator, leaving the captain to redraft his order for the medical examinations.

To a degree, it worked. Collins, who it seems had submitted a written protest in addition to expressing himself so freely orally, when he read the revised order asked leave to withdraw his objection, and submitted himself (though very sullenly) to the examination which Dr. Ambler carried out in the privacy of his cabin. And the captain, who, boiling under Collins’ insolence, had been ready to hang him for it, calmed down despite the fact that in a measure Collins had won, and accepted the situation, treating Collins as courteously as if nothing had ever arisen.

Collins, however, not appreciating his luck, failed to reciprocate. Ever since the bear hunt incident, he had refused to ask the captain’s permission to go on the ice, staying aboard except when his routine observatory duties (and now the enforced exercise order) gave him the opportunity to leave the ship without asking. Instead, he had ostentatiously paced the deck, indulging in what he was pleased to inform us was “a silent protest,” which obviously gave him great satisfaction, though why I don’t know for De Long diplomatically took the sting out of that performance by totally ignoring it. Now Collins withdrew still further into his shell, avoiding the captain altogether except when duty made it impossible, and what was worse for him, taking to avoiding the rest of us also when he conveniently could, a proceeding which hardly added to the sociability of the wardroom mess. He even refused to say “Good morning” to any of us when first we greeted him in the messroom, and this boorishness soon put him completely beyond the pale of our little society.

Queerly enough, Collins now began associating almost exclusively with the very seamen with whom he took such violent objection to being classed, spending most of his time with my fireman Bartlett, and retailing to him and thus to the crew generally, practically every bit of wardroom gossip that he heard. Such a situation was hardly desirable aboard ship, and De Long endeavored to put an end to it by privately conveying to our meteorologist the information that such association was decidedly contrary to naval custom and that it was beneath his dignity as an officer so to consort with enlisted men. But the captain’s friendly admonition only drew more black looks from Collins, leaving De Long more perplexed than ever over Collins who refused to comport himself either as officer or seaman, and leaving Collins with his persecution mania flaring up even more fiercely.

December dragged along. The ice around us kept freezing thicker and thicker under the intense cold. On the surface, the pack held together, but despite that, kept us uneasy. Night and day (by the clock, that is, for so far as light went, it was always night for us except for a semi-twilight around noon) even in calm weather we were likely to be disturbed by noises like the beating of the paddle wheels of innumerable steamers and by occasional terrifying shocks on our hull, all of which kept us jumpy. At first we had no explanation for this uncanny state of affairs, the pack around us showing no movement and the ship being solidly enough frozen in.

But Dunbar finally solved it for us. As he pointed it out, evidently we were now suffering from a bombardment of underrunning floes. Considerable masses of ice thrust under the pack in the November breakups were kept constantly in motion by the current beneath the refrozen surface. They bumped along as best they could under its ragged contour, giving that paddle wheel effect, and naturally enough when one collided with our submerged hull, giving us the unpleasant sensation of having struck a rock.

An understanding of the situation, while removing the mystery, did not greatly help our peace of mind. None too sure in the light of our past experiences, of the solidity of the newly frozen pack, we were forever standing by for an emergency with sledges, boats, knapsacks, and provisions ready to go over the side. The monotony of continually expecting trouble with none of the excitement of actually seeing things happening, had its own peculiar effect on us, making sound sleep impossible, killing our appetites, and leaving us restless, listless, and haggard, a condition which the severe physical discomforts of our situation naturally aggravated.

Still, for all our nervousness, we began to note some strange things, the results of the intense cold which descended on us. The atmosphere, practically free of moisture, was startlingly clear, and never have I seen such brilliant stars as shined down on us from those December Arctic skies. Then (owing perhaps to the increased density of the cold air) sounds on the ice traveled unusual distances and boomed and reverberated as if from an overhead dome or the roof of a mammoth cave. And the auroras, shimmering across the sky in a dance of vivid colors, were indescribably beautiful. But what struck us most, around thirty degrees below zero, was the almost unbelievable effect of the cold on the ice itself. Subjected to a temperature far below its freezing point, the ice assumed a flinty hardness and strength entirely different from its normal state. The floes grating against each other, instead of crumbling under pressure, gave out an unearthly high-pitched screech. And when we went out with picks or axes to dig away the ice in the fire hole under our stern, granite itself could not have been more effective than that cold ice in turning the edges and blunting the points of our tools.

Finally there was another effect of the extremely low temperature which most of all racked our nerves. Standing, sitting, or sleeping, who can accustom himself to having pistols unexpectedly discharged practically in his ears? Yet we were constantly exposed to such nervous shocks. For all over the ship, the iron fastenings of our planking and our timbers, contracting abnormally from temperatures never expected by the builders, compressed the wood under the bolt heads as the iron shrank till the wood, finally able to stand no more, suddenly snapped with a noise like a pistol shot. And so startling was each such explosion in one’s ears, so like a pistol discharge, that even the thousandth time it happened, involuntarily I jumped as badly as the first time I ever heard it.

Even the poor dogs suffered unexpected trials and I well believe that to their canine souls, their difficulties were quite as trying as ours. Like Dunbar, I had little natural sympathy with the vicious brutes and saw little value in their presence, but having been to some degree a party to transporting them from their usual habitat, I could not but feel some responsibility for their new troubles. And queerly enough it fell to my lot as engineer partly to relieve them.

Aneguin and Alexey, our two Indians, were primarily responsible for our forty dogs. Each day in the forenoon watch, they fed them, bringing up from the forehold from the cargo of dried fish we had taken aboard at Unalaska, the necessary amount for issue, one dried fish per dog per day being the authorized ration. Ordinarily, the wise dogs immediately crushed their fish in their powerful jaws and swallowed them in one gulp; the otherwise dogs (a pun I fear almost worthy of Collins) found themselves fighting for the remains of their fish with their mates who were quicker on the swallow, a habit which always made feeding time alongside ship a bedlam. Without particularly paying any attention as to why, I noted vaguely that as December drew on, this daily snarling of the dogs over their food subsided. As a minor blessing I was duly grateful, until one day coming aboard a little late after my prescribed exercise period, I saw Alexey on the quarterdeck performing an autopsy on a dog which following a brief illness the afternoon before had died during the night. As I approached, Alexey removed from the dog’s stomach a wad of oakum as big as a baseball, the very evident cause of his death. I squeezed the ball, incredulous. Oakum, all right. But why should even an Eskimo dog eat that? I asked Alexey. Between pantomime and Indian English he explained it to me,

“Fish in hold freeze, chief. Verr hard. Dog chew. Verr hard. Lak iron. No good chew.” He seized a marlinspike, went through the motions of a dog trying to chew a fish frozen presumably as hard as iron, and very plainly breaking his teeth on it. He laid down the marlinspike. “No good. No chew fish, no swallow. Dog get ongry. Bym bye eat oakum. Bym bye die.” Sadly he waved at the deceased dog.

That explained the cessation of our daily dog fights at feeding time. The fish stowed in our hold had frozen so hard there that no dog, no matter how energetically he chewed, was now able to masticate his own fish quickly and get it down. As a consequence, all the dogs being in the same boat, too busily engaged trying to chew their own dinners to bother about stealing each other’s, there were no fights. But this poor devil, his teeth apparently unable to make any impression on the fish, had been driven in desperation to something softer and had unwittingly committed suicide by gobbling the oakum.

I grunted sympathetically. A dog’s life, all right. But I could fix it. Motioning Alexey to follow me inside the deckhouse, I had him bring up from the hold one day’s issue of fish, only thirty-nine now. They were frozen hard, no question; even with a crowbar, it would take a strong man to make a visible impression on one of those glaciated fish. Sizing up their approximate volume, I had Lee make a sheet iron box large enough to hold the lot, and fit inside it a few turns of pipe which I connected to the blowdown from our evaporator, the Baxter boiler. Alexey tossed in the frozen fish, and Lee put on the cover.

“That’ll thaw ’em out, Alexey,” I informed him. “Every time we blow down the hot brine from that boiler, it’ll heat the fish, and in a few hours, they’ll be so soft, even a dog with false teeth won’t have any trouble with ’em. Now don’t forget; fill the box every night, and by morning dinner for the dogs will be all ready.”

Alexey, a very good Indian and deeply concerned for the well-being of his charges, thanked me profusely, and judging by the resumption of the snarling over dinner next day, I guessed the dogs had reason to also.

But the dogs had still one more cross to bear that I could not ease. Their instinctive habit in cold weather was to bed themselves down at night in soft snow, keeping themselves as comfortable that way as an Eskimo inside his igloo of ice. But if we had reason to regret the absence of snow because it deprived us of a source of fresh water, the dogs lamented its absence even more because it robbed them of their natural beds. Night after night they wandered round the ship disconsolately looking for drifts, and finding none, were forced at last to turn in on the bare ice. For some time, we had noticed each morning here and there hair imbedded in the ice, but when the December cold snap hit us, we were surprised to find several dogs with so much hair frozen to the ice that they just could not tear themselves free. There was, however, nothing we could do about that except to make it Aneguin’s regular detail to go out before feeding time each morning with a shovel and break out from the floe all the dogs that had been frozen down the night before, a job which required great finesse with the shovel on Aneguin’s part lest all our dogs soon become as bald as Mexican hairless poodles.

CHAPTER XVIII

Monotonously the dreary days drifted by. In darkness we ate our food, took our exercise, thawed out our frozen noses afterward, and vaguely wished we could “go somewheres.” December 22, the shortest day of the year came, bringing with it, aside from the most brilliant display of auroras we had yet witnessed, only the knowledge that with the sun at its extreme southern declination, half of our seventy-one day long night was gone. But the day itself was further marked by the fact that Mr. Dunbar, that veteran whaler and the only member of our mess who had ever before wintered inside either the Arctic or the Antarctic Circles, came down with a bad cold. His tough hide had according to his own claim always before resisted illness, so this made him doubly miserable, and he moped around the wardroom very low in spirit. Finally, as if to make sure that we remembered the day, Danenhower also complained that his left eye pained him, and after a session with the doctor, big Dan completed our picture of wardroom woe by coming in with a black patch over the ailing optic, explaining that Ambler had found it somewhat inflamed and had advised him to give it a rest by shielding it even from the poor glow of our oil lamps for several days.

Two days later we came to Christmas Eve, which for us, except for plenty of ice around, was everything that traditionally Christmas Eve is not. No children about, eagerly excited over hanging up their stockings; no friends dropping in; no families, no wives, no sweethearts—nothing of these for any of us, but instead only the memories of bygone Christmases under happier circumstances, and the hope (clouded by gnawing doubts) that another Christmas might see us out of the ice and restored home.

We gathered in the wardroom, a glum group—Dunbar nursing his cold, Danenhower with his black patch looking like a pirate in distress, Ambler, De Long, Chipp, Newcomb, and myself. Only Collins was missing. That his presence would have added any gaiety was questionable, but that he saw fit to stay locked in his stateroom keeping the wardroom bulkhead between himself and us, certainly added to the general gloom. And gloomy it certainly was in that room—a smoky oil lamp the only illumination, the warped wood panels of the bulkheads the only decoration, overhead the deck beams heavily covered with insulating layers of felt and canvas, dismally sagging under the weight of the combination of frost and moisture with which they were saturated, and beneath our feet the sloping wood deck, wet from the condensate dripping off the cold forward bulkhead.

I did the best I could to lighten matters up. Back at the Mare Island Navy Yard before we left, Paymaster Cochran had thoughtfully presented me with a bottle of fine old Irish whiskey which I had so far carefully hoarded. Now I broke it out from beneath my berth, scraped together some other ingredients, and with all hands watching, mixed a punch in the soup tureen. In the damp chill of the barren wardroom, we filled our glasses, lifted them.

“To Cochran!” I proposed. “May he yet be Paymaster General!”

With no disagreement to this, we all downed Cochran’s whiskey, and warmed a little by the fiery Irish spirits, promptly refilled our glasses. There was just enough for a second round. I looked questioningly at De Long for him to propose the second and (of necessity) last toast. Whom would he choose, James Gordon Bennett, the sponsor of our venture; the President; someone more personal, perhaps?

But Danenhower gave him no chance. Lifting his glass, he waved it over the empty bowl, swept us all with his one uncovered eye, and sang out,

“To our old shipmates, Emma De Long and Sylvie—may they never have cause to worry over us!”

That also I could heartily endorse, so wasting no regrets over the amenities due Bennett or the President, I raised my glass to drink as did the others, when Dunbar alongside me poked me in the ribs. I leaned over toward him.

“Mrs. De Long’s all right with me,” he whispered, his voice hoarse from his cold, “but who’s this Sylvie?”

“Captain De Long’s daughter,” I hissed. “You old fool! Drink it down before he knocks you down!”

“Oh, all right,” mumbled Dunbar. “I thought maybe she might be Newcomb’s sweetheart.” He drank his whiskey at a gulp.

And that just about ended our party. With no more punch to serve as an excuse for conviviality, the conversation soon faded into the general murk gripping the room, and with everyone seemingly immersed in memories of happier Christmas Eves, one by one all hands drifted away to warm over their recollections in the solitude of their staterooms.

