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.