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HELL ON ICE
THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”
[Illustration: Decoration]
_Books by_
COMMANDER ELLSBERG
ON THE BOTTOM
PIGBOATS
S-54
THIRTY FATHOMS DEEP
OCEAN GOLD
SPANISH INGOTS
[Illustration: Decoration]
[Illustration: Decoration]
HELL ON ICE
THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”
_by_
COMMANDER
EDWARD ELLSBERG
[Illustration: Decoration]
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK 1938
[Illustration: Decoration]
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.