Christmas Day, mainly because it lasted longer, was even more dreary than Christmas Eve. A high wind and biting clouds of fine snow made going on deck or on the ice wholly uninviting. Confined again to the wardroom or to our staterooms, we moped over our memories, tried to imagine how friends, relatives, or families were spending the day, and thought a little enviously of Navy shipmates in port the world over with vessels decorated from deck to trucks with wreaths and garlands of greenery, and wardrooms echoing with the alluring laughter of women troubled with no deeper problem than how after dinner to get a husband or a sweetheart excused from watch and off the ship.

We did have a grand dinner, to provide which Ah Sam performed miracles with the humdrum materials available in the storeroom, topping off all with mince pies soaked in brandy. The eating of this unexpected banquet almost made us forget our surroundings and our situation. But not quite, for we ate our dinner to the constant rumbling of the unseen pack, the occasional explosive snapping of timber fastenings, and even a few sharp shocks from underrunning floes. And like a death’s head at the feast, to show that all was not joy and brotherly love on the Jeannette on this Christmas Day, there next to Danenhower at the foot of the table was Collins’ chair—empty, while Collins, sulking in his stateroom, dined alone.

I think I misstate nothing when I say that in the wardroom of the Jeannette we were all thoroughly grateful to see the last of that Christmas Day, and I have little doubt that each of us fervently prayed ever to be spared another like it.

December dragged away. We came to the end of the year 1879. To help the crew in welcoming in the year 1880 on which now he banked heavily for success, the captain sent forward four quarts of brandy, while I did what I could with a fifth quart to provide good cheer for the wardroom mess. As a result, when the rapid ringing of the ship’s bell at midnight marked the birth of 1880, the whole crew (despite a temperature nearly 40° below zero) gathered on the quarterdeck just outside De Long’s cabin, gave three cheers for the Jeannette, sent an embassy of two into the wardroom to wish us all a Happy New Year, and then hastily beat a retreat to the berth deck to warm up on those four bottles.

This evidently so heartened the crew that after their New Year’s dinner (mince pie and brandy once more) they staged an entertainment, the high lights of which were Aneguin imitating Ah Sam singing over his kettles, and a prompt and contemptuous imitation by Ah Sam of an Indian attempting to imitate a Chinaman, which performance brought down the house.

This comic relief for a brief while took our thoughts off what our more sober senses looked forward to with misgivings in contemplating 1880. Under our noses, so to speak, as we emerged from the crew’s entertainment to the deck, was the unpleasant discovery that the mercury in our thermometers had frozen at -40° F., unobtrusively suggesting thereby that what we had so far seen of Arctic temperatures was merely an introduction to what was yet to come.

A second more disquieting situation was that Danenhower’s eye inflammation had grown worse. The doctor had that day been forced to put him on the sicklist, confining him to his room in absolute darkness because the slightest light falling on his eye caused severe pain. Aside from the fact that the loss of his services threw an added load on the remaining officers—the captain, Chipp, and myself—in carrying on the ship’s work, his condition gave us real cause for worry. In case the ship went out from under us, leaving us stranded on the ice, there was a blinded and a helpless officer on our hands to care for, probably requiring to be dragged every inch on a sled, for it was as much as even a man with two perfectly good eyes could do to get over that rough pack without breaking his neck every few steps.

What had caused Danenhower’s eye troubles? All of us, from the first day we were caught in the pack until the sun in November vanished for good, had religiously worn snow goggles, for the glare off the ice was intolerable to face. Why had Danenhower, the youngest regular officer we had and physically by far the most powerful member of the wardroom mess, been knocked out by eye failure when neither forward nor aft had anybody else in the ship’s company been so much affected? Puzzling over that, I could conclude only that it was an unfortunate combination of his job and his personal characteristics functioning under very unfavorable circumstances. Dan was navigator. Innumerable times he stood under terrible conditions of cold, straining his eyes through his sextant, trying to get with poor horizons (or with an artificial mercury horizon) shots at the sun, the moon, or the stars to establish our position as we drifted with the pack. That was bad enough, but what apparently was worse was that Dan was the most painstaking and the most indefatigable worker over account books I ever saw aboard ship. In addition to being navigator, he was our supply officer, and hour after hour he had pored over coal reports and storeroom records, figuring and refiguring, trying to keep track of and account for each pound of coal used, almost each ounce of flour expended. Under the poor lamplight by which since early November he had worked continuously, the load on his eyes, already overstrained by constant squinting through sextant telescopes, proved too much and an inflammation enveloped his left eye, shortly developing into an abscess which threatened to blind that eye completely and even involve the other one. The result was that in a desperate effort to save his sight, the doctor was forced to make Dan a prisoner, forbidden (except when completely blindfolded, he was led out for meals) to leave the darkness of his room. And few prisoners in history, regardless of the horrors of their medieval dungeons, ever had a worse outlook to face than Danenhower in his pitch-black cell—small, damp, chilly, and with always the rumbling and screeching of the pack to remind him that any day the unseen walls of his prison might collapse and the prison itself sink from under him, leaving him helpless on the ice.

Over all of us, his shipmates, Danenhower’s disaster threw a pall of gloom that New Year’s Day. Over De Long, who felt a special responsibility for each man in the ship’s company, it fell like a blight, evoking apparitions for 1880 of calamities yet undreamed of.

So ended our holiday season—a dismal Christmas and a worse New Year’s, leaving us with the temperature starting downward from -40° F. to face whatever new the pack had to offer.

January drew along, bringing gales, biting clouds of flying ice particles, and deeper cold. The ice, getting denser and denser as it grew colder, shrank, and about the middle of the month cracked open, forming little canals on both sides, leaving us in a small island of ice hardly a shiplength across. We contemplated that dubiously, for if any pressure came from the pack about us, now forty inches thick, we would receive almost directly the thrust of the pressing floes with no protection at all. But luckily no pressure came before the extraordinary cold rushed to our rescue by freezing the water which welled up in the fissures. The first half of the month, therefore, went by with only the usual monotonous groaning and rumbling of the pack and occasional nips on our hull to keep us in mind of our position.

January 19, 1880, was on the other hand a red letter day for us. In the silence following the subsidence of a gale which was in no way worse than many another we had experienced, for no reason apparent to us the floe into which we were frozen began early in the morning to crack and split in every direction. Promptly the anchor watch sent word below, and as usual, we all came tumbling up on deck, there to remain stockstill in our tracks as awestruck we watched in the unearthly half twilight of the Arctic a sight entirely new to us.

North, south, east, or west, it was the same. In a large circle surrounding the ship, the surface of the pack was everywhere heaving up into a ring of rugged mountains high above the level of the sea! Huge masses of ice, large as ocean liners, pitched and rolled on the crests, while reverberating from all about came a shrieking and a screeching from the tumbling ice that froze the very marrow in our bones. Like the jaws of a slowly closing vise, that circle drew in on us—ahead, astern, on either beam—whichever way we looked there was an approaching mountain of ice steadily, relentlessly advancing on the Jeannette across the small expanse of yet unbroken pack, while on that undulating ring with cracks streaking across it like forked lightning, the floes parted with roars like thunder, forming a deep bass background for the “high scream” of the flintlike ice of grating floebergs, the whole echoing across the pack to us in a veritable devil’s symphony of hideous sounds.

The ring was still a quarter of a mile away.

On the bridge, Captain De Long, eyeing it, cupped his hands to try to make himself heard above the din, bellowed to those on the spar deck below,

“All hands! Stations for abandon ship!”

Listlessly we moved to our stations abreast the loaded sledges on the poop, but what could we do? Enclosed on all sides by that shrinking circle of tumbling ice, where could we go for safety when we abandoned ship? Even unincumbered by sledges or knapsacks there was not a chance in the world of scaling the slopes of those moving mountains of ice against the stream of floebergs cascading down their sides. Flight was impossible, annihilation certain!

Dunbar was by my side. With a seagoing eye he scanned the little plain of unbroken pack still surrounding us, then muttered,

“That ice is approaching us at the rate of a fathom a minute. It’s still sixty fathoms off. In sixty minutes, chief, we’ll all pass over to the Great Beyond!”

Apparently he was right. Motionless, silent for the most part, we stood, clinging to our useless sledgeloads of pemmican. That terrifying ring, irresistible, inexorable, shrank in on us. Numbly we waited for that avalanche of ice to come tumbling aboard, crushing us like flies, crushing our ship.

On it came. Fifty fathoms, forty fathoms, thirty fathoms. Then as inexplicably as the motion had started, it stopped, a shiplength or so away, leaving us after an hour of looking death squarely in the face, limp, completely drained of emotions, and incredulous almost of being still alive. Slowly the hills of ice flattened out, there remaining around us an indescribable “Bad Lands” of broken floes; and the shrieking died away into a strange quiet except for the rumble of underrunning floes bumping along in the current beneath our pack. It was over, we were safe, our vessel undamaged. Yet had the ship been a few hundred feet in any direction from the exact spot in which she lay, she would inevitably have been lost, and we with her.

Feeling like men reprieved when the noose had been tightened about our throats and the trap all but sprung, we left the poop slowly, noticing for the first time how cold we were. But in spite of that, curious to examine at still closer range the danger we had so narrowly escaped, all hands except those on watch clambered down the starboard gangway to the ice and were soon dispersed among the nearest slopes, climbing the pinnacles, gazing in awe at some of the nearer floebergs standing upended from the pack, and speculating on the results had this or that colossal berg capsized on our vessel.

On the Jeannette, five bells struck. It was 10:30 A.M., the time for serving out the daily allotment of coal for the galley, the heating stoves fore and aft, and the distillers. Regretfully I turned my back on the marvelous vista of ice peaks and canyons stretching before me, and with a frozen nose, bleary eyes, and a beard white with frost from my heavy breathing, started stiffly back to the ship. I wanted to make sure that young Sharvell, the most inexperienced of my four coalheavers, whose turn it was to break out the coal from the bunkers, was not imposed upon either by the guile of that Chinaman, Ah Sam, or the bullying of the bosun into passing out a pound more of our precious fuel than was allotted them by my orders.

I climbed the gangway, crossed the deck to the machinery hatch, and was halfway down the ice-covered iron ladder, just turning on the middle grating to descend into the fireroom, when in that darkness, as if the devil were after him, a man came bounding up the ladder, rammed me in the stomach, and nearly ricocheted me off the grating to the fireroom floor below. I saved myself only by grabbing his arm as he shot by. But to my surprise, instead of stopping, he struggled to tear loose and continue on his way. In the gloom, I peered at him. It was little Sharvell, my coalheaver, apparently badly frightened, his rolling eyeballs and pallid face startlingly white against the smudges of coal dust on his forehead. Well, I was no doubt as white, having just had my wind completely knocked out by his carelessness, and I was mad besides. I tightened my grip on him.

“You clumsy cow,” I gasped, “wait a minute there! What d’ye mean by—”

The next I knew, I was talking to myself. Sharvell, twisting free, was racing up the ladder.

Thoroughly enraged now, I shouted after him,

“Damn you! Come back here!”

But Sharvell did not come back, he kept on climbing. The thought, however, of coming back penetrated his fright enough to loosen his tongue, for he yelled down to me,

“On deck, quick, chief, while you got a chance! The ship’s sinking! The fireroom’s flooded already!”

CHAPTER XIX

The Jeannette sinking? Sharvell must be crazy. The ship had gone through far worse squeezes before without a leak. Nevertheless, forgetting our encounter, I raced down the ladder. There was the fireroom entirely flooded from port to starboard, with water already over the floorplates and rising steadily toward my empty boilers!

For a second I stared in cold dismay. No steam on the ship to run a pump. If the water rose over our furnaces before we got our fires going and steam up, there would never be any steam—and we were through! Once the water got that high, nothing under Heaven could prevent the ship from filling at her leisure and sinking from under us. I had to get steam and get it fast!

On deck, Sharvell had already spread the alarm. Even as I watched the rising water, sizing up my procedure, estimating my chances of getting steam before the water got us, overhead I heard the noise of running feet, guns being fired to recall the men on the ice, the shrill piping of the bosun, and Jack Cole’s stentorian call,

“Man the pumps!”

Man the pumps? Why man them? There in the engine room a little abaft me, their bases already in the water, were my frost-covered pumps. What they imperatively needed in those frozen cylinders was steam, not manning. Then it came to me. The Jeannette was a sailing ship as well as a steamer—she still carried hand pumps, the same crude hand pumps with which Columbus had kept his leaky caravels afloat. And they might save us too; keep the water down below the level of my furnace grates till I raised steam!

And now came action. Down the ladder to join me slid my black gang—Lee, machinist; Bartlett, fireman; all my assortment of coalheavers—Boyd; Lauterbach, the German; Iversen, the Swede; and even that frightened little Englishman, Sharvell. In the biting cold of the fireroom, 29° below zero (it was 45° below outside), I hastily detailed them.

“Lee! Get aft into the engine room and line up the main steam pump to suck on this fireroom as soon as you get steam!”

