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.