“Bartlett! Outboard there with you! Open the port sea cock and flood the port boiler to the steaming level. Open her wide, and four bells on that flooding!”

“Lauterbach! Get some kindling wood down here from the galley! Shake it up now, and mind you keep that kindling dry! And while you’re on the topside, tell the skipper I’m firing up the port boiler!”

“Iversen, you and Sharvell start breaking out the coal. Get plenty, and keep it in the buckets, out of this water!”

“Boyd! Spread the fuel in both furnaces in the port boiler as fast as it comes to you, and get an oil torch going, ready to light off when the water’s up to level!”

In the faint gleam of a few oil lamps in that frigid fireroom, off the men splashed through the ice water on the floorplates, an incongruous group for a black gang if ever there was one, as clad all in furs from hoods to boots they stumbled away to their stations in a temperature more suitable to the inside of a refrigerator than to a boiler room.

On deck, I heard the clatter of equipment and the banging of mauls, Cole’s shouts, the hoarse responses of running seamen, and the curses of Nindemann and Sweetman struggling to break out crossbars and handles frozen to the bulkheads and rig the hand gear for working the forward bilge pump—a tough job in that sub-zero atmosphere on the topside with everything iron shrunk by the cold, everything wood swelled by frost and moisture, and nothing fitting together properly as it should.

But long before they got the hand pump on deck assembled, I ran into troubles of my own. Bartlett, wrestling with the port sea cock (I had chosen that side because the ship being heeled to starboard, it was the only one still showing above water), his stocky frame and brawny shoulders straining against the wrench, sang out to me,

“This cock’s frozen, chief! I can’t get her open!”

I jumped to his aid. Together we heaved on an extension handle to the valve wrench. No movement. I was desperate. We had to get that cock open to the sea or we could not fill our boiler. More beef was needed on the wrench. I looked inboard. There in the dull light of the oil torch in his hand, before the port boiler waiting for fuel to arrive, was big Boyd, doing nothing.

“Boyd! Lend a hand here!”

Boyd shoved his torch into the cold furnace, splashed over to us. The three of us, fireman, coalheaver, engineer, braced ourselves against a floor stringer, put our backs into it, heaved with all our might against that wrench handle. The cock gave way suddenly, twisted open. I sighed thankfully, let go the wrench.

“Watch her now, Bartlett,” I cautioned. “Wide open to the sea till the water shows halfway in the boiler sight glass, then shut off! Careful now; it’ll only take a few minutes. Don’t overfill her!”

But I might have spared both my thanks and my caution. Bartlett waited a moment for the water to rush through from the sea into the empty boiler, then feeling no vibration in the pipe to indicate flow, stooped, pressed his ear near (but not too near) the frost-coated sea cock, and listened carefully. Not a murmur of running water. Bartlett lifted his head.

“No water coming through, chief.”

No water? I felt sick. Then that long disused seachest must be plugged with ice! Frozen solid where beyond the valve it passed through our thick wood side to the sea, totally beyond our reach for thawing out, effectively blocking off any flow of water. We could not fill our boiler!

I cursed inwardly. Literally we were sunk now. Caught with no steam, boilers empty, unable to get water into them to raise steam, what good to us now was all the coal we had saved for our exploring by that economy? There the saved coal lay, worse than useless in the bunkers, serving only to ballast down the ship that she might sink the faster under us!

Thump, thump! Thump, thump!

From on deck came a welcome sound. The carpenters had at last got the handles rigged. The hand pump was starting! With four men on each side swaying over the bars, vigorously putting their backs into each stroke, that steady thumping gave me new hope. If the hand pump, inefficient though it was, could only keep the leak from gaining too fast on us, I still had a chance! Water to fill the boiler? Why bother about the sea? We were standing in an ocean of salt water right there in our fireroom and more was coming in all the time! All I needed was time enough to get a boiler full of it off the submerged floorplates into that port kettle, and I could light off!

“Bartlett, forget that sea cock! On top of that port boiler with you and your wrench. Open up the manhole there, then stand by the opening to receive water in buckets! Boyd, get Sharvell and Iversen out of the bunkers, get some buckets, and form a line to pass water up to Bartlett as soon as he gets that manhole open!”

Bartlett scrambled over the furnace fronts and up on top of the boiler. Boyd passed up his torch to illuminate the work, and I tossed up a sledge hammer to help him start the bolts on the manhead. While Bartlett labored over the bolts and Boyd and the other coalheavers scurried through the engine room and the fireroom collecting all the buckets, I stood a moment before the port boiler, sizing up the situation.

Where was all that water coming from anyway? There was no sign of damage, no sign of leak in the machinery spaces. From forward, probably; we had got some very bad raps on the bow during the morning’s excitement. Perhaps an underrunning floe had rammed our stern, opened up our forepeak. If such were the case, that hand pump running on deck forward was in the best location to hold down the water, to keep it from rising too rapidly here amidships. I listened an instant to the rapid thump, thump of the oscillating handles, then caught mixed with the noise a husky cry from the men at the pump,

“Spell O!”

There was a break in the rhythmic thumping, a new gang stepped in and relieved the men at the handles, then the monotonous throbbing was resumed. Spell O, the cry for relief, already coming from the first gang manning the pumps! Backbreaking work that, all right. How long could the sixteen men we had on deck, even relieving each other frequently, keep those handles flying up and down fast enough to give us a chance in the fireroom? Not for long could human muscles stand that pace, I feared. It would be nip and tuck between us and the rising water.

From atop the boiler came the banging of metal on metal and the muffled curses of Bartlett as sprawled out in the scanty space between boiler and deck beams overhead, he fought with sledge and wrench to loosen the manhole bolts. Lauterbach came cautiously down the fireroom ladder, balancing a huge armful of kindling. I motioned him to toss it onto the grates, then to join Boyd, Iversen, and Sharvell with the buckets. In silence, we waited below, listening to the mingled chorus of the banging sledge hammer, the rasping screech of rusty nuts, and the fluent profanity of Bartlett, prone on his stomach, a fantastic fur-clad demon with his distorted face showing up intermittently in the flickering flame of the torch, battling the boiler beneath him. No one could help him; there wasn’t room for two men to work in those confined quarters. And there was no use giving him any advice either. So below we stood, straining our eyes impatiently toward Bartlett, while inch by inch the water rose on us and the margin between water level and furnace grates shrank. The hand pumps on deck were losing out—they had slowed up the rise, but they could not stop it.

My chilled legs felt cramped. Instinctively, not taking my gaze off Bartlett, I tried to flex my knees to relieve them, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. I found I could not lift either leg. Looking down sharply, I saw for the first time what before in the poor light had escaped my notice—in that intense cold, far below zero, the water was turning to slush, ice was forming here and there over its surface, and both my feet were solidly frozen down to the iron floorplates on which I stood!

I gripped my legs one at a time with both hands, savagely tore them free.

“Keep moving, boys!” I warned the men in the water alongside me. “If you stand still a minute, you’ll be frozen down!” And standing there in that fast freezing water, at 29° below zero, I was at least thankful for the four pairs of wool socks, the three suits of blue flannel underwear, and the two pairs of woolen mittens which encased me under my fur suit and boots, for otherwise by now, between cold water and cold air, I should have been frozen stiff as a board.

Bang!

With a final blow of his sledge, Bartlett knocked free the last dog, lifted out the boiler manhead, shouted,

“All clear, chief!”

“Start those buckets!” I ordered, but it was unnecessary. Already Boyd had dipped the first one full, was passing it up to Bartlett, who dashed the contents through the open manhole into the boiler, where splashing over the frigid iron plates inside, I haven’t the slightest doubt but that it promptly became ice.

Round and round went the buckets, Lauterbach filling, Boyd and Iversen passing them up full to Bartlett, and little Sharvell catching the empties as they came tumbling down the boiler front. All the men were soon coated from head to foot with ice from the water slopping from the buckets—only their constant stooping, rising, and twisting which kept cracking the ice off in sheets prevented their soon accumulating so heavy a weight of it as no man could even stagger under.

Meanwhile, as they labored, I turned to, and took Boyd’s place in spreading fuel on the grates, preparatory to lighting off. Hastily I scattered the kindling over the cold furnace bars, then slid several buckets of coal out the nearest bunker door, carefully maneuvering them through the slush and ice across the flooded floorplates to avoid slopping the sea water which reached nearly to the tops of the buckets, in on the coal. Seizing then a shovel, I started to heave coal into the furnaces, an awkward job, for getting the shovel into the tops of the upright buckets was difficult, and naturally I dared not dump the coal out on the floorplates first. As best I could, I managed it, spreading the coal over the kindling, a little thin at the front of the grates, a thicker bed at the rear. That done, I leaned back on my shovel, and alternated between watching the waterline creeping up the boiler fronts and my men frantically passing up buckets to fill the boiler.

It was a big boiler, eight feet in diameter, and would require innumerable buckets. Mentally I calculated it, making a rough estimate. Nine tons of water had to be manhandled up into that boiler to fill it properly, a thousand bucketfuls at the very least. I timed the heavy buckets; about six a minute were going up, but the men could hardly maintain that pace. Still, even if they could, it would take three hours to fill that boiler to the steaming level! Long before then, the fireboxes at the bottom of the boiler would be flooded, we could never light off! Somehow, we had to keep the water down in the fireroom till I got steam, or the Jeannette was doomed. And her going meant a two hundred mile retreat over the broken pack to Siberia—in mid January at 40° or worse below zero, an absolutely hopeless journey!

“Keep ’em flying, boys!” I called out to my coalheavers, “while I lay up on deck for help. I’ll be back here in a minute!”

Coated with ice to the waist, I clambered up the ladder, went forward into the deckhouse. Swinging on the pump bars there, were eight straining seamen; against the bulkhead, resting a moment, were eight more, including even the Chinamen Ah Sam and Tong Sing. A little forward of them was De Long, anxiously peering down a hatch into the forepeak, while below him in that gloomy hole, Lieutenant Chipp and Nindemann were sloshing round in deep water with a lantern, searching for the source of our troubles.

“Where’s the leak, captain?” I asked, bending down alongside him.

De Long straightened up, intensely worried.

“We don’t know, chief; Chipp can’t find it. All he can see is that the water’s gushing through that supposedly solid pine packing the Navy Yard filled our bow with, as if it were a sieve. The leak’s in the stem, down somewhere near the keel; I think our forefoot’s twisted off.” He looked at me with haggard eyes. “We’re still holding our own on the forepeak with the hand pump; but the men’ll break down before long. How soon can you give us steam and help out, chief?”

I drew him aside, a little away from that squad of resting seamen, not wishing to discourage them.

“Never, captain!” I whispered hoarsely, “unless we get help ourselves!” Briefly I outlined our desperate position. There was no hand pump in the fireroom, the water was gaining on us there also. “I’ve got to have a gang to hoist water out of that fireroom by hand someway to keep it down till my boiler’s filled and I get steam up, or we’re done for! And it’ll take three hours yet. My gang’s all busy. Who can you spare?”

De Long gazed at me somberly.

“Except Danenhower, who’s blind, every man and officer’s working now. But Newcomb and Collins are only collecting records in case we abandon ship. Will they do?”

I laughed bitterly.

“Newcomb isn’t worth a damn for real work, captain; and from what I’ve heard from Collins, you could shoot him before he’d turn to as a seaman! Besides, two are not enough anyway. It’ll take six good men at least, to keep ahead of that water, and then they may not do it. But give me Cole and half of that relief gang at the pumps there and I’ll try.”

“That’ll reduce us here to six men a shift on the pump handles,” muttered the captain, dubiously eyeing the crew at the pump. “But we’ve got to get steam! All right, Melville, take them. But for God’s sake, hurry it up!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” I turned abruptly to our Irish bosun, who was nearby supervising the pumping. “Jack, pick four men out of the gang here, any four, and come aft with me. Shake a leg, now!” I started for the after door in the deckhouse.

Cole grabbed Starr, a Russian and physically the strongest seaman in our crew, off the starboard pump handle; took Manson, a burly Swede, off the port handle to even things up, and beckoned to Ah Sam and Tong Sing from the relief gang.

“C’mon, me byes; lay aft wid yez!” Cole marshalled his little detail out of the compartment and slammed the deckhouse door behind them almost before the twelve startled men left at the pump could realize that they now had the work of all sixteen to carry on.

Close outside the deckhouse stood the barrel which received the fresh water condensed in our distiller. That barrel was just what I needed; distilling for the present was the least of my worries.

“Jack,” I explained briefly, “the fireroom’s flooding on us. We got to keep that water down till I get fires started. Sling that barrel in a bridle, rig it on a whip to the davit over the machinery hatch, and start hoisting water out of the fireroom, four bells and a jingle! She’s all yours now, Jack! Get going!”

Cole, a rattling good bosun if I ever saw one, needed nothing further.

“Aye, aye, sor. Lave ut to Jack!” In a moment he had that Russian, the Swede, and the two Chinamen round the barrel, emptying it; in another second they were rolling it aft; and as I started down the ladder to the fireroom, Cole had the barrel on end again and already was expertly throwing a couple of half hitches in a manila line round it to serve as a sling.

Almost before I got down the ladder to my fireroom again, the barrel came tumbling down the hatch at the end of a fall and landed alongside me with a splash, while above, Cole roared out,

“Below there! She’s all yours! Fill ’er up!”

Being nearest, I tipped the barrel sidewise in the water, pushed it down till it submerged, then righted it. It filled with a gurgle, settled through the slush to the floor plates.

“Full up!” I shouted. “Take it away!”

“Aye, aye!” The line to the barrel tautened, then started slowly to rise. Down the hatch floated Cole’s voice, encouraging his squad on the hoisting line,

“Lay back wid yez, Rooshian! Heave on it, ye Swede! An’ git those pigtails flyin’ in the breeze, ye two Chinks, or we’ll all be knockin’ soon at the Pearly Gates, an’ fer sailor min the likes of us, wid damned little chanct to get past St. Peter! Lively wid yez; all togither now. Heave!”

The loaded barrel suddenly shot up the hatch.

Hurriedly Cole swung it over to the low side scuppers, dumped it, and sent it clattering down again. Once more I filled it, started it up, then called Lee, my machinist, from the engine room pump to stand by on that filling job while I went back to the all-important boiler.

Why go into the agony of the next two hours? Wearily, without relief, my men heaved water, ice, slush, whatever the flying buckets scooped up, indiscriminately into the yawning void inside that boiler; just as wearily, with aching shoulders, Cole and his little group labored, unrelieved and unshielded from the bitter cold on deck, heaving that barrel up and down; while from the deckhouse, the more and more frequent cries of Spell O! showed that at the undermanned pump, backs were fast giving way under that inhuman strain.

And in spite of all, I could see that we were going to lose. Another hour yet to fill the boiler to the steaming level, but from the rate with which the flood waters were still rising, in another hour it would be too late—the water would be over the grates. Hoping against hope that perhaps I was wrong, that perhaps the water was going into that kettle faster than I thought, I crawled myself to the top of the boiler. Keeping as clear of Bartlett as the scant space allowed, not to slow up the stream of buckets, I seized the torch and in between the dumping of those cumbersome buckets peered through the ice-rimmed manhole into that Scotch boiler. As I feared. The upper tubes down there were still uncovered; the crown sheets of the furnaces were still perhaps a foot above the level of the slush (I could hardly call it water) line. As I looked, Bartlett, sprawled out beside me, sent another bucketful splashing through the manhole, which soaked my beard and almost immediately froze it into a solid mass. But I hardly noticed it, staring with leaden eyes into that still half-empty boiler. With a sinking heart, I slid away on the ice-coated cylinder from the manhole, and crawled down the breechings to stand once again on the thickening ice covering the flooded floorplates.

Dare I fire up without waiting further?

I was in a terrible predicament. To light fires under a partly filled boiler like that, with tubes and furnace plates not wholly covered with water, was not only the surest way to a courtmartial which would probably end my naval career, it violated also every tenet in my engineer’s code, violated every principle of safety, practically insured a boiler explosion! But if I did not get fires going right away, I would never have a chance to fire up, and not only that boiler but the ship herself and all her crew besides would vanish in that Arctic ice.

I must risk whatever came.

With flying buckets and tumbling barrel splashing and spilling water all around me, I applied a match to another oil torch, fanned it a moment in the chilly air till it blazed brightly, shoved it (in the narrow space still remaining between the flood waters and the grate bars) into the inboard furnace under the kindling, till the wood took fire and then hurriedly transferred it to the outboard furnace until that also lighted off. The extreme cold of the outside air favored me, creating a tremendous draft as soon as a little warm air filled the flues, and in no time at all it seemed, the wood was blazing up fiercely and igniting the coal which, shining brightly down through the grate bars onto the water flooding the lower part of the ash-pits, cast a lurid red glare out into the dark fireroom, evidently putting new life into the drooping sailors, for both below and on deck, a ragged cheer greeted that crimson glow.

“Keep that water going, lads; we haven’t won yet!” I warned, flinging open the furnace doors and heaving in more coal. “We’ve got to get that water level up over the crown sheets before they get red hot, or we’re all going straight to hell! Twice as fast now on those buckets!” And whatever it was, fear or hope, that inspired those coalheavers, a moment before ready to drop from utter exhaustion, the buckets started to fly faster than ever.

I finished heaving coal, slammed to the fire doors, and leaned back on my shovel. I was in for it now. Never in the history of steam, before nor since, has a boiler been fired under such weird conditions—furnaces half-flooded, no water showing in the sight glasses, slush and ice for what charge there was, and the boiler manhead still off! But I was relying on some of those very dangers to save my bacon—till I put the manhole cover back, there could be no pressure to cause real trouble; and till we had melted down and warmed up that ice and slush, I counted on that chilly mixture and the water still splashing in to soak up heat so rapidly as to keep the bare tubes and exposed crown sheets from getting red hot and collapsing.

My other fears I need hardly go into—the dangers of bringing up steam suddenly in a cold boiler instead of gradually warming up first for twelve hours as was usual; of frozen gauge glasses; of frozen feed pumps—all these I deliberately put out of my mind. Only one thing counted now—to get some steam at any cost whatever before the water reached the grate bars and flooded out my fires.

And we did. With only a few inches left to go, came at last from Bartlett the long-awaited cry,

“The crown sheet’s covered now, chief!”

“On with that manhead!” I roared back.

The clanking of Bartlett’s sledge hammer, breaking away the ice round the manhole so the cover would fit, was my only answer. The worn-out coalheavers dropped their buckets, rested for the first time in hours, sagging back against the boiler fronts to keep from dropping into the icy water. No time for that. I seized a slice bar, started savagely to slice the fire in the outboard furnace, sang out,

“Boyd, get busy with another slice bar on that inboard fire! Lauterbach, relieve Lee on filling that barrel! Lee, get back to your pump now! And, Sharvell, you and Iversen, get into those bunkers and break out some more coal! Come to life now, all of you!”

Boyd, nearly dead from his half of heaving up over eight tons of water, staggered over to my side, gripped a slice bar. Together we labored over the fires, forcing them to the limit, nursing in more coal without deadening the blaze, till helped by an amazing draft from the stack, we had them roaring like the very flames of hell itself. Never have I seen such fires!

Leaving the stoking job now wholly to Boyd, I dropped my slice bar and stepped back to examine the gauge glasses. Water was barely showing in the sight glass, but, thank God, it was showing! And the needle of the pressure gauge was starting to flutter off the zero pin. Steam was coming up! If we could only hold down the flood for a few minutes more now, till I could get that pump warmed up and going, we were saved! But that part was up to Jack Cole.

“Jack!” I shouted up the hatch. “A little more and you can quit. But right now, for God’s sake, shake it up; faster with that barrel!”

“Aye, aye, sor!” Then to his strangely conglomerate crew, ready undoubtedly to collapse in their tracks, Cole called gruffly,

“C’mon me byes! Lit’s raylly git to liftin’ now, an’ work up a sweat, or we’ll freeze to death in this cowld! Lay back on ut, Starr! Heave there, Manson! Wud yez have thim two Chinks outpullin’ yez? An’ step out there now, ye Chinese seacooks, an’ don’t be clutterin’ up the decks, or whin that Rooshian gits goin’, he’ll be treadin’ heavy on thim pigtails! Yo heave! Up wid ut!” And with astonishing speed I saw the loaded barrel vanish up the hatch.

I breasted my way through the water aft to where Lee in the engine room stood by my largest steam pump. No need to worry about priming the pump for suction; another foot higher on that flood and we would have to go diving to reach the pump valves. I felt the steam line. The frosty chill was gone; a little steam at least was already coming through to the pump.

“All right, Lee; let’s get going,” I mumbled. We cracked open the steam valve a hair, started to drain the line. And no mother nursing her baby ever handled it more tenderly than Lee and I nursed that frozen pump, gradually draining and warming the steam cylinder, lest the sudden application of heat should crack into pieces that abnormally cold cast iron, and after our heartbreaking struggle with the boiler, leave us still helpless to eject the sea. With one eye on Jack Cole’s rapidly moving barrel and the other on that narrowing margin between flood water and furnace fires, I nursed the pump along by feel, taking as long to warm it up as I dared without swamping those flames. At long last the pump cylinder was hot; steam instead of water was blowing out the drains. And the boiler gauge needle stood at thirty pounds. Enough; we could go.

I straightened up, motioned Lee to start the pump. He opened the throttle valve. With a wheeze and a groan the water piston broke free in its cylinder, the nearly submerged pump commenced to stroke.

Leaving Lee at the pump, I ran (that is, if barely dragging one ice-weighted foot after another can be called running) up the ladder toward the deck. While I climbed, the empty barrel came hurtling down the hatchway, splashed into the water in the fireroom. Before Lauterbach could fill and upend it, down on top of the barrel in a maze of coils came the slack end of the hoisting line. Apparently Cole’s gang was through.

As I poked my head above the hatch into the open, there—Oh, gorgeous sight for bleary eyes and aching muscles! was a heavy stream of water pulsing into the scuppers! Nearby, prone on the deck where they had dropped in their tracks when they let go the hoisting line, were four utterly worn-out seamen, gazing nevertheless admiringly on that beautiful stream. And leaning against the bulwark watching it, was Jack Cole, who as he saw me, sang out,

“Praises be, chief; we’re saved! There’ll be no calls for Spell O from that chap!”

CHAPTER XX

Our immediate battle was won, but the war thus opened that 19th of January, 1880, between us and the Arctic Sea for the Jeannette dragged along with varying fortunes till the last day I ever saw her.

Our big steam pump made short work of all the water in the fireroom that was still water. In an hour the room was bare down to ice-coated floors and bilges, with the pump easily keeping ahead of the leakage coming from forward. But the men at the hand pump, optimistically knocked off the minute the steam pump began stroking, were unfortunately not wholly relieved. Despite the fact that we opened wide the gates in the forepeak and the forehold bulkheads to let the water run freely aft to the fireroom pump, the flow through was sluggish, impeded I suppose by having to filter through the coal in the cross bunker. So fifteen minutes out of every hour, the hand pump was manned again to keep down the water level in the forehold, while, sad to contemplate, our weary seamen, between spells at the pump, had to labor in the forehold storerooms breaking out provisions (much of which were already water soaked) and sending them up into the deckhouse to save our food from complete ruin.

It was ten-thirty in the morning when the leak was discovered; it was three p.m. when I finally got steam up and a pump going; but at midnight the whole crew was still at work handling stores. The state we were then in was deplorable beyond description.

Who struck eight bells that night I do not know, for since morning we had had no anchor watch, but someone, Dunbar perhaps, whose seagoing habits were hard to repress, snatched a moment from his task and manned the lanyard. At any rate, as the clear strokes of the bronze bell rang out on that frost-bitten night, De Long, in water up to his knees in the forehold, was recalled to the passage of time. The provisions actually in the water had been broken out; his effort now was to send up all the remainder which rising water might menace. But with the bell echoing in his ears, the captain, looking at the jaded seamen about him, staggering through the water laden with heavy boxes and casks, toiling like mules, came suddenly to the realization that they had only the limited endurance of men and called a halt.

“Knock off, lads,” he said kindly. “If anything more gets wet before morning, it gets wet. Lay up on deck!” And on deck, as the men straggled up the hatch to join the rest of the crew round the hand pump (at the moment unmanned) he ordered Cole to serve out all around two ounces of brandy each. Frozen hands poured it into chilled throats, to be downed eagerly at a gulp—there was not a man who might not have swallowed a whole quart just as eagerly, and probably then still have felt but little warmth in his congealed veins.

At the captain’s order, Cole then piped down—the starboard watch to lay below to their bunks, the port watch for whom there was to be no immediate rest, to man the hand pump as necessary through the remainder of that dreary night, keeping the water in the forehold down below the level of the as yet unshifted stores. The frozen seamen tramped wearily off, some to rest if they could, the others to bend their backs over the bars of the pump, which soon resumed its melancholy clanking.

But neither for me, for the captain, nor for Chipp was there any rest. Immediately I had downed my share of the brandy, I turned to at once, figuring how I might get steam and a steam pump forward to suck directly on the forehold and eliminate altogether the toil over the hand pump which must soon break our men down. I had in my engine room that spare No. 4 Sewell and Cameron pump (which my men and I had so thoughtfully picked up in the dark of the moon at Mare Island before we started). I set to work on a layout for installing it in the deckhouse forward; which task, between designing foundations and sketching out suction and steam lines for it, kept me up the rest of the night. As for Chipp, he was down in the forepeak with Nindemann, endeavoring to stop, or at least to reduce, the leak. The water was pouring in through the innumerable joints in that mass of heavy pine timbers, which stretching from side to side and from keel to berth deck in our bow, filled it for a distance of ten feet abaft the stem. However valuable that pine packing may have been in stiffening our bow for ramming ice, it was now our curse, very effectively preventing us from caulking whatever was sprung in the stem itself. All through the night Nindemann and Chipp labored, stuffing oakum and tallow into the joints of that packing where the jets of water squirted through. It was discouraging work. As fast as their numbed fingers rammed a wad of oakum into a leaking joint and stopped the flow there, water spurted from the joints above. Methodically through the night they worked in that dismal hole with freezing water spraying out over them, following up the leaks, caulking joint after joint, but when at last they got to the top, plugging oakum into the final crack, the water rose still higher and started to pour down their necks from between the ceiling and the deck beams overhead where they could not get to it. They could do no more. At five a.m., each man a mass of ice, they came up, beaten.

Meanwhile, De Long, foreseeing the possibility of such a contingency, had himself put in the rest of the night over the ship’s plans, designing a watertight bulkhead to be built in the forepeak just abaft that packing, so that if we could not stop the leak, we could at least confine the flooding to a small space forward and thus stop all pumping, either by hand or steam.

In the early morning, after twenty-four hours of continuous strain and toil, the three of us met again in the deckhouse, I with my sketches for the pump installation, De Long with his bulkhead plans, and Chipp with the bad news that we had better get both jobs underway at once for he had failed utterly to stop the leak. So we turned to.

I will not go into what we went through the week following—my struggles with frozen lines, improper equipment, and lack of men and tools for such a job. Suffice it to say that after three days I got that auxiliary Sewell pump running forward so that to the intense relief of the deck force, their torture at the hand pumps ended altogether, and I was able to keep the water in the forepeak so low that Sweetman and Nindemann were enabled to start building the bulkhead.

From then on, Nindemann and Sweetman bore the brunt. On these two petty officers, Sweetman, our regular carpenter, and Nindemann, our quartermaster (but almost as good as a carpenter) fell the entire labor of building that bulkhead. In the narrow triangular space in the peak, they toiled hour after hour, day after day, cutting, fitting, and erecting the planking. William Nindemann, a stocky, thickset German, was a perfect horse for work, apparently able to stand anything; but Alfred Sweetman, a tall, spare Englishman, had so little flesh on his ribs that he froze through rather rapidly, and in spite of his objections, had to be dragged up frequently to be thawed out or he would soon have broken down completely. As it was, every four hours both men got a stiff drink of whiskey to keep them limbered up, and as much hot coffee and food in between as they could swallow, which was considerable.

Meanwhile, during all this turmoil and anxiety, the captain was weighed down with the problem of what to do with the blinded Danenhower should the water get away from us, either then or later. To add to his worries, Dunbar, who was also still under the weather from his illness, seemed between that and his efforts to assist, to have aged overnight at least twenty years. It was pathetic to see the old man, looking now positively decrepit, struggling in spite of the captain’s orders to hold up his end alongside husky seamen, fighting with them to help save the ship. And as if to make a complete job of De Long’s mental anguish during that agonizing first day of the leak, Surgeon Ambler was suddenly taken violently ill, and to the captain’s great alarm had to be left in his cabin, practically unattended. Aside from De Long’s natural concern over what might happen to Ambler himself, the effect on the captain’s mind of this prospect of being left without a doctor to look after Danenhower and any others who might collapse in our desperate predicament, can well be imagined. It amazed me that the captain under the combined impact of all these worries and disasters, instead of caving in himself, maintained at least before the men an indomitable appearance, by his actions encouraging them, and with never a word of profanity, urging and cheering them on.

By the end of the ensuing week things showed signs of improvement—I had both steam pumps going, hand pumping was discontinued, Nindemann and Sweetman against terrible odds were making progress on the bulkhead, Dunbar was no worse, and Ambler (whose trouble turned out to be his liver) was under his own care, sufficiently on the mend to be no longer in danger.

Only Danenhower, aside from our leak, remained as a problem. He, instead of getting better, got worse.

The third day of our troubles, while I was still struggling with a frozen steam whistle line through which I was trying to get steam forward to start my Sewell pump, there into the glacial deckhouse beside me came our surgeon, wan and pinched and hardly able to drag one foot after another. I gazed at him startled. He had not been out of his bunk since his illness.

“What’s the matter, brother?” I queried anxiously. “Why aren’t you aft in your berth where you belong? We don’t need help; we’re getting along here beautifully.”

“Where’s the captain?” he asked, ignoring my questions. “I want him right away.”

“Below there,” I replied, pointing down the forepeak hatch. “He’s inspecting the work on the bulkhead. Shall I call him for you, doc?”

Apparently too weak to speak a word more than he had to, Ambler only nodded. A little alarmed, I poked my head down the hatch into the dark peak tank and called out to De Long standing far below on the keelson. He looked up, I beckoned him, and he started cautiously to climb the icy ladder, shortly to be blinking incredulously through his frosty glasses at Ambler, even more astonished than I at seeing him out of bed. Ambler wasted no words in explanations regarding his presence.

“It’s Danenhower, captain. I got up as soon as I could to examine him. His eye’s so much worse today that if I don’t operate, he’ll lose it! So I came looking for you to get your permission first. You know how things stand with us all.”

The captain knew, all right. It was easy to guess, looking into his harassed eyes as Ambler talked, what was going through De Long’s mind—a sick surgeon, poor medical facilities, a leaking ship, and the possibility of having the patient unexpectedly thrust out on that terrible pack to face the rigors of the Arctic, where with even good eyes in imminent peril of freezing in their sockets at 50° below zero, what chance for an eyeball recently sliced open? All this and more besides was plainly enough reflected in the skipper’s woebegone eyes and wrinkling brows. De Long thought it over slowly, then wearily shook his head.

“I can’t give permission, doctor. It’s not Dan’s eye alone; it means his very life if we have to leave the ship soon. And since it’s his life against his eye we’re risking, he ought to have a voice in it. I can’t say yes; I won’t say no. Put it up to Dan; let him decide himself.”

“Aye, aye, sir; I’ll explain it to him.” Dr. Ambler swung about, went feebly aft, leaving the captain and me soberly regarding each other.

“You’re dead right, captain; nobody but Dan should decide. It’s too much of a load for another man to have on his conscience if things go wrong.”

De Long, abstractedly watching Ambler hobbling aft, hardly heard me. Without a word in reply, he turned to the ladder behind him, and with his tall frame sagging inside his parka as if the whole world bore on his bent shoulders, haltingly descended it. I looked after him pityingly. He had brought Dan, a husky, vital young man into the Arctic; now of all times, what a weight to have on his mind as Dan’s life hung in the balance! Unconsciously I groaned as I turned back to thawing out my steam line and I am afraid that my mind wandered considerably for the next hour as I played a steam hose back and forth along that frozen length of iron pipe.

I was still at it, and still not concentrating very well, when Tong Sing’s slant eyes peered at me through the cloud of vapor enveloping my head and he pulled my arm to make sure he had my attention.

“Mister Danenhower likee maybe you see him, chief.”

I shut off my steam hose, nodded to the steward, started aft. If I could help to lighten poor Dan’s burden any, I was glad to try. But what, I wondered, did he want of me—advice or information?

I entered Dan’s room, sidling cautiously between the double set of blankets draping the door to shut out stray light. It was pitch-black inside.

“That you, chief?” came a strained voice through the darkness the minute my foot echoed on the stateroom deck.

“Yes, Dan. What is it?”

“My eye’s in horrible shape, the doctor tells me, chief. If it’s anything like the way it hurts, I guess he understates it. What’s happened to make it worse the last couple of days I don’t know,” he moaned, then added bitterly, “Most likely it’s just worry. How do you think I feel lying here useless, not lending a hand, while the rest of you are killing yourselves trying to stop that leak and save the ship?”

I felt through the blackness for his bunk, then slid my fingers over the blankets till I found his hand.

“Don’t let that get you, Dan,” I begged, giving his huge paw a reassuring squeeze. “We’re making out fine with that leak. As a fact, we got it practically licked already. It wasn’t much trouble.”

“Quit trying to fool me, chief,” pleaded Dan. “It’s no use. Maybe I can’t see, but I can hear! So I know what’s going on around me. As long as I hear that hand pump clanking, things are bad! And with the skipper’s cabin right over my head and yours just across the wardroom and me lying here twenty-four hours a day with nothing to do but listen, don’t you think I know when you turn in? And neither of you’ve turned in for a total of ten minutes in two nights now! Don’t try to explain that away!”

I winced. Dan, in spite of the Stygian darkness in which he lived, had the facts. No use glossing matters over.

“Listen, Dan, I’m not fooling you,” I answered with all the earnestness I could muster. “It’s true we haven’t slept much, but we’re both all right. And while things looked pretty bad at first, for a fact, we got that leak practically licked. Before the day’s over, that hand pump will shut down for good. Now forget us and the ship; let’s get back to Danenhower. What can I do for you, brother?” I gave his palm a friendly caress.

I felt Dan’s invisible hand twitch in mine, then close convulsively on my fingers.

“I’m in a tough spot, Melville. The doctor tells me if he doesn’t operate, I’ll go blind. And if he does, and I have to leave the ship before my eye’s healed and he can strip the bandages, I’ll probably die! And it’s up to me to decide which. Simple, isn’t it, chief?” Danenhower groaned. Had I not kept my lips tightly sealed, I should have groaned also at his pathetic question. With a lump in his throat, he added, “I don’t want to go back blind to my f—,” he choked the merest fraction of a second over the word, then substituting another, I think, hastily finished—“friends, but as much as anybody here I want to get back alive if I can. Honestly, chief, you won’t fool a blind shipmate just to spare his feelings, will you?” He gripped my hand fiercely. “What’re our chances with the ship? I’ve got to know!”

“The leak’s licked, Dan,” I assured him earnestly. “We won’t sink because of that. But about what the ice is going to do to us, your guess is as good as mine. Seeing what she’s fought off so far, I’d back the old Jeannette’s ribs to hold out against the pack for a while yet.”

“Thanks, chief, for your opinion.” Dan pressed my hand once more, then slowly relaxed his grip. “I guess I’ll have to think it over some more before I decide. You’d better go now; sorry to have dragged you so long from your work to worry you over my poor carcass.”

I said nothing, I dared not, fearing that my voice would break. With big Dan stretched out blind and helpless on his bunk, invisible there, to me only a voice and a groping hand in the darkness, I slipped away silently, leaving him to grapple with the choice—to operate or not to operate—possible death in the first case, certain blindness in the second. And with the knowledge that however he chose, the final answer lay, not with him, but with the Arctic ice pack. He must guess what it had in store for the Jeannette with his sight or his life the forfeit if he guessed wrong. I went back to my own trifling problem, thawing out the steam line.

Shortly afterward, Tong Sing came forward again, calling the captain this time, who immediately went aft. Whether Danenhower had decided or whether he was seeking further information, the steward did not know. I worked in suspense for the next hour till De Long returned. One look at his face informed me how Dan had decided.

“Well, brother, when’s the operation?”

“It’s over already, Melville! Successful too, the doctor says. I watched it and helped a bit. And, chief, I hardly know which to admire most—the skill and speed with which Ambler, weak as he was, worked, or the nerve and heroic endurance with which Dan stood it. He’s back in his stateroom now, all bandaged again. God grant the ship doesn’t go out from under us before those bandages are ready to come off!”

Well, that was that. With a somewhat lighter heart, I resumed blowing steam on my frozen line. De Long crawled back into the forepeak to resume his study of the leak.

But my happier frame of mind did not last. If it was not one thing on the Jeannette to drive us to distraction, it was a couple of others. The captain soon squirmed back through the hatch with a long face to join me again beside the deck pump.

“How much coal have we got in our bunkers, now, chief?” he asked.

“Eighty-three tons and a fraction,” I answered promptly. I felt that I knew almost every lump of coal in our bunkers by name, so to speak.

“And what are we burning now?” he continued.

“A ton a day, captain, to run our pumps and for all other purposes, but as soon as that bulkhead’s finished and the leak’s stopped, we ought to get down to 300 pounds again, our old allowance.”

De Long shook his head sadly.

“No, chief, we never will. The way the ship’s built, I see now we’ll never get that bulkhead really tight; she’s going to keep on leaking and we’re going to keep on pumping. But a ton of coal a day’ll ruin us! By April, at that rate, the bunkers’ll be bare. Can’t you do something, anything, to cut down that coal consumption?”

I thought hastily. Our main boiler, designed of course for furnishing steam to propel the ship, was far bigger than necessary just to run a couple of pumps, and consequently it was wasteful of fuel. If pumping, instead of lasting only a few days more, was to be our steady occupation, I ought to get some setup more nearly suited to the job. Before me in the deckhouse was the little Baxter boiler I had rigged for an evaporator. That might run the forward pump. And looking speculatively aft through the deckhouse door, my eye fell on our useless steam cutter, half buried in a mound of snow and ice covering its cradle on the poop. There was a small boiler in that cutter. Perhaps I could remove it, rig it somehow to run a pump in the engine room. And then I might let fires die out under the main boiler again and do the job with less coal.

Briefly I outlined my ideas to the captain, who, willing to clutch at any straw, gave blanket approval to my making anything on the ship over into what I would, so long as it promised to save some coal.

“Good, brother,” I promised. “As soon as I get this pump running and knock off the hand pump, I’ll turn to with the black gang and try to rig up those small boilers so we can shut down that big coal hog. And even if we have to hook up Ah Sam’s teakettle to help out on the steam, we’ll get her shut down; you can lay to that!”

“I’m sure you will, chief,” answered De Long gratefully. “Now is there any way we can help you out with the deck force?”

“Only by plugging away on those leaks, captain. We’re making 3300 gallons of salt water an hour in leakage; every gallon of that you plug off means so much more coal left in the bunkers.”

“I well appreciate that, Melville. Nindemann and his mate are doing what they can with the bulkhead; I’m starting Cole and the deck watch to shoving down ashes and picked felt between the frames and the ceilings in the forepeak to stop the flow of water there. We’ll get something on that leak, I don’t know yet how much, but we’ll never get her tight. I see that now.”

And De Long, looking (though he tried to conceal it) as if that sight were breaking his heart, crawled back again to the freezing forepeak. I felt strongly tempted to seize him by the arm and start him instead for his bunk, but I was afraid he would urge the same on me and I had to get that line thawed and the Sewell pump going forward before I knocked off, so I let him go.

CHAPTER XXI

January dragged away, followed in dreary succession by February, March, and April, and the Jeannette drifting aimlessly with the pack, was still solidly frozen in. Our lives were only a wearing repetition of what had gone before—fierce cold, alarms, the roaring and tumbling of the ice pack, tremendous squeezes and pressures from the floes, and night and day the wheezing of the steam pumps, pumping, forever pumping. It seemed almost a reasonable supposition to conclude that we must have the whole Arctic Ocean nearly pumped dry to judge by the length of time we had been at it and by the huge masses of ice banked up against our bulwarks and spreading out over the floes where the streams of sea water flowing from our scuppers had frozen.

A few minor triumphs and reliefs we had, but not many. In late January the sun came back over the horizon for the first time in seventy-one days, to reveal that we had all bleached strangely white in the long Arctic darkness. On the mechanical side, I had succeeded, after many heartbreaking disappointments, in supplanting the main boiler with the two little ones; and that, aided by the never ending efforts of Nindemann in plugging leaks (which had cut the hourly flow nearly in half), had resulted in gradually reducing our coal consumption to only a quarter of a ton a day. We shot a few bears and a few seals, which gave a welcome variety to our diet of salt beef and tasteless canned meat; we even had hopes of knocking down some birds but there we were disappointed.

“No, Melville,” the captain gravely rebuked me, when empty-handed I returned to the ship after a February tramp over the floes and pushed my shotgun disgustedly into the rack, “birds have more sense than men. No bird with a well-regulated mind would possibly trust himself out in this temperature.”

On the debit side, the temperatures reached unbelievable depths. 57° below zero was recorded by our thermometers (the spirit ones, for the mercurial bulbs froze solidly at around -40°). The pack ice reached thicknesses of thirty-five and forty feet below the water where underrunning floes, freezing together, consolidated into a kind of glacial layer cake. Contemplation of these formations, measurable whenever the floes near us cracked apart, gave a gloomy aspect to the ship’s chances of ever getting free of the pack. And the irregular and formidable surface of the pack also gave us cause for thought, now that in the growing daylight we could see in what state the upheaval of January 19th had left the ice around us. Sledging across the pack was impossible; as soon might one think of getting from the Bronx to Brooklyn by dragging a team of dogs and a sledge over the Manhattan housetops. Here and there, conditions were even worse. Sharvell, with the impressionability of youth, came in from an exploring trip with eyes popping to tell me,

“Say, chief, five miles north o’ ’ere, the ice is standing in mountains ’igher nor our mast’eads!”

“Yes, Sharvell, it’s quite likely.”

“Shall I tell the skipper, sir, or will you?” he asked anxiously.

“Why bother him about it?”

“If ’e knew, it’d save work, sir. ’E’d quit ’aving the bug’unter clean an’ mount that big walrus ’ead with the tusks that ’e’s so busy fixing up. ’Cause when that ice gets to us, sir, we’re through, an’ it’ll be a terrible lot o’ work for us sailors dragging that ’eavy walrus ’ead over the pack. ’E better quit now, an’ ’e will, sir, when I tells ’im abaht them mountains of ice!”

But I told Sharvell to forget it, for I doubted that with all his other worries, the captain would be much exercised over mountains five miles off.

Aside from the aspect of the ice, we had troubles closer home. Especially forward in the deckhouse and crew spaces, the inside of the ship which now we had to keep above the freezing point to save our pumps from damage, was damp and disagreeable beyond expression, with moisture condensing on all cold surfaces and dripping from the beams into the men’s bunks.

Finally to deepen our gloom, Danenhower failed to respond favorably to treatment, and the doctor had to perform several more operations on his eye, coming at last to the conclusion that Dan must, till we escaped from the ice, remain a chronic invalid confined in darkness to his cabin, with no great hope of saving his sight even should he then get back to happier surroundings and decent hospital facilities.

Oddly enough through all this, after the first week’s struggle with the leak, we continued our scientific and meteorological observations. The captain clung to that routine as to a lifeline, which perhaps to him mentally it was, constituting his solitary claim to conducting a scientific expedition. For of explorations and geographical discoveries there were none; on the contrary instead of a steady drift northward which might uncover new lands or at least get us to higher latitudes, we shuffled aimlessly about with the pack, occasionally drifting northward for some weeks to De Long’s obvious delight, only to have the drift then reversed and to his intense depression of spirits, to turn out some clear morning to find himself gazing once again across the pack at the familiar mountainous outline of the north side of distant Wrangel Land. But after March, even this sight of far-off land, depressing as it was from its associations, was denied us, for as the season advanced the pack, still zigzagging over the polar sea as aimlessly as ever, failed to get quite so far south again; from that time on we saw land no more and the world for us became just one vast unbroken field of broken ice.

Only one hope kept us going. No one really knew what happened to that moving pack in summer time—no one before us had ever wintered in it, involuntarily or otherwise. So we lived on in the expectation that as the days lengthened and the thermometer rose above zero, summer weather and the long days under the midnight sun would sufficiently melt the ice to break up the pack, and if by then we still had any coal left, permit us to do some little exploring northward before with bare bunkers we loosed our sails and in the early fall laid our course homeward.

In that spirit then, we cheerfully greeted the advent of May, and as if to justify our confidence, May Day burst upon us with gorgeous weather—no clouds, and glistening at us across the ice a brilliant sun which even at midnight still peeped pleasantly over the horizon, and a temperature which in mid-afternoon reached the unbelievable height of 30° F., only two degrees below freezing. We were positively hot. All hands (except of course Danenhower) turned out on the ice to bask in the sunshine, with the queer result that many of us came back aboard with our complexions sunburned to a fiery red and unable at first to believe it. Our hopes started to mount; if the sun could do that to such weather-beaten frost-bitten hides as ours, what would it not do to the ice imprisoning us? Release was seemingly just around the corner of the calendar—by June 1 at the outside, say.

But meanwhile, awaiting that happy event, the captain prudently ordered (lest more casualties go to join the luckless Danenhower) that snow goggles be worn on all occasions by all hands except when actually below on the ship.

So May moved along, made notable mainly by a positive flood of bears, which daily kept us on the jump. The bears, ravenous with hunger after a long winter, were attracted to the Jeannette by mingled scents, mainly canine, which to their untutored nostrils probably meant food. But we had long since lost any fear of ice bears and the dogs apparently never had any, so the cry of—

“Bear ho!”

was the immediate signal for whoever had the captain’s permission (which now meant practically anyone off watch) to seize a rifle from the rack placed conveniently at the gangway, and be off. We became so contemptuous of the bears, that we chased them even with revolvers, and if necessity had arisen, would no doubt have done so barehanded, for I have never seen a bear which would rush a man. Except when brought to by the dogs, with a man in sight all that ever interested the bear was to get behind the nearest hummock or into an open lead, where swimming with only his nose above water, he could escape the rain of bullets from our Remingtons and Winchesters. The vitality of the bears was amazing. Unless filled so full of lead that the mere weight of the bullets as ballast slowed them down enough for the dogs to bring them to a stand where a close range shot into the brain finished them off, they usually got away.

We had queer experiences with the bears. On one occasion, exploring one of the narrow leads in the pack about a quarter of a mile from the ship, the captain was sculling unconcernedly along in the dinghy when he found himself facing an ice bear not a hundred feet off. Wholly unarmed, De Long regarded the bear with dismay. He could not run, for over broken ice he was no match in speed for Ursus; besides he was in a boat, which prevented running away, for while the water was an obstacle to him, to the bear it was merely the most convenient means of transportation. Inquisitively the bear advanced; De Long, unable to do anything else, sat and stared, trying out the power of the human eye as a defence. The bear, only fifty feet off, still approached, sniffing curiously and De Long, short-sighted though he was, said he could clearly make out where the short hairs ended at the edge of the bear’s beautiful black nose. The captain quickly concluded there was nothing in hypnosis as applied to polar bears. So gripping his oar, prepared to fend off the bear should he approach closer to the boat, he sang out lustily,

“Ship there! A bear! A bear!”

At this, the bear, more puzzled than ever, sat down on the ice to contemplate De Long and was still seriously thinking him over, trying to make him out, when a pack of dogs hove into sight from under the Jeannette’s stern, followed by several seamen, and off lumbered the bear.

So long as we had the Jeannette under us, the plethora of bears meant at most only a break in the monotony of our existence and a welcome change in our salt beef diet. Should we have to abandon ship, however, they offered a ray of hope. For convinced now that we could never drag across the upheaved pack pemmican enough to keep us from starvation till we reached Siberia, we looked on the bears as a possible source of fresh meat on the hoof which we might with a little luck knock over as we went along and thus keep life in our bodies.

The only other springtime event to compare with the bears was a brilliant idea which struck De Long.

While he never discussed his family with me or with anyone, De Long, alone among the ship’s company which had sailed from San Francisco, had a wife and a child to occupy his thoughts. I have no doubt that frequently in the dreary months when I saw him, as I did one morning, abstractedly gazing out over the pack, his mind was far away from us, perhaps dwelling on that moment in the tossing whaleboat off the Golden Gate when Emma De Long had to the last possible instant clung round his neck in her farewell kiss. Drifting backward down the years from that, his thoughts on this morning evidently got to the days of his youth as an ensign aboard the U.S.S. Canandaigua. While cruising through the Channel ports, he had amongst the dikes and mills of northern France and Holland courted Emma Wotton, and as he thought of that landscape, so different from the ice-fields round the Jeannette, his keen mind saw a connection. He waved me to join him.

“Melville,” he asked, obviously off again on the one ever-present topic, coal, “what’ll you do to keep your pumps going when the coal’s all gone?”

I pointed aloft.

“Cut down our masts and spars and burn them,” I replied. “They’re useless anyway.”

“And when they’ve gone too, what then?” De Long’s clear blue eyes gazed at me fixedly, as if he had me there.

“Break up our bulwarks, the deckhouses, and the main deck, and shove those into the fires too. They’ll all burn fine.”

“And after that, what?” he asked relentlessly, puffing away on his ever-present pipe.

“I guess then we abandon what’s left of the Jeannette and take to the ice, captain. I’ll admit I can’t keep any boilers going while I’m cutting the foundations out from under them for firewood. When the main deck’s gone, I guess we’re through.”

De Long looked gravely at me through his glasses, bent his head a little to shield his pipe from the cold wind sweeping the deck, and irrelevantly asked me,

“Melville, have you ever been in Holland?”

“Why—yes,” I mumbled, taken aback at his sudden change of front. “I guess it’s tulip time there now, captain. And quite a different scene from all this ice that’s sprouting round us in the merry springtime here. Why?”

“I was there in the springtime once also,” parried the captain. “Lovely scene. I just wonder if we couldn’t make the scenery round here resemble Holland in the springtime a little better. You remember the tulips, eh, chief? Do you by any chance remember anything else in the Dutch landscape—some windmills, for instance?”

And then a great light dawned on me. I looked at my captain with added respect. What did the Dutch have all those thousands of windmills for except to meet the same problem we faced—to pump water!

“Ah, you see it, do you?” asked the captain, gratified. “Melville, can you rig up a windmill here to run our pumps?”

“Can do, brother!” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’ll turn to on it right away; before long you’ll see a windmill going round here in the Arctic to beat the Dutch!”

This job was rather intricate for our facilities, windmills not being exactly in a sailor’s line, but aided by Lee, machinist, and Dressler, blacksmith, we contrived it. Lee especially was a great help, which might seem somewhat surprising, for having been shot through both hips in the second day’s fighting while helping Grant drive back Beauregard at Shiloh, Lee was rather slow and unsteady on his feet. But there was nothing the matter with his hands and he soon had Dressler’s crude forgings turned up in our lathe into a crankshaft and connecting rods, so that by the time Sweetman had made the wooden arms of the windmill, we were ready to go. Paradoxically, the one thing which on a ship we were best prepared to furnish, the sails themselves, failed to work well on our first trial. The mill occasionally hung on the center because the heavy canvas sails sagged too much to hold the wind. Chipp, responsible for making the sails, watched them in pained silence, but having no canvas more suitable, soon rectified the matter in a novel manner. Sending Noros and Erichsen down on the ice, he had them collect some dozens of the empty meat cans littering the ice floes, and beating these out flat, he laced them together with wire, and soon had our mill-arms covered with fine metal sails! Impelled by these, our windmill, mounted on the starboard wing of the bridge, was soon rotating merrily and, connected by a special rig to a bilge pump in the fireroom, was pushing overboard in grand style all our leakage. So well did it work, that we quickly were enabled to shut down the steam cutter’s boiler, leaving only the little Baxter boiler going for distilling and in case the wind died down (which in the pack it rarely did) for unavoidable steam pumping.

So to our intense relief as spring drew on to its close, we got our coal consumption down again to 300 pounds a day, as it had been before that leak started to chew into our bunkers in such ravenous fashion. Which was a very fortunate thing for us, for with only sixty tons of coal left to go on, our days on the Jeannette would indeed otherwise have been numbered. Not least among the blessings which resulted was the improved cheerfulness of De Long at this success. He once more began to have some hope that when the ice broke up, we would have coal enough to do some exploring, so that he might again without too much shame on his return face our sponsor’s sister, Miss Bennett, the ship’s godmother, the “Jeannette” whose name we bore.

As the long days dragged out under the May sun, we eagerly watched the floes, noting with satisfaction the increasing number of rivulets coursing toward every crack and hole in the pack, and how under the intense sunlight, the cinders and ashes about the ship fairly seemed to burrow their way down into the snow. (Watching the striking manner in which everything dark soaked up the sunshine and settled, De Long half-humorously suggested that we all take a day off and pray for some miracle which might make all the snow and ice about us black and thus hasten its disappearance.)

And so we came to May 31, to our discouragement still held in the unbroken pack which, as measurements close about us showed, was still four feet thick. We decided to defer the day of our liberation to July 1, giving the sun another month to work on the ice. But to damp our spirits, June 1, the first day of summer as we reckoned it, opened in a snow storm which continued through June 2 also, accompanied by a heavy gale which drove the snow, soft and mushy now, along in horizontal sheets.

When the snow finally ceased, the captain, optimistic again, began to prepare for the day of our release. First of all, fires were discontinued in the stoves fore and aft, thus saving a little coal. Next, all hands and the cook were turned to on knocking down our portable deckhouse and clearing the main deck, so that looking like a ship once more, we might be able to spread sails and get underway when the wind served (provided, of course, the ice let go of us first). Several days’ hard work accomplished this task, and with the topside shipshape again, we needed only to hang our rudder to be fully ready to go, but here again we had to wait on the ice which still clung solidly to our rudder post.

Below, I got my machinery and boilers in shape to move. With no fear of dangerous temperatures any more, I connected up all piping, moved the engines by hand, secured all cylinder heads, and filled both boilers to the steaming level (through the sea cocks this time), and started generally to clean up the machinery spaces. For a small black gang, only six all told, this was slow work, so to avoid being caught with the pack suddenly parting and my machinery not ready to turn over, I pushed my gang hard. Consequently I was doubly annoyed when I noted several times that Nelse Iversen, one of my coalheavers and ordinarily a willing enough worker, showed decided signs of soldiering whenever my back was turned. I cautioned Bartlett who had charge of his watch, to get Iversen started, but after another hour, seeing he still tended to hide in the bunkers rather than scale rusty floorplates, I yanked Iversen up sharply for it.

“Come to now, Nelse, and get behind that scaling hammer! Or will it take a little extra duty to keep you out of that bunker and on the job?”

Iversen, now that I got a closer look at him, looked queer in the eyes, so when, his slow mind having digested my statement, he finally answered, I was quite ready to believe him.

“Ay tank, chief, Ay work so hard Ay can. Ay ban sick man. My belly, she ache bad!”

“So, eh?” I said sympathetically. “Why didn’t you tell Bartlett that an hour ago? Go up and see the doctor right away. What ails you, diarrhoea again?”

“No; de odder way.”

“Constipation, huh? Well, you’re lucky. On this bucket, that’s a better thing to have than diarrhoea any day. Go up to the doctor and get some castor oil. And don’t come back till it’s quit working.” I eased him over toward the fireroom ladder, and started him on his way toward Ambler.

But after a day had elapsed, I began to wonder whether the doctor’s castor oil had somehow been affected by the cold or whether my coalheaver had evaded swallowing his dose, for Iversen still showed the same tendency to shirk work and hide in the bunkers in spite of Bartlett’s frequently breaking him out of there. So taking Iversen in hand myself, I escorted him up to the dispensary to see personally that there was no foolishness about his taking his medicine, and calling Tong Sing, I sent him off to find the doctor who was out on the ice.

The minute Tong Sing disappeared, Iversen poked his head out the door, looked both ways quickly, then as if satisfied, hastily shut the door and to my complete bewilderment, stealthily approached me, cupped his hands over my ear and whispered,

“Chief, Ay no ban sick, Ay ban vatched! Dere ban mutiny on foot here!”

Mutiny? I stared at Iversen incredulously. The men were having a veritable hell in their life there in the Arctic, but what could they gain by mutiny? And who would lead it? For an instant I had a vague suspicion, but I resolutely put that out of my mind. Preposterous! I looked at Iversen intently. But there could be no doubt as to his sincerity. He was serious, all right.

I pushed him down into a chair, ordered sharply,

“Wait there, Nelse! I’ll get the captain!” and closing the door behind me, I shot out of the dispensary and across the cabin to the captain’s stateroom forward in the poop. Fortunately De Long was there, writing in his journal.

“Come with me, skipper. I want you to hear something. Right away!”

Puzzled unquestionably at my haste, De Long dropped his pen, put down his meerschaum pipe, stretched his six-foot frame up out of his chair, and reached for his parka.

“No, you don’t need that, captain; just as you are. We’re only going to the dispensary.”

“Oh, all right. Who’s hurt now?”

“Nobody, but come along!” I started back for the dispensary with De Long following, puffing leisurely at the retrieved meerschaum which was his greatest comfort and his inseparable companion.

Iversen started up from his chair as we entered, saluted the captain, and again swiftly scanned the cabin outside before he closed the door.

“Now, Nelse, tell the captain,” I said briefly.

Once more Iversen cupped his hands, whispered into the captain’s ear. De Long’s jaw dropped abruptly. His pipe fell from his mouth and only by a quick lunge did I save it from hitting the deck. But insensible to that, De Long, immovable, only stared at Iversen, searching his face as I had done. Finally he shook his head, muttered,

“It just can’t be! Where’d you get this, Iversen?”

“Yah, cap’n. Ay tal you it ban yust lak Ay say! Ay ban asked to yoin. Ay no say, Yah; Ay no say, No; so Ay ban vatched clost. Dey kill me for’ard if Ay tal!”

De Long looked at me. I handed him back his pipe, which, wholly unconscious of his action, he took.

“What do you make of this, chief? It looks serious if Iversen’s right!”

“Sounds crazy to me, but it might be so. Depends on who’s in it and how many. The men are all armed, you know. The rifle rack’s right at the gangway. Anybody can help himself, and lots of ’em are out on the ice, guns in hand this minute. But why they should want to mutiny, I can’t see, unless the ice has affected their minds.”

Shocked at Iversen’s report; impressed by the gravity of the situation if Iversen were right, for there already with weapons in their hands were the mutineers, the captain still looked skeptically at my grimy coalheaver. Why should his crew mutiny? But on the other hand, what had Iversen to gain by lying about it? And Iversen, a steady man, always carefully attentive to his duty, was just the type of seaman who might be trusted to stand with his captain at all hazards.

“Well,” said De Long grimly, “let’s get into this! Now, Iversen, who’s behind it?”

But there the captain ran into a stone wall. Iversen, very nervous now, became evasive, dodged the questions, and apparently in mortal fear of his life, refused to name the mutineers, repeating only over and over again how, for two days, he had been closely watched. Threats, promises, got nothing more out of him. Finally the captain, baffled, took a new tack.

“See here, Iversen, they can’t hurt you, and nobody else’ll get hurt either if you tell. I can manage it then. There are eight officers here; surely there are some of the crew will join us! I’ll get all the mutineers, if you’ll name them, out on the ice on some pretext. I don’t care if they do go armed. Then we’ll haul in the gangway and from behind the bulwarks we can hold the ship! A couple of nights freezing on that ice will bring them round, all right! They’ll come cringing back, hands in the air, begging to be taken aboard. Out with it now! Who’s the leader?”

Iversen, more nervous than ever, shuffled to the door, opened it a crack to assure himself no one was eavesdropping outside, then faced us, and tremblingly blurted out,

“Sharvell!”

An amazing change came over the captain. He dropped into a chair, roared with laughter.

“Sharvell? That’s rich! That lad? He’s not even a man yet! Nobody’d follow him in a mutiny any more than a child! Hah, hah!” But abruptly he stopped laughing, for Iversen was now weeping hysterically, tears running down his coal-stained cheeks. Soberly De Long looked at him, then took me by the sleeve, pulled me aside a little, and whispered,

“I guess the mutiny on the Jeannette’s over, chief. I thought there was somebody crazy in it, and now I know who. Send for the doctor, quick! I’ll stay here with Iversen.” He started to light his pipe again.

“I’ve already got the steward out looking for him, captain,” I replied. “Ambler ought to be here any minute. And I guess you’re dead right, brother! Poor Iversen!”

It was so. Immediately Surgeon Ambler came aboard, we turned the weeping coalheaver over to him. An hour later, when, after a careful examination, Iversen under Cole’s surveillance had been led forward, he confirmed our fears. Iversen, if not already insane, was trembling on the border of it. Only observation over several days could prove which. De Long, much relieved at first by freedom from dread of any mutiny, was nevertheless badly enough depressed by the doctor’s report.

“First a blinded officer,” he muttered, “now a crazy seaman! What’ll this ice do to us next?”

CHAPTER XXII

June 21st came, the longest day in the year. Further south, to ordinary people, that meant more daylight; to us, with daylight twenty-four hours every day, it meant only that the sun stood on the Tropic of Cancer, having reached his most northerly declination. Ruefully we considered that. The sun was as far north as possible, as high in our heavens as he would ever get, though even so, at noon he stood not so high, only about 40° above the horizon. We would never receive his rays any more direct; instead, from now on they would become even more slanting, and less hot as he went south. And we were still held in the ice. Our case for release began to look less hopeful, and we went around that day with cheerless faces. Long afterward, picked out of the Siberian snows, I salvaged the captain’s journal and looking through it was particularly impressed by what he put down for June 21, 1880. So aptly did he express the situation and our feelings of desolation that day, that I repeat it here.

“June 21st, 1880. Monday.

“Discouraging, very. And yet my motto is ‘Hope on, hope ever.’ A very good one it is when one’s surroundings are more natural than ours; but situated as we are it is better in the abstract than in realization. There can be no greater wear and tear on a man’s mind and patience than this life in the pack. The absolute monotony; the unchanging round of hours; the awakening to the same things and the same conditions that one saw just before losing one’s self in sleep; the same faces; the same dogs; the same ice; the same conviction that tomorrow will be exactly the same as today, if not more disagreeable; the absolute impotence to do anything, to go anywhere, or to change one’s situation an iota; the realization that food is being consumed and fuel burned with no valuable result, beyond sustaining life; the knowledge that nothing has been accomplished thus far to save this expedition from being denominated an utter failure; all these things crowd in with irresistible force on my reasoning power each night as I sit down to reflect on the events of the day, and but for some still small voice within me that tells me this can hardly be the ending of all my labor and zeal, I should be tempted to despair.

“All our books are read, our stories related; our games of chess, cards, and checkers long since discontinued. When we assemble in the morning at breakfast, we make daily a fresh start. Any dreams, amusing or peculiar, are related and laughed over. Theories as to whether we shall eventually drift northeast or northwest are brought forward and discussed. Seals’ livers as a change of diet are pronounced a success. The temperature of the morning watch is inquired into, the direction and velocity of the wind, and if it is snowing (as it generally is) we call it a ‘fine summer day.’ After breakfast, we smoke. Chipp gets a sounding and announces a drift east-southeast or southeast, as the case may be. We growl thereat. Dunbar and Alexey go off for seals with as many dogs as do not run away from them en route. The doctor examines Danenhower and Iversen, his two chronic patients. Melville draws a little for this journal, sings a little, and stirs everybody up to a realization that it is daytime. Danenhower (from his stateroom) talks incessantly—on any and all subjects, with or without an audience. The doctor moralizes between observations; I smoke; Mr. Newcomb makes his preparations for dredging specimens; Mr. Collins has not appeared, his usual hour being 12:30 in the afternoon. Meanwhile the men have been set at work; a sled and dogs are dispatched for the day’s snow for washing purposes. The day’s rations are served out to the cook, and then we commence to drift out on the ice to dig ditches, to look at the dogs, calculate the waste in the ice since yesterday, and the probable amount by tomorrow. The dredge is lowered and hauled. I get the sun at meridian, and we go to dinner. After dinner, more smoke, more drawing, more singing, more talk, more ditch and canal-making, more hunting, more dog inspection, and some attempts at napping until four p.m., when we are all around for anything that may turn up. At 5:30 time and azimuth sight, post position in cabin, make chart, go to supper at six, and discuss our drift, and then smoke, talk and general kill-time occupations till ten p.m., when the day is ended. The noise subsides; those who can, go to bed; I write the log and my journal, make the observations for meteorology till midnight. Mr. Collins succeeds me four hours, Chipp him four hours, the doctor next four hours, Mr. Collins next six hours, I next two hours, Melville next two hours, and I end the day again, and so it goes.

“Our meals necessarily have a sameness. Canned meat, salt beef, salt pork, and bear meat have the same taste at one time as another. Each day has its bill of fare, but after varying it for a week we have, of course, to commence over again. Consequently we have it by heart, and know what we are going to get before we sit down at table. Sometimes the steward startles us with a potato salad (potatoes now rotting too fast for our consumption), or a seal’s liver, or a bear’s tongue; but we generally are not disturbed in that way. Our bill of fare is ample and good, our water is absolutely pure, and our fresh bread is something marvelous. Though disappointed day after day we are cheerful and healthy, and—here we are.”

And to all that I can fervently say “Amen!”

June on the whole was chilly and disagreeable. The temperature rarely got above 32° F., and yet in spite of that the ice did keep on wasting, from direct absorption of sunlight, of course. The ship came up somewhat through the softening ice to a lighter draft, owing to our considerable consumption of coal and stores since late November when we were frozen in after our transit of the ice-canal. But as an offset to this cheering rise, she heeled gradually more to starboard, adding to our discomfort.

Meanwhile, De Long kept Dunbar, who naturally was a good walker, scouting far and wide over the pack looking for open leads, which might promise a break-up of the pack and a chance of escape through one of them. June 28th, Dunbar, duck-hunting in the dinghy in a little lead about a mile from the ship, came back in the late afternoon with thirteen ducks, but with what was far more exciting, the news that the lead had suddenly opened up, that he had followed it (open here and there to a width of half a mile) at least fifteen miles before turning round. And from there it still stretched northward as far as he could see!

De Long was immediately all excitement. If only we could get the Jeannette across that single mile of solid ice between, there was no telling how far north we might go along that lead! He dragged Chipp into his cabin and went over with him the possibilities of blasting out the intermediate ice. While Chipp was calculating how far our supply of gunpowder would take us, De Long, eager to size up the situation on the spot, hastily departed to examine the lead for himself.

About midnight, he came back into the cabin, tossed his parka onto the table. Chipp, surrounded by a sea of papers containing his computations on the explosive powers of gunpowder, handed the captain a sheet containing his conclusions. De Long pushed it aside without even a glance.

“Never mind, Chipp, we won’t need it. I got there just in time to watch that lead close up so tight you can’t get a toothpick into it now! At least I had the melancholy satisfaction of realizing that if the Jeannette had been there, she would in all probability have been in for a very fine squeezing!”

And so June ended. We were still in the ice. Danenhower, thin and bleached, was worse. Iversen seemed to be improved; while still occasionally hysterical, his delusions of mutiny were no longer obvious.

July came and went. We dressed ship on July 4 in a thick fog and a chilling mist. The flags came down at midnight (there was no sunset) all covered with frost. Rain, mist, and fog were general. Our hopes for what the summer sun would do for us began to fade. And even the few glimpses we got of the sun, instead of cheering the captain up, further irritated him. For De Long being now navigator and having finally after days of delay got a shot at the sun on meridian for latitude, hopeful that the drift had carried us north, glanced at his sextant only to exclaim in anguish,

“Look at that altitude! All the sun shows me is how much closer I’m getting to the South instead of to the North Pole! If ever a man had justification for profanity, this southerly drift is it! The Bible says that Job had many trials and tribulations which he bore with wonderful patience, but I’ll bet he was never caught in pack ice! Nor drifted south when the wind was blowing north! But then Job’s may have been an ante-glacial period!” De Long picked up his pipe and nearly bit the stem in half. But a puff or two of tobacco partly, at least, restored his equanimity. Putting his sextant back in its case, he remarked to Chipp, also engaged in shooting the sun,

“I suppose we might as well look at it philosophically. As Jack says, ‘It’s all in a cruise, boys; the more days, the more dollars!’”

July ended, and we were still in the ice. Such a miserable month we were glad to be rid of.

August opened. Looking back over two thirds of the spent summer, with the highest temperature only 38° F. on the hottest day, all hands began to despair. So also, I think, did the captain, for he changed the schedule for taking meteorological observations, requiring them only once every three hours instead of hourly.

We came to the middle of the month, with the only change in our condition an increase in our heel to 7-1/2°, a change indeed in something, but not an improvement. We began to get morose—summer was fast fading, we were not released, and our hopes of doing anything in 1880 or in any succeeding year were vanishing into space. I tried to cheer the mess up by singing (if I say it myself, for an engineer I have a very good voice), Irish songs and ditties having been my specialty since early in my Civil War days on blockade. Whether I cheered up anyone except myself with the sound of my voice, I do not know, but I did get some sullen looks for my efforts from Collins, who being Irish himself may have thought I failed to do justice to the songs of his native land. Collins (who also imagined he could sing) reciprocated by regaling us with melodies from Pinafore, then only two years old, but I thought he did the English far more violence than I did the Irish. In this conclusion, I have as independent evidence the reactions of Newcomb, who, whenever I sang in the cabin, continued reading wholly oblivious of me, but whenever Collins opened up on Pinafore, immediately closed his book and remembered that he had a gull or a seal that required stuffing.

As August dragged along, the little pools of water covering the floes round about the ship now began to give us real cause for depression by freezing over at night with a skin of ice which failed to melt until the next noon. When that commenced, what chance was left for the sun to have any effect on floes still thirty and more feet in thickness?

And to add to our woes, we found that as a result of our southerly and easterly drifting, we had been steadily going backward. We were much closer to our starting point, Herald Island, in late August than we had been in early May. A whole summer’s drifting in the pack, and for a Polar Expedition, we had got worse than nowhere!

Meanwhile, the wearing days crawled by and we chafed at our impotence—well, well-equipped and eager to do something, we lay idle. I could have chewed nails for a change; our captain was even more ambitious—entering his cabin one evening with a sketch for his journal, he looked at me and asked abruptly,

“Know Hamlet, chief? No? Well, for something to do, like Hamlet I can say,

“‘Wouldst drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile? I’ll do it!’

“And so I would, chief, if there were any eisel and a few crocodiles in our stores, and by so doing I could change our position to one of usefulness. Well, what have you got there for my journal? Another sketch of this eternal ice?”

August 31st, the last day of summer, came and went. We were still fast in the pack. As a confirmation that summer was gone, we saw again that evening for the first time in months a faint aurora in the sky. De Long climbed to the crow’s-nest with a telescope, took a look around. A desert of ice in all directions, nothing but ice, ice, ice! He came down from aloft, all hope of release gone. Calling the carpenter, he ordered him to commence preparing our portable deckhouse for re-erection. Sending for me, he asked me to accompany him on a tour of the bunkers, to reassure himself, no doubt, on the coal question. Together, lighting our way with oil torches, we clambered through the dusty bunkers, the captain checking by eye my statements of the quantity in each one. Coming out, De Long musing over the figures, declared feelingly,

“God forbid anything happens to make us go back to steam pumping. Only fifty-three tons of coal—an equal weight in diamonds would not tempt me to exchange! For that coal, chief, has got to last us through another winter in the pack!”

Only another winter? What reason, I wondered, had he for supposing the end of a second winter would find us any closer to release? But the pack had far from exhausted its versatility, as I soon enough found out.

CHAPTER XXIII

September 1st came, and winter fell on us like a blanket. Snow, low temperatures, and the prompt freezing over of all stray pools with a coat of ice that failed to melt again gave the pack an immediate wintry appearance that only deepened as the month drew on. September 6th, the anniversary of our being first frozen in, opened our second year in the pack, with the only change noticeable the fact that winter had set in earlier and harder. But of course our present position, a hundred and fifty miles north of that of the year before, might easily have accounted for that.

September drifted by. October came. The temperatures dropped into the sub-zero twenties. We noted only that we were less sensitive to cold than the year before—luckily for us, for apparently we were in for a worse freezing. All hands, officers and men, became more moody, less talkative. By now it was evident to even the dullest-witted that we might go on thus forever in the ice pack; that is, at least till death in one form or another—by starvation, when our food gave out; by freezing, when we exhausted our coal; or by the ice crushing our weak bodies at any time—put a period to our tale. To talk further about what the expedition would do when the ice released us seemed just a waste of breath. The ice was not going to release us.

Meanwhile, in spite of our dreary outlook, we had to stick to the ship, for what else could we do? But would the ship stick to us? What would the ice do to the Jeannette during this winter? Our memories of the horrors of the winter past were not reassuring.

The month drew along. We ate our tasteless food, we drank our distilled water, we kept ourselves alive. Two things only broke up our unvarying daily routine—Divine Service on Sunday, and the weekly issue (begun now for the first time on the cruise) on Wednesday of two ounces of rum per man. Jack Cole did not have to pipe long of a Wednesday afternoon to get the complete roster round the whiskey barrel. But his long piping of a Sunday morning drew no such crowds. To Divine Service, conducted weekly in the cabin by the captain, came not a single seaman, and of the officers, just Chipp, Ambler, Dunbar and myself—a congregation of four only to hear George Washington De Long, acting chaplain, feelingly invoke the blessing of the Almighty upon our enterprise and ask His mercy upon us—distressed, worn mortals trapped in the Arctic wastes.

As October drew toward its close, distant rumblings in the pack, cracks in the floes roundabout caused by contracting ice, ridges of broken floe thrown up hither and yon, and the pistol-like snappings of shrinking bolts in our timbers, warned us of trouble. November came; we viewed its advent with trepidation, for the previous November had inaugurated our reign of terror. On November 6th, the sun departed from us and the long Arctic night commenced, our second. It would be longer this time till the sun reappeared, ninety days or more instead of seventy-one, for we were further north.

True to form, the thundering of the ice and the grinding of the pack recommenced as per schedule in November and the tremors coming through the thick floes shook the Jeannette as in a storm. But we were more calloused. Let the pack screech and roar! So long as nothing was happening close aboard we merely listened. Newcomb and Collins, however, who were more nervous than the rest, were forever running up on deck at these shocks. They came back even more disturbed when they could see nothing than when moving ice within eyesight gave the explanation.

November drew along without visible disaster, but the dread and anticipation of terrors yet to come caused trouble in other ways. Newcomb, childish always, became mum as a clam at meals, and at other times talked to no one, except perhaps to Collins. Whatever De Long thought of this, he said nothing till one day passing through the taxidermy room while Newcomb was mounting a crab, the latter stopped him, queried,

“Captain, will you ask Mr. Dunbar whether he saw that Uria Grylle he shot with his rifle yesterday, in flight?”

De Long, a little piqued perhaps at being thus asked by a very junior officer to serve as a messenger boy, said,

“Why don’t you ask him yourself, Mr. Newcomb?”

“Because,” replied our naturalist, “he has declined any relations with me.”

De Long looked at him puzzled.

“Declined? On a matter of duty? That seems queer. I’ll have to look into this.” Poking his head into the cabin outside, he called the veteran Dunbar into the workroom, then closed the door.

“What’s this, Dunbar, about your refusing to speak to Mr. Newcomb? He’s just asked me to ask you a question about a bird you shot, because he says you won’t speak to him.”

“Let him ask,” replied the ice-pilot. “I’ll speak to him any time about anything in the line of duty. But not on other things; I despise that little Yankee pedlar and he knows it!”

“Come now, Mr. Dunbar,” broke in the captain, “that’s no way to talk about a shipmate. Don’t lay too much stress on that little trading episode of Newcomb’s with those Indians at St. Michael’s; Mr. Newcomb did it only as a joke.”

“A joke, eh?” burst out the angered whaler. “And I suppose it’s a joke too, when he tries to write a letter home from Siberia, criticizing his superiors, saying that you, the captain, are a profane Catholic and Melville’s an atheist! A fine shipmate he is!”

De Long, at this unexpected personal turn, reddened, grew suddenly stern, gazed intently at Newcomb.

“What’s that, Mr. Newcomb? I’m a Catholic, right enough, but I think no man can truly say I’m a profane one. Did you write such a letter, sir?”

“I did not!” said Newcomb promptly.

“I didn’t say he wrote one,” countered Dunbar. “I merely said he tried to. There wasn’t any mail going, so I guess he didn’t. But the little fool’s too chummy with the men; it got out around the crew somehow that he was going to. That’s where I heard it.”

“Well, never mind about any scuttle butt rumors, Mr. Dunbar. Mr. Newcomb says he didn’t write such a letter, and that settles it. Now, Mr. Newcomb, I’ve noticed before your not talking to your fellow officers. Forget any such child’s play, and you’ll get along better.”